Jonathan Haidt is part of the newly-announced University of Austin, created in response to what its founders deem a lack of viewpoint diversity among college faculty. Haidt was beginning to explore those themes when he joined on the show in March 2019.
We say on this show all the time that democracy is hard work. But what does that really mean? What it is about our dispositions that makes it so hard to see eye to eye and come together for the greater good? And why, despite all that, do we feel compelled to do it anyway? Jonathan Haidt is the perfect person to help us unpack those questions.
We also explore what we can do now to educate the next generation of democratic citizens, based on the research Jonathan and co-author Greg Lukianoff did for their latest book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
Jonathan is social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures — including the cultures of American progressive, conservatives, and libertarians.
The Coddling of the American Mind
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Jenna Spinelle
Hello and welcome to Democracy Works. I'm Jenna Spinelle. This week we are rebroadcasting our conversation with Jonathan Haidt from March of 2019. This is an episode that I wanted to share again for some time now. But the news last week that Jonathan is on the board of advisors for the new university at Austin, provided the perfect opportunity to bring this one back. The University of Austin, if you're not familiar with it, is a new college that's launching to correct the problems that its founders see with higher education, particularly when it comes to viewpoint diversity and talking about controversial issues. Other people on the board include former Democracy Works guest Andrew Sullivan, journalist Barri Weiss, Harvard's Steven Pinker, lots of folks getting involved in this effort. And in this conversation with Jonathan Haidt, I think you'll hear some of the seeds of his thinking around these topics that the problems that our educational system has with things like liberty and freedom of expression, things that he really feels are valuable to being a good democratic citizen. Some of this is related to his book, The coddling of the American mind, which came out in 2018. And we also talked about in this conversation, I'm sure we'll have more to say about the university of Austin in the coming weeks and months. But for now, enjoy this conversation with Jonathan Haidt from March of 2019.
Michael Berkman
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy in the studios of WPSU on the campus of Penn State University, I'm Michael Berkman.
Chris Beem
And I'm Chris Beem. And this is Democracy Works.
Michael Berkman
Chris, we have a really special guests today we always have special, always but today, we mean,
Chris Beem
No, we always mean it. Yeah. But but this is a special guest. And we're lucky to have him
Michael Berkman
Jonathan Haidt Jonathan is a social psychologist, he holds the Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership in the stern business school at NYU. But I know what strikes me about so much of Jonathan's work is how interdisciplinary it is. I mean, he's a social psychologist. But he also is a informs political science. And then he teaches at the business he teaches in the business school and, and just all kinds of things brought together all kinds of strands of thought brought together by by Jonathan's work, he's looking at the the importance of polarization. And for him, it's the social psychological roots of polarization about how tribal people are, by nature. But of course, what's become different about American politics, and I think he has a nice understanding of this trend and in politics is that people have really sorted themselves out across the parties in such a way that Democrats and Republicans are increasingly unlike one another both in the kinds of values that they bring to their approaches to politics and other things. In terms of where they live in terms of the demographics, and we we've talked about this in various ways
Chris Beem
In terms of how they're informed how they understand the world, rather, they understand politics in general, big sore. But the point is that, that our objective here in this in this episode is to see what to say about democracy. Right, to tie those into democracy. Yeah. And to see, you know, to reflect on, you know, we talk a lot on this podcast about how democracy takes work, right. And it's unnatural. And it's, and Jenna once asked me, you know, you never say what that why you think it's unnatural. And, and so I think that is where Jonathan's insight is most relevant and helpful is because he just kind of says, here's why, right?
Michael Berkman
And he'll talk about that with with genomes. Sure. But, you know, this idea that it's in our nature to be tribal, the parties have sorted in such a way that we're in kind of almost like tribes, although I don't know that he would use the word tribe, but I wouldn't buy it, but he might. And, and so much of what he concerns him, he sees he sees there, but I also think he's concerned about, you know, how we're raising our next generation of democratic citizens.
Chris Beem
Right. I think that's right, and how things that you don't necessarily see as connected are indispensable, right. Little I mean, that if you're going to be a democratic citizen, you have to learn how to work through problems. You have to learn how to hear things you don't want to hear things that you disagree with and how to disagree without being disagreeable without getting into fights. And he would argue that we haven't done a very good job. Our generation has done a good job of Teaching, you know, this generation of income and college students how to do those things. And as a result, democracy is worse off.
Michael Berkman
Yes, because we didn't follow the directive that I know my mother had, which was get out of the house. Right. Don't come back until dinnertime. Right.
Chris Beem
When the streetlights come on, that's when you have to come in. I don't know, any kid our age that didn't hear that.
Michael Berkman
And, and, you know, he sees that I don't think anybody would argue with with that anybody that's, you know, involved in raising kids now. And, you know, it's like, you can't just send them out to play. There's nobody out on the street playing. They're all at soccer practice, right. And he, he sees, he sees that, you know, he's one who sort of takes that to its implication. What does it mean, if we're not just sending kids out to learn how to play by themselves? Right? Yeah, yeah, let's bring him on. And I'm sure everybody will find him as as interesting as we do.
Jenna Spinelle
This is Dennis banally. Here today with Jonathan Haidt. John, thanks for joining us. So, Jon, you have written and we say on this podcast all the time that democracy is hard work. It's not natural, it's not easy. And I think you are perhaps uniquely qualified to help us understand why that is.
Jonathan Haidt
Okay. Well, let's, let's give it a try. Yeah. So I'm a social psychologist, and I study morality. And I always try to put everything in both an evolutionary context and a cultural context. You know, there is a human nature, we're products of evolution. But one of the great innovations is that we're actually pretty flexible. And humans live in all kinds of ways around the world. And so the way I like to approach the problem is to say, Well, how do humans tend to live politically, and as far as I can tell, there are two main ways there are two ways that are really, really stable and widely found. And so one is a gala, terian hunter gatherers, this is the way all of our ancestors lived for hundreds of 1000s or millions of years, depending on how you count it. And before they get settled, before there's agriculture, this is the way all societies are. And then once you take up agriculture, you get hierarchy. And pretty quickly, you get something like feudalism, and it emerges on multiple continents. And you know, it's really clear in Japan. And so these two ways of living really fit with our psychology. And then there are a bunch of other ways that have been tried, you know, communism, communes, democracy, and these ways tend to be very short lived, they tend to be very unstable. Plato said, it's the second worst form of government because it always descends into tyranny, because the people get carried away by passions. So democracy is not really such a great thing. What is great is that the people can kick out the government, if they don't like it, the people have to have the ability to reject the government if they don't like it. And that was what our founding fathers were really committed to. And so they gave us a republic with Democratic features. And you know, like, I'm not a political scientist or historian, I'm sure I'm getting some details wrong here. But the big picture is that in the 20th century, we developed this obsession with democracy. And I think it's because we fought a war to defend democracy in World War One. And then we did it again, and World War Two and, and we all got kind of fooled into thinking that democracy is the greatest thing in the world. And then in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapses, it was clear that democracy one and there is no alternative. It's the end of history, and every country as it developed is going to become a free market, liberal democracy just like us. And we were wrong. We were fooled. Democracy is a lot harder, a lot less stable. Now, it's clear, we took it for granted. And it's a lot harder than we thought,
Jenna Spinelle
So other things about the way we're wired, as people that that make it so hard, are so kind of difficult to carry out in practice.
Jonathan Haidt
Yes, the feature so the founding fathers in addition to being great historians, I mean for their era, and with the limited books that they could get, they really tried hard to study the lessons of history. They were also really good psychologists, and again, with no research, just reflecting on human nature, as was, as was actually the customer at the 18th century, the the Age of Enlightenment, and that was really the beginning of good psychology. And this is where my own work comes in. The reason I got into this aspect of political theory is because I studied moral psychology. And my research basically led me to the view of David Hume. That reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. So Hume was basically disagreeing with the long rationalist tradition in philosophy, saying all you people who think like, oh, humans are such great reasoners and we're rational and that's our God given ability. You're just completely wrong. Have you ever looked at a person? Do you relate Teddy people we're not like that. And the Founding Fathers knew that. And so that's why you don't want to have something that's too democratic because especially when there are hard times somebody is going to come along and tell you, the reason for our troubles is them. They're the reason and it's really easy to rally people to hate them, and then attack them and kill them. So the founding fathers knew that. And as again, I'm not an historian, but it seems as though a lot of the reforms in the Progressive Era made America more democratic. Now, they were responding to all kinds of corruptions and problems, not saying that the Progressive Era was wrong, I'm just saying, we got a lot more democratic reforms in the 20th century, and after Watergate, as well, various reforms. And some of them may have kind of backfired. And many people will look at the 2016 election, and see, in many ways, the fulfillment of the founding fathers worst nightmares, as they expressed in the Federalist Papers,
Jenna Spinelle
But you know, even though you kind of started started to touch a little bit on this, this kind of idea of or, you know, we're not as rational as we think. And even though we all kind of understand that, that democracy is so hard, it doesn't really stop us from trying to practice it, right, we vote and we support the Free Press, and we, you know, we we go out and organizer demonstrate some of us, so what, what motivates people to do those types of things, even in the face of knowing that it is hard, and it is, you know, all the things we were talking about earlier?
Jonathan Haidt
So, you know, the founding fathers thought that democracy so, you know, we talked about the American experiment, and what it really was, as I understand it was an experiment in self government. Because in 1776, there were not a lot of examples, right? I think there were none of people self governing, it was always either a monarch of some sort or a dictator. And I believe they wrote a lot about the need for virtues. So you have to they definitely wrote about the need for education, they believed a lot in public education. You have to educate people for democracy, you have to have cultivate virtues for democracy. You know, self control, willingness to follow rules, abide by procedures, accept defeat, compromise. So there are virtues, and then there are institutions, you know, respect for the for the courts rule of law. And so if you have all these things, then there's a it's kind of like a playing field on which people can pursue their interests, what they call the pursuit of happiness, happiness didn't mean joy, it meant the pursuit of a well ordered life in which you are successful. And you like your life it was it was your condition, your state is what happiness meant. And so people are, you know, Americans have long been known for being individualists. And de Tocqueville noted how we individualists come together very quickly and easily to solve problems. That was what he noted was really unique about us. So we've always been a democratic people in that sense, ready to take things into our own hands solve problems. And America in the in the 20th century, we certainly see many cases of activism that were like that, and that worked. Of course, taking things into your own hands can also lead to riots and violence. But we're not a sub subjugated people were a free people. And, you know, our political behavior shows that.
Jenna Spinelle
And, you know, thinking specifically about the way that we've organized ourselves into political parties here in the US, your your book, The righteous mind does does a great job of of going through several moral foundations that that separate, you know, what, what conservatives value versus what, what liberals value? Can you kind of walk us through what those are and how the parties differ from that way?
Jonathan Haidt
So, so, you know, the founding fathers didn't want political parties. But of course, as soon as the Constitution was proposed, there was one saying yes, and one saying no, the worst number of political parties to having a country is one. But the second was number is two. Because we are we evolved, we have offered tribal warfare, we evolved to do us versus them. And research shows that if you simply have three combatants, then the hatred of each for the other is much less. And my colleagues and I came up with a theory called moral foundations theory based in part on the work of Richard sweeter an anthropologist at the University of Chicago. And what we did is we said, okay, what are the taste buds of the moral sense? What are the the features, the the intuitions that you find all over the world? It doesn't have to be in every single society. But what are the very, very common features that you see? And so the list we came up with by looking at anthropology and evolution, because it for each one, we said, there has to be an off the shelf evolutionary theory. We're not going to do armchair evolution to make stuff up. And so the five really clear matches were first is care, care versus harm. And that comes right out of the attachment system. We're mammals we care for our young we're sensitive to harm The second is fairness versus cheating. And there's work on reciprocal altruism, and every society has reciprocity. And the third is loyalty versus betrayal. We do coalitional psychology. The fourth is authority versus subversion. We're primates we have deep, deep hierarchical psychology, we show deference the same way that other primates do.
Jonathan Haidt
And the last of the original five is called sanctity versus degradation. This is something no other animal has. But we have this emotion of disgust we, we see contamination, if a touches B, and B touches C, then C takes on the properties of a we have all kinds of magical beliefs. And you see this in religious practice sacred objects, a lot of moral regulation is about who can touch what, when, and with what purification rituals beforehand. So those are the five original ones. There's a bunch more we talk now about Liberty versus oppression, I think property or possession is one. So there's, I am not, I don't believe in parsimony, I don't believe that evolution gave a damn about parsimony or simplicity. And so the mind is just a lot of stuff in it. What we found empirically is that people on the left in the United States, but we find this in most other countries, we look at two, they tend to build their moral world on care, the care Foundation, and then a version of fairness, which emphasizes equality, those are the two main ones. People on the right, they have those concerns. They certainly love their children and their dogs with you know, that care, attachment, but their political theories, their their social understandings are not based primarily on a sense of compassion for suffering. They're based more on a sense of fairness, as just desert as proportionality. Do the do the crime do the time. And then conservatives also build a lot more ungroup loyalty, all the way up to nationalism, respect for authority, you know, God and country, respect your parents, and a sense of sanctity or purity, especially the social conservatives, the Christian conservatives, libertarians are different libertarians are actually low on everything except for liberty, they really, really value liberty. And so what we what we got, beginning once the set once Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act, and that sets in motion, a set of tectonic changes, whereby the southern conservative Democrats begin shifting over to the Republican Party just as President Johnson had predicted. And then the liberal Republicans start getting either primary or more pushed out.
Jonathan Haidt
So by the only by the 1990s, do we get a perfect sorting, where we have two parties and anyone who's psychologically disposed to leftism or progressivism is now a Democrat, and any was psychologically predisposed to conservatism or traditionalism or stability order is now Republican. And that means that the people on the other side really are odious. They really are different from from us. It's not just that they have different material interests where we could compromise No, no, no, those people, they and you can go through the list of the virtues that they don't have that your side does. And that's part of the reason why when you look at cross partisan hatred, the degree to which people on both sides hate each other, it was pretty low in the 70s. I mean, the graphs from ACS, the American national election survey, show not much hatred. I mean, we didn't like people in it aside, but we didn't hate them. And we didn't mind so much of our children married some of them the other party. And since then, the hatred for the other side and the unwillingness to have your kids marry the other side, you just gone up and up and up, and especially in the 2000s. And that's where we are today.
Jenna Spinelle
Right? And so how those how those moral foundations stay the same?
Jonathan Haidt
So the moral foundations never change. That's the whole metaphor is that their foundations, but a political party, a political worldview, is is like a building, but that's to static a metaphor, because, you know, even from even over the course of every four years, the particular building changes. And so we know what, what the left was, in the early 80s. It was really in the 70s and 80s. It was really drifting more towards sort of European leftism, and then Bill Clinton pulls it back and gives us a more centrist version, which is more pro business. And, you know, the Republicans by many measures began to radicalize move further right in the in the 90s, and 2000s. And now it's pretty clear the Democrats the Democrats are now they are building one that's much more sympathetic to socialism. So they're called each side if you think about it as each side constructs a moral matrix. And I mean matrix like the movie The Matrix which Gibson defined as a consensual hallucination. A moral or political order is a consensual hallucination, we hallucinate it together. We pretend that it's real, it becomes real. We live in it and we get Angry within it, right? And those are constantly in flux,
Jenna Spinelle
And and now of course we tweet about it and it all you know, it's on cable news 24 hours a day those those kinds of things actually ties to another kind of metaphor from from your previous work of the elephant and the rider. So as I was going through the righteous mind, I wrote that 2019 That it's like the elephant's on steroids. That's right. Yeah. So can you explain to us what what that that metaphor means and how it relates to how we view each other and into Jersey,
Jonathan Haidt
Politics is always a game of, it's driven by emotions and passions and interests. And then the the job of the writer, the writer is not really in charge, the writer is really more of, as Hume said, a servant or press secretary is a good metaphor of the emotions. You see this in politics, you know, we can justify anything our side wants. And then next year, you know, something flips. And we justify the opposite, as we saw with the health care, debate, and all sorts of things. So if you think about it as this delicate balance between what we can articulate with our reasons, and what we really want with our tribal emotions. And then you think of a healthy political order in which there are some restraints on what you can say, and there are social restraints, well, you can't just lie. And you can't say things that are just obviously untrue, they have to be at least justifiable. And so you imagine a system in some sort of balance with all that, and you have a stable political order. And then just for fun, why don't we reach into the social network, the basic structure of society, and let's take all the cables connecting individuals, to individuals, and let's suddenly change the capacity a hundredfold. Let's just make everyone really, really connected instantly to everyone else, and able to respond to everyone else right away.
Jonathan Haidt
And let's, you know, let's do this, maybe around 2006 2007, we'll start it, we'll call it Facebook. And then we'll have a lot of other platforms that do this. And let's also add a lot of video, let's give everyone a video camera in their pocket. So that everyone gets to take videos are the most outrageous things that people in those sites are doing and saying, and we'll give everyone away that they can put into this sort of the social stream, the most shocking, horrifying outrage inducing videos they can come up with. And we'll have a filtration process that only the really best ones are the ones that get sent out millions and millions of people. And this can all happen within few hours or certainly a day or two was all it takes. What happens that delicate balance it goes completely haywire in countries all around the world. And this is the main reason I think, why it seems as though democracy is in big trouble and things are falling apart. There are a lot of trends there's globalization and aquatic there a lot of trends, but the the the sudden linking of everyone to everyone, and with materials that outrage the elephant in the space of about five or 10 years, I think is the reason why things are really going to hell.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. I mean, it's which is which is kind of ironic, do you think about it, these these tools on their face should be the most democratizing things out there. Right? I mean, they we've we've kind of had this this discussion on our show before about how they're also on the one hand used to organize people and connect people and in all these ways, but as you said, it's seems like there has to be some type of of restraint or kind of balance there. That just doesn't we never, we've never quite gotten around to that, that piece of things.
Jonathan Haidt
Well, that's right. So a lot of it depends on your view of human nature. And so this is one of the main things. So I started off on the left, and I started writing the righteous mind in order to help the Democrats win, because I couldn't stand it. But I had no idea like Al Gore, and John Kerry had no idea how to talk about American morality. So and so I began reading conservative writings in order to understand it. And in the process, I discovered, you know, what John Stuart Mill told us all along, he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. You just You really don't know anything until you know the critic criticisms of your view. And you know, whether or not they're, they're valid. And so I learned a lot about conservatives and came to have tremendous respect for the philosophical tradition, not for the Republican Party, but for the conservative philosophical tradition. And so, suppose the internet was developed only by people on the left by people had no clue about conservative arguments or conservative ideas. You might get something like this. This is from the founder of the Stanford persuasive technology lab. So this is a particular lab at Stanford, that taught a generation of people how to create devices and programs that will addict people that will hook people. So a lot of the architecture of our modern Internet was created out of Stanford or the Bay Area.
Jonathan Haidt
And so, so here's what the founder of that lab said. If I weren't an optimist about human nature, I would be worried about the future. But I am an optimist. I believe that we humans are fundamentally good Now that persuasive technology is being put into the hands of millions of people, that the tools for creating these systems are no longer given only to the highly Jade's democratic, it's good, let's connect, let's empower him. I'm paraphrasing here. But the point is, it was created by people who really didn't understand human nature and had the internet been created by conservatives, they would have said, Oh, my God, you know, people are monsters, unless they're constrained, we're not just going to connect everyone to everyone, and my God is going to be hacking, there's going to be all kinds of exploitation, we've got to build a really defensive internet, we can't just connect everyone. Now, unfortunately, you know, people on the right are more traditional oriented, they're not as creative or innovative. I'm sure you can get a lot of hate mail about this. Each side has its virtues. And I'm really big on the fact that it's when you put left and right together, you get a yin yang, each side really has something to contribute. So yeah, the Internet was created by people who didn't understand human nature. Now, I think it's wrecking our most valuable political systems, right.
Jenna Spinelle
And on that point of putting left or right together, I see a lot. I hear a lot of calls for restoring civility. I see that hashtag on Twitter all the time. What do you what do you make of that is that the the right approach, given where things are and how
Jonathan Haidt
We know it's absolutely the right approach that we need to restore civility. But it's the wrong approach to thinking, hey, let's all just say we should restore civility. And let's take a pledge, let's sign a pledge. You know, because what we really mean by civility is you guys need to be more civil, you guys need to stop doing what you're doing. And, and so I'm a social psychologist, I don't think we're going to get very far by training writers, I think we're going to get really far by changing the path that the elephant is on.
Jonathan Haidt
And so anything that rewards call out culture, anything that gives you prestige for shaming, and humiliating others for forwarding false, or even true outrage materials, as long as the structural system that as long as the reward systems, the prestige economy does that we're all just going to be continuing to choke on outrage. So it's gonna take changing the algorithms somehow to reward. So I think the word for 2019 should be nuance. That's my favorite word now. And now that Twitter doubled its character length of whatever, a couple years ago. Now, it's actually possible even on Twitter, to sometimes say, I think you're right about x. But I disagree on why, like, you can do that in 240 characters now. And so if we, if there was a way to reward nuance, and to punish oversimplification, or, or people who are frequent, outrageous, you know, if you think about it, like co2 pollution, like, you know, we're in a biosphere, and if people are making a lot of smoke, you know, or like in the LA area, they're sensitive to this, you know, if, and we're all choking on it. And in the same way, if you have a friend who keeps forwarding outreach articles, they're just putting out smoke emerald choking on it. And if there was a way to not quite shame them, but somehow make them less prestigious, that would help,
Jenna Spinelle
Right and this, this ties to some of your work in, in your latest book, The coddling of the American mind, from your work that you've done on Gen Z, what do you think we're likely to see from them moving forward?
Jonathan Haidt
The rap on democracies has always been that they tend to be weak, inconsistent, driven by passion. And, you know, this is what Mussolini said about democracies in the 30s. And it wasn't clear in the 30s, that democracy was the right way. Well, you know, Xi Jinping is doing a pretty darn good job of supporting Mussolini's critique of democracy. any developing country that looks at America and looks at China, and says, what kind of government do we want? I mean, they'd be crazy to take our form, at least in what they see now. Shi Jin pongs, authoritarian, we can sort of quite weak mall, authoritarian capitalism, is delivering the goods delivering growth and giving stability. So So I think, you know, so if you're growing up now, as in America, you're not exactly going to be pro China. But if someone asked me, Is it absolutely essential to live in a democracy? Like why would you say yes, say maybe probably, it's pretty good, but not that good.
Jenna Spinelle
Or you just don't have that that frame of reference, you don't maybe have the historical background as well. We talk a lot about that the decline of civics education, and kind of on that point of education, I know you've, you've also written about the the relationship between free play and democracy, which isn't one that you know, people might might make, you know, kind of readily so so what what does that look like?
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, so, so I co wrote this book, The coddling of the American mind with my friend, Greg Lukianoff. And we have, we're trying to understand why is it that campus culture changed so quickly? Between 2014 and 2017? Not everywhere. But at the elite schools, especially in the northeast, there's a new culture of safety ism, in which students who, you know, the millennials, who were college students in the early 2000s, the last of them graduate around 2015 or so 2016. And so there's an enormous rise of self perceived fragility. and a lack of toughness, and people started commenting on how the Gen Z the kids born in 1996 or later, Gen Z was not able to solve basic problems for themselves. They expect adults to fix things, if they're wrong. They're not self reliant. They do not have the virtues of liberty that the founding fathers thought and that de Tocqueville praised in us.
Jonathan Haidt
Why is this? So I'm probably going to six reasons or six reasons why this new culture came about so quickly. But the biggest one, the biggest single one, I believe, is that kids in America, always were let out at the age of six, I do I give this talk all over the country, I was asked, and the mode is six if you were born before 1982, if your Gen X or older, you were let out in first grade. And you go outside you play. And in play groups. There's a lot of research on play. In play, you learn to cooperate, you learn to set rules, you learn what to do when someone seems to have broken the rules. How do we duplicate this? If some, some kids are really young? Well, how can we incorporate them to play we'll take it easy on them. So this is how you learn social skills is play, free play and it has to be unsupervised. If there's an adult there to settle disputes, you learn nothing, no, wait a second, you learn how to appeal to adults. And so Gen Z is the first generation in American history that was deprived of childhood. We freaked out in the 90s. And thought even though the crime rate was plummeting, and actually the Crime Wave ended in the 90s, Americans began to think because we're frightened out of our minds by the media, that if we ever take our eyes off our kids outside, they will be abducted.
Jonathan Haidt
And so in the 90s, we stopped letting kids out. And by the early 2000s, nobody had seen a child outside unsupervised in 10 years. And so in the early 2000s, you start hearing about adults who are arrested, because their kid was caught playing outside. And so since we have a whole generation, beginning with kids born in 1996, who didn't get to practice, they didn't get 1000s and 1000s of hours of practice of free play in mixed age groups where they had to set the rules and resolve disputes. This we believe, is they simply did not learn the skills of democracy. Democracy requires setting rules, enforcing rules, changing rules, compromise, working it out as self governing people can solve this. Whereas what Tocqueville was saying was that well, my God in France, if there's a problem, it takes an aristocrat to solve it, or the government. And so I think democracy, our democracy is in real danger now. But when Gen Z becomes more politically active, you know, in the 2030s, when there will be the largest group, let's say, I think our ability to govern ourselves will be much harder.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. So that that runs counter to to a lot of what we heard typically people place their hope in in Gen Z, I think thinking about things like the the Parkland students and you know, increase voter turnout among among Gen Z. But would you consider those things to be more outliers?
Jonathan Haidt
Overall, I have the opposite view. The Parkland thing. That was the one that was excellent. And the reason why that was excellent, was the way the students responded to that is they actually did some research. Gun control is a complicated issue, simple solutions are going to backfire, or not work. They actually did some research. And they came out with a probe I think, was nine points, or I can't remember, but I read, I used to run a gun control group. When I was in college, I know a lot about the issue. And I read it said, My God, they really thought this through. And then they went to Tallahassee, and they protested, they tried, but they they tried to get a law passed. Now they failed. But they really did research and then they organize to apply pressure in the right place. That's about the only time I've seen that. So I think a lot of the Gen Z activism is very counterproductive. Activism divorced from research is a bad thing. Activism, it's just we're a bunch of young angry people, and we're gonna demand that you do something, which is probably gonna backfire. That's a bad thing. So no, I am. I think that, you know, again, I don't blame Gen Z, Gen Z, we did this to them, we deprive them a childhood. But if they you know, if the if the if they all behave like department students, that'll be great. But that's the only case I know of where they did that.
Jenna Spinelle
You know, people who who listen to this show are concerned about democracy, they will not have sought out a podcast about democracy if they weren't. So what what can people do? Or you know, what, what's your what's your advice to concerned small d Democrats out there for for how to write the ship, so to speak.
Jonathan Haidt
So I think we have to break it up into a couple of levels. So the first thing is we have to give kids back childhood to create more resilient kids. And this isn't the argument here isn't Oh, if you love democracy, the argument is, oh, if you love your children, I mean, the rates of anxiety and depression are skyrocketing, especially for girls. So there is an urgent national health emergency that we have to stop over protecting kids. We have to let them develop skills of independence.
Jonathan Haidt
So that will pay off in about 30 years and we can start doing that tomorrow. You 3040 years, our democracy would be better. So that's one thing we have to start doing. Secondly, I think we have to educate kids as if democracy was fragile and if it as if it mattered. And so that means we have to be teaching skills of democratic engagement. And so, so first thing, so I co founded an organization called let grow.org With Lenore Skenazy, who wrote free range kids. So anybody who has kids under 16, please go to let grow.org. And you'll learn all kinds of ways to give your kid back childhood and to encourage your schools, your kid schools to to raise stronger, healthier kids. Second, in terms of teaching skills of interaction, I think that high schools should be teaching politics in a very different way. That is, teachers and social studies, teachers in particular tend to be on the left. They either don't teach anything about conservatism or they, some of them let their politics intrude. And I think we should be teaching great respect for the long philosophical traditions of left and right. And then teaching skills of democratic discourse.
Jenna Spinelle
Great. Well, that is a great place to leave things. John, thank you so much for your time today.
Jonathan Haidt
My pleasure.
Chris Beem
We've just been sitting here thinking, Well, where do we go with that there is just so much to talk about so much, right? And, and all of it is, and
Michael Berkman
that is what's so interesting about his work, it just takes in, it goes in so many different directions, you know, able to talk about philosophy, psychology, politics, history, bring things together. And you know, the modern university is so hyper specialized, that we just don't get a lot of people these days, that are able to do that. And there's some scientists we think about as real public intellectuals. But from a social scientist perspective, I have a hard time thinking about anybody quite in Jonathan's league.
Chris Beem
And just I mean, and I couldn't agree more. The other thing is just, you know, seeing the talk yesterday, just how thirsty people are for that,
Michael Berkman
You know, have to say the probably the first of our guests who when we've asked our four questions, too, about what are you angry, hopeful, when it came to hope did not put all his hope in, you know, right, next generation of kids? How often have we heard that answer? My hope is in the next generation. My hope is in the future. My hope is in the Parkland kids. And while he did talk quite positively about the Parkland kids, although maybe in a different way than then we've talked about them at different times. On the show, you know, he's he's concerned about this generation of college kids, he's teaching on a college campus. Right. And he's concerned
Chris Beem
right now. And, you know, who knows, right? I mean, it is, it just strikes me, as you know, unlikely that these Gen Z folks are are going to prevail against world, right, they're going to get out, they're going to find out that it's not this way, and they're going to have to adjust. So Michael, what do you think? What do you think about what Jonathan said about this kind of, you know, his his, the lines that he tells himself not to get too overly depressed, and to see this kind of these short term trends within the context of these longer and more, much more positive trends towards human rights and freedom and health and you know, people getting fed and things like that,
Michael Berkman
On the one hand, we're doing better than we ever have, right? We humanity. Yeah, humanity is doing better than it ever has. I don't know that democracy is necessarily doing better than it ever had no, these days. And I mean, I'm struck by this idea that Martin Luther King used to talk about that the arc of justice, the arc of history bends towards justice as long but then towards Islam, but bends towards justice. And of course, Brock Obama, with a campaign of hope, used to rely on that back quite a bit as well. But maybe the arc of history bends towards authoritarianism. Well, maybe maybe democracy is is just a moment. And that democracy, because it is so on heart so hard, because it is so unnatural, which is really his work, right, essentially, right. And because we're seeing these models, in for example, China of authoritarian capitalism, where you can have fast economic growth and people's standard of living can increase. But without democracy, that may be you know, maybe in the arc of justice, maybe the arc of history does not bend towards justice, or at least not towards democracy.
Chris Beem
You know, I mean, so I think what that the response that requires is to nuance which is a word you wanted, or wants to, to put forward the the idea of unnaturalness right, because, while yeah, there are Are things about democracy that are unnatural, there is also naturally this desire in, you know, in the breast of every human being to be free and do what they want. Right, and to say, this is what I believe, and I don't want you tell me what to believe. And and I don't think that is any less natural than then are kind of like, you know, this kind of respect for authority and things like that. And and so it may just be that, you know, I mean, you know, I've actually said this in other contexts that the democracy is, is not great, but it's the least worst. And and I would continue to, you know, put that forward as as an argument that, that, you know, we have to live together, and, and we all deserve to have certain prerequisites to how we live. And democracy is the least worst way for us do that. You know, it's it's natural and easy for us to look at trends in, you know, 5-10 year increments, over 50 years. Who knows? We just don't know.
Michael Berkman
Well, good point. I mean, we'll be doing doing democracy work in 50 years, we'll talk about the hard work of democracy, and we could come back somebody else
Chris Beem
Might.
Michael Berkman
You don't think we'll be here?
Chris Beem
I know, I don't. But yeah, who knows? And you'll still be That's right. Somebody will still be here. Somebody will be keeping up, you know, picking up the mantle. And yeah, anyway, so for the coordinators super democracy at Penn State in the studios of WPS you I'm Chris beam. And I'm Michael Berkman, and this has been democracy works. Thanks for listening
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