Power Line links to an
interview of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt done for the
Spiked website. Haidt's topic is the fragility of today's college students, or at least a highly visible subset thereof. Bottom line: it worries him.
I’m very concerned about a phenomenon called “concept creep” – which has been happening to a lot of psychological terms since the 1990s. When a word like “violence” is allowed to creep so that it includes a lot of things that are not violence, then this causes a cascade of bad effects.
It’s bad for the students themselves because they now perceive an idea that they dislike, or a speaker that they dislike, as having committed a much graver offence against themselves – which means that they will perceive more victimisation of themselves.
It’s also really bad for society because, as we are seeing in a spectacular way in the United States this year, when each side can point to rampant occurrences of what they see as violence by the other side, this then justifies acts of actual physical violence on their side.
The political problems are mostly confined to elite schools where people live together for four years. (snip) So the problems are localized, especially in intense communities that co-create a particular moral order.
As to why this is happening, Haidt believes:
Kids need conflict, insult, exclusion – they need to experience these things thousands of times when they’re young in order to develop into psychologically mature adults. Every adult has to learn to handle these things and not get upset, especially by minor instances.
In the name of protecting our children we have deprived them of the unsupervised time they need to learn how to navigate conflict among themselves. That is one of the main reasons why kids and even college students today find words, ideas and social situations more intolerable than those same words, ideas and situations would have been for previous generations of students.
Is Haidt correct? I am uncertain, however I come from one of the "free-range" generations who spent much of our childhood out from under adult supervision. Sometimes it was brutal but we survived it and were toughened thereby.
