Jonathan Haidt opines as to 'why public discourse has become so stupid': Yascha Mounk plays apprentice to the Master.
Old Socialist offers some selective commentary.
If 'you' can't get enough of political/moral hysteria, of the precursors of Jonathan Haidt, like the long dead and un-mourned Allen Bloom, of 'The Closing of The American Mind', he fancied himself as a modern day Plato! Or the 'Tenured Radicals' of another of that ilk @rogerkimball …
I’ll be reading the ‘edited’ transcript of Yascha Mounk’s interview with @JonHaidt : print has a way of making clear the intentions, of a class of political charlatans, who trade on the evanescence of the spoken word, as it becomes part of a past, that defies the capture of that listener.
Mr. Haidt is the co-author of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ , here is short version in this seven thousand plus word screed of 2015, that marked his ‘arrival’ of this New Democratic propagandist/apologist. Call him one of Hillary Clinton’s Brain-Trust of respectable Academic/Intellectuals, hysteria mongers, trying to destroy what is left of the remains of the New Deal Tradition within the Party, and other inconvenient political actors, who might also be suffering from the political malady of the ‘Coddled’.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
Haidt and Lukianoff , after that seven thousand word plus essay, provide a set of Diagnostic Tools, for the evaluations of the disordered students, suffering from the malady they diagnose via:
Common Cognitive Distortions: A partial list from Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn’s Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders (2012).
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
Note this self congratulatory preamble to this ‘source’ :
We believe that this is still—and will always be—the best attitude for American universities. Faculty, administrators, students, and the federal government all have a role to play in restoring universities to their historic mission.
What might be of help to The Reader reach one of the stages of possible political equilibrium, is this excerpt of this interview with Wendy Brown from May 1, 2022 :
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When people talk about free speech problems in colleges, it’s often in the context of woke ideology run amok. Which to me seems like a simplistic understanding of what might be causing changes in discourse on campuses. What do you see as being responsible?
Campuses are complicated spaces, because they aren’t just one kind of space: There’s the classroom, the dorm, the public space that is the campus. Then there’s what we could call clubs, support centers — identity based or based on social categories or political interests. It’s a terrible mistake to confuse all of these and imagine that the classroom or the public space of the campus is the same as your home. Some of that confusion, and I don’t think it’s limited to the left, is responsible for the effort to regulate or denounce what transpires in public spaces. The other thing is that we are suffering from highly politicized discourse about education — discourse that often doesn’t care one whit about actual education. The most recent example is for reasons that he can’t explain and that have some vague connection to something he doesn’t understand called either critical race theory or social-emotional learning. The politicization of academic environments is unhelpful in being able to understand how we teach and orient ourselves to contesting views. What you need is to have the classroom as a space where we’re not talking left wing and right wing but offering the learning that students need to be able to come to their own positions and judgments. So there are two problems. One is the loss of distinctions among different spaces on campus. The other is the hyperpoliticization of knowledge and education.
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/02/magazine/wendy-brown-interview.html
The headline and sub-headline are instructive as Yascha Mounk and Jonathan Haidt explore the vexing question of ‘Why Public Discourse Has Become So Stupid’ !
First start with Mr. Haidt being a New Democrat, though that might mean, in the political present, that he owes an allegiance, to the current iteration of that ‘Centrism’ : defined by the political rapprochement between the New Democrats and the Neo-Cons?
The question itself seems a bit too trivial a subject. for Mr. Haidt to be interested in exploring? But Mr. Haidt manages to make this seemingly trivial question into an opportunity for self-promotion, steeped in an American Hysteria dating from Cotton Mather.
Jonathan Haidt: The piece is the culmination of my eight-year struggle to understand what the hell happened. I've been a professor since 1995. I love being a professor, I love universities. I just felt like this is the greatest job on Earth. I got a glimpse, as a philosophy major, of Plato's Academy—sitting under the olive trees talking about ideas. And then all of a sudden, from out of nowhere in 2014, things got weird. They got aggressive and they got frightening. This game has been going on for thousands of years, in which one person serves something, the other person hits it back—around 2014, intimidation came in. There was a new element, which was that if you say something, people won't argue why you're wrong, they'll slam you as a bad person. On the left, they'll call you a racist; on the right, they'll call you a traitor. But something changed on campus.
And Greg Lukianoff was the first to really diagnose it. So he came to talk to me in 2014. And that became “The Coddling of the American Mind.” That was my first attempt to figure out why universities were getting so weird. And we thought maybe it was just on campus, that colleges were somehow teaching these ways of thinking. But then by 2017, this is spreading more widely, as Gen Z began to graduate and take jobs in journalism and go to law school and medical school. But it wasn't just that Gen Z was carrying these bad ideas out of college, it's that they were spontaneously germinating all over the place in Europe and Canada and Britain. So I wrote another essay in The Atlantic called “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks” really trying to hone in on what it is that’s deeply wrong with the social universe. And I had little glimpses of what it was. The core idea of the piece is social media’s structural stupidity. We humans are smart as individuals. But we're actually not good at figuring out complicated things. We have confirmation bias, we search for evidence that we're right. But you have to have viewpoint diversity, you have to have people pushing against each other. And by design, we always used to have that in universities, journalism—the adversarial legal system is set up that way—and when that fails, when you systematically intimidate dissenters, the institution gets structurally stupid. It cannot do smart things. And that's what happened beginning in 2014. And it spread into journalism, I'd say, in 2018/2019. And after George Floyd, the intensity on the left of shooting dissenters was really intense. Of course, when Trump came in 2016, the Republican Party got much stupider in its own ways.
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Mr. Haidt looks to ‘Gen-Z’ as the new culprits, as self-congratulation, self-aggrandizement of the newest iteration of Mr. Haidt search for the Apostates, identified by a journalist cliché, takes form as a warning, about the debased tone and character of American political discourse. The vulgarization of American Political Discourse- being seventy six years old gives me a perspective on this ‘idea’, that has been used by the forces of a toxic Political Stasis/Reaction before. Its once arch practitioners of ‘civility’ were the Republicans and Democrats who waged a war against Communism, that infested Post War America!
Haidt is not Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford who co-authored ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ but another in a long line of an American Political Tradition, of seeking both purity and conformity, of a ‘Centrism’ as the singular value of Our Civic Experiment!
Old Socialist
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Added May 9, 2022 5:07 PM PDT:
This the final paragraph of Aaron R. Hanlon August 14, 2015 essay from The New Republic:
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The trigger warning problem isn’t actually a trigger warning problem; it’s what happens when the messy business of teaching and learning, and the complex challenges to students’ mental wellbeing, become flashpoints in the culture wars. The effect of this entanglement is an exaggerated impression of trigger warnings that draws on the most extreme examples, a tactic that mirrors and plays into the very currents of partisan politics that Lukianoff and Haidt lament as a threat to American democracy. Of course, the authors consider trigger warnings to be “bad for American democracy,” too, and call on universities to “officially and strongly discourage” them. Instead of seeking new sources of outrage around trigger warnings, though, we should understand more thoroughly why this particular pedagogical choice, one of so many, has become a national wedge issue. That trigger warnings are rare, and may be of occasional benefit to professors like me who employ them, is too inconvenient a reality for those who are busy waging war on political correctness.
https://newrepublic.com/article/122543/trigger-warning-myth
O.S.