The Toughest Generation?

Your poll is far too specific to capture the frequency of abuse.  Anyone sensitive to this phenomenon will notice whites being blamed regularly, sometimes only implicitly, for nearly everything bad, in any topic dealing with race, from nearly any media or academic source. And race talk is a constant, daily feature within our current discourse.

I see a 1B –  not yet.  I don’t think the time to develop the toughness has yet elapsed.  So maybe #1 is true — 20 years from now.

Virtually every other demographic group gets official sympathy, but white males get official disdain.  While the dose varies widely, “white male” is almost the sole demographic category Americans publicly pronounce in sneer italics.

I noticed a rather trivial (and to be honest, amusing to me) iteration of this the other day. If you pull up an app on your phone or in your chat program to look up gifs and search for, say, “dancing”, what you’ll get is gifs of people dancing. However, if you search for gifs of “white dancing”, the results are entirely of people making spasmatic fools of themselves on the dance floor. The same holds true for any search you might make, be it singing, dancing, cooking – adding the prefix “white” to any of these essentially switches the results to “losers who are terrible at everything.” Still, I was mildly pleased to discover this because it makes it easier for me to find funny gifs to attach to messages – I only need to add the word “white” to a search.

The main point here is interesting. The phenomenon Haidt and Lukianoff are attempting to explain still needs examination. They do a good job in their book of making a case that despite the insistence of some, what’s going on at college campuses isn’t just how college students have always been but with a higher media profile. Lukianoff in particular is in a good position to notice the difference, given that he’s been involved with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for a couple of decades. One of the more interesting points he makes is that until just a few years ago, attempts to cancel/censor/deplatform etc were almost always instigated by faculty members, and students were the ones reaching out to FIRE to ensure free speech was protected. But in the last few years, suddenly, the calls for cancelling/censorship/deplatforming began to come overwhelmingly from the students themselves – students are now the ones demanding censorship from (and of) the faculty. This is a new development, and not a good one, I think.

Another explanation for why students might at least appear to be much more fragile than previous generations is that students are rationally responding to newer cultural incentives that didn’t exist in the past. (I know, this is exactly the sort of thing an economist would say, isn’t it?) I’m again here reminded of a video from a Youtuber I enjoy who argues for the value of offense, where he makes the following observations:

One aspect of the culture at our secondary school was that students were expected to respond aggressively to insults, specifically insults to their families, especially their mothers. The insults didn’t need to be that imaginative. Often just the phrase “Your mum” was enough. In response, students were expected to get angry and physically defend their mother’s honor. If they didn’t, they were seen as weak and cowardly. This ritualized behavior continued for a couple of years. Then, there was an interesting shift.

Aggressive reactions to insults stopped being admired. Students who were easily provoked came to be seen as weak and fragile, and were scorned for being hysterical. Shrugging off insults became the cool thing to do. The frequency of insults didn’t go down, but the frequency of aggressive responses plummeted.

In groups where dramatic expressions of offense are encouraged and rewarded, we can make two predictions. First, we can expect to see more expression of offense. Second, we can expect to see them in response to increasingly smaller provocation, as individuals hunt for things to act offended about. But, when overblown reactions of offense receive scorn, instead of sympathy, the emotional displays can fizzle out fast, exposing the fact that they’re unnecessary and well within personal control. If teenagers can learn to control their responses like this, shouldn’t we expect even more emotional maturity from adults?

I don’t see why #1 is not the correct answer but it is domain specific.

White males really do have thicker skins when it comes to insults against them for being white males.  So for that specific domain they are tougher.

They have also been coddled in many other domains relative to their fathers and grandfathers and thus are not relative tough in other domains.

Haidt would say rich whites are over coddled as well (as per Haidt’s observations). So rich white men don’t have it tough.

Now. There’s a language trick going on here where “whites” (by white college grads) actually refers lower class non-educated whites. So it’s low class whites who are facing added abuse.

So it’s fair to ask whether lower class white males are stronger or not. Of course we know non-college whites have reduced life expectancy and more drug abuse. Not everyone can be Rob Henderson. So I guess your argument still holds. But I think saying all white men face extra abuse is an err. The most visible white men are college grads, and they are coddled.

Coddling ay result in two not seen consequences. The weak will not flourish and the self possessed will succeed. Personal story. I was an instructor in finance at Loyola of Chicago. I was teaching CAPM and derivatives. I told the class that while the course work is not easy I will do all I can to help any student(s) who struggle. I said: as students you’ve have purchased a product, this class, paid for in the form of tuition. All of you are free to do what you please with it. I don’t care what you do with it. Soon I was called to the Dean’s office as a complaint was lodged against me. Some said I didn’t care about them. I explained that they were free to choose as to the effort they intended to put into the course and I, like the butcher who sells filet mignon, don’t care whether the buyer cooks it to his taste or gives it to his pooch. I was asked to apologize or clarify my statement. I refused as I did nothing inappropriate. To have done so would have been a disservice to the complainants as I would have reinforced their insecurities.

Fourth possibility: they’re right that coddling produces weakness, but abuse doesn’t produce resilience.

This is intuitively true. Giving a person unlimited dessert and no exercise produces weakness, lassitude, and depression. However, starving him and working him to death in forced labor under the lash of the whip produces malnutrition, weakness, and early death.

A moderate, nutritious diet and strenuous exercise produces strength. Likewise, if you want to raise strong-minded children, you neither verbally abuse them, subject them to humiliation, and starve them of affection nor do you protect them from all trial, praise them endlessly, and tell them that they are perfect how they are.

It is naive to believe that the often subtle but constant undercurrent of derogatory talk about white privilege and toxic masculinity would produce a strong, visible, and pointed effect of weakness or strength. Rather, one should assume that the effect will vary based on the context and whether one is in a hostile environment or not.

Talk about toxic masculinity and white privilege makes it easy to distinguish who I should associate with and who I shouldn’t, the same way more ordinary forms of racism and sexism are red flags for association. It’s made me more canny and circumspect about revealing my true opinions, and cautious about throwing in my lot with strangers—you never know about their true colors. I am certainly less generous, because I’m careful not to put my money in the hands of people who are hostile to people with my skin color, genitalia, or sexuality. And I trust institutions less, because I’ve seen how easy it is for the bureaucracy to mouth equity platitudes but turn their backs on people like me. Is this strength? I don’t think so. It’s just more signs of societal trust disintegrating. But what choice do they give me?

People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

I believe this part of the quote was originally by Emily Dickinson.  And if we accept its premise, then the Jewish and Black communities must be the most resilient among us.

None of those. IIRC antifragile is inspired by weight lifting, which uses Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (stimulus-recovery-adaptation). This has a few implications:

Adaptations are specific. You don’t train for a marathon with heavy deadlifts; lectures on white privilege don’t increase tolerance of physical pain.
Changes are adaptations, not necessarily improvements. Additionally, adaptations often come with drawbacks, e.g. lots of muscle increases calorie needs and impairs distance running.

Let’s apply to today’s white men. Expect some hyperbole to aid in illustration.

White men are verbally denigrated and ostracised by institutions (stimulus). Expected adaptations? I’d say (i) mistrust of institutions, (ii) reduced reliance on institutions (depending instead on family, friends or self-reliance), and (iii) lower vulnerability to identity-based verbal abuse (with possible carry-over to verbal abuse in general).

These seem supportable contentions.