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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
You asked me for a decent outline of Lukainoff's and Haidt's book. I offered what I thought were decent ones which covered the main arguments of the book. Here's a much better one: https://quillette.com/2018/10/14/mor...oned-critique/
Pardon the framing of the piece, to the extent it responds to a less than stellar critique of the book by someone named Weigel. I think it still gets the outlined main ideas of the book across. |
Nothing in that review -- the brief description of the big ideas in the book, the critique by this Weigel person, the response to the critique -- says anything useful, as far as I can tell. The Great Untruths are hard to argue with, but the idea that they capture something important about the way some set of people is thinking -- that seems silly.
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In the book, we outline three misguided principles (“Great Untruths”) that form the foundation of the new moral culture we are seeing on some college campuses:
The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
We also trace six explanatory threads—cultural trends and practices that explain why this new moral culture, which we call “safetyism,” seemed to emerge so rapidly between 2013 and 2015:
Rising teen depression and anxiety.
The damaging effects of overprotection and social media.
The loss of play in childhood.
The polarization of the country.
New ideas about justice.
The bureaucratization of higher education.
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It's not that any of this is wrong, it's that it feels manufactured and irrelevant.
