Ezra Klein had Jonathan Haidt to talk about the influence The Anxious Generation has had on school no-phone policies. Haidt is mostly right in his societal diagnosis, but I wish his ideas had a different messenger. Haidt is a fool, a boor, and a coward.
He’s a coward because underneath his innuendo about children losing a ‘coherent moral order’ is old-fashioned Bill Bennett conservatism: young people are fucked up because they weren’t taught good values. It can’t engage with the reality that people weight moral values differently, or have different opinions about how to express them. Taken to the extreme, only conservative people are given the agency to have their own moral stances–socially liberal people are brainwashed or “only doing what feels good.”
He’s a boor because he cannot help himself from bringing weird gender essentialist, heteronormative asides into his argument. There is no sense that he talked to young people about his ideas. In his world view, they are all damaged, maybe permanently. Why bother finding out what they think?
He’s a fool because he thinks the solutions to the problems he diagnoses are simple. Totalitarian age-verification systems are not a viable answer. The collateral damage would be tremendous, especially to repressed groups. We’ve decimated IRL social spaces for kids & teens and better age verification policies wouldn’t do a thing to make alternatives more accessible.
As the argument that I first encountered in Johann Hari’s book about depression goes, when mammalian environments are stimulating and social, we are not as attracted to quick dopamine buttons. The argle-bargle about morality is necessary for Haidt’s to explain how this generation of kids is different. It’s easier for him to conjure the specter of a zombie army of braindead amoral iPad kids than to confront the unique material conditions of the moment: lower birthrate, two income families, loss of recreational spaces, changed norms around childhood independence.
And despite all that I do think he’s more right than he’s wrong! It’s OK to consider how we are raising children right now, to compare them against the ideas from many wisdom traditions about how to live a good life, and to find it alarming. There is endless room for scientific debate about what something is and how it became that way, but the question of why it matters is always a values question.
I’m thinking about this a lot because I am preparing for the arrival of a child. The way I am wrapping my head around it is to think about positive interaction loops.
The oldest and most important positive loop is the secure attachment between parent and child. There are others, like between audience and performer or pupil and teacher. There are even non-human interaction loops, like the way that a cup and ball toy builds fine motor coordination. The things I’m looking for are that they provide true feedback (so, not like a modern videogame that adjusts its skill level down if you suck) and that the more interaction you give to them the more you walk away with (so not like Instagram, which takes your time and leaves you with nothing). I can’t see the future or understand how every parenting choice is going to affect my child, but I can tell which interaction looks are providing positive training or just wasting time. That’s enough to get started.
hammer & jack 