I don’t envy university administrators and what their jobs have become over the last couple of decades. I just finished reading “Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (published 2018), and I have a question or two that their thesis provokes for me.
Their work is summarized by several pithy quotes that they note, one of which is: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.” Okay - yeah. That seems a pretty sound principle.
In chapter 10 (“The Bureaucracy of Safetyism”) they address the concept of “Harassment and Concept Creep”. My basic takeaway from this chapter (and the rest of the book) is that the bar for what counts as harm to any individual (or group) has been lowered so far that it is more of a request for or empowering of authoritarian censorship than it is needed protection for those who feel threatened. It is now a culture of cultivated vulnerability. To quote from later in that chapter:
In an optimally functioning dignity culture, people are assumed to have dignity and worth regardless of what others think of them, so they are not expected to react too strongly to minor slights. Of course, full dignity was at one time accorded only to adult, white men; the rights revolutions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries did essential work to expand dignity to all. This is in contrast to the older “honor cultures,” in which men were so obsessed with guarding their reputations that they were expected to react violently to minor insults made against them or those close to them—perhaps with a challenge to a duel. In a dignity culture, however, dueling seems ridiculous. People are expected to have enough self-control to shrug off irritations, slights, and minor conflicts as they pursue their own projects. For larger conflicts or violations of one’s rights, there are reliable legal or administrative remedies, but it would be undignified to call for such help for small matters, which one should be able to resolve on one’s own. Perspective is a key element of a dignity culture; people don’t view disagreements, unintentional slights, or even direct insults as threats to their dignity that must always be met with a response.
For example, one clear sign of a dignity culture is that children learn some version of “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me.” That childhood saying is of course not literally true—people feel real pain as a result of words. (If no one felt hurt by words, the saying would never be needed.) But “sticks and stones” is a shield that children in a dignity culture use to dismiss an insult with contemptuous indifference, as if to say, “Go ahead and insult me. You cannot upset me. I really don’t care what you think.”
…
In 2013, Campbell and Manning began noticing the same changes on campus that Greg had been noticing—the interlocking set of new ideas about microaggressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces. They noted that the emerging morality of victimhood culture was radically different from dignity culture. They defined a victimhood culture as having three distinct attributes: First, “individuals and groups display high sensitivity to slight”; second, they “have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties”; and third, they “seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.”
Of special relevance to our concerns in this chapter is the second attribute. Campbell and Manning pointed out that the presence of administrators or legal authorities who can be persuaded to take one’s side and intervene is a prerequisite for the emergence of victimhood culture. They noted that when administrative remedies are easily available and there is no shame in calling on them, it can lead to a condition known as “moral dependence.” People come to rely on external authorities to resolve their problems, and, over time, “their willingness or ability to use other forms of conflict management may atrophy.”
This is the concern that Kipnis voiced when she said that overprotective policies make students more vulnerable instead of less, and that schools are creating a culture of vulnerability.
I fully acknowledge that such concern (perhaps the whole book) would carry a lot more cultural cache had it been written by people who have actually suffered under historically/presently discriminatory systems, and not two presumably fairly well off white men. But setting aside that culture war objection for the moment and addressing the actual thesis put forward (something that can be rightly and reasonably expected in our society when we’re following our better angels I think) … here is a question I have as a Christian.
Is it not a Christian teaching - from the Sermon on the Mount no less, that hurtful words can and should rightly be seen as violence? The authors make a convincing (to me) case that actual physical violence still needs to be maintained as a separate category from “mere” words. They aren’t saying words (especially threats of harm, and other slanderous speech too) are insignificant and should never warrant consequences. They are claiming that to elevate anything found offensive - even slights, whether intended or unintended - to the same level as actual harm is to foster yet more vulnerability in the very population that rightly needs protection. It turns very authoritarian very quickly and makes enemies out of potential allies. It is (to quote Haidt in another context) to “send your child as a balloon out into a world filled with pins and needles.” It doesn’t end well - for them! And yet Jesus seems to demolish the difference between what the law would recognize as real, physical murder, and murder in our hearts. How would Jesus react to this book’s thesis?
My wrestling with that so far is to think that there are two very distinct levels of interaction being addressed. The book is addressing something at a “policy level” or “best governmental practices” level, whereas Jesus is addressing a spiritual social (personal relationship) level that will have a very different (much higher) bar of expectation than what we can reasonably put onto some administrative bureaucracy. This book is suggesting that we are ceding way too much of our own potential empowerment over to third-party authority, and will/are paying a high social price for doing so in our homes and educational environs. They seem to me to make a reasonable and urgent case. What do others here think?
