On Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, Part Two

Guest post

For paid subscribers, The Anxious Generation is our next book club pick. Digital and in-person conversations will both be held on August 18th.

Sixteen weeks have passed since the launch of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. The first part of this review came out on the very same day.

I predicted that the book’s sustained popularity would lead to great deal of actual change from policy makers. In the final chapter, Haidt had written:

I want us to get moving. If the phone-based childhood is a major contributor to the international epidemic of mental illness, then there are a few clear and powerful actions that parents, teachers, and members of Gen Z can take to roll back the phone-based childhood.

He got his wish. After opening number one at the end of March, The Anxious Generation is still number three on the New York Time’s best seller list for hardcover nonfiction. Haidt has been on an unending publicity blitz, having landed interviews on The Daily Show, The Joe Rogan Experience, Real Time with Bill Maher, and many other media outlets.

And in this short time school districts across America and the world have implemented some form of classroom cellphone ban for September. My own province of Ontario will require students to have phones “out of sight” the entire school day up to grade six. Older grades will be prohibited them in classrooms. Similar policies are being prepared for Alberta, Quebec, and British Colombia. This month the State of Virginia went phone-free from K-12 by executive order, joining Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, and Ohio. Across the pond, where Haidt has incidently just spoken with Virgin Radio UK, Eton college banned smartphones for first year boarding students. They will be issued Nokia “brick-phones.” More reports of policy change continue flood in every week.

I don’t generally review books. But from its first announcement The Anxious Generation promised to be larger than a book. The whole curious project. It seems, is more like a carefully sterilized lance. With his trademark unassuming airs, Haidt has aimed directly at a ripened and very-sore area of high-pressure in the collective psyche.

Most curious, at least to me, is how the strategy which has lead to all these victories. As far as I can tell, it is by ignoring the immensity of the problem that Haidt has actually managed to overcome, in such short time, the static inertia of all our former inaction.

The Foundations... of What?

The answer lays in the careful construction of the book’s subtitle, “How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”

His topic is not “the Great Rewiring of Childhood” at all. That term is an indulgence of grandiosity. Childhood is always being rewired—what makes this rewiring so great? Media ecology has long expounded foundations for “the Great Rewiring” far deeper than Haidt’s formulation. The happy, wild and uncoddled childhood he recalls with nostalgia is the sombre subject of Neil Postman’s dire 1982 book The Disappearance of Childhood. Best known for Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman explained in Disappearance how the “high-watermark of childhood” between 1850-1950 had been totally rewired by telegraph and television. This entailed not just “the Gary Coleman phenomenon” of kids ever more like little adults, but even the stultified professionalism of little league baseball and other adult-supervised games; an indicator Haidt emphasizes himself in the book. The timeline is telling; the begining of Haidt’s rewiring is Postman’s end.

Haidt’s topic is actually “an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” and it is this epidemic—on which his charts centre—which is great, not the rewiring. Great or not, he tells us that this particular mental health crisis has arisen from four foundational harms. These are social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Any reader who has been paying attention to public discussion on “screen time” will find little new here.

The first two simply mean that there are a fixed number of hours in a day. More hours spent online means fewer hours for embodied play or hanging with friends or sleeping well. Attention fragmentation has been widely-understood since cognitive scientists Gazzaley and Rosen’s The Distracted Mind gave it gravitas in 2016. In a word: human’s can’t “multitask,” as endless context-switching ruins our ability to focus. (A question for another time is why we’re all happy to allow pharmacology to just slap a band-aid on this.) As for addiction, Haidt points to books like Stanford Professor B.J. Fogg’s 2002 text Persuasive Technology, and Nir Eyal’s 2014 book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. He explicitly ties books like these back to behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner. And… well actually that’s about as far as his analysis goes.

Skinner, of course, was the anti-free will antagonist central to Shoshanna Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism. She interrogates his thought deeply throughout the book. But unlike Zuboff, Haidt finds no reason for extended scrutiny of the business models which lay behind addiction-forming techniques. Surprisingly, he barely casts any moral judgment upon big tech at all. And, with a moment’s consideration of where such conversations often lead to, that may be a very good thing.

Don’t Look ‘em in the Eye!

Long contemplation of the ills of technology lends itself all-too-naturally to ruminations on totalitarian politics and science fiction dystopia.

To many intently-focused skeptics of techno-optimism or corporate marketing, the spectre of technology in our world sometimes grows into a Lovecraftian horror. Sustained efforts at elaborating it fully can overwhelm and paralyze the unprepared researcher. This is a hazard, for instance, in reading Zuboff’s book. It is too easy, in the attempt to take the threat seriously, to be driven too far, steering perhaps toward existential terror. Or to madness over 5G antennae or the very-real potential for invasions upon bodily and mental autonomy by micro-technologies and neural implants. Between all this and gene-splicing, technology today is just uncontroversially scary.

And in the effort to gain perspective, one’s imagination can easily drift back centuries or more: to Romantic revolts against Western industrialism or even religious injunctions against graven images. The technological condition of humanity—our very ability to externalize ourselves into our environment—is so total that every starting point in the narrative is arbitrary.

That, then, is the trick of this book’s success: the foundations Haidt provides are a shield against having to consider the bigger picture. He has given his readers a small collection of prominent and easily measurable side effects of a something larger only hinted at. Relative to that nebulous something so large that its proportions exceed all of us, his “Great Rewiring” is in fact a pip-squeak, sterilized of all that existential terror. The technological causation as he frames them are familiar and mundane. Clear, tangible and conquerable.

Baby Steps

Haidt asks for four foundational reforms: More unsupervised play and childhood independence, no smartphones before high-school (as a matter of parental policy), no social media before age sixteen, and phone-free schools (as a matter of government policy). A tall order from the human scale, yet all achievable by coordinated effort. Each could be very consequential and each should be done.

Meanwhile, those of us who would project deeper into the rewiring can only be aided by his activism.

Haidt’s book isn’t addressed to us, but it is for us. Haidt is addressing parents and policy-makers. These are all very busy people, and can hardly afford the time or the risks of contemplating these problems on top of the barely-manageable ones they already have and worry about. We’re all familiar, after all, with paralysis in the face of too many emergencies we can deal with, let alone those we can’t.

It is impossible to rally these powerful groups around such overwhelming and total situations as, say, the effects on cyberspace on embodiment and gender or the threat to free will imposed by the virtualisation of reality into the post-modern simulacra. You could never get official agreement on the causes. There is no longer any safe pop-science here to explain it well, as perhaps there might have been back when psychoanalysis (or Marshall McLuhan) was in vogue. Only we half-crazed Post-Rat millennial early-internet addicts are seriously grappling with these contemporary forms, as of yet.

But we must learn from, and build upon Haidt who is, right now, managing to encourage a great deal of real-world action by withholding any direct description of the Gorgon while directing and firing his battery of weapons toward its head.

Esoterica Cybernetica

Of course, the most interesting parts of Haidt’s book are the ones not summarized in most reviews or media appearances. They are the sections where, like alchemical script, visions of the larger scene do in fact shine out for those with eyes to see it.

Most obvious, of course, are constant the allusions to the “virtual world,” contrasted with the embodied world of the living. He constantly talks of flows and currents of information and culture, hinting constantly the post-human literature. Individual words also pique interest. Nothing feels good anymore for addicts—of cocaine or phones alike—because “the brain adapts to long periods of elevated dopamine by changing itself in a variety of ways to maintain homeostasis.”

That use of jargon is tantalizing for anyone thinking about developmental psychology in cybernetic terms. So too is his observation of the subtle re-branding of “social networks” to “social media platforms.” It’s a subtle nod to how the term “platform” evokes ideas of a stage for public performance. And surely his choice of the term “experience blockers” is intended to convey a very potent analogy.

All of these latent suggestions present potential hooks by which the energy he’s mobilized could later be pulled and directed. Of all the threads promising to unravel something larger, the most seductive for me are within the two chapters on religious experience—only one of which is clearly labelled as such.

Spirituality for Atheists

The chapter on “Spiritual Elevation and Degradation,” I found, is a feint for secular audiences unaware of the spiritual waters they’re already long-steeped in.