What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.
-EPICTETUS
A good deal of energy and effort is being put into defeating ignorance and hate. Many of the current efforts are rooted in creating safe environments for everyone. In many ways, this often feels like we are doing a good thing in our work and in our schools. I’m going to use this week’s essay to explain why I think the whole approach is wrong and misguided. I’ll kick it off with who is to blame.
I blame George Lucas. I suppose hippies, well meaning educators, psychologists, and, parents are to blame as well. That said, if had to pin the blame on this notion of “trusting your feelings” on anything, it has to be the 1977 film Star Wars. You’re probably wondering a little bit what I am on about here. In some ways I am too, but let me see if I can pull the thread for you.
When Torri and I were raising our kids, we were often greeted with some degree of skepticism when it came to the amount of freedom we’d allow. We left our kids in the care of each other and went to the movies when the oldest was only 10. When they learned to ride a bike, we let them roam as far as they felt comfortable. We let them walk the 1.3 miles to and from elementary school when the Massachusetts weather cooperated.
But it was more than just our friends. A great many of the adults in our community (and many other places as it turns out) were instructing children to “trust their feelings.” They were encouraged to report their disappointments and concerns. The adults then set out to stamp out anything in the path ahead that might give rise to these bad feelings.
The best of intentions of parents and educators were on full display in our children’s elementary school. From policies that prohibited kids from saving seats at the lunch table to a recess aid who declared to our youngest child that his team had to return the football to the other team after he had intercepted a pass, adults were trying to minimize hurt feelings. Seemingly a noble idea when it comes to small children that in the end weakens their internal natural state of anti-fragility.
Overprotected children tend not to handle disappointments without intervention from adults. They grow dependent on assistance; this, in turn, leads to discouragement at the first whiff of an impending challenge. On turn this leads to low self esteem, as they feel like they can’t do anything by themselves. Overprotection makes children feel both entitled and fragile.
“Recall that the fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Antifragility, a term coined by author Nassim Taleb, describes objects which become stronger when exposed to stress and randomness. This is in direct contrast to fragile objects. Fragile objects break when exposed to stress whereas antifragile objects need stress to develop and thrive. Which brings us back to the children.
In general, the children of primates grow stronger from facing challenges, moderate pain, and low-stake conflicts. The freedom to fail and navigate through the ups and downs of life tends to bring out their best over time. As a species then, human children are naturally antifragile and, to the greatest extent possible, we shouldn’t fuck with that.
As this thread pulls past the training our kids are getting from parents and educators, we get to safety culture which has invaded academia. It was true when I was in University in the late 1980s that this thing called “political correctness” was starting to take root. People were being attacked for the things they said, and the currency people were trading to build their reputations was this thing called outrage. Since then the safety culture has created “safe” spaces, trigger warnings, and concern over micro-aggressions. Perhaps worst of all, concern about being “canceled” has convinced professors to curtail, change, or otherwise drop lectures; and, in some cases, just leave campus all together.
This emphasis on feeling safe seems to have grown from what I observed in my college days, and what Torri and I experienced as we were raising our kids. Parents and educators were increasingly engaged in practices in which they “prepared the road for the child, not the child for the road,” as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argued in their 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind. By the late 2010s this vocabulary of emotional safety-ism seemed to have become ubiquitous across all levels of education. In the early 2020s we are watching it creep into the work place. People who feel "assaulted" by ideas they deemed hurtful now find themselves armed with a powerful rhetorical weapon not to mention rather limitless potential targets.
What does this lead to?
Silencing of speech. If an idea makes you or someone else feel unsafe there can hardly be a conversation, now can there?
The need to feel safe will make you neurotic. “What is new today is the premise that students are fragile. Students think they are in danger and therefore need more protection. Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection.… Stated simply: many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.”1
It causes conflict. “If you … encourage students to find more things offensive (leading them to experience more negative impacts),” Haidt and Lukianoff note, “and you also tell them that whoever says or does the things they find offensive are ‘aggressors’ who have committed acts of bigotry against them, then you are probably fostering feelings of victimization, anger, and hopelessness in your students. They will come to see the world—and even their university—as a hostile place where things never seem to get better. If someone wanted to create an environment of perpetual anger and intergroup conflict, this would be an effective way to do it.”2
Overreaction is the default reaction. Consider this interaction between a Yale professor (Nicholas Christakis) and a group of angry students:
Christakis: So I have a vision of us, as people, as human beings, that actually privileges our common humanity, that is interested not in what is different among us, but what is the same.… I believe, even though I am not like you in the sense of my superficial appearance, that I can sit down and talk to you and understand your predicament, that I can listen to you. If that’s not true, if you deny that, then what is the reason that you ask to be heard, by me or anyone else?Student: Because we’re dying!3
I could go on. This approach to emotional safety-ism is killing free speech, politicizing and polarizing campuses, it catastrophizes relatively normal interactions, patronizes people of color, undermines pluralism, but most of all, this approach distracts us from real solutions to very real problems.
Fighting ignorance and hate cannot be accomplished by making emotionally safe environments. Not in school, and not in the work place. When we set about to eliminate hurt feeling by chasing out people who say hurtful things and refuse to allow speech that some have deemed unsafe, we are applying platitudes to problems. It would be like fighting a deadly infection that is causing a fever in the patient by breaking all the thermometers in the hospital.
Hatred comes from fear and ignorance.
Confronting reality, not hiding from it, is a much better solution.
Lukianoff and Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind, pp. 7 and 9.
Lukianoff and Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind, p. 46
Darel E. Paul, “Listening at the Great Awokening,” Areo, April 17, 2019.