Free Kids from Their Cells

Several reviews of this book have compared NYU psychologist and business school professor Jonathan Haidt to a new William F. Buckley, standing athwart the iPhone and shouting “STOP!” While that likening is not wrong, it is misleading. I know Jonathan a bit, personally; he has a cell phone, and uses it. He is far from Luddism.

What Haidt is worried about is the constitutive role of cell phone addiction in shaping the minds and habits of children and young adults. In particular, this jeremiad is a warning against seeing children’s use of cell phones and social media as inevitable. Parents who shrug and say, “What can you do? All their friends have phones” are making a mistake, and should read this book while there is still time.

Haidt is the sort of center-left progressive that once dominated the better social science departments, at least at major universities with genuine research aspirations. The species combines a basic faith in the goodness and potential of state action with a healthy and informed skepticism of the pitfalls of actual political process. Like many people who were serious about collecting data as a means of learning about society, Haidt was brought up short by the stridency, and occasional hysteria, of the identitarian academic left after about 2012. Haidt’s first widely-known book, The Righteous Mind, happened to be published at this moment, the worst (or perhaps best) possible time. The book’s thesis—people who disagree with you are still good people, and have good reasons to disagree, given their core premises about the world—had become literally unacceptable, even unspeakable, for the academic left. The only acceptable explanation for disagreement with extreme statements by [blank identity, fill in the blank with anything but “conservative”] was that you, the critic, had conscious or subconscious biases against [blank identity]. No discussion was necessary, nor even possible. You, the racist/sexist/homophobe/bigot, must be canceled and publicly humiliated, cast into the outer darkness of the intellectual community.

“That can’t be right,” thought many center-left Progressives, including Haidt. He worked to found The Heterodox Academy, an organization that, according to its web page, seeks to “advance the principles of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement to improve higher education and academic research.” To Haidt’s credit, and the dismay of some of the more superficial identitarians on the left, Haidt pursued a controversial intellectual agenda, inverting that which animated Righteous Mind. Where the first book considered disagreement as productive, his next book—with FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff—was The Coddling of the American Mind, which showed how agreement could be destructive.

More specifically, the thesis of COTAM was that the absence of disagreement, or even serious discussion, in high schools—even and perhaps especially elite high schools—had created an emotional and intellectual fragility that made college students literally afraid of the idea that they might think on their own. The requirement of universal agreement on the importance of dubious propositions about social justice and the centrality of bias and bigotry in explaining differences in wealth and power turned into a pseudo-religious conviction.

Perhaps this is not surprising; after all, as David Foster Wallace noted, “Everybody worships.” A recent essay by the indispensable Nathan Cofnas discusses the problems that have kept Heterodox Academy from achieving much, in spite of its lofty rhetoric and ambitious goals. Much of Cofnas’s explanation has to do with the stripping out of all religious restraint and guidance, which paradoxically (given the supposedly scientific purposes of getting rid of God) freed up intellectuals to fabricate increasingly fanciful and unfounded secular convictions to take the place of academic discussion. Many universities were founded on narrow religious principles, and for much of their early history were zealous about rooting out error and heresy. The new academies of the 21st century have no connection with God, but rooting out error and heresy have come back with a vengeance. It is hard not to remember what Nietzsche—himself no fan of religion—said about conviction, with a remarkable prescience:

I suggested long ago that convictions might be more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. This time I should like to pose the decisive question: is there any difference whatever between a lie and a conviction?—All the world believes there is, but what does all the world not believe!—Every conviction has its history, its preliminary forms, its tentative shapes, its blunders: it becomes a conviction after not being one for a long time, after hardly being one for an even longer time. What? could the lie not be among these embryonic forms of conviction?—Sometimes it requires merely a change in persons: in the son that becomes conviction which in the father was still a lie.—I call a lie: wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it: whether the lie takes place before witnesses or without witnesses is of no consequence. The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

The statement I have italicized, Nietzsche’s insight that the child holds a conviction that, for parents, was still a lie and that each new generation is susceptible to false convictions in a way that surprise those that come before, is a fine starting point for The Anxious Generation. But the object of the analysis here is quite different, and substantially broader, than Haidt’s previous work. Until now, he has mostly addressed problems stemming from the failure of social sciences and humanities disciplines to live up to their obligations to encourage learning and discovery through viewpoint diversity and open discussion. Anxious Generation takes a step back and asks whether the process we have chosen, or perhaps just allowed, for framing the worldview of the present generation is going to change much of humanity for the worse, and for the foreseeable future.

My summary/caricature of Haidt’s argument (there is a lot more to it than this, so draw no conclusions if you disagree with my version) goes as follows:

1. Children’s brain architecture is highly plastic. Everyone’s is, actually, but children are especially open to be “rewired.” This is a feature, not a bug, because it is what allows children to learn multiple languages essentially without effort, or conscious intention, up to a certain age. Even in the teenage years, the degree of neural and synaptic plasticity is remarkable.

2. It is unlikely that parents would willingly send their child into an unknown and potentially dangerous environment—Haidt uses the example of spending decades on Mars to be raised by others—without considerable reflection, and detailed knowledge of the likely consequences for the child’s development.

3. But this is analogous, on a less extreme scale, to what “we,” the parents of children and the society that depends on them, have done. Cell phones, the digital apps they can run, and the social sites on the internet to which they can connect, are rewiring young brains in ways that yet be understood, much less predicted for the future if the process continues to expand.

4. Now, if it sounds like there might be an element of breathless hysteria, and hyperbolic book-selling here, that’s not wrong. I’m not sure that Haidt’s tone needs to be so consistently apocalyptic. After all, we seem to be surviving the eschaton brought on by fast food, in spite of the outrage of Fast Food Nation, and its claims that corporations intentionally made food delicious to the point of being addictive. Sure, they give out little toys, and create cartoon figures tied to their products, but people need to be able to control themselves.

5. Don’t they? Well, to a point. But imagine that everything bad you’ve heard about McDonald’s is true: the food is chemically calibrated and concocted to mimic authentic sources of pleasure from taste and smell, and eating that kind of carbohydrate-packed meal changes your metabolism and blood chemistry so that the more you eat, the more you want to eat, in a never-ending cycle. I’m not saying that’s true, but suppose it is. Would you then be willing to put that food in a bag, tied around your child’s neck, so that the aroma was constantly distracting kiddo? Suppose that the bag is a magic bag, where the food is always completely fresh, and in fact constantly changing in new and different, and disturbingly interesting, ways? Well, that “magic food bag” is already there, in your child’s pocket. Only it’s a cell phone, and instead of food and smells it delivers text, sound, and images.

Now, that is my summary, not Haidt’s argument. But I was disturbed to think about the fact that the argument is much more persuasive in the case of cell phones and social media than it was for fast food. Cell phones and the connections they create can be both satisfying and productivity-enhancing, but having one With. You. Always. has implications we don’t understand.

Haidt proposes that we consider Gen Z: those born after 1995. He argues, provocatively: “I don’t think that Gen Z—the anxious generation—will have an end date until we change the conditions of childhood that are making young people so anxious.” A “generation” is sometimes bracketed by events, but it is better defined by the ethos that those events evoke in the culture. In that case, according to Haidt, everyone in Gen Z shares more with other Gen Zs than with anyone who was born before.

Of course, the “anxious” part of the book’s title requires more justification. Haidt is already on the record in joining with other thinkers about the excessive protectiveness and overly structured environments of modern childhood. It has been said that where once we looked to events in our neighborhood or town, we now look to histrionic internet accounts to tell us about the riskiness of the world. Where once it took weeks to become aware of kidnappings or murders even in my own state, now I hear of “risks” to my children if there is a child abduction in New Zealand. As the world has gotten safer, we have perceived that it has become more dangerous.

I used to ride my bike to school, two miles along a narrow, and busy country road. In any case, even if the weather was bad, I was going to take the bus. If my mom had to take me in the car, we were going to the doctor, because I must have been sick if I needed that kind of pampering. But today many schools don’t use buses, because parents pick up and drop off their children, denying them any sense of personal efficacy for arranging transportation. Admittedly, finding the correct bus and boarding it before it leaves is not difficult, but that is still too much for many parents, who park and look for their children so the kiddos are not inconvenienced.

And there is the connection: parents want their children to be home, and safe. Not out riding their bikes, playing basketball or football in the street, not heading over to the reservoir to swim. (Here, Haidt is clearly in league with such critics as Lenore Skenazy and others). We want the precious little tykes to be safe in their rooms. And, as if by a miracle, we are provided with a magic food bag, or rather experience bag, to attach to the children so they are happy to stay in their room rather than ….well, rather than doing pretty much anything. The magic experience bag that comes with a smart phone provides an intensity, variety, and duration of exciting experiences that were impossible for anyone to access 100 years ago, and probably even 30 years ago.

We have made a deal with the Devil, in other words. To keep our kids home, we have made them frightened of the world. To keep our kids from harm, we have exposed them to brain-altering habits, online predators, and addictive pastimes that don’t just have the risk, but the near certainty, of making those now children turn out to be anxious and dysfunctional adults.

Haidt offers a variety of prescriptions, and partial solutions, including what children must learn to do, what schools must teach children to do, and what parents should try to do. His suggestions for parental support groups—possibly online, but perhaps….in person?—all seem sensible, though it’s a bit much all at once. But as a starting point, the bare necessities, Haidt proposes that there are four “foundational reforms”:

A. No smart phones before high school. (Cell phones, for communication, may be okay, but smart phones are simply a different thing)

B. No social media before 16.

C. Phone-free schools

D. More—far more—unsupervised play and childhood independence.

It is clear that parents alone could mandate A, and try to manage D, on their own. C is a matter of public policy, but it would help enforce both A and B. Just these four things, pursued resolutely and on a broad scale, could make a big difference and give us an “end event” for Gen Z, a time when the vistas of actual childhood once more open up, and the idiosyncrasies of brain development will be determined by what people want to learn, and do.

Though Anxious Generation is often more preachy and strident than is required to get its message across, the argument overall is persuasive, and timely. I recommend it.