Every few days, the public square is roiled by another round of offense taken and apologies given. Sometimes the stakes are incredibly low, as when Bon Appétit issued an apology for publishing an irreverent piece about a Jewish pastry. Sometimes the stakes are greater, as when Apple canned a new hire after more than 2,000 employees signed a letter claiming they were “profoundly distraught” by misogynistic statements in his critically acclaimed gonzo-style memoir.
There are a few competing theories about the new hypersensitivity that has become a feature of our public culture. When someone makes hay of their victimhood in a way that someone else who comes from the same background would play down, it raises questions about why they do so—and why so many more young people do so today than used to.
One theory is that they are merely putting on a manipulative performance.
Another is to take them at their word and accept the professed offense as a sincere reaction to hurt feelings, which raises questions about why the same things hurt some people so much more than other people.
Could this be because they have cultivated the sorts of habits of mind that cause them to experience deep pain from what would be, to most people in the world at most times in history, minor and passing harms? What if the people right-wing media once spent a lot of time deriding as special “snowflakes” are as fragile as they claim? Would this not be an occasion for psychological inquiry about how they ended up that way? What if those who say they’ve been deeply wounded do feel intense pain because they’ve been trained to magnify their pain?
In their article and later book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue…
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