Jonathan Haidt Is Not Optimistic

Jonathan Haidt will be speaking in Seattle on Wednesday. Rob Kim / Stringer

I told three people that Jonathan Haidt will be speaking in Seattle this week . One is a left-leaning university professor, another is an apolitical meditation teacher, and the last is a conservative talk radio host. Despite the chasm between their personal politics, they were all equally enthusiastic to hear Haidt speak. He seems to have that effect on people, and is one of the rare political thinkers who manages to both appeal to (and occasionally enrage) people across the political spectrum.

A professor of social psychology at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Haidt is also the author of best-selling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which he published with First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff last year. That book grew out of an article of the same name that the duo first published in the Atlantic in 2015. As anyone who was paying attention back then may recall, the article made quite a splash, and it brought some emerging trends at university campuses into the public consciousness, including the rise of trigger warnings, deplatforming speakers, and university administrators' attempts to protect students from any perceived harm. The article, and the subsequent book, didn't exactly make Haidt popular in some hyper-left circles, and Haidt is occasionally accused of being a conservative in disguise. What he actually is, is a centrist, which gives him a perspective outside the typically left/right binary, and much of his recent work is about tribalism and division in the U.S. It’s a trend he thinks is getting worse.

“For the last few years—since Trump was elected but also before he was elected—a lot of people have a sense that things are coming apart in a way they have never experienced in their lives before,” Haidt told me in a phone interview this week. “It really is happening. We really are coming apart.”

Haidt might not be able to fix this coming apart, but he does have an explanation for it. In The Coddling of the American Mind, he and Lukianoff write 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.” And while humans may have come a long way since we were living in caves, tribalism remains a strong force in our lives. Sometimes, tribalism can be benign—take, for instance, sports. But it can also lead to terrors like ethnic cleansing and genocide if the in-group responds to the out-group with cruelty and force.

More commonly in the U.S., tribalism manifests in politics and culture. We view life as left versus right, good versus evil, us versus them. This sort of thinking leads people to cut out members of their families for voting on the wrong political candidate, and it creates echo chambers that are so deep and impenetrable that we have no idea what’s happening outside our own bubbles. This, I suspect, is why so many liberal Americans were absolutely shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election: If no one you know voted for Trump, it’s only natural to assume there’s no way he could win an election.

Haidt says the collapse of traditional media and the rise social media has exacerbated these divisions. “I think the internet on the whole is spectacular and wonderful, but social media is changing some fundamental parameters,” he says. “Social media is not real communication. It’s an excuse to show off your gang signs.”

Along with a number of his colleagues, he's trying to do something to combat tribalism on college campuses, many of which suffer from ideological homogeneity. This is a relatively recent phenomenon: As Haidt and Lukianoff write in their book, in the early 1990s, the left-to-right ratio of university professors was about two to one. This ratio was sustainable, but by 2011, liberal professors outnumbered conservatives by five to one. Today, that ratio may be even higher, and even if you despise conservatives, this is a significant problem, because when institutions lack viewpoint diversity—when they only hire people who fit one political persuasion, silence dissenting views, or isolate themselves from outside opinions—they become vulnerable to confirmation bias and groupthink. This doesn't just harm institutions; it does a disservice to students.

“If you are in a university that puts you into interaction with diverse ideas, that makes you smarter,” Haidt says. “You can solve more problems. You become a more critical thinker. The more you hang out with people who think like you, especially if they enforce orthodoxy, the lower your IQ gets.”

In other words, only engaging with ideas you already support can actually make you dumber. It can also damage your cause. As an example, Haidt sites student attempts to deplatform both outside speakers and faculty on campuses over the last few years. Video of protests at schools like Evergreen State were widely shared on conservative networks, and while the students may have seen themselves as warriors in the fight for social justice, those who don’t already support their ideals were more likely to see hysterical students screaming at befuddled adults. The backlash was inevitable. “The antics on campus did a lot, I think, to elect Donald Trump,” Haidt says. “Most people on the left have not seen those videos but most people on the right have seen them. And so even if you think it's virtuous to always be fighting, in the long run, you are harming your own side.”

In an effort to reverse the trend of ideological homogeneity on campus, Haidt founded the Heterodox Academy, an organization that advocates for universities to embrace viewpoint diversity (even, yes, when those viewpoints are conservative). Last year, they hosted the first Heterodox Academy Open Minds Conference in New York, which I attended. (Full disclosure: I moderated a panel, for which I was compensated.)

The conference was remarkable: Everyone I spoke to seemed to have some story about what made them first see that the world isn’t cleanly broken up into good versus evil, from professors who’d been the subject of protests to journalists who’d been canceled. Still, this was a conference mostly made up of academics and writers, and I doubt there was a single stereotypical Trump voter or social justice warrior in attendance. For the sake of viewpoint diversity this is probably a failure, but the organization still managed to bring together a crowd that included conservatives like Bret Stephens and liberals like Alice Dreger and libertarians like Kmele Foster all in one space. There were heated discussions, to be sure, but no one called for anyone else to be fired. This, I am sure, would be appalling to a certain subset of leftist Twitter, but as Haidt reminded me, social media may be loud, but it’s not representative. “We have to distinguish between the average and the visible anecdote,” he said. “This is another thing social media has done to us: We used to have a sense of the mood in a room or the mood in our social network, and now we have no idea.”

Still, he’s not optimistic that we’ll work our way out of these divisions, at least without significant disruption in the process. “Things feel so strange to me,” he said. “It feels as though a fundamental constant of the universe has been altered. I think social media has done that.”

You can hear Jonathan Haidt speak about this, and much more, on Wednesday, 7 PM, at the Temple De Hisrch Sinai on Capitol Hill.