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I am, I have often said, a raging hypocrite when it comes to my relationship with technology. Since I began seriously thinking about it in my undergraduate studies, I have come to believe that much of our new technology is making us worse people. This is not an accidental feature, a quirk of use, a simple product of people using products badly. Instead, the tendencies baked into our devices foster our vices, and only a strong force can redirect the use of those devices away from these in-built tendencies.
I am, despite this, an active user of Twitter, or X (though I will never call it that). More than any other platform, in my use of Twitter I feel the exacting pressure of all the things we so often complain about: the outrage fostered by the algorithm that serves hot-button content and encourages our responses, the neurochemical thrill of a like or a retweet from a prominent account, the excitement of vigorous debate that keeps me looking at my phone far longer than I would like to admit. While I fancy myself a critic of technology, many of these criticisms arise because I count myself among its victims. For this reason I eagerly awaited Jonathan Haidt’s latest book, The Anxious Generation, which aims at explaining just how extensively the advent of smartphones and social media has harmed us and, most troublingly, our children. Like Meletus before the Athenian court, Haidt has arrived to tell us that he truly knows who, in all our political community, is corrupting the youth: not Socrates but Silicon Valley.
Haidt is best known for his work in “moral foundations theory,” which attempts to plumb the deep, brain-level origins of our moral intuitions and explain divergences between conservatives and liberals, the religious and the irreligious. This is, obviously, a contentious topic. In this most recent book, Haidt tackles a no less thorny project: What is the origin of our so-called mental health crisis? Young people today are experiencing exploding rates of mental illness, both professionally diagnosed and self-diagnosed, including skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression. Even more alarming, suicide rates among the young have climbed to new heights, reversing age-old wisdom that middle-aged men are at highest risk for suicide. While these trends appear to be affecting boys and girls differently, and having different effects among different age demographics, they are clear and constant, and the harm is apparent, despite attempts to hand-wave away the data.
Like Meletus before the Athenian court, Haidt has arrived to tell us that he truly knows who, in all our political community, is corrupting the youth: not Socrates but Silicon Valley.
This crisis, I would argue, is moral and spiritual as much as psychological, and the primary source of that crisis is, on Haidt’s account, quite clear: it’s the phones. Dramatic changes in the mental lives of our young people happened when we handed them all a portal into new waters, untried, untested, and without the navigation tools to see them through to safety. Worse than opening them up to any specific, immediate harm, we seem to have opened our children up to a long-term “rewiring” of their brains that has prepared them poorly for real-world, embodied living and has set them up for practical and emotional failure.
Before unpacking Haidt’s argument, I should confess that my reading of this book was something of an elaborate exercise in confirmation bias. The notion that the radically new devices—which put the world’s information at our fingertips in mobile form, gave us immediate stimulation and entertainment, and came with no pre-designed limits—would do something drastic to our mental lives is, to me, absolutely intuitive. Nevertheless, Haidt has a hefty body of skeptics waiting in the wing to dismiss his concerns as nothing more than warmed-over moral panic, no different from Luddism, which saw danger in looms, no different from those old fogies who opposed the television, no different from those who feared the obsolescence of the horse and buggy, and so on.
But this is a silly response to serious technological criticism. It strikes me as similar to someone seeing recent suicide statistics, which show that recorded suicide rates have never been higher than they have been in recent years and that suicides are rising among previously resilient younger demographics, and responding with “Well, people have always killed themselves,” rather than attempting to understand the source of the crisis. That things have been bad before, and that people have made mistaken predictions before, or have unnecessarily catastrophized before, is no excuse for indulging in thought-terminating clichés. Such thinking serves only to keep us from serious reflection on the issue at hand.
Haidt’s story unfolds, then, in several parts. In part 1 Haidt establishes the fact of the crisis, showing what studies support the idea that youth are suffering unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and more. In the second part Haidt provides “the backstory” to the introduction of phones: before smartphones were everywhere, there had already begun a decline of what he terms “play-based childhood,” a childhood characterized by free, roaming play with other young people in unstructured, often unsupervised environments. In part 3 Haidt highlights the harms of a “phone-based childhood,” which caused what he terms “the great rewiring,” the restructuring of children’s brains to depend on these flashy, addictive creations. Finally, in part 4 Haidt lays out his practical policy proposals: How exactly do we go about fixing the problem now that the floodgates are open? How do we solve what amounts to a “collective action problem,” where social pressures are compounded by each young person with a phone? Do we condemn our children to social exile, cut them off from the internet, and refuse to prepare them for the real world they must someday encounter?
Haidt’s argument is not merely correlational. The move from what Haidt calls “play-based childhood” to “phone-based childhood” didn’t just coincide with the rise in negative mental health outcomes; it caused it, or so he argues. Though Haidt has elsewhere conceded that someone may, at this juncture, remain rationally ambivalent about the true source of these problems, the evidence has sufficiently convinced him and his research assistants that he feels a causal argument can be made: early exposure and increased use of phones and social media, particularly during formative adolescent years, is causing measurable harm. No sufficiently convincing alternative hypothesis has been presented, Haidt explains, though he has asked for people to present alternatives.
In the lead-up to Socrates’s trial on the charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens, Socrates tells his friend Euthyphro that the charge against him must be taken seriously. What could be of greater importance, he says, than our young people and how they can be made the best they can be? If you think you know the source of some harm to the younger generation, you have an obligation to speak against it. But to claim to know what harms young people is, Socrates says, to claim by implication that you know what makes young people better. Though his work is not primarily positive, Haidt certainly thinks he knows one way that young people can be made better: through a revival of unstructured play. And, to his credit, Haidt explicitly identifies this “epidemic of mental illness” as not just a crisis of grey matter and neural pathways but a deeply spiritual problem. What is at risk in the mental life of our children is something deeper than mere chemistry.
But as a social scientist first, Haidt avoids stronger claims about virtue, about human good, about spiritual necessities. His book is thus useful, I would argue, but incomplete. A useful supplement, particularly for Haidt’s Christian readers, comes in the form of Samuel James’s recent book, Digital Liturgies, accompanied by a Substack of the same name. Building on James K.A. Smith’s work on cultural liturgies, James argues that our devices habituate in us a kind of liturgical life, though a wrongly directed one.
These liturgies build in us deep and reflexive habits. If you regularly participate in corporate worship, you will respond to certain prompts automatically. My graduate school advisor would often demonstrate this in large lecture classes: among a diverse student body, he would say, “I can identify your religious tradition without asking. Watch: Hail Mary, full of grace, the . . .” And as he watched a small number of students mouth “Lord is with thee,” he would say, “Aha! I have found the Catholics in the room.” He would often follow up with the Shema, or the Lord’s Prayer, to drive home that some things are baked into our nature by repeated action.
What is at risk in the mental life of our children is something deeper than mere chemistry.
In the case of our phones, the liturgies they cultivate drag us toward reflexive habits that, it should be obvious, are destructive to ordinary human health and flourishing. They capture our attention long past when we should have been sleeping. They drive us to check them relentlessly, to scroll endlessly, to engage in fruitless debate, to seek fruitless approval. These devices do these things to all of us, and it is rare to find a person who says they are happy with the relationship they have with their devices. If these things are harming us all, how much more are they harming the most vulnerable, the most developing, the most suggestable among us, our children?
Haidt helpfully recognizes that this is a problem that cannot be fully addressed through spreadsheets, regression tables, and psychological experiments. All the stripped-down, supposedly value-free social science in the world cannot solve what amounts to a “spiritual” crisis. To this end, Haidt devotes chapter 8, “Spiritual Elevation and Degradation,” to a consideration of how individuals are drawn closer to what he calls “divinity” or the transcendent. “Whether or not God exists,” he explains, “people simply do perceive some people, places, actions, and objects to be sacred, pure, and elevating; other people, places, actions, and objects are disgusting, impure, and degrading.” Haidt is quick to clarify that “I am an atheist, but I find that sometimes I need words and concepts from religion to understand the experience of life as a human being. This is one of those times.”
The question before us, then, is, “Does the phone-based life generally pull us upward [toward the divine] or downward [to the degraded]? If it is downward, then there is a cost even for those who are not anxious or depressed. If it is downward, then there is spiritual harm, for adults as well as for adolescents, even for those who think that their mental health is fine.” This notion of spiritual harm couples with a society-wide degradation. Haidt sides with those other moral theorists like Thomas Jefferson who, though skeptical about the divine as Christians profess belief in it, simultaneously profess belief in the necessity of some sort of elevating practice, something to draw individuals out of themselves and into consideration of others.
Though Haidt means something different by “spiritual harm” than I or other Christian critics of technology might, it is to his credit that he includes this chapter and the consideration that follows. Drawing on psychologist David DeSteno’s book How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, Haidt examines six “spiritual practices” that social psychologists agree impart some sort of health to the individual and their community. For instance, one of these is the practice of “embodiment.” We are, we should all be aware, physical beings, and thus our elevating practices ought to be embodied, often involving the whole person (think prostrations, the sign of the cross, or the consumption of the Eucharist in various Christian traditions). Haidt concludes that “humans are embodied; a phone-based life is not. Screens lead us to forget that our physical bodies matter.” Other “spiritual” practices that are undermined by our addiction to our phones are things like being “slow to anger, quick to forgive” and “finding awe in nature.”
Of course, given his personal and scholarly commitments, Haidt turns to a materialistic explanation at the end of the chapter. Pascal is correct, Haidt suggests, that humans have a “God-shaped hole” in their “heart”—and the explanation for this hole is evolutionary selection that drives individuals to find cohesion. The drive to seek the spiritual, the transcendent, is thus nothing more than a survival instinct. One wonders if Haidt, as an atheist, looks forward to the day when humankind has evolved past the need for this quirk of a survival instinct and substitutes more practical, more material, less superstitious grounds for social cohesion. In the meantime, like many others, Haidt seems content to embrace the social benefits of religion while undercutting the grounds for authentic belief in its teachings (something that Jefferson’s contemporary George Washington warned strongly against in his famous Farewell Address).
This chapter is the closest that Haidt comes to giving individual-level solutions to the problem of technology. The remainder of the book focuses on how to motivate collective action for healthier childhood, acknowledging that any one person or family fighting against the influence of tech and social media is the equivalent of attempting to drain the ocean with a bucket. But before I turn to consideration of his policy proposals, I would like to make a suggestion. Individual-level solutions compound to make possible the kind of collective decisions Haidt takes as essential. And those individual-level solutions may be made more solid if we pay greater attention than Haidt does to the issues of human good and human excellence I mentioned above. Is it possible, for example, to develop habits of personal character that dispose us to use technology well (which would imply using these technologies less)? Is it possible to cultivate, in other words, technological virtues? Work on this topic is being done on multiple avenues, both in secular scholarship (e.g., Technology and the Virtues by Shannon Vallor and Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues by Jared S. Colton and Steve Holmes) and in what we might call the Christian self-help genre.
One notable example of the latter is The Common Rule by Justin Whitmel Earley. By setting out a “rule of life” that is adaptable to any individual’s situation, Earley lays out a program that, while lofty as a goal for many of us, is nonetheless implementable at the small scale and through increasingly serious devotion to the practices (or, really, to God via the practices, such as “scripture before phone,” a daily habit to guide your mornings). Though writing from a Christian perspective and primarily for a Christian audience, Earley is aware, like Haidt, that these practices will be in some way beneficial for all practitioners (hence the notion that this “rule” is “common,” unlike, say, a rule of life for a devotee of a particular monastic order), and so he helpfully provides adapted forms of the habits for those who may be irreligious or questioning their faith. In any case, before we even approach a world where Haidt’s favoured policies are under consideration, each individual, each family can take steps to implement such habits insofar as they are able. (See also Andy Crouch’s The Tech-Wise Family for advice in a similar vein.)
Haidt’s list of policy proposals is one of the more controversial components of his book. Our current regulatory regime, he suggests, is woefully inadequate to deal with the problems we face. Among the solutions he suggests trying (“trying” being the operative word, because as he candidly admits, we aren’t sure at this point what, if anything, will stem the tide) is federal policy to make sixteen an age of “internet adulthood,” up from the current requirement of thirteen to agree to online terms of service. And this new age requirement would actually be enforced, unlike the current one. While some agree with Haidt in principle that delaying access to these technologies would be wise, they also balk at the suggestion that federal intervention is necessary. Concerns about online privacy and free speech are most commonly invoked, particularly by those with a libertarian bent.
It is clear, first, that as a matter of law and constitutional precedent, age restrictions are not out of the question. It is further clear to Haidt that, in the absence of a US federal policy, policies created by the UK or the EU or other nations may have strong influence over the behaviour of companies and corporations, who would rather comply with new age restrictions rather than lose a market. An interesting counterexample to this optimism, however, is the behaviour of certain pornographic websites in response to age-gate legislation in specific states. Rather than provide an avenue for their users to confirm their age, to prove that they aren’t children in other words, many of these sites have chosen to ban their services on IP addresses that flag as being within age-restricted jurisdictions. One can only imagine that these pornography companies anticipate or at least hope that banning their own website instead of complying with simple legislation will spark a wave of constituent backlash from those cut off from their supply of degrading material. One can only hope that they are wrong, and that such state- or local-level legislation is the first salvo of a much larger battle against the worst things the internet has to offer. That our children have easy and perpetual access to these materials is, I think it has been shown by these recent examples, a consequence of our lack of effort rather than an inevitable fact of modernity.
In sum, Haidt clearly has his finger on the pulse of the problems that beset our youth. Of course, the causal explanation is not singular. The phones alone did not cause all the problems with which parents and teachers wrestle today. The phones instead are part of a larger picture of evaporating embodied childhoods, replaced with amorphous, unhealthy electronic substitutes en masse faster than virtuous habits appropriate to those new devices or electronic spaces could develop. That Haidt’s story is incomplete is not a fatal flaw. It merely means that citizens who find something troubling in these pages should expand their reading to seek out comprehensive explanations and solutions for the difficult road ahead.
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press, 2024. 400 pp.
