Coddling of the American Mind

Status: Finished 12/26/2021

Rating: 1/5

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I very much enjoyed Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. This book was not as good.

The book is highly structured, which I summarize below

Part I: Three fundamental untruths:

The book describes three fundamental untruths:

• What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker (as opposed to antifragility)
• Always trust your feelings (as opposed to teachings of cognitive behavioral therapy)
• The world is a battle between good and evil (as opposed to nuanced thinking)

The book justifies why these are bad ideas, but this was already pretty obvious (to me at least).

Part II: These fundamental untruths are present on college campuses

The book summarizes lots of anecdotes of bad behavior on college campuses. I don’t think any are worth repeating. The section of the book talking about “intimidation and violence” and “witch hunts” actually reminded me a lot of scrolling Twitter (in a bad way). There were lots of examples of the worst behavior on the “other side.”

Ironically, I find exposure to these kinds of stories makes my thinking less nuanced. This part of the book felt like a good vs. evil narrative, and made me feel angry against the “evil” college people for doing “evil” things. In the prior section, the book was telling me not to think in those terms. But how do the authors expect the readers to feel when presented with the information in this manner?

Part III: Why is this happening?

The book offers six threads to explain why this happening:

1. Political polarization contributes to less ideological diversity on college campuses.
2. Increased rates of anxiety and depression in Gen Z, likely driven (at least partially) by social media use.
3. Helicopter parenting that obsesses over protecting against extremely low-risks (kidnapping by strangers).
4. Free time being crowded-out by obsession with college admissions and too much homework.
5. Bizarre behavior from university administrators.
6. Non-intuitive ideas about justice that think in terms of groups as opposed to individuals.

Despite the book’s structure, this section felt very random to me. I didn’t see a particularly strong connection between these six threads and the fundamental untruths. The fundamental untruths are so general, they could have almost talked about anything in this section. I found much of it to be familiar, particular threads #1 , #3, and #4. Threads #2 and #5 were most interesting to me, though the statistical analysis in #2 felt a bit flimsy.

Part IV: What to do about it all

The book offered some recommendations. I mostly skimmed this section, because everything seemed sensible/uncontroversial/what-I’m-already-doing.

General reaction

If you are interested in this book’s ideas, I recommend listening to Jonathan Haidt’s book talks. Those are pretty interesting. The book itself is very boring and fluff-filled. This book had two red flags that I should have observed:

1. This book started out as an essay in The Atlantic. It was a popular so the authors chose to expand it to a book. This is a red flag for a fluff.
2. I only read this book because I enjoyed The Righteous Mind so much, but that book was sole-authored by Haidt. The first author of this book was Greg Lukianoff. So beware of books with random coauthors.

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