If you’re familiar with the so-called “heterodox” space, this week’s guest on The Unspeakable scarcely needs an introduction. In 2018, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, along with author and first amendment advocate Gregg Lukianoff, published The Coddling of The American Mind: How Good Intentions And Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation For Failure. The book was central to a burgeoning public conversation that asked why young people, especially students on college campuses, were so unwilling to engage with ideas they perceived as dangerous — and in fact, why they found so many ideas dangerous to begin with.
Jon’s research offered crucial data points as to why this was happening and suggested that a handful of intersecting cultural trends—fearful parenting, omnipresent social media and the corporatization of higher education, to name a few—had resulted in a generation marked by high anxiety and a low sense of autonomy. His more recent work, including his article last month in The Atlantic, “Why The Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” goes beyond what’s happened with young people and looks at our collapsing institutions more broadly. Jon and Meghan talked about that article and covered lots of new territory, too, including a project of Meghan’s that she has just begun to talk about, a heterodox women’s community. Many of her observations about the male-dominated “free think” space and women’s reluctance to speak their minds map onto Jon’s own research about girls’ social development.
