Liberal Education & Bad Pop Psychology

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have an excellent piece in The Atlantic: “The Coddling of the American Mind”.  Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and Haidt is a social psychologist.  Their topic is the recent movement on college campuses to create an environment where no one can be offended, let alone traumatized, by anything that anyone says.  They provide a lot of familiar examples, but perhaps the most telling concerns the efforts of some law students to suppress the teaching a rape law in their classes.  After all, someone in the room might have been subject to this terrible crime and might well be traumatized by the discussion. 

The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.

The authors make some traditional arguments on behalf of a liberal education and critical thinking‑they mention the Socratic Method, for example‑but their primary argument seems to be based on cognitive psychology. 

For millennia, philosophers have understood that we don’t see life as it is; we see a version distorted by our hopes, fears, and other attachments. The Buddha said, “Our life is the creation of our mind.” Marcus Aurelius said, “Life itself is but what you deem it.” The quest for wisdom in many traditions begins with this insight. Early Buddhists and the Stoics, for example, developed practices for reducing attachments, thinking more clearly, and finding release from the emotional torments of normal mental life.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is a modern embodiment of this ancient wisdom. It is the most extensively studied nonpharmaceutical treatment of mental illness, and is used widely to treat depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and addiction. It can even be of help to schizophrenics. No other form of psychotherapy has been shown to work for a broader range of problems.

Having practiced Zen Buddhist meditation for many years, I can testify that it indeed works like cognitive psychology as they describe it.  It also just plain works.  The strategy is to avoid avoiding.  When someone suffering from distress and trauma tries to avoid the source of the trauma, it only makes it stronger.  Gentle persistent exposure (or mindfulness, as current Buddhist language has it) is the best way to work through the human problems.  Norman Fisher’s Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong is an excellent introduction to the Zen method.  In a nutshell, it teaches you to move toward rather than away from what is causing pain. 

So I am, as it were, primed to receive the message that Lukianoff and Haidt deliver.  I can’t speak about cognitive psychology but I know something about liberal education.  I suspect that it is impossible without trauma.  Socrates only became Socrates when he experienced a moment of deep crisis.  The philosophical method he was practicing (that of pre-Socratic science) brought him to a point of intellectual collapse.  Out of that trauma, he became the most influential personality in the history of philosophy.  His trauma is recorded in the Phaedo.  I don’t think he had another, but his students certainly did.  The story of their traumas is written throughout the Platonic corpus.  Aristotle must have had the same experience when broke away from Plato. 

I have had two such experiences.  One in my second year of college, when I realized that I was a conservative.  My friends thought I had been captured by aliens.  All the way through graduate school and into the early years of my teaching career, I rejected Darwinian explanations.  I thought they were inconsistent with Plato and Aristotle.  I still remember sitting on my deck reading Larry Arnhart when I realized that this was not the case.  It was a traumatic moment.  Maybe two is enough for anyone. 

Liberal education is inseparable from trauma and discomfort.  If the universities try to isolate students from these, it is not only bad pop psychology, it is a deep betrayal of their mission. 

Pure Food & Liberal Culture

Jonathan Haidt’s fascinating survey work on the moral foundations of politics identifies a number of dichotomies that define the political culture in the U.S.  These are care/harm; fairness/cheating; liberty/oppression; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; and sanctity (or purity)/degradation.  Haidt argues that what distinguishes the left and right in America is which of these dichotomies they hold to be most important.  Here is a quote that I take from an earlier blog post:

Political liberals [in the U.S.] tend to rely primarily on the moral foundation of care/harm, followed by fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression. Social conservatives, in contrast, use all six foundations. They are less concerned than liberals about harm to innocent victims, but they are much more concerned about the moral foundations that bind groups and nations together, i.e., loyalty (patriotism), authority (law and order, traditional families), and sanctity (the Bible, God, the flag as a sacred object). Libertarians, true to their name, value liberty more than anyone else, and they value it far more than any other foundation.

One interesting thing that Haidt notes is that conservatives are much better at guessing what values liberals hold than vice versa. 

I am guessing that liberals may be just as bad at guessing what they themselves believe as they are at guessing what conservatives believe.  As I recall, the further to the left you go, the less emphasis you get on sanctity/degradation.  Most on the left, I suppose, would be uncomfortable those terms.  However, anyone who pays attention to the liberal culture in America will note that they spend a lot of time, energy, and money on achieving purity. 

The fair trade culture is one glaring example.  I can buy a pound of “Peace Coffee” at my local coopt.  Such labels as “fair trade” and “sustainable” are nothing if not certifications that the purchase and consumption of a product is kosher.  A couple of articles illustrate the character and the absurdity of this culture of purity. 

Judith Shulevitz at The New Republic exposes the “cleansing” fad as a quazi-religious bit of numbskullery. 

One afternoon last month, I made a nervous visit to the office of Ghiora Aharoni, an Israeli sculptor and architect of some renown. The awkward part was that I hadn’t come to interview him about his work. I was there to hear about his gut. He had just finished a 21-day cleanse, the kind with supplements, protein shakes, and endorsements by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow. (It’s called the Clean Program.)…

What draws sophisticated and healthy people like Aharoni’s friends to commercial quasi-fasts? Cleanses, whether they last a day, a weekend, or three weeks, and whether they consist exclusively of fruit and vegetable juices or just a severe restriction of solids, are quickly becoming a part of what you might call the cosmopolitan diet, consumed in the more urbane sectors of New York and Los Angeles and Austin or wherever you find Whole Foods–levels of gastronomic consciousness and sufficient disposable income…

Aharoni and others made it clear that they fast for more than the mere improvement of their psycho-physiological wellbeing. Aharoni described his cleanses as “journeys” or “traveling while staying at home,” phrases that echoed (to me, at least) the visionary transports achieved by fourth-century Christian desert ascetics and medieval holy women. As it happens, these saints starved themselves only partly out of piety; rejecting food, they also rejected a church committed more to institutional growth than the extremes of religious experience. Another explanation I heard was that people cleanse out of a sense of shame: Their eating and sometimes their lives feel out of control. In the past, this same feeling might have provoked atonement, particularly for the deadly sins of greed and gluttony.  These new cleanses are “religion without theology,” my friend Ruby quipped.

That is how I see it.  Cleansing is religious fasting without the theology but not without the superstition.  The ubiquity of such practices in various religious traditions testifies to the psychology need that it attempts to satisfy.  However, the practice makes a lot less sense without the theology.  It’s one thing if God or my recommends a diet.  But Gwyneth Paltrow? 

A second article in The Atlantic by David H. Freedman exposes the locavore/anti-processed food cult to withering scrutiny.  Freedman is chiefly concerned with America’s big health problem, which is big Americans. 

He goes after natural food gurus Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman.  They peddle the tale that the food and restaurant industries are making us fat.  If only we would stop eating processed foods and eat only something our great grandma would recognize can we burn off the pounds and be healthy again.  Behind them is the establishment press and a range of commercial enterprises (the New York Times and Whole Foods figure prominently). 

Thousands of restaurants and grocery stores, most notably the Whole Foods chain, have thrived by answering the call to reject industrialized foods in favor of a return to natural, simple, nonindustrialized—let’s call them “wholesome”—foods. The two newest restaurants in my smallish Massachusetts town both prominently tout wholesome ingredients; one of them is called the Farmhouse, and it’s usually packed.

A new generation of business, social, and policy entrepreneurs is rising to further cater to these tastes, and to challenge Big Food. Silicon Valley, where tomorrow’s entrepreneurial and social trends are forged, has spawned a small ecosystem of wholesome-friendly venture-capital firms (Physic Ventures, for example), business accelerators (Local Food Lab), and Web sites (Edible Startups) to fund, nurture, and keep tabs on young companies such as blissmo (a wholesome-food-of-the-month club), Mile High Organics (online wholesome-food shopping), and Wholeshare (group wholesome-food purchasing), all designed to help reacquaint Americans with the simpler eating habits of yesteryear…

If the most-influential voices in our food culture today get their way, we will achieve a genuine food revolution. Too bad it would be one tailored to the dubious health fantasies of a small, elite minority. And too bad it would largely exclude the obese masses, who would continue to sicken and die early. Despite the best efforts of a small army of wholesome-food heroes, there is no reasonable scenario under which these foods could become cheap and plentiful enough to serve as the core diet for most of the obese population—even in the unlikely case that your typical junk-food eater would be willing and able to break lifelong habits to embrace kale and yellow beets. And many of the dishes glorified by the wholesome-food movement are, in any case, as caloric and obesogenic as anything served in a Burger King.

In other words, the whole whole foods movement is very well designed to satisfy the desire of a prosperous elite for purity but poorly designed to address the real problem of obesity and hopeless when it comes to meeting the needs of those who most suffer from it. 

Freedman rigorously establishes three points. 

1.        Much of the food peddled by the food revolution is “obesogenic as anything served in a Burger King.” 

2.      The food peddled by the food revolution is too expensive both in money and in time to be available to the obese masses. 

3.      The one institution in America that can effectively address the problem is the fast food industry. 

The last is the most provocative, but that is what The Atlantic is for.  I would add that he is obviously right.  No one is better than McDonalds or Carl’s Junior at making food cheaply and quickly available and no one is better at marketing food to the masses.  Getting the industry to move in that direction is not so hard.  It is already happening, as Freedman demonstrates. 

The desire for purity is a basic human instinct but it is not always a reliable guide.  Modern liberalism has always been an elitist business, yet it purports to care about the many unwashed.  If it is really to make good on that purpose, it will have to take a good hard look at itself.  Don’t hold your breath.