The riddle of social media’s children

Let me talk, if I may, about my emerging love-haidt relationship. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who has an “ethical leadership” chair at New York University’s business school, is inarguably one of the most important American intellectuals alive, and his new book The Anxious Generation is poised to become an absolutely decisive coup in political and social agenda-setting. Haidt’s new thesis is that electronic social media are “rewiring” the brains of young people and creating enormous amounts of observable mental illness in the highly networked parts of the world. If you’re a parent, this is a discussion you are already having; and if you’re a worried parent, and who isn’t, Haidt’s arguments aren’t likely to make you less worried.

As a childless newspaper columnist, I don’t have a lot of anecdotal colour to contribute to the Haidtian conversation we’re about to have. I don’t dare write too much that smacks of giving advice to 21st-century parents. What I can say is that I am suspicious of Haidt on a number of levels. First of all, the title “social psychologist” is, amid the smoking ruins of the scientific “replication crisis,” a red flag per se: too many charlatans of this species have already been allowed to make vast fortunes at the expense of a gullible public.

If Haidt has special expertise that wouldn’t pertain to any well-educated person, I wonder a little in what precise realm it lies. Read the second sentence of this article again: he’s a psychologist ... who teaches ethics ... at a business school? Note that he seems to have abandoned a prior career as an evolutionary biology pedlar, and the COVID pandemic wasn’t kind to his influential ideas about political conservatives being specially motivated by disgust and purity. Much of The Anxious Generation is instead devoted to trendy findings from “neuroscience” that it might be too kind to describe as “speculative.” (I’ll say it again until it’s conventional wisdom: a “neuroscientist” is somebody in a newly invented pseudo field who couldn’t get three inches into the previously established “-ology” for “neuro-.”)

These are my overwhelming prejudices against Haidt; and, in spite of all of them, I suspect somebody had to do what he is now doing, which is to make the strongest available case for social media as a historical impactor on social arrangements and child development. Economist/podcaster Tyler Cowen has published a delightfully adversarial interview with Haidt that provides a relatively fast way of boning up on the Haidt Crusade. Cowen belongs to my pro-innovation, techno-optimist, libertarian tribe: we both feel positive panic at the prospect of conservative-flavoured state restrictions on media, which are at the heart of the Haidt agenda.

But reading the interview makes me somewhat more pro-haidt than I would otherwise be (i.e., not one tiny little bit). On a basic level, Cowen doesn’t, by any means, win the impromptu debate by a knockout — even though he is one of the most formidable debaters alive. Haidt has four key reforms he would like to see implemented politically: “No smartphones before high school; no social media before age 16; phone-free schools; far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.”

This is a fairly limited, gentle agenda for school design and other policies, and although I believe Haidt’s talk of “rewiring brains” is mostly ignorable BS, none of his age-limitation rules are incompatible with a free society, and none bear on adults, except in their capacity as teachers and parents.

The “rewiring” talk isn’t BS because it’s necessarily untrue, mind you. Haidt, like Jordan Peterson, is another latter-day Marshall Mcluhan — a boundary-defying celebrity intellectual who strategically turns speculation into assertion, and forces us, for better or worse, to re-examine our beliefs. Mcluhan preached that new forms of media like movable type or radio do drive neurological change, that they cause genuine warp-speed human evolution — but his attitude, unlike Haidt’s, was that these changes are certain to happen, and that arguing against them was like arguing with the clouds in favour of a sunny day. The children who seem “addicted” to social media are implicitly preparing to live in a world that has social media. They are natives of the future, and we adults are just observers of it.

But I suspect we do have a short-term social or anthropological problem with screens replacing face-toface interactions in childhood. (If I had a kid, I’d certainly insist on participation in some team sport. This is the entirety of this column’s “unsolicited advice to parents” section.) Respect for human biology and nature have to be consciously incorporated into our use of technology.

If you read the Cowenhaidt disputation (and this is the precise historical term for what they are up to), you come to realize that Cowen is saying, over and over again: “Don’t worry so much, man! Humans adapt to new media technology; that’s how we extract the material benefits of progress!” And Haidt is saying, over and over again: “Yeah, and I’m telling you how we need to adapt!”

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THEY ARE NATIVES OF THE FUTURE AND WE ADULTS ARE JUST OBSERVERS OF IT.