Coddling of the American Mind

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, 269 pages

It is free-speech activist Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's contention that Western (and especially American) society has developed profound misunderstandings of human realities which are not only empirically false but positively harmful.  They condense these into three great untruths - that adversity is psychologically damaging, that feelings are the most reliable guide to what is right, and that people can be sorted into those who are fundamentally good-intentioned and their enemies.  As a consequence, young people are being encouraged to remain emotionally fragile, irrational adolescents who view anyone who disagrees with them as irredeemably evil.  Not only does this tend to reduce public discourse to grievance-fueled shouting matches, it also produces a mass of disconnected, immature, desperately unhappy individuals who lack even the basic resources necessary to understand the causes of their unhappiness.

The greatest risk for a book of this sort is that it will only contribute to, rather than ameliorate, the culture of outrage.  Thankfully, Lukianoff and Haidt are not partisan firebrands, and while readers of every political persuasion will likely find cause for anger in their analysis, they should also find reasons for self-reflection on their own complicity in our anti-cultural spiral into unreality, which extends far beyond the gloomy groves of academe.