I read a fair bit of it, and then started skimming. It seems to me that they think the 'bad idea' is how people are classified. They think that young people are learning that the underdog is always good and the people in power are always bad.
Instead, I think they hit on the real problem accidentally: Binary choices aren't real. Life isn't just black and white, good and bad, wrong and right. It's all grey area with almost nothing falling into the very extremes.
Being unable to recognize that people are complex is what people today are lacking, I think.
"To take 18-year-olds, and rather than try to turn that down and say “okay hold on, don’t be so moralistic. Let’s try to give people a chance. Let’s judge people as individuals.” That was the great achievement of the 20th century—to make progress there. Instead in the 21st century to say, “okay welcome to campus. Here are five or six dimensions; we’re going to teach you to see men, maleness, masculinity as bad, everyone else is good. White is bad, everyone else is good. Straight is bad, everyone else is good.” This is Manicheism. This is ramping up our tendency to dualistic thinking."
Sure that's the rhetoric. Most people don't take that completely seriously, however. (Lots of people make an exception when it benefits them to do so.) Those who take this rhetoric seriously most of the time, can be mostly avoided.
"Well-meaning bad ideas spoiling a generation" is just a hook to engage readers and listeners, and I don't think Haidt believes that. His ire seems directed toward lazy thinking, regardless of whether that comes in the form of traditional bigotry or intellectual shortcuts like choosing virtuous groups, but he isn't an advocate of middle ground fallacy thinking either.
The problem with two-point, binary choices in making optimal social or public policy decisions might be explored with geometric analogies. When reading a historical presidential campaign speech or watching a historical presidential debate from over 50 years ago, it is difficult to completely agree with one person, and the middle ground in between the two speakers' positions is more likely than not to be disagreeable, too. Both speakers almost always seem to be far to the right or far to the left of what a majority of people today think with regard to issues like individual freedoms or fairness standards.
In other words the two points are "wrong", but so is the middle ground or "grey area". The two points don't imply a line segment that defines limits to a spectrum of good choices. Furthermore they don't define a line along one dimension, where one or both of speakers are simply to the right or to the left of what future citizens will think is right.
What does Haidt actually think? According to his writings he thinks that it is a worthwhile effort to understand what political philosophers actually said, and if you want to be reductive, you can do a lot better than left vs. right. He argues in favor of a model with five "moral foundations" to explain a significant portion of individuals' sociopolitical preferences:
So, rather than saying people should look for grey area, middle ground choices, he is saying that they can maximize their utility by looking for a positions that best accord with their preferences in a five-dimensional hyperspace! That sounds glib, but left/right is garbage, and understanding what your personal values in those five moral foundations is at least tractable.
If nothing else, I feel like this is the biggest flaw in the author's argument. It boils down to "smart is good, dumb is bad", which comes off as "yet another tone-deaf academic", regardless of which side of the aisle the author sits on.
Smart isn't good? It's not difficult to come up with examples of an issues being framed in left/right terms leading to people voting contrary to their preferences.
The argument comes down to, "your preferences are your business, and understanding them makes it difficult for people to bamboozle you." That's the opposite of the elitist tone-deaf academic archetype, which would tell you've they've already done all the thinking, and they are the ones who know what you want and what is right and wrong.
The headline doesn't do a great job of summarizing the content and ideas in the interview. You seem to have skimmed past many of the interesting ideas and missed the other points that might be referred to by the poor headline.
Other bad ideas that might arguably be the referents of that headline.
1) Making kids safer is always good and we should teach them that the world is a dangerous place so they protect themselves.
2) winning the culture war (vs discovering truth through dissent) can lead to better social justice.
3) That striving for equality of outcomes naturally leads to equality of opportunities.
4) That you can teach people a class that will make them behave ethically, rather than teaching them how designing social structures that encourage ethical behavior leads to better efficiency.
(That last one doesn't really fit but is an example of the interesting ideas in this interview that don't cleanly fit within the thesis of the headline)
Ah, It's not that. Haidt's hypothesis in The Coddling of the American Mind is that by trying to ensure we never see disagreement or unpleasantness, and by attributing any such thing that we do see to a societal oppressive phenomenon, we are making ourselves fragile.
The other bits are concessions he's making wrt his thesis.
I usually like his hypotheses. Quite thought provoking.
The article indicates that intersectionalism is a valid idea, i.e. that we must consider that 'black women' for example will faces systematic challenges that others do not.
However - when intersectionalism becomes the only policy tool, then we're led astray.
The example given is that 50% of letters to editors published in the NYT will be women, even though 75% of the letters written are by men.
The totalitarian intersectionalists need to see equal outcomes, which gets ... well, very ridiculous, very quickly: the NYT is only one policy inch away from mandating that 'published letters' must not only be 50/50 men/women - but also 15% Black, 18% Latino, 65% White, 5% Asian. And also 8% Gay and 92% straight. 10 years ago it would have been absurd to even suggest that NYT letters must be 50/50. Not even 'far left' types I think would be in support of the idea.
>young people are learning that the underdog is always good and the people in power are always bad.
This is not a bad thing, but something to be proud of. This is built into the blood of the American fabric. Questioning authority and fighting for the underdog is what built America, and created a nation free from monarchs. Every notable thing in American history to be proud of has come from resisting government overreach, and the treatment of all people with justness and compassion.
Anyone who tries to say that fighting against oppression and manipulation by the upper class is somehow a bad thing... well...
Instead, I think they hit on the real problem accidentally: Binary choices aren't real. Life isn't just black and white, good and bad, wrong and right. It's all grey area with almost nothing falling into the very extremes.
Being unable to recognize that people are complex is what people today are lacking, I think.