In 2016, Jonathan Haidt spoke at SUNY New Paltz on the cultural shift on college campuses from a focus on truth and knowledge to an obsession with victimhood and social justice. The title of the talk was “How two incompatible sacred values are driving conflict and confusion in American universities” (complete transcript available here). Five years on, Haidt’s observations still hold and are more broadly applicable than ever. I’d love to see him update and expand his observations in a new talk or article. Possible title: “How two incompatible sacred values are driving conflict and confusion in America.” In the meantime, here are some excerpts from the 2016 talk:
“…the reason why any other motive other than say truth is bad for scholarship is because reasoning is very, very heavily motivated…Human reasoning is motivated. We’re not very good at objective, careful, balanced reasoning. When we evaluate a proposition, anything; that fat is good for you, that Obama was born in Hawaii or Indonesian, wherever … Any proposition, you evaluate it. We don’t say, “Well what’s the evidence on one side, what’s the evidence on the other? Which one … ” We don’t do that. Our brains are not set up to do that. We start with a feeling; we want to believe X or we want to doubt X. We ask, “Can I believe it? I want to believe this. Can I believe it?” and then we send our reasoning off on a search to find evidence. If we find one piece of evidence, we can stop, because we’re now … If someone holds us accountable, they say, “Why do you think that?” you pull out the piece of evidence and you say, “Here, this is why.”
A motivated scholarship often propagates pleasing falsehoods; once something that is published that is politically pleasing to the majority of scholars, it’s almost impossible to recall it because it’ll get cited…There’s only one major protection against motivated scholarship, and that is institutionalized disconfirmation. That means if you participate in an institution that institutionalizes critique and disconfirmation, then the bad ideas, the bad research, gets caught and filtered out, and that’s the way the academy is supposed to work. This was the genius of science. It’s not the scientist who’s so rational; it’s that science is a community of scholars that critique each other’s work. That’s great and it used to work, but it stopped working in the ’90s…[This has been] a very rapid change with profound consequences for everything that happens at the university.
For students, I think those consequences are that orthodox views, whatever is politically pleasing to the left, become much more strongly held than they were 10 or 20 years ago, but much less weakly supported. People don’t know the reasons for their beliefs because they’ve never been challenged. Nobody dares challenge them, and this was [John Stuart] Mill’s concern, that if you’re not even exposed to anybody who believes the opposite, you can’t know what you think you know.
Secondly, …students are much more afraid to speak up and disagree than they were 10 or 20 years ago. They’re walking on eggshells…Many become intellectually fragile, and I’ll talk about fragility in a few minutes, because if you’ve never had to defend your ideas and then suddenly you’re challenged, then it feels like, a phrase that some use is, “You have invalidated my existence.” Students now say that. If you challenge a core conviction, they say you have invalidated my existence, and that’s a form of violence, and so we can’t allow that.
The consequences for faculty are almost as profound... Everybody’s focused on the trendy topics. So misallocation of effort, loss of rigor, fear of dissent, and fear of students; the professors are increasingly afraid of students. Everybody’s on the left, but they’re increasingly being hauled up for some charge of racism or sexism and they don’t know why, but professors all over the country are pulling videos, pulling material.
Just the last two years, professors all over the country are changing their teaching because they’re afraid of the students. So that’s motivated reasoning. And the reason why political orthodox becomes so dangerous and you get all this strange stuff happening is because political orthodoxy then, or any kind of orthodoxy, activates the psychology of sacredness.
And what we find in the archeology record is that wherever there is civilization, it starts with temples, or at least the record begins with temples. And the reason, I believe, we always start with temples is that humanity’s great trick, our evolutionary trick over the last half-million or so years, I’d say, is we evolved a psychology of sacredness; we evolved to be religious and that means if we circle around something, we then make that thing sacred and then we can trust each other.
So what is sacred at a university? I mean, what do we circle around?.. The most sacred thing at a university [has become] the victim; not in all departments, not in the sciences, but in the social science and especially the humanities, the victim is the most sacred thing.
[What] has been happening, and it happens first on campuses in the United States, is the transition to a victimhood culture; a culture of victimhood is one characterize by concern with status and sensitivity to slight, so just like an honor culture. Any little thing can cause it … You have to react. So people are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, as in an honor culture, but here they react differently; they don’t deal with it themselves. They bring it to the attention of the authorities… to punish the person who did this. In such a culture, you don’t emphasize your strength. Rather the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and their social marginalization. They also point out that the only way to gain status is not just to be a victim, but to stand up for other victims. And so even if you’re not in a victim class, you can gain status by aggressively pursuing those who you think have marginalized members of the victim class.
Students are learning a Manichean view of the world, good versus evil. This means that there is eternal conflict and grievance; there can never be peace in a victimhood culture. There is eternal conflict and grievance because that’s what the struggle for status is all about. Students are walking on eggshells in a victimhood culture, everybody is afraid, everyone is self-censoring...”
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Source: Haidt, J. (2016). How two incompatible sacred values are driving conflict and confusion in American universities. A talk given at SUNY New Paltz, sponsored by the Office of the President and the Free Speech Task Force.