Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1004: #1004 - The Coddling of the American Mind: Greg Lukianoff

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

Greg Lukianoff is the co-author (with Dr. Jonathan Haidt) of what I think is one of the top 5 most important books of the last decade: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Ideas and Bad Intentions Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. In this conversation, I talk to Greg about the content of this book including the rise of safetyism, the diminishing of free speech on college campuses, the concept of anti-fragility, whether ideas are harmful, whether is healthy or damaging to “platform” ideas you disagree with, whether speech is violence, whether safe spaces on campuses are helping students, and whether trigger warnings help improve a person’s mental heath.  A graduate of American University and Stanford Law School, Greg Lukianoff is an attorney and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe, in addition to dozens of other publications.  –––––– PROMOS Save 10% on courses with Kairos Classroom using code TITR at kairosclassroom.com! –––––– Sign up with Faithful Counseling today to save 10% off of your first month at the link:  faithfulcounseling.com/theology –––––– Save 30% at SeminaryNow.com by using code TITR –––––– Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review. www.theologyintheraw.com

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in a Row. I am so excited about this podcast episode I have on the show, Greg Lukianoff. Greg is an attorney, a New York Times bestselling author, and the president and CEO of FIRE, which stands for Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He is the co-author with Jonathan Haidt of one of my favorite books. I mean, I would say one of the most important books in the last five to 10 years. I don't think that's an overstatement. The Coddling of the American Mind, How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas

Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. If you have not read this book, you need to read this book. It's absolutely incredible. So super excited to have Greg on the show. We had a wonderful conversation, lots of great stuff here. So please welcome to the show, for the first time, the one and only Greg Lukianoff. And every now and then I reach out to a guest who I'm pretty sure I will never be able to get on the show.

And so I've been wanting to have Greg on for a while. And I was like, well, he doesn't know me from Adam. So I said, I'm just going to try and take a stab in the dark. Reached out and you agreed to come on the show. So this is one of those fanboy moments where I can't believe I'm talking to the author, co-author of one of my favorite books I've ever read. I mean, this is, this is like me talking to the apostle Paul almost. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. So the book is the coddling of the American mind, how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure co-author with Jonathan Haidt. Um, and, uh, is that how you pronounce his last name? There's always a big debate about that. Oh, yeah, that is.

Most people, they say Haidt, and he's like, no, it's Haidt. So somebody I know was 100% convinced that it's Haidt. I'm like, I never heard him say Haidt. And like, no, it's Haidt. I'm like, I don't... Anyway, this book is at least the most important top five. I'll just say top five most important books

I've read in the last five years. Every page, I feel like you and Jonathan put language to things I was sensing and feeling and then you backed it up by research. So I just, yeah, I want to go through every page almost and have you unpack it. But let's start with what led you to write this book. I'm sure there's a big backstory that maybe people aren't aware of.

Oh, sure. Yeah, no. Happy to talk about it. I'm kind of amazed. It came out in 2018 and it's still selling like it's a new book. And for me and Haidt, we thought it was pretty much common sense to a degree. But it seems that partially because I work on campuses, or at least I have for most of my career, you could kind of see the trends coming. So yeah, so I'll back up. I went, I'm like the weird, I'm a first generation American, you know, like a lot of people like that. I have a sort of special place in my heart for what makes America unique and freedom of speech was always one of the big parts of it. So I've always been a very big

defender of free speech in the First Amendment, my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education. We actually just announced on June 6th that we're expanding from being solely focused on higher ed to being defending free speech all over the country. And I joined FIRE in 2001 as the first legal director. We were only about a year and a half old and we're genuinely nonpartisan, but that can be really exhausting in the culture wars. I'm sure pretty much anybody, you know, whoever tries to talk across lines of differences knows these days. So I became president in 2006. You know, it's exhausting to be in the culture war. And I, as I'm very explicit about in the book, I had a very dangerous depression. I was hospitalized as a danger to myself.

You know, I, you know, called 911 because I was planning to kill myself, you know, like I'd even, you know, figured out different ways to do it. And I was hospitalized for a couple of days and I never really thought I'd be okay again. Now, for people who are listening who struggle with depression, when you're at that stage, the therapy I'm going to recommend, cognitive behavioral therapy, that's not enough. You need to see a doctor. You need to get on the phone. You need to tell friends.

You need to take action right then, right away to go get help. But as I was recovering, I was studying cognitive behavioral therapy. For those of you who don't know a lot about it, CBT is this really amazing approach to dealing with anxiety and depression. And it has the most research on it of any non-drug intervention. And it's kind of like, you know, the wisdom of Plato, you know, all the old people who believed in sort of reason as being the, you know, will bring you to happiness. It really tries to put that into practice. And what you do is you look at what, like when you're depressed, generally the voices in your head, I don't mean this in a mystical sense, but like the like your self critical voices go on overdraft. You know, everything's a catastrophe,

everything's personal, every emotional response you have, you have to do something about it. These are all called cognitive distortions. And to be clear, every human being does these. But when you're anxious and depressed, what they found was that you do these a lot more. But if you could actually get in the habit of talking back to your brain and get your brain in the habit of not taking these panicked voices quite as seriously, it's transformative. It saved my life. And it's transformative for anxiety and depression. But you have to get in the habit of it. A lot of people think that just knowing this intellectually will be enough. And that's not true at all. So I was doing cognitive behavioral therapy as I was recovering, and I was looking at the free speech cases I deal with on campus. Oh, we also defend religion on campus as well and due process. campus as well and due process. And what I thought to myself is like, wow, this is like they're telling young people that they should catastrophize, that they should overgeneralize, that they should

engage in binary thinking and emotional reasoning. But at the time, 2008 by that point, thank goodness the students weren't paying attention. You know, like they were rolling their eyes at authority, just like young people have always done. But unfortunately, right at the end of 2013, and going through 2014, like lightning struck, you had students suddenly who had been previously on campus, the best constituency for free speech, they got academic freedom, they got, you know, they got racy jokes, they got the how you need to protect, you know, offensive comedians, all this kind of stuff. But in 2014, suddenly you had students really demanding new speech codes in the form of trigger warnings and microaggressions. You had a massive uptick in disinvitations of speakers being disinvited because people didn't like what they had to say.

because people didn't like what they had to say. And it was all couched in this sort of medicalized language, you know, that essentially like if this person shows up to campus, it will be traumatic, usually not for the person saying this, but for some other third party there that they need to protect and they need to do anything to protect. And I was like, wow, this is exactly what I was afraid of. Like they are they're not just going against speech. They're using cognitive distortions to go against speech. So this won't just be bad for freedom of speech. This is going to be bad for mental health. And so I told my friend, my new friend at the time, Jonathan Haidt in 2015, social psychologist, this idea, which so far anybody I'd told it to thought it was kind of weird.

We got together and wrote a article, a long article for The Atlantic. It was a cover story in August, 2015. And we solved the whole problem. The title, I remember reading that. The title was The Coddling of the American Mind, right? It was the same title as the book? Okay. Yeah.

Solved the whole problem. Done. And here we are. We live happily every hour. No cognitive distortion. Yeah, exactly. Uh, I can't resist making that joke, uh, partially because like, since people give us credit for seeing this coming and you know, that's, I appreciate that. That's very nice to say, but at the same time, given on the other side of this, this is something we've been fighting, you know, forever about both the free speech and the and it's all gotten so much worse.

So in 2015, you know, we thought we were done. We thought that, you know, we wrote this article that was very well cited and surprisingly warmly received. And then everything got so much worse. We decided to write a book and go much more in depth. And that came out in 2018. we decided to write a book and go much more in depth. And that came out in 2018. And sadly, you know, like even though things were much worse in 2018 than they were in 2015, it's gotten so much worse since the book came out because 2020 was the worst year for free speech on campus that I've seen. It was not a great year for mental health. The mental health situation

for young people is still in a very bad state. Suicides are up. I'm glad that we were able to contribute to people's understanding of this stuff, but I don't think we're paying enough attention to what the mental health lessons are for that matter, the free speech lessons are of coddling because we're still teaching kids like, you know, an idea that they're super fragile. And part of the problem is if you tell people that they're super fragile, and by the way, human beings are not super fragile, like we can recover from amazing things. We're incredibly resilient, unless you actually tell them, oh, by the way, you'll be ruined for life if you actually hear this thing or experience this thing. So yeah, I think that we that when I have to sum up what coddling the American mind is about, I just say, listen, we've been teaching a generation of

young people, the mental habits of anxious and depressed people. So we should not be surprised when they become anxious and depressed in huge and terrifying numbers. One of the things you touch on early on that I thought was really helpful. And again, it's one of the many things in the book that kind of put research and language as something that I was just kind of sensing a lot, is this whole rise of safetyism. And I was the milk carton generation, so I'll never forget being raised in the 80s where every time I made my cereal, I'm looking at a milk carton with another missing kid. And my parents are looking at this and it almost became this mindset that if I walk out the door, there's at least four or five kidnappers waiting to come through, throw me in the van, take me away. And, and I think I was raised in the middle of that. So I remember riding my bike all around town or whatever, but then I think as I got into teenage years, it's almost like this

hyper fear of just, there's every other person out there is out to get me and everything. Can you explain, unpack that a little more? Cause I remember thinking about reading that section. I'm thinking back, I'm like, Oh my gosh, you, you trace what I never really reflected on, but like, yeah, what did we get from me riding my bike around town as a kid to all of a sudden teenage years, adult years. And then even like like as a parent i've got four teenage kids and it's like it's embedded in my psyche like oh yeah they can't get the mail like what if the mailman's you know gonna throw them in the back of you know can yeah can you unpack the rise of safetyism yeah well it uh i hate to pry but um can you let me know what year you were born 76 76 so yeah I'm 74. Okay. So you look, you look so much younger than me. I think,

I think the, uh, the great, the great, the great rockstar beard, man. Yeah. So yeah, it, it, I mean, I have to point out from my own childhood when people, you know, who know me pretty well, I always want to be very clear. We, I pro my childhood was too free range. I probably could have used a lot more oversight than I actually had. But at the same time, since I started working when I was 11 and rising to all these challenges, it meant that I showed up with superpowers when I got to college because I had all these people who'd never had a drink in their life and didn't know how to manage their own money, didn't know how to make money, had no discipline. It really was something that was a huge advantage, you know, going in. Now, when it comes to safetyism, I always like to do a shout out for a psychologist who was my chief researcher when we were writing Coddling the American Mind, Pamela Paretsky. She wrote, and I apologize, I always, like my mouth always wants to put a T into her name. And it's not that I think there's one there, but she was the one who coined the term safetyism.

And this was us trying to explain, trying to come up with a good term for two different phenomena. One is this idea that at some point there seemed to be no pushback against anything, if you argued physical safety. That partially comes from the fact that a lot of the things that we did, you we did in the 70s and 80s to improve physical safety made huge differences. Bike helmets save lives. Seatbelts save tons of lives. But just because it's successful on those low-hanging fruit doesn't mean that there's never a downside to it. So that's one aspect, the success of physical safety and also some other phenomena. But they're also, and I wanted to call this pseudo safety, but this does make it into the book. Also the conflation of physical safety for life and limb being confused with being comfortable,

because the way safety gets used a lot on campus and has for some time is when people are saying it, they're most often really talking about feeling sort of like psychologically unperturbed, you know, like basically like feeling safe means more, it's more like feeling comfortable. And so you've got that, you know, some confusing things in there. Now, one of the things that is particularly fascinating about why parents who are our age and are so focused on safetyism is a little bit harder to explain, partially because it is way safer to be a kid today than it was when we were kids, like by a lot from every possible, you know, certainly, you know, homicides, even though it's gone up quite a bit in the past two years, it's still much lower than it was when we were

kids. And the data is indisputable, right? The data, I mean, I remember reading Steven Pinker on some of this stuff and he cites a lot of data. That's not really disputed, right? In terms of people looking at just the data. Well, people try to claim that in ancient, ancient, ancient times when we don't have the best records that maybe that was the time that things were much less violent, much less violent. And there's, there's no evidence that's true. There's lots of evidence that indicates it isn't true. It doesn't, you know, um, people like to go at Pinker for being reasonable. Um, he's on our board of advisors, you know, like he's a, he's actually a genuinely sweet guy. Like I've been amazed at both height and Pinker, both complete stellar geniuses, but also very nice people, which makes a difference. So I think one of the reasons why parents our age were even more paranoid.

Oh, there's one clarification. that since we're trying to figure out what particularly was hitting campuses, that the book would be more focused on the kind of kids who go to college and graduate college, particularly the kind of kids who go to elite schools. So I say this, and I can't repeat it enough. It's not, it's, the book is mostly about maladies that are hitting people from a higher social economic strata than I'd say at least 50%, probably 75%. And when you get to elite campuses, probably 99% of the rest of the population. The problems faced by working class and poor people today, completely different. And I always want to be very clear on that. But so like parents, you know, like parents who are relatively well-to-do, who, you know, want their kids to go to the fancy

schools and all this kind of stuff. Why would they be so much more paranoid about safety when everyone, by every measure, everything was getting safer? And I think at least in part, it was because the sort of traditional wisdom around, well, you know, you got to like, like kids need challenges, kids need experiences that make them resilient to make them feel confident and all this kind of stuff, particularly in left-leaning circles, which is where I live and I'm left-leaning myself, were kind of poo-pooed. Essentially, it was like, no, no, no. We don't say that kind of stuff. So I think that the natural kind of like the wisdom of our grandparents fell out of fashion.

And this led to this real obsession, like no amount of safety is enough, essentially. But of course, if you don't, if you think that everything's too risky, one, that's a cognitive distortion by itself, that's catastrophizing, that's fortune telling, that's all these other things. But also, you might end up in a situation where you're not letting kids develop self-efficacy, up in a situation where you're not letting kids develop self-efficacy, which is this idea that you need to be able to, you know, you need to know that if your parents left for a couple of days, for example, that you'd be fine. And I, of course, knew that pretty early on, probably more than I should have, but still. But if they don't have these experiences that make them feel competent

living on their own in the real world, that is a formula for what I really want to call the book disempowered. It's disempowering young people. And of course, like if you don't think you're in control of your own world, you are anxious, you are depressed, you are fearful, all of these things. So I think the thing that was the most surprising for me in height in the process of writing the book is how much it became a parenting book. Yeah. Well, especially towards the end. I mean, you really, I was reading it through that lens all along, just kind of applying stuff to parenting. But then towards the end, you gave us a lot.

You really did focus on that, which was incredible. But it's not like you look at it, you wouldn't think it's a parenting book, but I I'll be the first, I have four teenage kids and I it's probably one of, if not the most helpful book on parenting. And my wife and I were constantly, cause we, we being raised in the milk carton generation, like we it's, it's just embedded in this, that they're going to fall off their bike and well, so that's a bad illustration because bike helmets do actually help, but like, oh, they're facing adversity at school. Oh, their teacher was unfair to them. I need to go and step in and do this.

It's like, no, let's, that actually is good for character building. Like, oh yeah, there's going to be authority figures that are not going to speak kindly. They're going to be unfair. Like, how do you build not just resilience, but as Talib says, I mean, anti-fragility, like you're not just resisting opposition. It's when you like an immune system, when you face opposition, tension, stressors, you actually get stronger and better and more competent, but that's not, it's so intuitive for me to not, to want to protect, to want to, you know, put padded walls around my kid, you know, but it's so, it's counterproductive,

right? Um, no, yeah, no, I, I have a, I have a four and a six year old, um, a boy named Benjamin and a boy named Maxwell. I wanted to hit it a lot harder, um, in the book that I am an anxious parent. Um, yeah, because I wanted to be like very clear, like, listen, I'm not giving this advice because it just comes easy to me. It's kind of like, you know, like a, like a supermodel, you know, pointing out like be prettier, you know, it's like, you know, it's easy for you to say, but for me, like anxiety, you know, as someone who's had a lot of issues with anxiety, like I am an anxious parent and I, and there are so many times it's my wife reminding me of my own values to be kind of like, listen, it's good to get them challenged. Like, um, and, uh, yeah, I wrote a little bit about, about this in a series that I did called catching up

with coddling, talking about like the, you know, the big steps. Um, we, we, when we got out of town for, I live in DC, when we got out of town for COVID, we rented this place that had these like terrifyingly long steps down to the, down to the water. And it really made me want to really be clear to the rest of the world. It's like, no, no, I experienced all of this stuff. And I certainly went into parenting knowing I'd be an anxious parent. But you have to remember, it's not just as simple as like toughen them up and like all this kind of stuff that sounds so passe in our heads. It's that if you don't give them the skills to deal with stressors in life, you are not doing them any favors. They will be, they will be sadder. They will be more frightened.

They will be disempowered. Well, you mentioned that, that spike in between 2013 and 2014. What, why, why is that? Well, what happened in that? Like why the shift then? Yeah, no. And that was the, that's kind of the whole question animating the book, is figuring out what was so different with these students who were hitting campus in large numbers around 2014. We still, you know, you'll never know these kind of things with perfect accuracy, but we do, and this almost sounds passe now since there's been so much written about it since we first published the article in 2015, but we think that social media sped up a lot of existing trends. So we talk about six different causal threads because, you know, that's where those kind of people would come up with six different causal threads. I actually think there's a seventh that I've added since.

But those are social media, polarization, why parents, paranoid parenting, which, you know, I got a little bit to why I think that happened. Most interesting one, in my opinion, that we didn't see coming, going in, lack of free play and lack of independent time. Because that self-efficacy that I was talking about, you can't develop it while your parents are holding your hands. Like you have to have the sense that you can you'll be OK by yourself and that you know how to function in the real world. Why campuses? You know, we talked about one hyper bureaucratization of universities have made everything much more like a like a permanent nanny kind of situation, which is not healthy. And then the last one is new ideas of social justice, which were sort of disseminated from campus to education schools to K through 12, repeat, like in that cycle.

The seventh one that we tried to point out a little bit in the paranoid parenting chapter is just the, um, and this is where I sound like a Marxist, but I think it's also true is wealth stratification. I don't like saying income inequality because there's not like a society in human history that didn't have unequal incomes, um, except for when everybody was dirt poor. Um, that that's, that's the only time you have, but I do, I particularly I went to Stanford Law School, which was complete other universe from the way I grew up. And it was really kind of it was really shocking in a way. And since there is a real sense that you could fall out of the, you know, the upper classes, even though America doesn't like to call them that, very easily, and it's very hard to get up into them. I think that part of this is leading to the absolute obsession with

getting your kids into elite colleges, which, of course, is very hard to do. It's getting harder every year. It drives people nuts at the same time. it's just like, I mean, I remember talking to someone when I was a cousin of someone that I was dating in law school and she was just like, oh yeah, no, talking about how stressed she was about getting into college and, you know, like, oh, you know how it is. And I was like, I really don't. I kind of, you know, I literally visited one school and went there. Can you give me an example? So, so you've done, your primary work is on these kind of elite college campuses and you're seeing a shift from environments that build anti-fragility and resilience versus now you're, it's kind of the script is flipped to where we're almost creating an environment that kind of feeds this anxiety and depression.

Can you give me like a concrete example? Describe maybe a real scenario of a college campus that you find for these various reasons is actually being very unhelpful for fostering anti-fragility among students. I mean, I've heard, I always hear like, you know, safe spaces when a controversial speaker comes on. Is that actually a real thing? Yeah, absolutely. It's a real thing. So one point of clarification is one, we don't just do campuses anymore. We do.

And so, you know, if your listeners know talent, you know, we're hiring, we're expanding a great deal at FIRE that we're looking for new plaintiffs for good First Amendment cases. So I'm trying to spread the word as much as I can about that. And when it comes to elite campuses, we deal with all campuses across the country. Just the problems that are hitting elite campuses are the hottest ideological ones. So you'll see abuses of power at regular state schools that are as old as time. Some administrator doesn't like this student or this faculty member, and they figure out an excuse for getting rid of him or her. But the problems in elite campuses are strange. Julie Lifford Hames wrote a book called How to

Raise an Adult, and she was actually a dean at Stanford when I got there. And the way she explained it, so in a sense, it started with parents because students were showing up. And, you know, to get into Stanford, like these are kids who have been working their whole lives, you know. And so there are a lot of cases they're brilliant kids, but they're that after 2000, drip by drip, you start having slightly more and then a lot more students who would immediately get on their phone, their parents to make basic decisions, even relatively small ones. And it's like, wow, that's, that's not healthy. And at first you thought it was kind of like strange, but then it got more and more common. So there was this, um, and yet another way that, you know, cell phones kind of changed, changed the world. You actually, as a practical matter, could find out what your mother and dad think. When it comes to how campuses make this stuff worse, it's hard to even know where to begin. Even some of the big

state schools, you know, Louisiana State University rightfully took a lot of flack because they spent tens of millions of dollars on a giant, gently floating pool called the Lazy River that, you know, students could just relax in, which, you know, sounds pleasant. But it was usually framed as kind of like, they so often frame things that are just nice or pleasant as being crucial to your mental health. So when it comes to the safe spaces, you know, that was something that seemed almost beyond parody when it really started hitting. So early on, one of the examples that really even shocked me, and I was, I'd already been working in this field for 15 years, Brown, there was a, there was a more conservative leaning feminist and a more left-leaning feminist coming to Brown. And it was about, the topic was about sexual assault.

And if the people had, if the critics of this more conservative-leaning feminist had gone, they would have found that she was raped when she was younger and that she still believes that people have a right to be presumed innocent on all this stuff. But, you know, and what does and doesn't work. Is it Paglia?

I was looking at my book. Is it Camille Paglia? Was she the, uh, I know she's done stuff on abuse that stirred some people, but not Paglia. Um, I'll, I'll, I'll remember sometime at three o'clock in the morning. I'll remember. And so they set up a, a safe room. It was like a safe space as like alternative programming where people, there would be pictures of puppies and freshly baked cookies and, you know, butterflies and like all this kind of stuff that was like, apparently was appealing to some students at least. But it was like everybody my age or older or certainly, you know, and then a big chunk after me, would have found that incredibly demeaning, incredibly insulting. Like, aren't we supposed to be adults? What are you saying here? So they were really sort of contributing to this sort of like infantilizing of people that we,

up until fairly recently, thought of as adults when they turned 18. Yeah, so there are many different ways in which campuses do this. You know, speech codes, which we fought forever, ways in which campuses do this. You know, speech codes, which we fought forever, bias-related incident programs that allow you to anonymously report faculty members or your fellow students for saying offensive things. There are many things that they do on campus that sort of play into this idea that students are fragile, they need protection from words, and that it's the campus's job to, you know, sort of police the entire environment for offense. I've heard, so let me, I'm going to try to dig into this a little bit, because I think the whole speech is violence, and platforming this speaker is harmful for, you know, whatever.

And I'm just trying to understand, because it's become such a polarizing conversation. So, on the one hand, I've heard people typically on the right say, Oh, so now we're just protecting people from ideas that they disagree with. It's kind of how it's framed sometimes. Like, well, obviously anybody who does that is that's just terrible. But what, what about, are there legitimate cases where words can trigger a traumatic response. I'm trying to play devil's advocate here. Cause I,

I can tell you what I'm saying, but like take the abuse thing, like somebody that has gone through abuse. If they hear somebody speaking about that insensitively, or even saying something that could really trigger a genuine traumatic effect is, is that a, is that a real concern?

And B is that, or would you say that like, no, even in that case, they should, if it's just a word, if somebody is not trying to physically abuse them, they should learn how to build resilience to somebody who might even downplay the percentage of abuse on campus, whatever. It's a, it's a fantastic question. And it is important to take, you know, people, their claims seriously on this kind of stuff. And believe me, like there are people who, you know, who have survived rape, for example, or more to professors saying that you need to provide trigger warnings because you don't know if someone in your class, you know, has a history of PTSD, for example. And this puts professors in a really hard position because they can't know that they have to kind of guess, you know, like what materials they have the trigger warning in front of. that, they have to kind of guess, you know, like what materials they have to put the trigger warning in front of. But also, you know, when it comes to trigger warnings, this is something that was badly misunderstood. And even though we said it very clearly from in the original article and

on, if there was good evidence that trigger warnings helped people with PTSD, that would be a very different scenario. And I could be persuaded that they make a lot of sense. Not only is there no evidence of that, and there's been at this point five or six studies on trigger warnings, no benefit has been found in any of them. And in a couple of them, there were negative side effects that essentially it made students more frightened because it was kind of like, you know, like the equivalent of playing scary music, you know, like, don't don't don't this thing is going to get you. So something that they barely would have reacted to otherwise becomes fraud. And there was at least one study in which they showed that it made students more, more students believe in that free speech, you know, is fundamentally harmful. So I do get the concern and I share the concern for people who are suffering from trauma but the older way that you would deal with some of this would be to have um that it has to

some degree fall upon someone who's suffering from it to talk to the professor and there are awful professors out there but i do think that most of them would be like okay you know if you want to you know read this instead not show up for the class where we, you know, show a documentary about sexual assault. But the most important way in which the thinking is wrong in this is that avoidance is actually a symptom of PTSD. And so the idea that you can sort of treat PTSD by facilitating people avoiding it, that plays into the idea that people are fragile, that plays into the idea that there is actually something to be scared of. Meanwhile, like as far as approaching ideas, there probably couldn't be a safer space than an American college classroom. It's important to, you know, be as compassionate as you can. But

I do think that to a degree, you know, our framing everything is like sort of a constant assault upon people's fragile psyches is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's leading people to believe that they are more fragile than they are. And here's the part that I feel like, particularly on my side of the spectrum on the left, that we don't like to admit at all, is that you have to remember that things are also going to be abused if it involves people. And I've heard plenty of stories of people saying, you know, some wise-ass 18, 19-year-old figuring out a way to make a professor's life miserable because they, you know, they claim this and they want to be called this and they're, you know, that people will game the system in a way that can sometimes be cynical. So you have to take, if you're dealing with people, you have to take in consideration all of these things.

So I think that by shifting the responsibility for dealing with dealing with people, you have to, you have to take in consideration all of these things. So I think that the, by shifting the responsibility for, for dealing with students with trauma to, to professors have put university professors in a horrible situation. And I know that it's least in part responsible for professors saying that they feel like their own speech is chilled. You know, it's definitely responsible for a big uptick in 2015 of students saying, of professors saying that they're kind of scared of their own students. And we've seen a huge uptick in professors getting, for lack of a better word, canceled. And some of those do relate to this new idea that essentially your professor is responsible for their students' emotional reactions. That's super helpful.

Is there a legitimate problem of, for lack of better terms, right of center or politically conservative or politically or culturally conservative viewpoints being not represented on college campuses because the majority would consider those viewpoints, not just wrong, but evil. So ideas lead to actions. And if you believe this idea is evil, then that could lead to bad actions. So, you know, we're not going to have, for instance, pick your favorite Ben Shapiro on campus because yeah, he's not physically violent, but his ideas are toxic and that's going to motivate people to do bad things is i think is that is that the logic of why they would not platform typically not platform like conservative viewpoints and how would you respond if that's

an accurate way of representative how would you respond to that uh you know i went into first amendment law partially because um you know i talked about being first generation and you have a special appreciation for also being from a different class than economic class and a lot of people I grew up with. But one really formative thing for that was being a student journalist. And you will find that a lot of people who are First Amendment, you know, champions are former journalists or at minimum former student journalists. And that's partially because you see people come into your office every day that they want you to get that one columnist fired or retract that one article or apologize for something,

but they haven't figured out the rationale yet. And so they work backwards on whatever they think will be the most compelling. And I'm not saying that they're doing this necessarily cynically. They're just kind of doing it automatically. That was harassment or that was intimidation or that was this. So my point here is just like my co-author John Haidt pointed out in The Righteous Mind, it's often the case that they don't want Ben Shapiro here and they will figure out what the argument is to get Ben Shapiro or not be here.

Now, I do think at the same time, since the rule of motives is most motives are mixed, is that there are people who genuinely believe that having Ben Shapiro there will lead to downstream horrible effects. You see this a lot when it comes to the current controversies around Dave Chappelle and trans. There is an idea that if he's allowed to poke fun at some aspects of that and poke fun about a lot of the gender ideology and pronouns and that kind of stuff, that it's going to directly result in violence against LGBT students.

I can understand that concern to an extent. I do think that's been used and abused badly. And I think that the idea that adult people can't talk about the pluses and minuses, for example, like when to put your kid on puberty blockers without that resulting in some horrifying downstream immediate effect is sometimes I think people sincerely believe it, but it's also highly speculative. It's also rhetorical. It's also a formula for if any downstream effect from speech can be considered negative, then you can really ban all speech. Oh, and by the way, this isn't a historical hypo. coined what he called the bad tendency test, which was if you can point to some speculative downstream effect of speech, then you could ban it. And then within about 13 years after coining it, he had a change of mind because he realized, wow, that means you can, like under these standards,

you can ban practically anything. You can always speculate that this speech will eventually lead to this bad outcome. And that was his changing his mind on that way of looking at free speech is how we ended up with the beginnings of a strong first amendment in the United States. Yeah. And it, to me, just, I'm trying to, I always like to really get inside of an argument and understand it before I really assess it. It's very healthy and compassionate. I really appreciate it. Cause I, you know, like, so this podcast I've got, it's largely a religious podcast, but I have loads of different people on, I mean, I'm like an email saying I'm a platformer and atheist.

You're leading people away from Jesus or something. My audience would never, they, they, they listen to it because they like the diversity of guests, but it just, I don't know what, how to respond, except to say like, it just does seem so subjective. Like, so all the left-leaning people are going to say Ben Shapiro's ideas are harmful. Um, all the right-leaning people are going to say Kamala Harris's ideas are harmful. It's like, what, where does it end? And each person thinks

they're not just correct, but like, just like, yeah, I am the righteous person. And the other person is unrighteous and immoral. And how do we get to that kind of binary space to where it's not just a disagreement, but ideas it's, it's this other side. If you don't agree with my position, you are immoral. And it's, I have a righteous mandate to stop immorality, you know, evil from happening that. I would say that the bigger mystery is how we ever pulled ourselves out of that tendency to see speech as just the same thing as violence of people who disagree with you or necessarily stupid or evil or possibly both.

That's more normal in human history. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. Freedom of speech is a relatively recent invention for mass societies. You know, there wasn't a lot of discussion of freedom of speech in the ancient world. It's not the way that we would understand it.

But of course you had, when you look at the democracies, there was. When you look at, you know, Athens, for example, and they had different ideas of this idea of isogoria, which was like calmly argued speech and parasia, which is this idea of like battling it out with your tongue, kind of like the like, and parrhesia was all was something that Roger Williams would talk about in early United States about like, about the defining characteristic of what freedom of speech is about is actually the ability to be offensive to somebody

else and to really do battle with words. But you shouldn't be surprised that there wasn't a lot of discussion of free speech before the printing press because it wasn't practical to talk to people on a mass scale before then. But almost as soon as there was a printing press, you started having people advocating for freedom of the press, literally, of the machine. It was a long time and a lot of hard fighting to get freedom of speech understood in an expansive way, the way it was when you and I were kids in the 80s. That was a long process. Freedom of speech is usually on the losing side in human history. When I point this out, I always say it's like freedom of speech. I call freedom of speech the eternally radical idea because in every generation, someone rises up to challenge freedom of speech and to demand censorship.

And that's why you need people fighting back. So I think that tolerance, believing in things like everyone's entitled to their opinion and that you don't always assume you're always right. And that all these, like everything from it's a free country to each their own, you know, like we had all of these little sayings that actually are really good habits for freedom of speech. When you get into a circumstance where the two sides are frankly back into the system, the more normal situation where they see their enemies as stupid, evil, or both, it shouldn't be surprising that free speech starts to suffer. So we're entering into a more normal time period than less normal. We had a window of...

Normal and the bad way. Normal, yeah. Typical, maybe typical. Yeah, typical. Yeah. What would you say? Because I've wrestled with this, again, probably the nature of my podcast, having a wide array of different people on that who's the most controversial person you've had on probably no one you'd recognize i mean everybody would be kind of me so i i have a lot of um i do a lot of work with like religious communities in the lgbtq conversation so i have loads of trans people intersex gay

lesbian liberal conservative you know like all across the board. And I love my largely Christian audience. You know, that's going to be a really sensitive area. And they might like, oh, I like this aspect. This person is great. But then this person you shouldn't have on. And the next email is the opposite. Oh, I like this person. But this other one, you shouldn't platform that voice.

I'm like, you two should talk because you each one like different. And I just have to say, you know what? Change the channel if you can't take it. I'm just, I like to have interesting conversations. You want to see where people are coming from because, because when you, when you go into, when you really try to see things from other people's perspective. Now, of course, the, the fact that there are genuinely malevolent people actually exist, um, can, can screw up, screw that up sometimes. Um, but I think that everything I've learned and read mean the genuinely malevolent malevolent people are tiny in number compared to

everybody else. And that most people think that they're doing something, uh, they think they're being kind. They think they're doing the right thing. They think they're responding to some kind of higher good out there. And it's important to begin with that assumption. You don't have to keep it if someone proves to be like highly dishonest, but it's a good starting point. And I think that when you have a situation like the United States where, you know, low population density places tend to be very Republican, high density population places tend to be very democratic, high income places are increasingly more democratic, which is, uh, which goes against Democrats own stereotypes, you know, like all of, all of these stuff that are kind of pulling us apart, but

making it easy for us to think of people who disagree with us as morally bankrupt or grifters or whatever. Is, is there any legitimacy to the critique of you shouldn't platform that idea? legitimacy to the critique of you shouldn't platform that idea. Um, and here's, here's the logic. Um, and so in my space, you know, I've got a wide range of liberal, moderate, conservative listeners and they say, okay, here's a, here's a good example. Actually, I've had, I've got a lot of people that enter into the race conversation and I like to get different perspectives that are, you know, more pro CRT, more anti CRT, more like systemic racism largely doesn't exist. It's the greatest problem. And I'll get different opinions.

And so when I have a voice that might be more conservative on the race conversation, the critique I get, and I think it's one that I'm really wrestling with. There might be something here. The critique I get is people are like, well, there are conservatives who are just waiting to hear that one kind of conservative black voices. They see, see, and like, it just confirms they're kind of lazy, really suspicion. I don't need to think through it.

There's this one, you know, conservative black voice and see, you know, um, they validated everything I said. Like, well, I don't want it, so what's the alternative? We just don't talk to people who might, the by-product might be they confirm somebody's maybe wrong suspicion. Like, do we just, I don't like that option, but I think it is, there is something there I want to consider. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think that the easiest version of the no platforming argument to contend with is when people apply that to campus. Because I think that they're thinking about one of the most important values of freedom of speech wrong. And this is partially because the way freedom of speech gets explained a lot of times is that it's about the search for truth. the search for truth. But when you say that in academic circles, one of the things that they think of is like the platonic form of truth, like objective truth, which is, as we know, you know, there are people who claim it doesn't even exist. And even those who think it does exist, we all have to admit that it can be incredibly hard to know, and you might not even know when you're right. So I think, but that muddies

the water, but I think it's an incorrect understanding of what the search for truth that freedom of speech allows for is really about. It's about knowing the mundane details, the everyday reasons why, what people think and why. So if you're doing a class on conspiracy theories, you know, having, showing a video, you know, discussion with, I don't know, Alex Jones or something expose on sort of Jewish control of the world before World War One. That was very influential for the detriment of the whole human race. Doing exactly what you're doing is being curious and wanting to know where people come from and why they think even the crazy things or maybe even especially the crazy things, is valuable. Does every podcast have an obligation to be as open to the exploration of where everyone's coming from?

They obviously don't have the obligation to. But I do wish sometimes listeners, the ones who said, you shouldn't have had that person on. It's like, well, did you learn anything from it? Even if what you learned about was about a new opinion that you didn't know really made you angry. Like, like that's actual knowledge. And if they say, well,

you're exposing a lot, a lot of people to this really bad idea. I'm like, okay, let's just say that's true. If it's such a bad idea that it shouldn't even be listened to, then the most people with a brain are going to immediately recognize that. Like if it's that off, like if I had David Duke on, and he's talking about the superiority of white people or whatever, it's like, it's so bad that people aren't going to buy it. They're going to, you know, you're going to expose evil to light, you know? But, or maybe, maybe you just don't like the idea,

but it's actually more nuanced and thoughtful than you want to give credit. And then maybe if you're exposed to it, you might actually have to think through why you disagree with it rather than just that, you know, don't careful about starting down that road at all, because once you're deplatforming someone because you think their views are odious, like, well, there are plenty of views that we think are odious. Actually, in a lot of cases, the view that's just about to become the dominant view is often seen as odious first. You know, it's hard to really make principled distinctions then. And I think that in some cases, reminding people, you know, like you said, you don't have to listen to the podcast. You don't have to, you don't have to read that book you hate, you know, like you don't, you don't have to go to a, you don't have to go to a talk on campus. Like, but yeah, I think that some of the lessons that we're teaching people

for living in a free society, they do almost presume also that you're the ones who's going to be making those decisions in the first place. You know, like, essentially, like the who decides question of freedom of speech is, of course, really central. Should I really feature this book? Because that might, and I think this is a really wrongheaded book, and I don't want other people reading it, you know, but who would you let make that decision for you? You know, Christopher Hitchens used to talk about kind of like, think hard, who would you want deciding what you could read? And the answer is like, well, nobody, of course, as to me, it's like, see,

it's funny as watching are you a bound off your baseball fan, a field of dreams, famous movie. Um, you know, I never, I've never actually seen it, which is embarrassing for someone my age. Cause it was like huge when I was a kid.

I was a football player. Um, not a baseball player. It's funny. There's a scene there where this, you know, Kevin Costner, his wife,

they're kind of post they're raising the hippie generation. So, you know, very liberal and they're on, they're on this PTA meeting at school where they're talking about banning a book. And she gets, she gets up as this kind of hippie liberal, like, and just lambast, you know, the leaders for wanting to ban a book, like worse for free speech. And we need to not ban, you know, anti-censorship, but that was filmed in 1989 and accurately represented the culture.

It's interesting to me. And I don't know why, but what used to be a very left-wing idea and passion of anti-censorship seems like it's kind of flipped around now. It's typically people on the far left that want to censor things. Well, maybe it's the both. Is it both the far right and far left that just want to censor different things? I just, I don't know. I talked about this on Charlie Sykes' podcast, and I think this might be the first time possibly in human history that freedom of speech is truly a centrist value. Because since free speech is such a, you know, like I call it the eternally radical idea, as I mentioned before, it's one of those ideas that

you think would normally be drawn to the extremes. But currently right now, it seems like the two extremes are much more comfortable with censorship as long as they're the ones doing the censoring. Right, right, right. And that's true. I do see it on the right too. Well, yeah, I don't want to keep you past your hour. Point people to where they can find you. And are you working on any book projects right now or anything? Sure. I'm at thefire.org and I'm working on a follow- right now or anything or uh sure i'm at the fire dot org and i'm working on a follow-up to coddling the american mind called extremely creatively the canceling of the american mind oh really when's that going to come out uh hopefully

september of next year you know we're trying to crank it out pretty fast partially because like the idea that there is no such thing as cancel culture is something that the data is pretty overwhelming that we're living in not just a you know that it's one it's not only is it a large number it's historic and that we're going to be looking back at this in 50 years and say what what happened do you see things getting better i guess that was the question i want to ask like as you look at college campuses 2013-14 really starts to turn the corner in a negative way is it getting worse and worse or do you think it's starting to get better i think it's improved a bit since 2020 but given um how yeah i fear that the belief that it might be getting a little bit better

would let us off the hook from trying to get uh you know giving people in some cases people who are fired for having the quote-unquote wrong I think, okay, well, if that's what we think, well, let's give them their jobs back. So I think that nothing could keep up as quite as intense as it was in 2020. But I think that if you don't actually make meaningful reforms, it's just going to be even worse the next time. Greg, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Thanks for your book. Really looking forward to your next book too. That's exciting to hear that you're working on that. Thanks. Well, real pleasure chatting with you. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.