Education should not be intended
to make people comfortable;
it is meant to make them think.
—Hanna Holborn Gray
In the early 1980s, a Canadian historian, James Stokesbury, wrote two, one-volume histories of World War I and World War II. They remain, in my opinion, among the best abbreviated examinations of these calamitous events, and I revisit my copies of both books when I am feeling the need for some perspective about the world they helped create and in which I have grown up and lived. Each time I do, I find myself discovering some new theme which I had not seen on previous reads, and when I recently revisited them this past month, what struck me this time was the almost rabid isolationism of the United States at the start of both wars and its impact on their outcomes. I was reminded yet again that we are a highly reactionary society, not an anticipatory one, and that what that can cost can literally be tens of millions of human lives.
I share this bit of personal background because in my other recent readings I have found what I think is a new form of isolationism, and I believe we may be looking at a new reactionary response rather than an anticipatory one. And no, I do not mean the isolationism within the MAGA movement and their cult leader, Donald Trump, which are impacting the current election. This is an isolationism at a larger scale, one that is permeating our entire society, and it is something which First Amendment attorney, Greg Lukianoff, and social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, call “safetyism.”
What is “safetyism?” Lukianoff and Haidt define it as “a culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger” and does so to such a degeree that it “encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy” (Coddling, p. 29). Examples include:
- helicopter-parenting that schedules every minute of a child’s day to ensure that said child is never without some form of adult supervision;
- school districts such as the one my niece and nephew attended where district policy would not allow them to enter their elementary school unless dropped off by car—even though said school was a five-minute walk from their house;
- “the head teacher of an elementary school in East London [issuing] a rule that children must not even touch recently fallen snow, because touching could lead to snowballs” (Coddling, p. 236; original emphasis)
- universities cancelling controversial speakers simply because some members of the campus might find them disagreeable;
Hence, at its extreme, safetyism is the notion that even ideas are physically dangerous and must therefore be regulated to prevent exposure to them. In other words, we must find a way to isolate each and every one of us from anything that might cause pain.
Sounds crazy right? Yet Lukianoff and Haidt point out that to some degree it makes a certain twisted logic because as “we adapt to our new and improved circumstances, [we] then lower the bar for what we count as intolerable levels of discomfort and risk” (Coddling, pp. 13-14). Modern industrial society with its medicine, abundance of food, sanitation systems, etc. has so removed us from the environment we evolved in that “coddled” isn’t even an adequate word to describe our lives today. Yet that same modern industrial society bombards our paleolithic brains with news of inflation, school shootings, and climate change, and so our heightened feelings of fear for our safety can drive us to the crazy isolation of safetyism.
Creating some very unintended and negative consequences in the process. As the subtitle to Coddling suggests, we have now raised an entire generation incapable of adulting; put the production of new knowledge at risk—since “to advance knowledge, we must sometimes suffer” (Kindly, p. 19); and even endangered our form of governing because “citizens of a democracy don’t suddenly develop this art on their eighteenth birthday” without many preceding years of free play and self-negotiated conflict (Coddling, p. 191). Just as the isolationism of the 1910s and 1930s did, safetyism has put us at grave risk as a nation, and I think it is worth quoting Lukianoff and Haidt at length here:
After all, if focusing on big threats [car seats, reducing exposure to second hand smoke, etc.] produces such dividends, why not go further and make childhood as close to perfectly safe as possible? A problem with this kind of thinking is that when we attempt to produce perfectly safe systems, we almost inevitably create new and unforeseen problems. For example, efforts to prevent financial instability by bailing out companies can lead to larger and more destructive crashes later on; efforts to protect forests by putting out small fires can allow dead wood to build up, eventually leading to catastrophic fires far worse than the sum of the smaller fires that were prevented. Safety rules and programs—like most efforts to change complex systems—often have unintended consequences. Sometimes these consequences are so bad that the intended beneficiaries are worse off than if nothing had been done at all…efforts to protect kids from risk by preventing them from gaining experience—such as walking to school, climbing a tree, or using sharp scissors—are different. Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment (Coddling, p. 169).
How, though, did we get here? What has allowed safetyism to arise and to thrive? One answer Lukianoff and Haidt provide is what they call the three great “Untruths” that have taken hold in our society: the Untruth of Fragility (“what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”), the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning (“always trust your feelings”), and the Untruth of Us vs. Them (“life is a battle between Good people and Evil people”). Together, Lukianoff and Haidt argue (and document), these three ideas have permeated much of the modern parenting literature, school policies pre-K thru PhD, and social media, and the consequence are large numbers of children and young adults who are not resilient, who are experiencing poor mental health, and who are permanently trapped in their own biases.
Added to that, Jonathan Rauch argues (and also documents), has been the rise over the past thirty years of what he calls the fundamentalist and humanitarian threats to research institutions of all manner. Namely (from the first) that all knowledge of any kind is absolutely relative and therefore equal in truth value and (from the second) that since “one person’s knowledge is another’s repression” (Kindly, p. 116), we must “set up authorities empowered to weed out hurtful ideas and speech (Kindly, p. 131). Objective truth withers and dies; new knowledge becomes impossible; and thoughtful, critically reflective individuals who might be able to challenge Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s three great Untruths become a thing of the past.
There is, of course, also the reality of the rise of social media and the consequent tribalism it has empowered that generates affirmation for the belief in the need to be safe against the “Other.” As Lukianoff and Haidt point out:
The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently. We are all descended from people who belong to groups that were consistently better at winning that competition. Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict (Coddling, p. 58).
And when social media simultaneously provides both the intragroup identity and the intergroup conflict, you have the perfect recipe for safetyism. In fact, Lukianoff and Haidt go so far in recognizing this reality that they actually have a term for the subgroup of Gen Z where we see this the most: iGen, the group who grew up after Steve Jobs unleashed the iPhone on the world.
So now what? This group of individuals bathed in safetyism since birth has only grown larger over time, and a strong case could be made that the whole reason for the general tenor of the last decade of election cycles is that we are losing the number of actual adults in the room. As political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daneil Ziblatt have written, “[political] parties [have] come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe” that must be protected against at all costs (Codling, p. 131).
However, there are still a few of us around adulting our way through life, and a large number of us work in education, where the task has been, remains, and will always be—as the old folk wisdom puts it—preparing the child for the road, not the road for the child. Not that schools shouldn’t be places of safety, but as former University of Chicago president, Hanna Holborn Gray reminds us in the epigram at the start of this essay—and ALL the brain research affirms—a certain degree of discomfort is necessary for learning to take place. Critical thinking is simply the ability to connect one’s claims to reliable evidence properly, but developing the capacity to do it involves falling and skinning one’s mental knees over and over again until you can skate logic’s constraints with ease. Learning hurts, and there will never be any way around that.
And while it is true that we can pave a bit of a child’s road for them, it has always been utterly self-defeating to think any of us could do more than that. Food, clothing, shelter…love, caring, empathy…medicine, education, athletics…generational wealth…we can smooth some of a child’s road for them. But we cannot prepare them for that call in the night that a loved one has died or the diagnosis of cancer or the failure of a marriage. Each person’s road is unique, and so we can only truly help prepare them to travel it.
What’s more, if “it [has been] foolish to think one could clear the road for one’s child [in the past], before the internet, now it’s delusional” (Codling, p. 237). As I commented in Chapter 9, I have confronted the paradox these past 15+ years that even as my digital native students have arrived in my classroom more and more unprepared for critical thinking, I have been steadily more successful at enabling them to do so. That I can do so, I think, is because of the subject I teach, and the how and why of that is what I will explore next time.
References
Lukianoff, G. & Haidt, J. (2018) The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. New York: Penguin Books.
Rauch, J. (2013) Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (Expanded Edition). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Stokesbury, J. (1981) A Short History of World War I. New York: William and Morrow Company, Inc.
Stokesbury, J. (1980) A Short History of World War II. New York: William and Morrow Company, Inc.
Light a Candle 