Last week I attended a seminar sponsored by Heterodox Academy. The title: Does Mill Still Matter? Among those featured at the seminar were Jonathan Haidt, Richard Reeves and Dave Cicirelli, co-creators of “All Minus One,” an illustrated version of the second chapter of Mill’s On Liberty. This new book can be downloaded for free.

I transcribed the following excerpts of Jonathan Haidt comments. What follows are Haidt’s words at the live seminar, minimally edited for print.

What I think is happening on campus is that we’ve traditionally played a game in which somebody puts forth an argument and then somebody critiques it. And that’s what we’ve done for 1000’s of years, until about 2015. And then, a new game came into town, where people weren’t seeing this like tennis, a game we are playing a game together. They saw it more as a battle like boxing or something where it was a struggle for dominance and power. And when you think of it that way, yeah, it’s hard work. And it’s painful. But if you think about it as like, you know, playing tennis or a game together, you’re expending calories. It’s not exactly hard work. It’s hard play. And that’s what I’ve always loved about being an academy is that it always felt like hard play. Until 2015.

A common phrase that began in 2014-2015, which is, “you are denying my existence” or “If that speaker comes [to campus to talk], then he or she is denying my existence.” And, you know, it’s suddenly came out of nowhere. And we’re all talking about what do you mean, denying your existence? And it’s because this new way of thinking, where it’s all a battle for power, and it’s all about identity. And so if there’s an is there’s a speaker who’s critical that on transition– doesn’t accept the reigning dogma on the trans issue? Well, that person thinks, or you might think, that they’re critiquing an argument about something. But critiquing the argument is critiquing the identity, which means you’re denying that I exist. That really helps us understand why there’s such incoherence on campus since 2015, because some people are taking any criticism of their ideas as an attack on their person. And therefore you think I don’t belong here on campus. And again, you can’t have a university like that.

I also just want to add in one of my favorite quotes I’ve found in the five or six years I’ve been working on this topic. This is from Van Jones when he spoke at the University of Chicago. He was asked by, David Axelrod, what he thinks about students who are demanding no platforming and safe spaces and things like that. And while this isn’t exactly Mill, in that he’s not really talking about the benefit to truth, but he’s talking about the way this actually makes you stronger and smarter. This is just so brilliant. He says, there’s a certain kind of safety, that is safety from physical attacks. Of course, we care about physical safety. But then he says, I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. And that’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity, I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym. That’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym. And Richard and his friends protested outside as a political act. And then they went in because it was the gym, and they actually wanted to hear what he had to say. And that, I think, is the model of a politically engaged college student, or what it should do.

I was asked, What do you think is most fundamental question? And they say, Oh, you know, is there a god? Or what’s the meaning of life? No, that’s like, a big question. Fundamental means, basic, like the thing that everything else is built on. The fundamental question of life, is approach or avoid. That’s it. As soon as life began moving, as soon as you get little tails on bacteria, you have to have some mechanism for deciding this way or that? Approach or avoid? And all of the rest of the billion years of brain evolution is just commentary on that question.

And so the human brain has these gigantic tracts of neurons on the front left cortex, specialized for approach. And then a frontal cortex specialized for avoid. And so all sorts of things go with this. So when we’re in explorer mode, some features of it are, we’re more, we’re curious. We take risks. You might feel like a kid in a candy shop with all these different things to explore. You think for yourself. And the model of a student in this mindset would be whoever grows the most by graduation, or whoever learns the most by graduation wins. If that’s your attitude, boy, are you going to profit from being in college for four years.

Conversely, if you spent most of your college years with your front, right cortex activated, because you’re told everyone’s against you, everyone hates you, you’ll never get ahead. It’s always been this way. Then it always will be this way. If that’s what you believe, you’re in defend mode, threat mode, and then you don’t trust people. Your goal is not to be curious. It’s to be safe. You’re afraid of things. And you think about books in terms of certain speakers in terms of danger versus safety. You see threats everywhere and you will cling to your team. And your motto is: If we defeat them, then we win. And that’s the incoherence that has been with us since 2015. We had an influx of students who were playing a very different game where everything was danger and conflict. And no, that’s not what a university [is]. You’ve misunderstood what we’re about and why you’re here. And so it’s been a tragic waste.

It’s not for a whole generation, because most kids aren’t like this. But for the activists who are intimidating everyone else and putting other people into this threat mode, they’re missing out. And it’s not unrelated that this is the class of kids born in 1996. Beginning with them, that’s the beginning of Gen Z. And that’s where the hockey stick graph of depression comes in. So we get a wave of students who are very high on depression/anxiety. They come into this cornucopia of a liberal arts college and they see it as this dangerous, destructive, frightening place.

We found that about half of Americans would cancel a speaker who criticized policing practices. Another half would want to cancel speaker who defended policing practices, there we go shut down police reform, right. About half wanted to shut down someone who ever thought that unauthorized immigrants or undocumented immigrants should be deported. I mean, that’s a widely held view. And or someone who thinks that all Christian people are brainwashed and backwards. So basically half of America wants to cancel all these different speakers. And the reason I selected these is that I would expect some of these would kind of offend you a little bit. That’s the whole point. The point is, how do we react when we’re a little bit offended?

Let’s remember, we’re talking about speakers that you don’t have to go to. So some campus group is inviting someone to come speak on something, and you know, five or 10 people or maybe 50, people will come see it. So the question is, if someone on this campus of 20,000 people is offended, do they have a right to shut it down by getting a few people to protest or to make demands? And just imagine what kind of world you’d want to live in? What kind of college would you want to go to where anyone has veto over everything?

Q: So, Jon, how do we can how do we encourage students to switch from defend mode to discover mode? How do we encourage this growth?

[Haidt] When Greg Lukianoff came to me with his idea that colleges were teaching this way of thinking in 2014, we thought that colleges were causing it, and so we wrote our Atlantic article on it, and that came out. But then we realized we were wrong. Colleges weren’t causing it, although they were sustaining it. They were not challenging it. In fact, it’s already in by the time kids are in high schools, especially progressive private schools.

And this month has been basically, you know, the month of Bitcoin going up through the roof and stories about insane private school New York City practices with, you know, leaked tapes and everything [Paul Rossi, at Grace College Church]. So we’re seeing the high schools blow up, those that embrace critical race theory, those embracing Ibram Kendi, specifically anti-racist. If a school has the word “antiracist” on its web page, if it hasn’t blown up yet, it will within the next year, that would be my prediction. Because it’s basically trying to take these nice, often curious kids and tell them, be in “defend mode,” be in “defend mode.” Everything’s terrible. Everything’s against you.”

So we’ve got to start much before college. But what you can do before college? When people enter a new environment, there’s a short period, maybe a few weeks, where they’re trying to figure out how to things happen. “What’s the culture? How should I be? How do they do things around here? And so kids are very good at code switching and they quickly learn this is the way to be here. And this is the way I am at home and this is the way I am a church.” And so if in those first weeks they learn, “Oh, this is all about social justice. This is all about fighting oppression, we’re here to fight oppression.” Okay, it’s too late [to save them from being indoctrinated by antiracism]. By October, many of them . . . they will think that’s what college is about.

But if at orientation, if before they come to campus, the Summer Reading is not a book like that. It’s not like Kendi or DiAngelo, if the Summer Reading is “All Minus One” by John Stuart Mill, edited by Richard Reeves and Jon Haidt, illustrated by Dave Cicerelli. . . . and you pair that with, by all means, pair it with a social justice book, that’ll be fine. Or pair that with The Coddling of the American Mind.

So if there’s five social justice books that are what everybody’s assigning, assign one of those and The Coddling and/or Mill or assign the open mind platform, openmindplatform.org. So by all means expose kids to critical race theory as you would expose them to Mormonism or Hinduism. But for God’s sakes, don’t say, “Welcome. Now you have to be a Hindu, or you have to be a Mormon.” That’s crazy. But that’s what’s happening. Not so much in college, but in high schools. That’s what these elite schools are doing.

Q: One of the assumptions that Mills argument rests on is that over time, the truth kind of bubbles up to the top, because it survives over time. But what if that’s not true in the current situation?

Haidt: That is exactly the reason to think that Mill might no longer apply, especially if you think about a “marketplace of ideas,” which Mill didn’t say, but I actually think is a good metaphor. It’s clear that the market has these massive failures now. So do we even have a marketplace of ideas? And the single best quote that I have encountered to explain what’s happening to us is from Jonathan Rauch’s forthcoming book . . . He has an amazing book called The Constitution of Knowledge, which is a play on words, because it’s both how knowledge is made–by a million processes and liberal science–and like a kind of a constitution by which we could have a knowledgeable society. So here’s the quote, he says,

“The techno-utopians of the information revolution assumed that knowledge would spontaneously emerge from unmediated interactions across a sprawling peer-to-peer network, with predictably disappointing results. Without the places where professionals like experts and editors and peer reviewers organize conversations and compare propositions and assess competence and provide accountability–everywhere from scientific journals to Wikipedia pages–there is no marketplace of ideas. There are only individuals running around making noise.”

Boom! That is exactly what has happened to us in the 2010s: just people running around making noise. So you could throw up your hands and say, “Oh, I guess Mill doesn’t matter anymore.” Or you could say wait a second, Mill really understood how we get knowledge and the systems that we have are broken. So we’ve got to fix those systems for universities, social media. And of course, social media has found some ways. Some platforms work better than others. So there is hope, but Mill can actually guide us in how to repair–some sort of information ecosystem infrastructure repair project is what we need.

Q: How could a teacher actually operationalize some of these ideas to teach students about it in the classroom?

Haidt: Okay, I’ll take this one because I’ve been talking with a lot of high school teachers at heterodox Academy. We have a lot of communities, including one for K 12 teachers. So if there are K-12 teachers out there who would like to join it, you can go to Heterodoxacademy.org, to find signup information.

And the most important idea that I can give you is that you can’t beat something with nothing. You can’t just go in and say we shouldn’t be doing this, you have to have a positive vision. You have to have some sort of moral foundation to build your argument on for why we should change why we should do this. And in order to do that, the key idea that you must have is “antifragility” and I find very few people know this word. It’s coined by Nassim Taleb. If you think kids are fragile like a wineglass, you’re going to protect them because there’ll be broken by things that are unpleasant. But once you understand that children are like the immune system. If you protect it, it never learns what it should respond to, and it gets weak. Stress is essential for childhood growth. Chronic stress is bad, but short term stress is essential for growth.

Once you have the idea of antifragility, then you can bring in the idea that well, how can we make these kids strong? Are we going to make them strong by only giving them you know, one side of this complicated thing? Or are we going to make them strong by exposing them to lots of ideas and letting them figure them out, you know, because of course, the thing teachers always said is, “Oh, we don’t teach them what to think. We teach them how to think,” and boy, is that nonsense nowadays.

Again, most teachers are great, but when it comes to how to think about society, and power and privilege and all that stuff, there’s a lot of indoctrination going on. But if you base your argument not on like, oh, they’re indoctrinated, that’s bad. But rather, you know what, there’s an epidemic of depression, anxiety. It’s catastrophic. It’s through the roof. Something’s going wrong for our kids. They are anti fragile. We need to make them stronger. So that would be my main piece of advice. And the anti-fragile concept is explained in chapter one of The Coddling of the American Mind. And if you go to thecoddling.com, we have the chapter there for free. You can just sign it, print it out, send the link. But it’s the essential concept to really understand why Mill is so good for high school kids.