Jonathan Haidt has been out and about a lot lately within the podcast space promoting his new book, which was published last week. Unlike prior works from Haidt which received near-universal praise, this one is taking on a more controversial subject — the exposure of our children to technology and social media, and what that is doing to their minds. Here is a critique offered by Reason Magazine, which does the expected thing of framing Haidt’s claims as a moral panic. I find that to be a particularly lazy response given the trends we know to be very real: namely, increased depression, suicidal ideation, and actual suicides. (In case you were unaware, suicides among Gen Z girls aged 15-19 has skyrocketed to 5.1 per 100k, compared to 3.1 for millennials.) Pretending something isn’t happening with teens these days and furthermore pretending that technology doesn’t have anything to do with it strikes me as very similar to the libertarians and conservatives who argued that campus cancel culture was nothing to worry about ten years ago — “college kids are always acting out” — who were then left aghast when that cultural movement migrated into the HR departments of mega-corporations across the country. Not everything is the Satanic Panic, people.
Simon Ings reviews Haidt for The Spectator here:
What’s not to like about a world in which youths are involved in fewer car accidents, drink less and wrestle with fewer unplanned pregnancies? Well, think about it. Those kids might not be wiser; they might simply be afraid of everything. And what has got them so afraid? A little glass rectangle, “a portal in their pockets,” that entices them into a world that’s “exciting, addictive, unstable and… unsuitable for children.”
So far, so paranoid — and there’s a delicious tang of the documentary maker Adam Curtis about the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s extraordinarily outspoken and well-evidenced diatribe against the creators of smartphone culture. These men, says Haidt, were once hailed as “heroes, geniuses and global benefactors, who, like Prometheus, brought gifts from the gods to humanity.”
The technological geegaw Haidt holds responsible for the “great rewiring” of brains of people born after 1995 is not, interestingly enough, the iPhone itself (first released in 2007) but its front-facing camera, released with the iPhone 4 in June 2010. Samsung added one to its Galaxy the same month. Instagram launched in the same year. Now users could curate online versions of themselves on the fly — and they do, incessantly. Maintaining an online self is a 24/7 job. The other day I had to catch a stroller from rolling into the street while the young mother vogued and pouted into her smartphone.
Anecdotes are one thing; evidence is another. The point of The Anxious Generation is not to present phone-related pathology as though it were a new idea, but rather to provide robust scientific evidence for what we’ve all come to assume is true: that there is causal link (not just some modish dinner party correlation) between phone culture and the ever more fragile mental state of our youth. “These companies,” Haidt says, “have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.”
His data is startling. Between 2010 and 2015, depression in teenage girls and boys became two-and-a-half times more prevalent. From 2010 to 2020, the rate of self-harm among young adolescent girls nearly tripled. The book contains a great many graphs with titles like “High Psychological Distress, Nordic Nations” and “Alienation in School, Worldwide.” There’s one in particular I can’t get out of my head, showing the percentage of US students in eighth, tenth and twelfth grade who said they were happy in themselves. Between 2010 and 2015 this “self-satisfaction score” falls off a cliff.
The Anxious Generation revises conclusions Haidt drew in 2018 while collaborating with the lawyer Greg Lukianoff on The Coddling of the American Mind. Subtitled “How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure,” that book argued that universities and other institutes of higher education (particularly in the US) were teaching habits of thinking so distorted, they were triggering depression and anxiety among their students. Why else would students themselves be demanding that colleges protect them from books and speakers that made them feel “unsafe?” Ideas that had caused little or no controversy in 2010 “were, by 2015, said to be harmful, dangerous or traumatizing,” Haidt remembers.
Coddling’s anti-safe space, “spare the rod and spoil the child” argument had merit, but Haidt soon came to realize it didn’t begin to address the scale of the problem: “By 2017 it had become clear that the rise of depression and anxiety was happening in many countries, to adolescents of all educational levels, social classes and races.”
Why are people born after 1996 so, well, different? So much more anxious, so much more judgmental, so much more miserable? Phone culture is half of Haidt’s answer; the other is a broader argument about “safetyism,” which Haidt defines as “the well-intentioned and disastrous shift towards overprotecting children and restricting their autonomy in the ‘real world.’”
Boys suffer more from being shut in and overprotected. Girls suffer more from the way digital technologies monetize and weaponize peer hierarchies. Although the gender differences are interesting, it’s the sheer scale of harm depicted here that should galvanize us. Haidt’s suggested solutions are commonplace and commonsensical: stop punishing parents for letting their children have some autonomy. Allow children plenty of unstructured free play. Ban phones in school.
For Gen Z, this all comes too late. Over-protection in the real world, coupled with an almost complete lack of protection in the virtual world, has consigned a generation of young minds to what is in essence a play-free environment. In the distributed, unspontaneous non-space of the digital device, every action is performed in order to achieve a prescribed goal. Every move is strategic. “Likes” and “comments,” “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down” provide immediate real-time metrics on the efficacy or otherwise of thousands of micro-decisions an hour, and even trivial mistakes bring heavy costs.
In a book of devastating observations, this one hit home very hard: that these black mirrors of ours are “the most efficient conformity engines ever invented.”
More here from Jean Twenge:
Building Back Baltimore
To save beleaguered Baltimore, we must rebuild the Key Bridge—fast. The waterway that the bridge spanned is vital to traffic from the Port of Baltimore—the third-largest port on the U.S. eastern seaboard. At least 15,000 jobs depend directly on the port’s commerce, with hundreds of thousands more possibly hanging in the balance. The 1.6-mile, four-lane bridge of Interstate 695 that spanned that vital logistical artery carried more than 11 million vehicles per year, linking Baltimore City to Baltimore County and its suburbs.
The bridge was constructed between 1972 and 1977, when Baltimore boasted about 906,000 residents. That number has declined by more than a third, and the city that remains is less prosperous, less safe, and less hopeful. Decades of neglect have driven Baltimoreans out of their city to the suburbs and out of the state.
For Baltimore to survive its latest wound, it must rebuild the bridge without delay. It can be done, and has been done, before—1,000 miles away. And with bipartisan support, to boot.
In the middle of evening rush hour on August 1, 2007, the I-35W bridge collapsed over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thirteen people died, and 145 were injured. The city felt like it was cut in half. Faulty design and poor safety inspections were blamed for the tragedy.
Republican governor Tim Pawlenty and the state’s Democratic-led U.S. congressional delegation immediately got to work to restore the span. Within hours, the federal government pledged millions to clean up the bridge’s debris. The chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Minnesota Democrat Jim Oberstar, earmarked $250 million for a new bridge. Within days, Congress passed the bill unanimously. President George W. Bush signed it into law five days after the tragedy. The new bridge reopened for traffic in an astounding 14 months—three months early.
How did it accomplish this so quickly? Federal and state officials “fast-tracked” the bridge’s reconstruction by reducing the regulatory burdens that hamper new construction projects—environmental, safety, labor, and contracting reviews. Then they supercharged the process with a carrot-and-stick approach to construction: if the contractors met the timetable, they would get a generous bonus; if they missed it, they would get hit with penalties. Crews worked around the clock every day, right through the state’s notorious winter weather.
Unfortunately, state, local, and federal authorities have been slow to adopt this commonsense model for other infrastructure projects.
Recently, the Bayonne Bridge, connecting Staten Island New York to New Jersey, was elevated and rebuilt. Even with public support for accelerated construction, the project ran from 2009 until 2017 before the bridge opened to traffic, with costs running hundreds of millions more dollars than expected. A much-heralded bridge spanning the Mississippi between Illinois and Iowa across I-74 was more than three decades in the making and ran significantly over budget, too.
While Baltimore’s Key Bridge is four times longer than Minneapolis’s and located in an estuary near the port, engineering marvels—unencumbered by red tape—have been constructed rapidly before. The similar destruction of an I-95 overpass in Philadelphia was repaired in just 12 days, after onerous rules were streamlined. Multiple hurricane-ravaged bridges in Florida have been re-opened in record speed, owing to government bureaucracies creating a glidepath instead of an obstacle to finishing the job.
Is Richard Dawkins a Christian Now?
When the New Atheism thing was new, I wrote a piece saying that the people who supported it were pretentious and cowardly. They pretended to know what religion is, and said that it caused great harm. I said this was “intellectual cowardice.” The intellectual coward is one who chooses simplicity over complexity and difficulty.
One aspect of their cowardice related to Islam. Their popularity was a result of 9/11, and the widespread fear of religious extremism that ensued, but they didn’t dare focus on Islamic extremism; they wanted to say that religion in general was to blame, that mild-mannered liberal Christians were implicated in violence.
Now Richard Dawkins is trying to sound more nuanced about Christianity. A recent radio interview with LBC is the latest example. But until full repentance occurs, I will continue to associate the man with intellectual cowardice.
Dawkins now says that he is not, of course, a believing Christian, but a cultural one. He’s glad that the old faith is still around. “I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos.” He notes that Christian belief is declining in Britain, “and I’m happy with that. But I would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So I count myself a cultural Christian.” Unlike Islam, Dawkins says, Christianity is “a fundamentally decent religion.”
“I don’t despise religious people, I despise what they stand for,” Dawkins said at the “Reason Rally” in 2012. “Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!” Does Dawkins still despise what religious people stand for? I wonder what it feels like to realize you’ve been peddling muddle for decades, and that you don’t know what you think. Dawkins ought to say: “Sorry, I was intensely conceited to have held forth on this subject, which I now realize is rather complex. I promise to stick to biology from now on.”
The distinction between a believing Christian and a cultural Christian is dubious, because religion is culture. Belief is not, or not just, an invisible thing in one’s head — it takes the form of culture. A lot of people are not sure if they believe, or are not sure how to articulate their half-belief, but sometimes take part in Christian worship — even if it’s just singing the occasional carol, as Dawkins himself enjoys doing. Dawkins wants to categorize such people as merely cultural Christians, like him, not believing ones. But there is no clear distinction.
Feature
Items of Interest
Foreign
Ukraine works to revive their birth rate.
Netanyahu’s critics mobilize in Israel.
Israel strike takes out Iranian leader in Damascus.
Iran’s response to Israel consulate attack.
J.K. Rowling exposes ludicrous Scotland law.
Rishi Sunak backs J.K. Rowling.
Domestic
Schumer prepares to deal with a leader other than McConnell.
McConnell plans to stay in Senate to battle “Isolationists”.
Judge rejects Hunter Biden plea to dismiss tax charges.
Lauren Boebert hospitalized for blood clot.
House Republicans want to rename Dulles airport after Trump.
Phoenix Planned Parenthood sees spike in vasectomies.
Florida abortion rulings keep issue front and center.
Florida Democrats warn Biden off abortion ballot issue.
Lawfare
Judge slaps expanded gag order on Trump.
Trump obtains 175 million bond.
Jack Smith rails against judge in documents case.
2024
Inside Donald Trump’s Apprentice style search for a running mate.
Media
Megyn Kelly presses Ben Shapiro on Candace Owens situation.
Tech
Google pledges to destroy Incognito browsing data.
Trump’s Truth Social lost 58 million in 2023.
Health
Why Ozempic doesn’t work for everyone.
Ephemera
The new Pete Rose biography review.
Disney winning proxy fight against Trian.
The intriguing revival of the British gangster picture.
Steven Spielberg praises Dune 2.
Podcast
Quote
“Something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one's own back, must be simply killed. I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will never feel it anymore. That is not how things happen. I mean that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head. It is hard work, but the attempt is not impossible.”
— C.S. Lewis