The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt

Rather than a canon, they want to preserve mental health. But if they are clearly hoping to tap into the forces that made Bloom and his successors bestsellers, this is a repetition with a difference. Lukianoff and Haidt update the themes of neoconservatives such as Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza, whose 1991 Illiberal Education also first appeared as an Atlantic cover story. But the “tenured radical” is a long-standing enemy in the culture war industry. The bait and switch might seem like a strange way to begin fighting dogma on behalf of facts. The book is less interesting for its arguments, which are familiar, than as an epitome of a contemporary liberal style “We didn’t have to.” They did not write this book because of an oracle they wrote it, perhaps, because an article that they published in the Atlantic went viral. “We didn’t really travel to Greece to discover these three terrible ideas,” the authors reveal.

This excursion turns out to be a bit of mischief ( misoponos means “lazy”, and Koalemos is an obscure god of stupidity). As if paying homage to Bloom’s love of classics, the new book opens with a pilgrimage to Misoponos, a Greek oracle who serves Koalemos, preaching the three great untruths. Their title echoes The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom’s 1987 bestselling attack on the “relativism” that he said threatened the achievements of western civilisation. Generation “iGen”, the one that comes after millennials, is, according to the authors, suffering a mental health crisis because of smartphone addiction and the paranoid parenting style of the upper middle class. Their targets are “safetyism”, the language of microaggressions, identity politics and intersectionality. The first section elaborates what the authors call the “Great Untruths” that supposedly dominate college campuses: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker Always Trust Your Feelings Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People. Instead, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt focus on students demanding “protection” from arguments they find challenging and the professors and administrators who cave in to them.

None of this comes up in The Coddling of the American Mind, a book about why young people feel anxious and college is making it worse. Meanwhile, college teachers are increasingly likely to live from contract to low-paid contract. Currently around 44.2 million Americans owe a total of more than $1.5tn, and 30% of these are struggling to make monthly payments.

I n the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, while all other forms of consumer debt have shrunk, student loan debt has tripled.

The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt