Confronting Ugly Truths

Blind, closed,
Suspicious, afraid,
Ignorance
Protects itself,
And protected,
Ignorance grows.
—Octavia Butler,
Parable of the Talents

I remember when I first learned about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. I was in my mid-fifties, and I was listening, ironically, to the NPR station out of that very city as I was driving down I-44, headed west to visit my beloved New Mexico. The local broadcast was carrying a story about the debate over reparations for the descendants of the survivors, and I distinctly recall thinking “how is it possible for me to have lived to be 53 years old and never have heard of this before now?” I was appalled that a significant dark chapter of our history had never made it into any textbook or lesson I had ever encountered during my schooling years, and I can still feel the consequent internal shift in my paradigms as I realized how much more unpacking my white privilege still needed than had been done to date.

I share this preface because about a month ago, I was again listening to NPR when the series Throughline came on as I was prepping for my morning run, and they were airing an episode about the science fiction writer, Octavia Butler. Butler—who black, female, and gay was the antithesis of the stereotypical sci-fi author—is a voice I have known about for many decades but whom I had never actually read, and by the end of that Throughline, I knew it was time to change that fact. Fortunately, my school’s library has copies of what are considered her three most significant works, and so I borrowed both volumes in the Parable series and got to work.

And after reading them, I can declare categorically that I would choose to live in Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy COMBINED before I would ever willingly live in the dystopian hell that Butler describes. So nightmarish did I find the alternate reality she sets forth that there were times when I had to compel myself to read further. What she writes is just that bleak and disturbing.

Yet why, a reasonable reader might ask, would I do that? Why force myself to read something so obviously discomfiting? My answer is: for the same reason that I should have learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre long before I did. Ugly truths are no less truths, and it became very clear early on in both books that Butler is using her own experience as a black, gay woman in the Los Angeles of the 1990s to inform the storyline. She is effectively elaborating what it is like to live as a black person in this country, a woman in this country, and a homosexual in this country, and very little of that experience is “pretty.” It is why I don’t think I can ever read what is considered Butler’s other most significant work, Kindred, because while I have understood for quite some time now the horror that nearly 100% of black women in this country’s history experienced rape (and often multiple times), the awareness that one would not exist as a black person today without that long ago act of rape (and sometimes not so long ago)…. I have no words.

Still I write, and I do so because part of what makes Butler’s work so compelling to this privileged white, heterosexual male is that she confronts readers of any background with the reality that ugly truths inform and impact all of our lives and that the most dangerous thing about ignorance of any kind is the threat it poses to acknowledging this reality. We already avoid so-called inconvenient truths at our peril; we avoid ugly truths at our demise.

Which is, of course, fine with the current administration in charge of the Executive branch of this country. The less truth the better as far as anyone in the White House is concerned. Ignore the U.S. Constitution and the Rule of Law. Ignore medical science and its impact on public health. Ignore climate change and its consequent loss in lives and livelihoods. Ignore the murder of two U.S. citizens in cold blood. Ignore basic human moral decency. Ignore. Ignore. Ignore.

The danger of ignoring, though, is the cultivation of ignorance, and as Butler wisely observes, ignorance will do anything and everything in its power to grow. We are watching that reality even now as one of the greatest social experiments in human history—a nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people”—systematically self-immolates because we don’t like confronting ugly truths about ourselves. Doing so is messy, uncomfortable, and regularly painful, and the simple certainty is that I owe my very existence to violence perpetrated upon others because there is at least one rape, murder, or pillage somewhere in every genetic line. In addtion, I owe at least a portion of my current status and wealth in our society to the programmatic violence that was slavery in this country. I do not “enjoy” knowing either of these facts, but their knowledge enables me to understand what actions I must take with others to create the conditions for less violence, more empathy, greater compassion, and increasing justice for “all God’s children.”

Again, the most perverse conviction of the Trumpian weltanschauung and those who seek it is the belief that returning to the willful ignorance of a previous age—when closets weren’t just for clothing, misogyny was hip, and the N-word not forbidden—will somehow make the perceived “flaws” in the liberal agenda for building a more humane, equitable, and ecologically sound world go away. Trump and his allies (which ironically include some women and people of color) want to make “everything better” once more for the white male heteronormative hegemony, and their principal tool in these efforts is the elevation of ignorance: to promote falsehoods, to attack even the most vaguely unpleasant truths, and to disable critical thinking through a firehose of compassion fatigue. All to maintain a caste system grounded in a myth of American exceptionalism.

Which brings me to a personal “ugly” truth I find distressing and distasteful to acknowledge: the realization that I, too, have bought into to certain components of that myth. Don’t get me wrong; anyone who has read pretty much anything I have written knows my embrace of the truth that the United States is fundamentally and foundationally a racist, sexist patriarchy built on the blood of generations of disadvantaged people. We’ve got a LONG way to go before declaring ourselves “the New Jerusalem.” But in fits and starts, we did at least seem to be going—chattel slavery was abolished; my mother would eventually possess her own credit card; there is a minimum wage—and that’s where I realized the impact of the myth on myself: I believed the social experiment itself was exceptional, that a “nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could survive anything thrown at it and eventually evolve into its more noble potential.

However, I now have more than a year of observable primate behavior of the basest sort to confront me with the ugly truth that the American experiment in democracy is no more exceptional than any other social construct humans have invented, all of them utterly dependent on the qualities of the experiment’s participants. Qualities that right now I am at my most pessimistic about, especially given the rise of technologies with deliberately designed algorithms to cater to the human brain’s most primitive whims. Ignorance growing indeed!

Yet pessimism doesn’t let me off the hook. As I have oft quoted my mentor, the Jewish philosopher, Steven Schwarzschild, “just because the world is ending doesn’t excuse you from getting dressed for dinner.” The American experiment may not be exceptional, but that doesn’t make the fight for civil rights, empowering women, and fair compensation for employment any less important or worthy an endeavor. If anything, that is the actual value of ugly truths: without confronting them, you cannot grow and change for the better.

Which, interestingly enough, is a significant message in Octavia Butler’s work. None of her protagonists are hapless, helpless, or hopeless. In the face of world’s they did not create, they are the very embodiment of strength, resilience, and resolve, and they manage their lives successfully amidst the proverbial “gloom and doom”—much as humans have been doing daily ever since our ancestors first evolved a little over 350,000 years ago. We have been fruitfully navigating ugly truths for a very long time.

So tomorrow morning, I will get up as I have now for more than thirty-seven and a half years and head off to school. I will teach my students of all colors about the heightened cortisol levels of their dark-skinned classmates and the negative impact this has on their daily health and lifespans. I will teach my students of all sexualities and genders about the evolution of the LGBTQIA+ phenotypes throughout the entire animal kingdom and why natural selection has maintained these value-added traits for millions of years. I will teach my students of all socio-economic backgrounds the realities of a finite planet and its limited carrying capacity for any species and why, thererfore, it might be a good idea to learn how to consume less and to share more. And I will teach my fellow carbon-based lifeforms that the natural cycling of this critical element has been vital to the wellbeing of our planet for billions of years but that continuing to abruptly dump millions of years of fossilized photosynthesis into the atmosphere might not be our smartest idea as a species.

In other words, I will teach truth, however unfashionable or ugly it might be, and I will fight ignorance, however quixotic that can sometimes feel. Because to do anything less is to dishonor the millennia of ancestors who confronted their own ugly truths to make our lives today possible. The lie presently in the White House may be endangering the American experiment, but that lie only succeeds if we ignore it.

References

Arablouei, R., et al. (Jan. 1, 2026) Winter Book Club: Octavia Butler’s Visionary Fiction. Throughline. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/01/nx-s1-5643047/winter-book-club-octavia-butlers-visionary-fiction.

Butler, O. (1993) Parable of the Sower. London: Headline Publishing Group.

Butler, O. (1998) Parable of the Talents. London: Headline Publishing Group.

Where Will We Go from Here?

You’ve got to be proud of your wounds.
—Nancy Pelosi

One of the great challenges I have when I’m writing these days is having anything I say remain remotely significant before getting the chance to upload it, such is the deranged chaos of the Trump presidency. Because I can only compose on weekends during the school year, I will start discussing my reaction to something I’ve encountered only to have what I’m writing about feel almost banal before I can return to it. Case in point, here is how this current essay began quite recently:

As most who know me can well imagine, I have been a loyal subscriber to Scientific American for almost 30 years now. In addition, I am one of those readers who actually starts on the first page and reads the entire issue cover-to-cover, including the math articles I can barely follow at times. I’m just that curious.

However, as the ancient dictum about cats reminds us, sometimes curiosity can be a dangerous thing—or at least psychologically problematic—and so I found myself finishing up the December 2025 issue just moribundly depressed—or at least discouraged. With one exception (which, ironically, was about post-partum depression), every feature article contained gloomy news about the future. There was the story about oil and gas companies pivoting to plastic to keep their profits flowing as more people purchase all-electric vehicles. Potential individualized cancer vaccines are being defunded by Kennedy’s HHS while Martian soil samples are now trapped inside NASA’s Perseverance because of Trump’s budget cuts to basic research. And the “highlight” of all “highlights:” a story about AI avatars for grieving the dead. Heck, even the commentary section contained news of more teenagers turning to chatbots as alternatives to personal relationships. It was just dark reporting piled on top of dark reporting.

I share all of this because I want readers to know the kind of mental mindset I was in when—on only the second day of the new year—I read the following headline in my local newspaper:

“Paramedic Under Investigation for Explicit Videos Defends Urinating in Family’s Food.”

Yes, reread that. Defends. Urinating. In food. A headline featured not in a tabloid but in a reputable news source was informing me that someone who society entrusts with people’s lives was arguing that it is okay to piss on material intended for human consumption. And that wasn’t even what had gotten him into trouble!

How did we get here? And more importantly, where do we go? While I pretty much know the answer to the first question (much of my writing is about it), I find myself feeling so mentally gob-smacked right now by everything that headline implies about us as a culture, that I am at a loss for any possible answer to the second one. Essayist Robert Fulghum reminds us to be wary of judgment, that “change the name, and the story is told of you.” But I find myself living in a world where there are now “shoes” I just cannot envision ever “walking in” and where there are now entire “warehouses” of such footwear strolling around our public domains. Granted, this guy got into trouble because he crossed a boundary in what remains of our social norms, but look at what our President’s done this past year and how much of our paramedic’s trouble is just his lack of political capital?

Oh! To go back to the relative naivete of when I wrote those words! News of some nitwit videotaping his genitals pales—indeed becomes outright invisible—when held up against the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation and a government condoned murder of a mother of three. My bewildered appall at someone defending their stupidity appears almost silly now when compared to the disgusted outrage I should feel at the absolute madness coming out of the minds of this administration. Where do we go, indeed!

Yet as tempting as it is, I can’t just rant. Cursing the darkness solves nothing, defeats nothing, illuminates nothing; it doesn’t even ultimately make the curser feel any better. The only way to banish darkness is to irradiate it, to make it fully visible for the evil it is and to chip away at its shadow with truth, honesty, and integrity. Admittedly, those three things feel in short supply right now (with AI threatening their very existence in today’s world). But as an educator (and especially as a science teacher), I am here to tell you that we in the veracity-manufacturing business are still hard at work, doing our best to fight the fundamental root of all evil: ignorance.

And a partner in that fight is nuance—bringing me to a marvelous book I just finished entitled, The Light Eaters. In it, the author, Zoë Schlanger, explores the latest science about our green friends, the plants—who, for those who don’t know this, literally build their bodies out of light itself and then pass that light onto us in the form of food—and near its beginning, Ms. Schlanger shares a sentiment both pertinent to this discussion and too beautiful not to pass on when she writes: “the world we could have if complexity was not backgrounded was the world I wanted to live in.” She then effectively invites the reader to join her in doing just that during the remainder of the book, and as I simultaneously processed both her book and the stupidity coming out of the White House, I began to realize that THAT was the root of all the overall awfulness of Trump’s actions (as well as those of any other petty tyrant): the “backgrounding” of the complexity of truth.

What’s more, I realized that this dismissal of truth’s fundamental nuanced nature is not only the foundation of Trump’s evil, it is also the source of its ultimate downfall. Because reality is going to BE complex regardless of whether any human might wish it otherwise. You can rip a brutal dictator out of his bed in the middle of the night, but doing so isn’t going to cause multinational corporations to suddenly risk billions of dollars in investments in a just-destabilized country. You can invade and terrorize entire communities of people, even murdering some of them in cold blood, but you still cannot make the jobs the foreign-born fill any less central to our economy or any more likely to be filled by so-called “real” Americans. You can even go on national television and bully the citizens of this country about the “affordability myth,” but you can’t make the price of groceries and housing come down with tariffs. The bottom line is that everything the Trump administration does offers nothing but simplistic (and often simpleton) responses to complex situations, and the people impacted—including his MAGA political base—have only seen those situations get worse. We are in desperate need of nuance.

Yet such a thing is challenging to find in today’s society, and before I address what we might do to change that fact, I do need to acknowledge first that I get the desire for simplicity; I truly do. I know firsthand the deep psychological longing for simple, binary, black-white, on-off, arithmetic answers: 1+1=2; a²+b²=c²; plug in “x” and find “y.” No need for the difficulty of adjusting one’s personal lifestyle or worldview. No need for the complications that come with inconvenient truths such as climate change or human infidelity. No need for the involvedness of truly “loving your neighbor as yourself.” Nice simple solutions, and I can get back to my Netflix.

Life, though, (as I continue to repeat ad nauseum to anyone who will listen) is messy. Always has been; always will be. Even math, that ultimate arbiter of simplicity, gets messy once you reach calculus (I will never forget the class where I discovered that an integral could have more than one totally correct answer!). Therefore, messy is simply “baked in” (just ask the quantum physicists), and no amount of apps or AI is ever going to remove all the messy from our lives (just ask the biologists).

Which brings me back why I write any of these essays—education. If ignorance is the root of all evil, then teaching and learning about what is true and real is the ultimate defense for the good. Furthermore, that teaching and learning can only lead to any good if it is messy and nuanced in its character and structure. What I think that needs to look like is the fundamental point of this whole on-line project; so I’m simply going to steer anyone interested to actually read some of the chapters in my book to learn more about my concept of “authentic engagement.” But for now, I conclude this particular set of musings by offering one possible interpretation of what I think Nancy Pelosi might have meant when she spoke the words in this essay’s epigram in an interview I once overheard: messy and wounded are inexorably linked; so wherever possible, engage in messes where you can be proud of your inevitable injury. The wounds are how we show we cared.

References

Doyle, C. & Bansil, S. (Jan. 2, 2026) Paramedic Under Investigation for Explicit Videos Defends Urinating in Family’s Food. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/chris-carroll-baltimore-county-paramedic-XQODS6ZUQVH4TPPSCSUFNKBQSA/.

Fulghum, R. (1989) It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It. New York: Villard Books.

Schlanger, Z. (2024) The Light Eaters. New York: Harper Perennial.

The Death of Science?

There was a beginning to it.
There are lots of societies that don’t have it.
It takes very special conditions to support it.
Those social conditions are now getting harder to find.
Of course, it could end.
—Thomas Kuhn

They who are aware do not die;
They who are unaware are as dead.
—The Dhammapada

If you are a member of Jonathan Rauch’s “reality-based community,” this past month has been a rough one. First, the re-election of the premier anti-intellectual in this country to the office of the President of the United States (and most depressing of all by an actual majority of voters this time around). Second, said President-elect’s announcements of his nominees for his Cabinet—including an anti-vaxxer for the Department of Health and Human Services! Third, the CEO of ExxonMobil all but imploring our President-elect to keep the U. S. in the Paris climate accords—and this coming from a company that currently depends for nearly 100% its profits on climate change’s very cause. And fourth, but so subtle that I suspect it flew beneath every radar except NPR’s, the threat of a second Trump presidency to the H-1B visas program.

“The H-1B what?” a reader might ask. Why on earth should a threat to H-1B visas generate despondency in the reality-based community? Simple answer: because the loss of this specific visa program will actually endanger the reality-based community in this country. H-1B visas are how universities, corporations, and engineering firms hire all the highly skilled workers they need (think PhD) to fill all the research positions needed to remain economically viable and competitive. “Foreign-born workers account for about half of the doctoral-level scientists and engineers working in the U.S.” reports NPR, and the reason for this fact is simple: there are simply not enough American-born individuals entering the educational pipeline for these kinds of degrees and scientific fields.

Which means our society’s anti-intellectual streak risks undermining not only our health and physical well-being; it risks damaging the very source of our economic power and standing in the world. If a pissed-off electorate that voted for Donal Trump thinks the price of eggs and rent are too high now, I can only imagine their reaction when major companies close because they don’t have the intellectual capital to compete in the world’s marketplace anymore. As Raymundo Báez-Mendoza of the Leibniz Institute for Primate Research in Göttingen, Germany points out, “a lot of countries in Europe benefited from Brexit, in the sense of capturing really amazing scientists that were working in Britain [because in the world of science] top talent is very mobile.”

Of course, it should not come as that much of a surprise that our country cannot adequately supply its own need for highly skilled workers. Not when we idolize celebrity over the painstaking work of solving an equation. Not when we would rather doomscroll on our phones than read a book that might challenge an assumption. And perhaps most telling of all, not when the brain science clearly shows that the first five years of development are the most critical for wiring a brain that can produce such a worker and yet we pay those responsible for teaching this age SO poorly that 12.3% of them live below the poverty line here in a state with the second highest household income in the country. And where more than a third of Maryland households in this state with an early childhood teacher in them must use at least one (and frequently more!) of the social safety net programs such as Medicaid and SNAP. It is cliché that you get what you pay for, and we as a society simply do not pay to produce the kinds of brains needed to produce highly skilled workers.

Therefore, here I sit, then, a trained biologist, thinking: the CDC is reporting that only around a third of all adults in the U.S. have taken this year’s flu shot and less than 18% have received the latest COVID booster; the childhood disease, measles—one of the most deadly and declared eliminated here in the U.S. more than two decades ago—has already had 16 outbreaks so far this year; and human life expectancy—at least in this country—has actually declined for the first time in centuries. All because, as Dr. Gregory Poland of Atria Academy of Science and Medicine puts it, “as a society right now, we’re in a phase of rejecting expertise, of mistrust of any expert, whether it’s science, meteorology, medicine, government – whatever it is.”

And that causes me to contemplate what I once thought impossible: that Thomas Kuhn may have been right when he suggested that science as a method of studying and understanding the world could actually disappear—perhaps forever.

Science, of course, is the “it” in my epigram from Kuhn as the start of this essay, and the famed historian of science is reported to have said these words in an interview with Scientific American towards the end of his life in the winter of 1991. As the author of one of the single most influential books of the 20^th Century, he comes across in the interview as weary of what he perceives as all the misunderstandings people have had about his ideas, and when pushed, he basically states flatly that science as an intellectual endeavor is just as much a social construct as any other such endeavor and, therefore, like any social construct, it can die.

Now I have recognized for some time that any shared sense of truth in this country was—at best—on life support. The firehose of dis- and misinformation modern digital technologies have made possible have all but ensured truth’s demise. But the idea that the one remaining arbiter of truth could be in trouble, that the one arrow left in our collective epistemological quiver could disappear…naively, that thought had never occurred to me before encountering Kuhn’s words amidst the events of the past month. Suddenly, I had gained a small, existential insight into the voices of the many African American women interviewed following the election: “Damn! Please don’t tell me I have to keep fighting yet again a battle that I should not keep losing.”

But for those of us in the sciences, fight we must. We must become the resistance to every effort of the in-coming administration to dismantle the scientific infrastructure in this country. Furthermore, we must do so anywhere and everywhere we can. In labs and research centers. In classrooms and homes. In legislatures and city halls. In movies and museums. Even in the kitchen!¹ Put bluntly, all of us in the “reality-based community” must join like-minded individuals such as Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers and Scishow and do everything in our power “to make the truth go viral.”² It won’t be an easy fight, and I openly confess that I, too, am growing weary of the constant need to battle ignorance and stupidity. But I could never look the generations of children who have come through my classroom in the eye if I didn’t say I tried. How they will judge me only time will see.

Coda

During my morning run today, I was reminded yet again of how spectacularly and especially beautiful this fall has been here in the State of Maryland. Seldom have I seen such rich colors that have lasted for as long, and there is even this one oak on my walk to school where the rays of the rising sun hit it in such a way that I can only shake my head in awe at the metaphor for God chosen by the authors of Exodus—burning bush indeed!

However, this same beauty has made me recall the opening lines from James Stokesbury’s history of World War I which I reread this past August:

The summer of 1914 was the fairest in living memory. Grass had never been greener, nor skies bluer. Europe lay rich and ripening under the warming sun, and from the Ural Mountains to the wave-beaten west coast of Ireland the cows fattened, the newborn animals played in rich fields, and lovers strolled in the country lanes….So beautiful was that summer that those who survived it invested it with a golden haze; it assumed a retrospective poignancy, as if before it, all had been beautiful, and after it, nothing ever was again. It became the summer that the world ended, and it was somehow fitting that it should therefore be the most glorious summer ever (p. 11).

For a whole lot of people—many of whom don’t yet realize it just as many didn’t in 1914—the world as they knew it ended on Nov. 5. Even science itself in this country may have ended, and what keeps me up at night about the looming battle is that while I am not yet truly elderly, I am also clearly no longer young, leaving me with a fraught and fretful question:

Who’s going to take up the mantle when I’m gone?

¹For more on science in the kitchen, check out J. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015).

²To learn more about Hank Green and his on-line efforts to debunk falsehoods of all kinds, listen to the Nov. 22 episode of NPR’s On the Media.

References

Center for Disease Control (Nov. 22, 2024; latest update) Measles Cases and Outbreaks. https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html#:~:text=Why%20is%20there%20more%20measles,returning%20to%20the%20United%20States.

Elliott, R. F. (Nov. 12, 2024) Exxon Chief to Trump: Don’t Withdraw From Paris Climate Deal. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/business/energy-environment/exxon-mobil-baku-climate-cop29.html.

Hamilton, J. (Nov. 21, 2024) Foreign Nationals Propel U.S. Science. Visa Limits Under Trump Could Change That. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5187926/u-s-science-could-suffer-if-trump-limits-h-1b-visas-again.

Horgan, J. (May 23, 2012) What Thomas Kuhn Really Thought about Scientific “Truth.” Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/what-thomas-kuhn-really-thought-about-scientific-truth/.

Johnson, S. (2021) Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (New York: Riverhead Books).

Kuhn, T. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2^nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lora, M. (Nov. 11, 2024) Just How Underpaid Are Maryland’s Day Care and Pre-K Teachers? The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/early-childhood/maryland-early-childhood-wages-MAJNPXPOFJGHPJOFZRJ3JJ7TBY/.

Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Stein, R. & Schmitz, R. (Nov. 27, 2024) As the Respiratory Virus Season Approaches, Where Does the Vaccination Rate Stand? NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/27/nx-s1-5199731/as-the-respiratory-virus-season-approaches-where-does-the-vaccination-rate-stand.

Stokesbury, J. (1981) A Short History of World War I. New York: William and Morrow Company, Inc.

Stolberg, S. G. (Nov. 14, 2024) Trump Picks R.F.K. Jr. to Be Head of Health and Human Services Dept. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/us/politics/rfk-jr-trump-hhs.html.

The Dangers of Safetyism

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.