Once we accept the model that knowledge held in long-term memory is active — that we think with it, there are several implications. Not least is the responsibility it places on adults and teachers when deciding what knowledge to impart to young people and what mental models to gift them.
I recently returned to The Coddling of the American Mind, a 2018 book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt where they expand upon ideas initially outlined in a 2015 essay for The Atlantic. A key element of this essay is the potential effect on mental health of ideas prevalent across American university campuses:
A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety
The 2018 book is structured around three ‘great untruths’ and one of these is that, ‘life is a battle between good people and evil people’. I want to explore that untruth and its implications.
We may choose to tolerate a children’s movie in which goodies fight baddies, but a mature film with such a motif would strike us as naïve — even planet destroying Darth Vader had hidden depths. A failure to reflect human frailties and complexity could even account for some of the notable cinematic and televisual failures of recent years.
Why do we prefer complex (anti)heroes? They are more interesting because they are more honest. We see ourselves in them. Speaking to us as a curator of the monstrosities of the Soviet Union’s prison camps, Alexander Solzhenitsyn examined the nature of this untruth in The Gulag Archipelago:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Solzhenitsyn’s observation strikes me as both true and strangely hopeful. Each of us has some control over where the line between good and evil sits.
I was initially amused to see an article in The Conversation this week ostensibly arguing for raising awareness in young people about climate change. Raising awareness! If you have met a teenager recently, you know they are aware of little else. Yet, the article had a purpose. I may not share all its emphasis, but it was a plea for detail and fewer abstract exhortations such as, ‘the planet is warming’. Abstractions of this kind raise anxiety without giving young people any sense of agency — a bad thing is happening and there is nothing we can do about it.
Agency is my main concern.
There is an ideology, well expressed in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that has hit the mainstream since 1970 when he published the book. Freire divides the world up into oppressors and the oppressed — in an abstract way where it is unclear who belongs to which group — and then muses on the educational and revolutionary implications of such as model. However, the oppressed and the oppressors are simply a different formulation of goodies and baddies. It is never going to be a simple as that.
Yet this is the model often presented to young people — a simplistic world in which there are oppressors and the oppressed, with oppression so ingrained it is built into the very systems we have constructed to organise our world. Oppression happens without conscious thought. It is designed in.
Consider the implications. Few young people want to be the oppressor because few want to be the bad guy — the exception being the sociopaths who sense an opportunity. Thanks to concepts such as intersectionality, there are many ways to identify with the oppressed and so if a young person can, they are likely to see this as an attractive option. And yet the oppressed live in a world designed to oppress them. Their oppression is expressed in its very fabric. They have no agency.
If there is a rise in anxiety and depression among young people, we have to ask — did we do this to them?
Hannah Arendt wrote extensively on all of these issues, and she's an author whose work I wish more were familiar with (and not just the Origins of Totalitarianism, which was early in her career). Among things she has said:
--we let ourselves become cogs when we stop thinking and judging for ourselves;
--great evil happens when we are not rooted in our thoughts (ie have content knowledge and have spent time thinking about what we believe), but when we skim over the surface of events and get carried away by whatever zeitgeist is present in society;
--thinking and knowing leads to action
--education is the place where we as adults prepare young people for the task of renewing the world
Great article.