Jonathan Haidt: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

JONATHAN HAIDT

Penguin/Allen Lane 2024

REVIEWED BY MARK SHORT

American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is best known for exploring the factors which contribute to the tensions and complexities of modern life. In The Righteous Mind he considered how moral disagreements arise not simply from contested facts but from diverse intuitions that go to the very nature of morality itself. In The Coddling of the American Mind (co-written with Greg Lukianoff) he lamented the rise of political polarisation and cancel in US universities.

His new book documents the alarming rise in mental illness amongst teenagers and young adults since 2010, especially females. Haidt contends that the blame lies with the deleterious impact of social media, with a secondary explanation being the continuation of overlyprotective parenting which has unnecessarily limited young people’s interaction with the physical world. “My central claim in this book is that these two trends – overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world – are the major reasons why children born after 1995 have become the anxious generation” p9 So why 2010? The internet and to some extent social media had been present before that date. However Haidt points to a number of innovations around that date which increased both the attractiveness of social media and its potential to be used as a means of social comparison. These included the introduction of the ‘like’ and ‘retweet’ buttons and the addition of a front-facing camera to smartphones, which is ideal for taking ‘selfies’. And why has the impact being worse on boys than girls?

Haidt points to girls’ higher vulnerability to social comparison and relational aggression, both of which are magnified by social media. For boys, the impacts tend to be different, and are seen in a tendency to withdraw from in-person engagement in favour of online gaming and pornography.

Since its release Haidt’s book has received much publicity and generally positive reviews. Where there has been pushback critics have argued that Haidt has confused correlation (increased use of social media coincided with deterioration in teen mental health) with causation (social media is responsible for the deterioration). Haidt is aware of this critique and responds by pointing to some experimental data and to the absence of any plausible explanation as to why mental health declined this much at this time.

There is of course a long history of blaming technological change for the problems of youth. It happened with Y and the internet; perhaps with the printing press as well. Nevertheless there is something about technology that simultaneously expresses our vocation as divine image bearers and our fallen-ness as sinful rebels. In his book The Life We’re Looking For Andy Crouch compares the promise of technology to the lure of alchemy – the aspiration for powers that would allow us to take the place of God. So the smartphone offers the promise of omnipresence and omniscience, but extracts a heavy price for this supposed privilege.

What is to be done about all this? Haidt makes a number of recommendations to legislators, parents and schools including raising the age of access to social media to 16 and developing schools that are both phone-free and conducive to unstructured unsupervised play. There is much wisdom here.

Of particular interest is a chapter called ‘Spiritual Elevation and Degradation’ where Haidt, who selfdescribes as a secular Jew, explores the potential of spiritual practices to elevate human well-being. These practices include shared embodied rituals, stillness and finding awe and nature. Haidt even references Pascal’s God-Shaped Hole, although he locates its origins in biological and cultural evolution rather than any divine design. “There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage. That has been true since the beginning of the age of mass media, but the garbage pump got 100 times more powerful in the 2010s.” p216

One must ask whether these spiritual practices and the promise they offer can ultimately be sustained in the absence of a commitment to divine design. Digital technology after all is thoroughly designed to enlist us as online consumers in the world of late modern capitalism.

Any resistance must begin with the conviction that we are created to know and be known rather than consume. As the Psalmist’s ancient wisdom reminds us “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” (Psalm 139:13-14. NIV)

Bishop Mark Short is Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn.