Free Republic

Over the past decade, American moral culture has changed. The evidence of those changes has been especially apparent on college campuses, where new concepts such as microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and bias response teams were first tested. But this new “victimhood culture” is devastating to its adherents, disempowering them and dooming them to disappointment. In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explain this mindset: What is new today is the premise that students are fragile. Even those who are not fragile...

What is the telos––the purpose, end, or goal––of the university? In a thought-provoking 2016 lecture, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that the answer ought to be “truth,” but that lately, more of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as a second or alternative telos. While acknowledging that those goals are not always at odds, he argued that “the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable,” and he urged academia to affirm the primacy of truth-seeking. A recent essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education recognizes the same conflict, but implies that it sometimes ought...

So, here's a story. You probably saw it in the news, in the dueling op-eds, in the outrage that swirled around it. But the story is still worth revisiting as a microcosm, a little diorama, of our cultural situation. This past July, The Nation published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee called "How-To," narrated by a panhandler offering advice to other panhandlers, explaining how to gin up sympathy among the passers-by. As a poem "How-To" was, meh, just about average: one of those not-particularly-good-but-not-particularly-bad productions by authors and editors well versed in the mechanisms taught by writing schools. We have a...

After an Ohio parent blew the whistle on a morality test given to a high school class, the Hilliard City School District sent the teacher who gave the test to time out. Students were given a 36-question test about various ethical situations in which they were asked to choose what actions were OK and which were not. But the questions, given to a 10th-grade language arts class at Hilliard Bradley High School, crossed a line as far as parent Todd Sandberg was concerned, The Columbus Dispatch reported. Sandberg said the test was graded in a way that it would tell...

In 2015, Greg Lukianoff (president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and Jonathan Haidt (professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business) wrote an article for The Atlantic entitled “The Coddling of the American Mind.” In that article, the authors argued that students (college but also pre-college) increasingly react to words, books, images, and speakers with fear and anger because they’ve been taught to exaggerate danger, to let their emotions rule, and to engage in binary thinking. It proved to be one of the most read and discussed articles ever published by the magazine....

Not only is Nowrasteh’s evidence irrelevant, but his own research proves him wrong, and shows that immigration changes America’s political culture because immigrants vote overwhelmingly for Democratic Party candidates and support socialist policies. Consider the following data from his paper, “Immigrants Assimilate into the Political Mainstream.” Figure 1, which shows that 50 percent of all immigrants lean Democrat, compared to just 18 percent who lean Republican—a much starker divide than we see among native born citizens. Furthermore, Figure 3 shows that these political preferences persist for at least four generations—immigrants’ decedents are more than twice as likely to be “strong...

'Liberal Mind' author's extensive study explains 'Psychological Causes of Political Madness' With the American left, the Democratic Party and the establishment news media displaying ever-more bizarre symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome, here comes a veteran psychiatrist making the case that the mental-emotional world of leftists really is tantamount to a mental disorder. “Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded,” says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the acclaimed book, “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.” “Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal...

A new study out of Harvard—the first randomized controlled experiment designed to examine the effects of trigger warnings on individual resilience—may indicate that Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt were right about trigger warnings.In the fall of 2015, Greg Lukianoff, First Amendment Lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (for which I work), and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business, published an article in The Atlantic. In it, they detailed how college campuses may inadvertently promote mental habits identical to the “cognitive distortions” that cognitive behavioral...

Public intellectual Jordan Peterson believes the cultural desire to view everything in terms of the political spectrum is at its root responsible for his wildly inaccurate portrayal by many in the establishment media, he tells The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview.TheDC reached out to Peterson after a particularly egregious NBC News segment titled "Who is Jordan Peterson, favorite figure of the alt-right." The segment featured only seconds of an hour long interview with Peterson and did not allow him to opine or offer thoughts on the "alt-right" political movement he is supposedly the poster child of.The NBC News interview...

I recall reading or hearing of research to determine the level of understanding of opponents political arguments by conservatives and leftists/liberals. The research, as I recall, showed a list of policy questions, and asked the recipient, who was self identified, as conservative or liberal/leftist, to give the opposite sides arguments on each policy question. My understanding was that conservatives consistently understood and knew the opposite sides arguments, while liberal/leftists were ignorant of the conservative arguments. I have been looking for the source of this research, but have not found any. Is this research a myth, or is there an actual...

The Fragile Generation Guest Post by Lenore Skenazy & Jonathan HaidtBad policy and paranoid parenting are making kids too safe to succeed One day last year, a citizen on a prairie path in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst came upon a teen boy chopping wood. Not a body. Just some already-fallen branches. Nonetheless, the onlooker called the cops.Officers interrogated the boy, who said he was trying to build a fort for himself and his friends. A local news site reports the police then “took the tools for safekeeping to be returned to the boy’s parents.”Elsewhere in America, preschoolers at the...

The Illusionist  David Bentley HartDaniel Dennett’s latest book marks five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness. It seems to me that we have come this way before. Some of the signposts are new, perhaps — “Bacteria,” “Bach,” and so on — but the scenery looks very familiar, if now somewhat overgrown, and it is hard not to feel that the path is the same one that Daniel Dennett has been treading for five decades. I suppose it would be foolish to expect anything else. As often as not, it is the questions we fail to ask — and so...

Free speech is under assault because of a three-step argument made by the advocates and justifiers of violence. The first step is they say that the validity or invalidity of an argument can be judged solely by the ethnic, sexual, racial, or cultural identity of the person making the argument. The second step is that they claim those who say otherwise are engaging in what they call “verbal violence,” and the final step is they conclude that physical violence is sometimes justified in order to stop such verbal violence. So let’s examine each of these three steps in turn. First,...

MURRAY: I think Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist who started the academy was right. He was right. He had an interview a few weeks ago where he said the 'Deplorables' comment by Hillary Clinton changed the history of the world, and he may very well be right. That one comment by itself may have swung enough votes, it certainly was emblematic of the disdain with which the New Upper Class looks at mainstream Americans. Full audio and transcript at link...

Jayne Riew is a photographer and artist who also happens to be the wife of academic Jonathan Haidt. Haidt may be familiar to readers as author of “The Righteous Mind” and co-author of a cover article for the Atlantic titled “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Today, Haidt announced on Twitter that his wife had put together a project titled “She’s With Him.” The project combines Riew’s photographs with statements from a small group of women who defied the expectations of many around them and voted for Donald Trump. Here’s a bit of Riew’s description of how and why she...

Meet Doctor David Diamond, a psychiatrist who has a practice in Dover New Hampshire, a peaceful town on New Hampshire coast 10 minutes north from Portsmouth. David Diamond is a psychiatrist as well as a peacenik, a militant liberal and though it is not known if he is a registered communist he certainly is a fellow traveler. David diamond is very active with local left wing groups in particular, seacoast peace response, a militant leftist group that emphasizes pacifism, peace and human rights all while demanding that conservatives, and those who support conservatives and capitalism be prosecuted. Since 9/11, the...

Imagine that you were the president of an American university at the end of 2015, as student protests over racial concerns swept the country, energized by the Black Lives Matter movement. The president of the University of Missouri resigned over controversies there, and other college leaders were confronted on their campuses. Now it’s your turn. A hundred students march to your office and present their demands. They give you one week to respond. What should you do?... As a result of these disparate admissions standards, many students spend four years in a social environment where race conveys useful information about...

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.... Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that...

Australian research from the 1990s has emerged as key evidence in the debate about same-sex parenting.The constant refrain from supporters has been that there is no difference in outcomes for children in traditional marriages or same-sex couples. In 2010 Judge Vaughn Walker struck down a voter-approved constitutional referendum in California, partly because he found no sociological evidence of a difference. He put the conventional wisdom in a nutshell:“Children raised by gay or lesbian parents are as likely as children raised by heterosexual parents to be healthy, successful and well-adjusted. The research supporting this conclusion is accepted beyond serious debate in...

Back in the day, when bosses and CEOs got a little too attentive to detail, we would wryly note that they were “micromanaging.” Today, students actually want university administrators to micromanage free speech, putting the First Amendment at risk. “Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt write in the latest issue of The Atlantic. “Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a...