The Coddling of the American Mind Chapter 3 The Untruth of Us Versus Them Life is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People

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The Coddling of the American Mind Chapter 3. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People

Author: Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt Publisher: New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Publish Date: 2019-8-20 Review Date: Status:💥

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There is the moral dualism that sees good and evil as instincts within us between which we must choose. But there is also what I will call pathological dualism that sees humanity itself as radically … divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad. You are either one or the other.

RABBI LORD JONATHAN SACKS, Not in God’s Name1

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Sacks (2015), p. 51.

A protest is always a claim that injustice is being done. When a group forms to protest together, they jointly construct a narrative about what is wrong, who is to blame, and what must be done to make things right. Reality is always more complicated than the narrative, however, and as a result, people are demonized or lionized—often unfairly.

One such case happened in October 2015 at Claremont McKenna College, near Los Angeles.

A student named Olivia, whose parents emigrated from Mexico to California before she was born, wrote an essay in a student publication about her feelings of marginalization and exclusion.2 Olivia noticed that Latinos were better represented on the blue-collar staff at CMC (including janitors and gardeners) than among its administrative and professional staff, and she found this realization painful. She wrote that she felt like she had been admitted to fill a racial quota. She suggested that there is a standard or typical person at CMC, and she is not it: “Our campus climate and institutional culture are primarily grounded in western, white, cisheteronormative upper to upper-middle class values.” (“Cisheteronormative” describes a society in which people assume that other people are not transgender and not gay, unless there is information to the contrary.)3

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To protect her privacy, we have changed the student’s name.
Adapted from the definition here: Cisnormativity. (2017). The Queer Dictionary. Retrieved from http://queerdictionary.blogspot.com/2014/09/definition-of-cisnormativity.html

In response to this essay, which Olivia sent in an email to “CMC Staff,” Mary Spellman, the dean of students at CMC, sent her a private email two days later. Here is the entire email:

Olivia—

Thank you for writing and sharing this article with me. We have a lot to do as a college and community. Would you be willing to talk with me sometime about these issues? They are important to me and the [dean of students] staff and we are working on how we can better serve students, especially those who don’t fit our CMC mold.

I would love to talk with you more.

Best,

Dean Spellman4

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Other than changing the name of the student and swapping in “[dean of students]” for the original “DOS,” this was the exact text of the email.

What do you think about Dean Spellman’s email? Cruel or kind? Most readers can probably see that she was showing concern and reaching out with an offer to listen and help. But Olivia was offended by the dean’s use of the word “mold.” She seemed to interpret it in the least generous way possible: that Spellman was implying that Olivia (and other students of color) do not fit the mold and therefore do not belong at CMC. This was clearly not Spellman’s intent; Olivia herself had asserted that at CMC, there is a prototype or pattern of identities that she does not match, and, as Spellman later explained,5 she used the word “mold” to express her empathy with Olivia, because it’s a word that other CMC students use in conversations with her to describe their sense of not fitting in.

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You can see her explanation at minute 48 of this video: The CMC Forum (Producer). (2015, November 11). CMCers of color lead protest of lack of support from administration [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/OlB7Vy-lZZ8?t=48m1s

Any student who was already feeling like an outsider might well feel a flash of negativity upon reading the word “mold.” But what should one do with that flash? There is a principle in philosophy and rhetoric called the principle of charity, which says that one should interpret other people’s statements in their best, most reasonable form, not in the worst or most offensive way possible. Had Olivia been taught to judge people primarily on their intentions, she could have used the principle of charity in this situation, as Karith Foster did in the situation described in the previous chapter. If a student in Olivia’s position was in the habit of questioning her initial reactions, looking for evidence, and giving people the benefit of the doubt, that student might get past her initial flash of emotion and avail herself of an invitation from a dean who wanted to know what she could do to address the student’s concerns.

That is not what happened. Instead, Olivia posted Spellman’s email on her Facebook page (about two weeks after receiving it) with the comment, “I just don’t fit that wonderful CMC mold! Feel free to share.” Her friends did share the email, and the campus erupted in protest.6 There were marches, demonstrations, demands given to the president for mandatory diversity training, and demands that Spellman resign. Two students went on a hunger strike, vowing that they would not eat until Spellman was gone.7 In one scene, which you can watch on YouTube, students formed a circle and spent over an hour airing their grievances—through bullhorns—against Spellman and other administrators who were there in the circle to listen.8 Spellman apologized for her email being “poorly worded” and told the crowd that her “intention was to affirm the feelings and experiences expressed in the article and to provide support.”9 But the students did not accept her apology. At one point a woman berated the dean (to cheers from the students) for “falling asleep”10 during the proceedings, which the woman interpreted as an act of disrespect. But it is clear from the video of the confrontation that Spellman was not falling asleep; she was trying to hold back her tears.

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Miller, S. (2015, November 18). VIDEO: CMCers of color lead protest of dean of students, administration. The Forum. Retrieved from http://cmcforum.com/news/11112015-video-cmcers-of-color-protest-dean-of-students-administration
Tidmarsh, K. (2015, November 11). CMC students of color protest for institutional support, call for dean of students to resign. The Student Life. Retrieved from http://tsl.news/news/5265
See the full video at: The CMC Forum (Producer). (2015, November 11). CMCers of color lead protest of lack of support from administration [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/OlB7Vy-lZZ8?t=3s
Tidmarsh, K. (2015, November 11); see n. 7.
See that moment at time 41:33 of the video linked in n. 5.

The university did not fire Spellman, but neither did its leaders publicly express any support for her.11 Faced with the escalating anger of students—amplified by social media and then by national news coverage—Spellman resigned.12

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We were not able to find any public statement of support, and when we emailed Spellman to ask if she knew of such a statement, she told us that she did not. Spellman, M. (personal communication, February 8, 2018).
Watanabe, T., & Rivera, C. (2015, November 13). Amid racial bias protests, Claremont McKenna dean resigns. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-claremont-marches-20151112-story.html

As this was happening, another conflict over an email was unfolding at Yale.13 Erika Christakis, a lecturer at the Yale Child Study Center and associate master of Silliman College (one of Yale’s residential colleges), wrote an email questioning whether it was appropriate for Yale administrators to give guidance to students about appropriate and inappropriate Halloween costumes, as the college dean’s office had done.14 Christakis praised their “spirit of avoiding hurt and offense,” but she worried that “the growing tendency to cultivate vulnerability in students carries unacknowledged costs.”15 She expressed concern about the institutional “exercise of implied control over college students,” and invited the community to reflect on whether, as adults, they could set norms for themselves and handle disagreements interpersonally. “Talk to each other,” she wrote. “Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”

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FIRE (2015, October 30). Email from Erika Christakis: “Dressing yourselves,” email to Silliman College (Yale) students on Halloween costumes [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.thefire.org/email-from-erika-christakis-dressing-yourselves-email-to-silliman-college-yale-students-on-halloween-costumes
FIRE. (2015, October 27). Email from the Intercultural Affairs Committee [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.thefire.org/email-from-intercultural-affairs. Note that the Intercultural Affairs Committee is part of the dean’s office.
Christakis, E. (2016, October 28). My Halloween email led to a campus firestorm—and a troubling lesson about self-censorship. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-halloween-email-led-to-a-campus-firestorm—and-a-troubling-lesson-about-self-censorship/2016/10/28/70e55 732-9b97-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html. For the email from Erika Chris-takis, see n. 13.

The email sparked an angry response from some students, who interpreted it as an indication that Christakis was in favor of racist costumes.16 A few days later, a group of roughly 150 students appeared in the courtyard outside Christakis’s home (within Silliman College), writing statements in chalk, including “We know where you live.” Erika’s husband, Nicholas Christakis, was the master of Silliman (a title that has since been changed to “head of college”). When he came out to the courtyard, students demanded that he apologize for—and renounce—his wife’s email.17 Nicholas listened, engaged in dialogue with them, and apologized several times for causing them pain, but he refused to renounce his wife’s email or the ideas it espoused.18 Students accused him and Erika of being “racist” and “offensive,” “stripping people of their humanity,” “creating an unsafe space,” and enabling “violence.” They swore at him, criticized him for “not listening” and for not remembering students’ names. They told him not to smile, lean down, or gesticulate. And they told him they wanted him to lose his job. Eventually, in a scene that went viral,19 one student screamed at him: “Who the fuck hired you? You should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! It’s about creating a home here… . You should not sleep at night! You are disgusting!”20

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Wilson, R. (2015, October 31). Open letter to Associate Master Christakis. Down Magazine. Retrieved from http://downatyale.com/post.php?id=430
By an extraordinary coincidence, Greg happened to be on the Yale campus that day and was present at the confrontation. To watch the videos that Greg took of the event, see: Shibley, R. (2015, September 13). New video of last year’s Yale halloween costume confrontation emerges [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.thefire.org/new-video-of-last-years-yale-halloween-costume-confrontation-emerges
Kirchick, J. (2016, September 12). New videos show how Yale betrayed itself by favoring cry-bullies. Tablet Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/213212/yale-favoring-cry-bullies
FIRE (Producer). (2015, November 7). Yale University students protest Halloween costume email (VIDEO 3). Retrieved from https://youtu.be/9IEFD_JVYd0?t=1m17s
On the question of whether the master creates an intellectual space or a home: the master plays a mixed role, partly residential and quasi-parental, partly intellectual. Jon graduated from Yale in 1985 and went to many academic events and talks in the home of the master of Davenport College.

The next day, the president of the university sent out an email acknowledging students’ pain and committing to “take actions that will make us better.”21 He did not mention any support for the Christakises until weeks after the courtyard incident, by which time attitudes against the couple were entrenched. Amid ongoing demands that they be fired,22 Erika resigned from her teaching position,23 Nicholas took a sabbatical from teaching for the rest of the year, and at the end of the school year, the pair resigned from their positions in the residential college. Erika later revealed that many professors were very supportive privately, but were unwilling to defend or support the Christakises publicly because they thought it was “too risky” and they feared retribution.24

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President and Yale College dean underscore commitment to a “better Yale.” (2015, November 6). YaleNews. Retrieved from https://news.yale.edu/2015/11/06/president-and-yale-college-dean-underscore-commitment-better-yale
Stanley-Becker, I. (2015, November 13). Minority students at Yale give list of demands to university president. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/13/minority-students-at-yale-give-list-of-demands-to-university-president. See also: Next Yale. (2015, November 18). Next Yale demands for the Administration. Retrieved from https://www.thefire.org/next-yale-demands-for-the-administration
Schick, F. (2015, December 7). Erika Christakis leaves teaching role. Yale Daily News. Retrieved from https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2015/12/07/erika-christakis-to-end-teaching
Physics professor Douglas Stone spearheaded a public letter defending the Christakises that was signed over the course of many weeks by ninety professors, mostly in the sciences and the medical school. See also: Christakis, E. (2016, October 28). My Halloween email led to a campus firestorm—and a troubling lesson about self-censorship. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-halloween-email-led-to-a-campus-firestorm—and-a-troubling-lesson-about-self-censorship/2016/10/28/70e55732-9b97-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html

Why did students react so strongly to the emails from Dean Spellman and Erika Christakis, both of which were clearly intended to be helpful to students? Of course, there was a backstory at each school; there were incidents of racism or other reasons why some students were frustrated with the administration.25 The protests were not just about the emails. But as far as we can tell, those backstories don’t involve Spellman or Christakis. So why did students interpret the emails as offenses so grave that they justified calls for their authors to be fired? It’s as though some of the students had their own mental prototype, a schema with two boxes to fill: victim and oppressor. Everyone is placed into one box or the other.

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There’s a famous series of experiments in social psychology called the minimal group paradigm, pioneered by Polish psychologist Henri Tajfel, who served in the French Army during World War II and became a prisoner of war in Germany. Profoundly affected by his experiences as a Jew during that period in Europe, including having his entire family in Poland murdered by the Nazis, Tajfel wanted to understand the conditions under which people would discriminate against members of an outgroup. So in the 1960s he conducted a series of experiments, each of which began by dividing people into two groups based on trivial and arbitrary criteria, such as flipping a coin. For example, in one study, each person first estimated the number of dots on a page. Irrespective of their estimations, half were told that they had overestimated the number of dots and were put into a group of “overestimators.” The other half were sent to the “underestimators” group. Next, subjects were asked to distribute points or money to all the other subjects, who were identified only by their group membership. Tajfel found that no matter how trivial or “minimal” he made the distinctions between the groups, people tended to distribute whatever was offered in favor of their in-group members.26

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For Claremont McKenna, see Watanabe, T., & Rivera, C. (2015, November 13). Amid racial protests, Claremont McKenna dean resigns. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-claremont-marches-20151112-story.html. For Yale, see Stanley-Becker, I. (2015, November 5). A confrontation over race at Yale: Hundreds of students demand answers from the school’s first black dean. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/05/a-confrontation-over-race-at-yale-hundreds-of-students-demand-answers-from-the-schools-first-black-dean
Tajfel (1970).

Later studies have used a variety of techniques to reach the same conclusion.27 Neuroscientist David Eagleman used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the brains of people who were watching videos of other people’s hands getting pricked by a needle or touched by a Q-tip. When the hand being pricked by a needle was labeled with the participant’s own religion, the area of the participant’s brain that handles pain showed a larger spike of activity than when the hand was labeled with a different religion. When arbitrary groups were created (such as by flipping a coin) immediately before the subject entered the MRI machine, and the hand being pricked was labeled as belonging to the same arbitrary group as the participant, even though the group hadn’t even existed just moments earlier, the participant’s brain still showed a larger spike.28 We just don’t feel as much empathy for those we see as “other.”

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See overall review in Berreby (2005); see Hogg (2016) for a review of social identity theory; see Cikara & Van Bavel (2014) for a review of neuroscience work in this area.
Vaughn, Savjani, Cohen, & Eagleman (manuscript under review). For more on this study, see: iqsquared (Producer). (2012, June 22). David Eagleman: What makes us empathetic? IQ2 Talks [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/TDjWryXdVd0?t=7m42s

The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently. We are all descended from people who belonged to groups that were consistently better at winning that competition. Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict.29 When the “tribe switch”30 is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves. A basic principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds,”31 which is a useful trick for a group gearing up for a battle between “us” and “them.” In tribal mode, we seem to go blind to arguments and information that challenge our team’s narrative. Merging with the group in this way is deeply pleasurable—as you can see from the pseudotribal antics that accompany college football games.

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For a review of this literature, including the debate over whether “group selection” played a role in the human story, over and above individual selection, see Haidt (2012), chapter 9. For a contrary view, see: Pinker, S. (2012, June 18). The false allure of group selection. Edge. Retrieved from https://www.edge.org/conversation/steven_pinker-the-false-allure-of-group-selection
Chapter 10 of The Righteous Mind (Haidt, 2012) describes the “hive switch,” a psychological reflex in which self-interest is turned off and group interest becomes paramount; people lose themselves in the group. People can become tribal without the hive switch getting activated. The hive response is what happens when tribalism is activated intensely, particularly through highly engaging multisensory rituals.
This is the third of three basic principles in Jon’s book The Righteous Mind.

But being prepared for tribalism doesn’t mean we have to live in tribal ways. The human mind contains many evolved cognitive “tools.” We don’t use all of them all the time; we draw on our toolbox as needed. Local conditions can turn the tribalism up, down, or off. Any kind of intergroup conflict (real or perceived) immediately turns tribalism up, making people highly attentive to signs that reveal which team another person is on. Traitors are punished, and fraternizing with the enemy is, too. Conditions of peace and prosperity, in contrast, generally turn down the tribalism.32 People don’t need to track group membership as vigilantly; they don’t feel pressured to conform to group expectations as closely. When a community succeeds in turning down everyone’s tribal circuits, there is more room for individuals to construct lives of their own choosing; there is more freedom for a creative mixing of people and ideas.

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We are using “tribalism” in a way that overstates the degree of closure and conflict of real tribes. For a description of how real tribes often draw from one another’s practices and form alliances to reduce conflict, see Rosen, L. (2018, January 16). A liberal defense of tribalism. Foreign Policy. Retrieved from http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/16/a-liberal-defense-of-tribalism-american-politics

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So what happens to a community such as a college (or, increasingly, a high school33) when distinctions between groups are not trivial and arbitrary, and when they are emphasized rather than downplayed? What happens when you train students to see others—and themselves—as members of distinct groups defined by race, gender, and other socially significant factors, and you tell them that those groups are eternally engaged in a zero-sum conflict over status and resources?

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To learn more about how the campus trends described in this book are now influencing high schools, and to find resources for high school students who want to find a more open and intellectually diverse culture in college, please visit heterodoxacademy.org/highschool

“Identity politics” is a contentious term, but its basic meaning is simple. Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at The Brookings Institution, defines it as “political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality, as opposed to party, ideology, or pecuniary interest.” He notes that “in America, this sort of mobilization is not new, unusual, unAmerican, illegitimate, nefarious, or particularly leftwing.”34 Politics is all about groups forming coalitions to achieve their goals. If cattle ranchers, wine enthusiasts, or libertarians banding together to promote their interests is normal politics, then women, African Americans, or gay people banding together is normal politics, too.

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Rauch, J. (2017, November 9). Speaking as a … The New York Review of Books. Retrieved from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/09/mark-lilla-liberal-speaking

But how identity is mobilized makes an enormous difference—for the group’s odds of success, for the welfare of the people who join the movement, and for the country. Identity can be mobilized in ways that emphasize an overarching common humanity while making the case that some fellow human beings are denied dignity and rights because they belong to a particular group, or it can be mobilized in ways that amplify our ancient tribalism and bind people together in shared hatred of a group that serves as the unifying common enemy.

Part of Dr. King’s genius was that he appealed to the shared morals and identities of Americans by using the unifying languages of religion and patriotism. He repeatedly used the metaphor of family, referring to people of all races and religions as “brothers” and “sisters.” He spoke often of the need for love and forgiveness, hearkening back to the words of Jesus and echoing ancient wisdom from many cultures: “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend”35 and “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”36 (Compare King’s words to these from Buddha: “For hate is not conquered by hate; hate is conquered by love. This is a law eternal.”)37

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King (1963/1981), p. 52.
King (1963/1981), p. 51.
Mascaro (1995), p. 2.

This is the way to win hearts, minds, and votes: you must appeal to the elephant (intuitive and emotional processes) as well as the rider (reasoning).45 King and Murray understood this. Instead of shaming or demonizing their opponents, they humanized them and then relentlessly appealed to their humanity.

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Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of The Righteous Mind (Haidt, 2012) provide a literature review in support of this claim.

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The common-humanity form of identity politics can still be found on many college campuses, but in recent years we’ve seen the rapid rise of a very different form that is based on an effort to unite and mobilize multiple groups to fight against a common enemy.

Identifying a common enemy is an effective way to enlarge and motivate your tribe.

developments on campus are often influenced by provocations from the right, which we will discuss in chapter 6. Provocations from the right mostly come from off campus (where the right is just as committed to identity politics as is the left).

There has never been a more dramatic demonstration of the horrors of common-enemy identity politics than Adolf Hitler’s use of Jews to unify and expand his Third Reich. And it is among the most shocking aspects of our current age that some Americans (and Europeans), mostly young white men, have openly embraced neo-Nazi ideas and symbols. They and other white nationalist groups rally around a shared hatred not just of Jews, but also of blacks, feminists, and “SJWs” (social justice warriors). These right-wing extremist groups seem not to have played significant roles in campus politics before 2016, but by 2017 many of them had developed methods of trolling and online harassment that began to have an influence on campus events,

As for the identity politics originating from left-leaning on-campus sources, here’s a recent example that drew a great deal of attention. In December 2017, a Latino student at Texas State University wrote an opinion essay in his school’s student-run, independent newspaper under the headline YOUR DNA IS AN ABOMINATION.47 The essay began like this:

When I think of all the white people I have ever encountered—whether they’ve been professors, peers, lovers, friends, police officers, et cetera—there is perhaps only a dozen I would consider “decent.”

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The essay was removed, but screen shots of it can be found here: Coyne, J. (n.d.). Texas college newspaper publishes op-ed calling white DNA an “abomination” [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/11/30/texas-college-newspaper-publishes-op-ed-calling-white-dna-an-abomination. (The first line is actually a variant of a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become white, destroyer of worlds.”)

The student then argued that “whiteness” is “a construct used to perpetuate a system of racist power,” and asserted that “through a constant ideological struggle in which we aim to deconstruct ‘whiteness’ and everything attached to it, we will win.” The essay ended with this:

Ontologically speaking, white death will mean liberation for all… . Until then, remember this: I hate you because you shouldn’t exist. You are both the dominant apparatus on the planet and the void in which all other cultures, upon meeting you, die.

Right-wing sites interpreted the essay as a call for actual genocide against white people. The author seems, rather, to have been calling for cultural genocide: the end of white dominance and the culture of “whiteness” in the United States. In any case, the backlash was swift and severe and came from both on campus and off.48 From off campus, the paper received hate mail, calls for resignations, and even death threats. More than two thousand people signed a petition to defund the student paper.49 (FIRE defended the newspaper’s First Amendment rights.) The student editors quickly apologized,50 retracted the article, and fired the writer. The president of the university called the essay a “racist opinion column” and said she expected the student editors to “exercise good judgment in determining the content that they print.”51

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Cohn, A. (2017, December 13). Students, faculty, and administrators launch attack on Texas State University newspaper. FIRE. Retrieved from https://www.thefire.org/students-faculty-and-administrators-launch-attack-on-texas-state-university-newspaper
Defund the racist University Star. (2017, November 30). Retrieved from https://www.change.org/p/bobcat-liberty-council-defund-the-racist-star
Cervantes, D. (2017, November 28). Editor’s note. The University Star. Retrieved from https://star.txstate.edu/2017/11/28/letter-from-the-editor-3
More details are found in Cohn (2017); see n. 48. See also: Trauth, D. (2017, November 28). Message from the president regarding University Star column. Texas State University–Office of Media Relations. Retrieved from http://www.txstate.edu/news/news_releases/news_archive/2017/November-2017/Statement112917.html

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In calling for the dismantling of power structures, the author was using a set of terms and concepts that are common in some academic departments; the main line of argumentation fell squarely within the large family of Marxist approaches to social and political analysis. It’s a set of approaches in which things are analyzed primarily in terms of power. Groups struggle for power. Within this paradigm, when power is perceived to be held by one group over others, there is a moral polarity: the groups seen as powerful are bad, while the groups seen as oppressed are good. It’s a variant of the pathological dualism that Rabbi Sacks described in the quotation at the start of this chapter.

Writing during the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx focused on conflict between economic classes, such as the proletariat (the working class) and the capitalists (those who own the means of production). But a Marxist approach can be used to interpret any struggle between groups. One of the most important Marxist thinkers for understanding developments on campus today is Herbert Marcuse, a German philosopher and sociologist who fled the Nazis and became a professor at several American universities. His writings were influential in the 1960s and 1970s as the American left was transitioning away from its prior focus on workers versus capital to become the “New Left,” which focused on civil rights, women’s rights, and other social movements promoting equality and justice. These movements often had a left-right dimension to them—progressives wanted progress and conservatives wanted to conserve the existing order. Marcuse therefore analyzed the conflict between the left and the right in Marxist terms.

In a 1965 essay titled “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse argued that tolerance and free speech confer benefits on society only under special conditions that almost never exist: absolute equality. He believed that when power differentials between groups exist, tolerance only empowers the already powerful and makes it easier for them to dominate institutions like education, the media, and most channels of communication. Indiscriminate tolerance is “repressive,” he argued; it blocks the political agenda and suppresses the voices of the less powerful.

If indiscriminate tolerance is unfair, then what is needed is a form of tolerance that discriminates. A truly “liberating tolerance,” claimed Marcuse, is one that favors the weak and restrains the strong. Who are the weak and the strong? For Marcuse, writing in 1965, the weak was the political left and the strong was the political right. Even though the Democrats controlled Washington at that time, Marcuse associated the right with the business community, the military, and other vested interests that he saw as wielding power, hoarding wealth, and working to block social change.52 The left referred to students, intellectuals, and minorities of all kinds. For Marcuse, there was no moral equivalence between the two sides. In his view, the right pushed for war; the left stood for peace; the right was the party of “hate,” the left the party of “humanity.”53

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As Marcuse explained in a postscript to the essay, added in 1968: “The Left has no equal voice, no equal access to the mass media and their public facilities—not because a conspiracy excludes it, but because, in good old capitalist fashion, it does not have the required purchasing power.” Wolff, Moore, & Marcuse (1965/1969), p. 119.
Marcuse referred to “official tolerance granted to the Right as well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity.” Wolff, Moore, & Marcuse (1965/1969), p. 85.

Someone who accepts this framing—that the right is powerful (and therefore oppressive) while the left is weak (and therefore oppressed)—might be receptive to the argument that indiscriminate tolerance is bad. In its place, liberating tolerance, Marcuse explained, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”54

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Wolff, Moore, & Marcuse (1965/1969), p. 109.

Marcuse recognized that what he was advocating seemed to violate both the spirit of democracy and the liberal tradition of nondiscrimination, but he argued that when the majority of a society is being repressed, it is justifiable to use “repression and indoctrination” to allow the “subversive majority” to achieve the power that it deserves. In a chilling passage that foreshadows events on some campuses today, Marcuse argued that true democracy might require denying basic rights to people who advocate for conservative causes, or for policies he viewed as aggressive or discriminatory, and that true freedom of thought might require professors to indoctrinate their students:

The ways should not be blocked [by] which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior.55

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Wolff, Moore, & Marcuse (1965/1969), pp. 100–101.

The end goal of a Marcusean revolution is not equality but a reversal of power. Marcuse offered this vision in 1965:

It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise, and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.56

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Wolff, Moore, & Marcuse (1965/1969), p. 110.

The student who wrote that essay at Texas State University may not have read Marcuse directly, yet somehow he ended up with a Marcusean view of the world. Marcuse was known as the “father” of the New Left; his ideas were taken up by the generation of students in the 1960s and 1970s who are the older professors of today, so a Marcusean view is still widely available. But why does this vision continue to flourish fifty years after the publication of “Repressive Tolerance,” in a country that has made enormous progress on extending civil rights to groups that did not have them in 1965, and in an educational system that cannot be said to be controlled by the right? Even if Marcuse’s arguments made sense to many people in 1965, can his ideas be justified on campus today?

In the decades after “Repressive Tolerance” was published, a variety of theories and approaches flourished on campus in humanities and social science departments that offered ways of analyzing society through the lens of power relationships among groups. (Examples include deconstructionism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and critical theory.) One such theory deserves special mention, because its ideas and terminology are widely found in the discourse of today’s campus activists.

The approach known as intersectionality was advanced by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA (and now at Columbia, where she directs the Center on Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies).57 In a 1989 essay, Crenshaw noted that a black woman’s experience in America is not captured by the summation of the black experience and the female experience.58 She made her point vividly by analyzing a legal case in which black women were victims of discrimination at General Motors even when the company could show that it hired plenty of black people (in factory jobs dominated by men) and plenty of women (in clerical jobs dominated by white people).59 So even though GM was found not to have discriminated against black people or women, it ended up hiring hardly any black women. Crenshaw’s important insight was that you can’t just look at a few big “main effects” of discrimination; you have to look at interactions, or “intersections.” More generally, as explained in a recent book by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge:

Intersectionality as an analytic tool examines how power relations are intertwined and mutually constructing. Race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, nation, religion, and age are categories of analysis, terms that reference important social divisions. But they are also categories that gain meaning from power relations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation.60

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Columbia Law School. (2011, October 12). Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies established. Retrieved from http://www.law.columbia.edu/media_inquiries/news_events/2011/october2011/Intersectionality
Crenshaw (1989).
Degraffenreid v. General Motors Assembly Division, 413 F. Supp. 142 (E.D. Mo. 1976).
Collins & Bilge (2016), p. 7.

Intersectionality is a theory based on several insights that we believe are valid and useful: power matters, members of groups sometimes act cruelly or unjustly to preserve their power, and people who are members of multiple identity groups can face various forms of disadvantage in ways that are often invisible to others. The point of using the terminology of “intersectionalism,” as Crenshaw said in her 2016 TED Talk, is that “where there’s no name for a problem, you can’t see a problem, and when you can’t see a problem, you pretty much can’t solve it.”61

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TED (Producer). (2016, October). The urgency of intersectionality [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality

Our purpose here is not to critique the theory itself; it is, rather, to explore the effects that certain interpretations of intersectionality may now be having on college campuses. The human mind is prepared for tribalism, and these interpretations of intersectionality have the potential to turn tribalism way up.

These interpretations of intersectionality teach people to see bipolar dimensions of privilege and oppression as ubiquitous in social interactions. It’s not just about employment or other opportunities, and it’s not just about race and gender. Figure 3.1 shows the sort of diagram that is sometimes used to teach intersectionality. We modeled ours on a figure by Kathryn Pauly Morgan, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. (For simplicity, we show only seven of her fourteen intersecting axes.) In an essay describing her approach, Morgan explains that the center point represents a particular individual living at the “intersection” of many dimensions of power and privilege; the person might be high or low on any of the axes. She defines her terms like this: “Privilege involves the power to dominate in systematic ways… . Oppression involves the lived, systematic experience of being dominated by virtue of one’s position on various particular axes.”63

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Morgan (1996), p. 107.
Morgan (1996), p. 106.

FIGURE 3.1. Seven intersecting axes of privilege and oppression. According to intersectionality, each person’s lived experience is shaped by his or her position on these (and many other) dimensions. (We created this figure as a simpler version of a figure found in Morgan [1996], p. 107. We left out her axes of gender-typical vs. deviant, young vs. old, European vs. non-European, credentialed vs. non-literate, Anglophone vs. English as second language, light vs. dark, and gentile vs. Jew.)

Morgan draws on the writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault to argue that each of us occupies a point “on each of these axes (at a minimum) and that this point is simultaneously a locus of our agency, power, disempowerment, oppression, and resistance. The [endpoints] represent maximum privilege or extreme oppression with respect to a particular axis.”64 She analyzes how two of those axes, race and gender, interact to structure schools in ways that privilege the ideas and perspectives of white males. Girls and women, she claims, are effectively a “colonized population.” They make up a majority of all students but are forced to live and learn within ideas and institutions structured by white men.

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Morgan (1996), p. 106.

Morgan is certainly right that it was mostly white males who set up the educational system and founded nearly all the universities in the United States. Most of those schools once excluded women and people of color. But does that mean that women and people of color should think of themselves as “colonized populations” today? Would doing so empower them, or would it encourage an external locus of control? Would it make them more or less likely to engage with their teachers and readings, work hard, and benefit from their time in school?

More generally, what will happen to the thinking of students who are trained to see everything in terms of intersecting bipolar axes where one end of each axis is marked “privilege” and the other is “oppression”? Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and to cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Furthermore, there is no escaping the conclusion as to who the evil people are. The main axes of oppression usually point to one intersectional address: straight white males.

An illustration of this way of thinking happened at Brown University in November of 2015, when students stormed the president’s office and presented their list of demands to her and the provost (the chief academic officer, generally considered the second-highest post).65 At one point in the video of the confrontation, the provost, a white man, says, “Can we just have a conversation about—?” but he is interrupted by shouts of “No!” and students’ finger snaps. One protester offers this explanation for cutting him off: “The problem they are having is that heterosexual white males have always dominated the space.” The provost then points out that he himself is gay. The student stutters a bit but continues on, undeterred by the fact that Brown University was led by a woman and a gay man: “Well, homosexual … it doesn’t matter … white males are at the top of the hierarchy.”

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A video of the encounter is embedded in the documentary Silence U, which is available here (the scene begins at time 7:53): We the Internet (Producer). (2016, July 14). Silence U: Is the university killing free speech and open debate? We the Internet Documentary [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/x5u aVFfX3AQ?t=7m55s

In short, as a result of our long evolution for tribal competition, the human mind readily does dichotomous, us-versus-them thinking. If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism and turn up the sense of common humanity. Instead, some theoretical approaches used in universities today may be hyperactivating our ancient tribal tendencies, even if that was not the intention of the professor. Of course, some individuals truly are racist, sexist, or homophobic, and some institutions are, too, even when the people who run them mean well, if they end up being less welcoming to members of some groups. We favor teaching students to recognize a variety of kinds of bigotry and bias as an essential step toward reducing them. Intersectionality can be taught skillfully, as Crenshaw does in her TED Talk.66 It can be used to promote compassion and reveal injustices not previously seen. Yet somehow, many college students today seem to be adopting a different version of intersectional thinking and are embracing the Untruth of Us Versus Them.

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TED (2016); see n. 61.

Imagine an entire entering class of college freshmen whose orientation program includes training in the kind of intersectional thinking described above, along with training in spotting microaggressions. By the end of their first week on campus, students have learned to score their own and others’ levels of privilege, identify more distinct identity groups, and see more differences between people.67 They have learned to interpret more words and social behaviors as acts of aggression. They have learned to associate aggression, domination, and oppression with privileged groups. They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent. How might students at such a school react to the sorts of emails sent by Dean Spellman and Erika Christakis?68

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For example, Creighton University posts on its website an exercise that is “designed to bring a group to certain conclusions regarding the concept of privilege and disadvantage.” Based on various questions, people either step forward or step backward. It begins: “Few White people in the history of the U.S. have ever been convicted and executed for killing a person of color. All White persons take a step forward.” Next: “The high school dropout rate for Latinos, Native Americans and African Americans is over 55%. Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans take one step back.” At the end of the exercise, whoever is at the front of the room has the most “privilege,” and whoever is at the back has the least. The instructor then says, “Notice what groups of people are in the front and what groups of people are in the back.” See: Privilege exercise (race focus). (n.d.). Retrieved from https://people.creighton.edu/~idc24708/Genes/Diversity/Privilege%20Exercise.htm
We do not know if ideas related to intersectionality were included in CMC’s orientation process; the ideas may have come from their courses or from other students. But intersectional language is common in the video of the confrontation with Spellman: The CMC Forum (Producer) (2015, November 11). CMCers of color lead protest of lack of support from administration [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlB7Vy-lZZ8

The combination of common-enemy identity politics and microaggression training creates an environment highly conducive to the development of a “call-out culture,” in which students gain prestige for identifying small offenses committed by members of their community, and then publicly “calling out” the offenders.69 One gets no points, no credit, for speaking privately and gently with an offender—in fact, that could be interpreted as colluding with the enemy. Call-out culture requires an easy way to reach an audience that can award status to people who shame or punish alleged offenders. This is one reason social media has been so transformative: there is always an audience eager to watch people being shamed, particularly when it is so easy for spectators to join in and pile on.

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Friedersdorf, C. (2017, May 8). The destructiveness of call-out culture on campus. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/call-out-culture-is-stressing-out-college-students/524679

Life in a call-out culture requires constant vigilance, fear, and self-censorship. Many in the audience may feel sympathy for the person being shamed but are afraid to speak up, yielding the false impression that the audience is unanimous in its condemnation. Here is how a student at Smith College describes her induction into its call-out culture in the fall of 2014:

During my first days at Smith, I witnessed countless conversations that consisted of one person telling the other that their opinion was wrong. The word “offensive” was almost always included in the reasoning. Within a few short weeks, members of my freshman class had quickly assimilated to this new way of non-thinking. They could soon detect a politically incorrect view and call the person out on their “mistake.” I began to voice my opinion less often to avoid being berated and judged by a community that claims to represent the free expression of ideas. I learned, along with every other student, to walk on eggshells for fear that I may say something “offensive.” That is the social norm here.70

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Barrett, K. (2016, September 22). Walking on eggshells—How political correctness is changing the campus dynamic. The Sophian. Retrieved from http://www.thesmithsophian.com/walking-on-eggshells-how-political-correctness-is-changing-the-campus-dynamic

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For extensive analyses of survey data showing that the campus dynamic related to speech has changed in the last few years, see Stevens, S., & Haidt, J. (2018, April 11), The skeptics are wrong part 2: Speech culture on campus is changing. Retrieved from https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-skeptics-are-wrong-part-2

Reports from around the country are remarkably similar: students at many colleges today are walking on eggshells, afraid of saying the wrong thing, liking the wrong post, or coming to the defense of someone whom they know to be innocent, out of fear that they themselves will be called out by a mob on social media.71 Conor Friedersdorf, who writes about higher education at The Atlantic, looked into the matter in response to our original “Coddling” article in 2015. Students told him things like this: “Students get worked up over the smallest of issues … which has led to the disintegration of school spirit and the fracture of campus.” And this, from another student:

I probably hold back 90 percent of the things that I want to say due to fear of being called out… . People won’t call you out because your opinion is wrong. People will call you out for literally anything. On Twitter today I came across someone making fun of a girl who made a video talking about how much she loved God and how she was praying for everyone. There were hundreds of comments, rude comments, below the video. It was to the point that they weren’t even making fun of what she was standing for. They were picking apart everything. Her eyebrows, the way her mouth moves, her voice, the way her hair was parted. Ridiculous.72

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Friedersdorf (2017); see n.

In this comment, we can begin to see the way that social media amplifies the cruelty and “virtue signaling” that are recurrent features of call-out culture. (Virtue signaling refers to the things people say and do to advertise that they are virtuous. This helps them stay within the good graces of their team.) Mobs can rob good people of their conscience, particularly when participants wear masks (in a real mob) or are hiding behind an alias or avatar (in an online mob). Anonymity fosters deindividuation—the loss of an individual sense of self—which lessens self-restraint and increases one’s willingness to go along with the mob.73

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Zimbardo (2007).

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The intellectual devastation wrought by this way of thinking can be seen in a report from Trent Eady, a young Canadian queer activist who escaped from this mindset in 2014. He then wrote an essay titled “‘Everything Is Problematic’: My Journey Into the Centre of a Dark Political World, and How I Escaped.” Eady identifies four features of the culture: dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism. Of greatest relevance to the Untruth of Us Versus Them, he wrote:

Thinking this way quickly divides the world into an ingroup and an outgroup—believers and heathens, the righteous and the wrong-teous… . Every minor heresy inches you further away from the group. When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues. Internal disagreement was rare.74

It is difficult to imagine a culture that is more antithetical to the mission of a university.75

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Eady, T. (2014, November 24). “Everything is problematic”: My journey into the centre of a dark political world, and how I escaped. The McGill Daily. Retrieved from https://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/11/everything-problematic
For an extended argument that political activity generally interferes with a scholar’s ability to find the truth, see: Van der Vossen (2014).

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Michelle Alexander, in her best-selling book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,76 illustrates what happens to the millions of black men dragged into the criminal justice system—often for possession or use of small amounts of marijuana. They are released into a society where they struggle to find jobs, are disqualified from state benefits, and sometimes face the loss of the right to vote, leading to an “undercaste” in American society that is in some ways reminiscent of the Jim Crow South.

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Alexander (2010).

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Balko (2013).

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The book has had a powerful impact on the political left, but the issues it raises resonate across the political spectrum. In books like Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces77 and FIRE cofounder Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent,78 libertarians have expressed opposition to both overpolicing and the excesses of the war on drugs. The conservative group Right on Crime opposes overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and the drug war.79 There are opportunities for real cooperation on serious but potentially solvable issues.80

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Silverglate (2009).
Right on Crime. (n.d.). The conservative case for reform. Retrieved from http://rightoncrime.com/the-conservative-case-for-reform
Hirsh, M. (2015, March/April). Charles Koch, liberal crusader? Politico. Retrieved from https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch-overcriminalization-115512

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For activists seeking reform, the lesson is to find common ground. Marches and rallies are good for energizing your “team,” but as Columbia University professor of humanities Mark Lilla points out in his book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, they are not enough to bring about lasting change. You have to win elections to do that, and to win elections, you have to draw in very large numbers of people from diverse groups. Lilla argues that the left did that successfully from the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt through the Great Society era of the 1960s, but then it took a wrong turn into a new, more divisive, and less successful kind of politics:

Instead they threw themselves into the movement politics of identity, losing a sense of what we share as citizens and what binds us as a nation. An image for Roosevelt liberalism and the unions that supported it was that of two hands shaking. A recurring image of identity liberalism is that of a prism refracting a single beam of light into its constituent colors, producing a rainbow. This says it all.81

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Lilla (2017), p. 9.

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Yet appeals to common humanity still work just as well today as when Dr. King made them. On September 16, 2017, on the National Mall in Washington, DC, a group of Trump supporters organized a rally they called “the Mother of All Rallies Patriot Unification Gathering.”82 Counterprotesters from Black Lives Matter (BLM) showed up and shouted at the Trump supporters. The Trump supporters shouted back. Someone onstage told the Trump supporters to pay no attention to the counterprotesters: “They don’t exist,” he said. Hawk Newsome, the leader of the BLM counterprotesters, later said that he expected to “stand there with [his] fist in the air in a very militant way and to exchange insults.” Tensions mounted, and onlookers recorded video of the potentially explosive situation. Then the Trump rally organizer, who goes by the name Tommy Gunn, took the stage. “It’s about freedom of speech,” he said. And in an unexpected move, he invited Newsome and other BLM supporters onto the stage. “We’re going to give you two minutes of our platform to put your message out,” Gunn told Newsome. “Now, whether they disagree or agree with your message is irrelevant. It’s the fact that you have the right to have the message.”

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For an edited version of the interaction in an extraordinary video, see: Now This Politics (Producer). (2017, September 8). This unexpected moment happened when Black Lives Matter activists were invited on stage at a pro-Trump rally [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/NowThisNews/videos/1709220972442719

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Newsome took the stage. “I am an American,” he began, and the crowd cheered. “And the beauty of America is that when you see something broke in your country, you can mobilize to fix it.” But then, as he spoke about a black man being killed by police, the crowd began to turn on him. They booed. “Shut up! That was a criminal!” a woman shouted. Newsome explained, “We are not anti-cop!” “Yes, you are!” people shouted. “We’re anti–bad cop!” Newsome insisted. He still seemed to be losing them. “We don’t want handouts,” he told the crowd. “We don’t want anything that is yours. We want our God-given right to freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Now they were coming back around. People cheered. Someone in the crowd shouted, “All lives matter!” which is usually intended as a rebuke to those who say that “black lives matter.” But Newsome responded in the tradition of Pauli Murray, by drawing a larger circle around everyone in the crowd: “You’re right, my brother, you’re right. You are so right. All lives matter, right? But when a black life is lost, we get no justice. That is why we say ‘black lives matter.’ … If we really want to make America great, we do it together.”

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The crowd cheered and chanted “USA-USA …” In an instant, the two groups were no longer “us” and “them.” Their ideological differences remained, but within that larger circle around them, their enmity melted away. And, at least for a short while, they interacted as fellow human beings and fellow Americans. “It kind of restored my faith,” Newsome said when interviewed afterward. “Two sides that never listen to each other actually made progress today.”83 One of the leaders of Bikers for Trump came up to Newsome afterward and shook his hand. The two men talked and then posed for a photo together, with Newsome holding the other man’s young son cradled in his arm.

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Hains, T. (2017, September 20). “Black Lives Matter” leader wins over Trump supporters: “If we really want America great, we do it together.” Real Clear Politics. Retrieved from https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/09/20/black_lives_matter_leader_wins_over_trump_supporters_if_we_really_want_america_great_we_do_it_together.html

Notes

Amount: 3

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