In my earlier post on the fragile generation the interview
has this quote from Jonathan Haidt.
In his forthcoming book Misguided
Minds: How Three Bad Ideas Are Leading Young People, Universities, and
Democracies Toward Failure, Haidt claims that certain ideas are impairing
students’ chances of success. Those ideas being: your feelings are always
right; what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; and the world is divided into
good people and bad people. ‘If we can teach those three ideas to college
students’, he says, ‘we cannot guarantee they will fail, but we will minimise
their odds at success’.
I agree with Haidt about the first two ideas that the
current generation seems to believe. To me the first idea, that feelings are
always right, stems from the lack of teaching kids the ability to think
critically. Way back in the mid 1980s a friend and I designed and taught an
adult continuing education course on critical thinking. At that time we could
see that our adult students had never been exposed to thinking in a methodical,
logical way. It makes sense that if people don’t have even a rudimentary grasp
of logic and arguments they are subject to subconscious biases and to the push
of emotional reactions.
I’ve read a number of books over the last ten years that explore
how we form opinions and how we are unconsciously influenced by many biases. I
recall reading about one study in which some of the participants read a series
of words related to being elderly. When they were later given a series of
physical tasks to perform they completed them more slowly than the control
group that had not been exposed to those words!
As I explain it to people we like to think we’re being
detectives when we’re really lawyers. By that I mean a detective tries to find
out who committed a crime by objectively collecting and piecing together the evidence.
A lawyer, on the other hand, tries to build a case, either to defend their
client or to prosecute the defendant. The studies I’ve read about show that we
often come to a conclusion about an issue then go looking for confirming data.
We tend to ignore or discount data that doesn’t fit our conclusion.
I agree with Haidt with his identifying the second prevalent
idea that what doesn’t kill us makes us weaker. This idea seems to be rampant
among what some call the derisively call the “snowflake” generation. I think
this is tied to the first premise. That is, if you don’t have the tools to think
critically then we’re threatened by ideas with which we disagree.
My main objective is to touch on his third point: that the
world is divided into good people and bad people. I’m sure Haidt will explain
this more in his upcoming book and that he isn’t saying there are no evil
people. Being familiar with Haidt’s work, I believe he is saying that people
are too quick to lump those who disagree with them into the evil camp. I’ve
seen it happen many times where you’re demonized if you disagree with someone
politically. Liberals think conservatives are evil and vice versa. I’m not
saying everyone does this but a lot do. It has happened to me during the 2016
presidential election. A couple people have quit talking to my wife and me when
we disagreed with them.
I’m assuming Haidt would agree that there are some evil
people. The clearly obvious examples would be Hitler, Mao and Stalin or murderous
sociopaths. But these are extreme examples. In our daily lives we rarely deal
with people who are truly evil. They might buy into ideas or policies that we
believe ultimately hurt people. For instance, conservatives and libertarians
believe gun control disarms the poor who might live in high crime areas.
Liberals believe gun control protects us from those who, in the liberal’s eyes,
can too easily obtain guns. Conservatives and libertarians think welfare
benefits eat away at the incentive for people to find work while liberals think
welfare is needed to compensate for the victims of an economy rigged in favor
of the rich and powerful. Neither side in these debates are necessarily evil.
But I’ve seen it happen too often where you get slapped with the evil label for
disagreeing! I assume Haidt’s book will delve into this in much more detail.
Before closing I’d recommend using something called steel
manning and taking the ideological
Turing test. Steel manning is opposite of a straw man argument which involves
distorting what an opponent is saying then refuting it while the original
argument wasn’t really addressed. Steel manning means we take the opposite
approach of the straw man argument: you try to strengthen the argument of the
other side before trying to refute it. To do this means applying what
has been called the Turing ideological test where you try to state the argument
of the other side as fairly as possible, as if you actually are taking that
stand, then addressing it. I think if more people tried to do this we would
have more civil and productive disagreements.
Both steel manning and the ideological Turing test take a
lot of work! It means trying to think like your opponent then coming up with
your response. Unfortunately, we tend to take the easy way out. Haidt has said
in his earlier work that humans are still fundamentally tribal in nature. Once
we form an allegiance to a tribe we talk the language of our tribe (see Arnold
Kling’s The Three Languages of Politics) and look at the other tribe as the
“enemy.”
