Haidt Anxiety
The Great Exaggeration part one
We do love a Great. The Great War was the biggest the world had ever seen, Mao’s Great Leap Forward was certainly a great leap though anywhere but forward, Alexander the Great created a Hellenic empire that stretched from the Balkans to the Indus, taking in Egypt along the way. Which was an achievement.
More recently however there has been a proliferation of questionable Greats. We’ve had the conspiracist-created Great Replacement, the conspiracist-inciting Great Reset and now the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt brings us the Great Rewiring. And to judge by professor Haidt’s media ubiquity in the weeks since the publication of his new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, this one has captured the current mood.
As summarised by an admirer the book “makes an urgent argument that smartphones and social media are the root cause of an epidemic of mental health problems afflicting young people”. This epidemic has an originating date – 2010 – which was when the new i-Phone was introduced featuring a forward-facing camera (though selfie sticks had allowed people to take photos of themselves for years before that).
The book has been absurdly well received mostly by reviewers and writers who will have had no time to examine in detail the basis for its argument. The reception is well summed up by the blurb provided by a Simon Ings in the Spectator. Haidt, he writes provides “robust scientific evidence for what we've all come to assume is true . . . it's the sheer scale of harm depicted here that should galvanise us”.
There is little more satisfying than when science appears to confirm “what we’ve all come to assume is true”. And little that is more dangerous. In an editorial in the Sunday Times it was case closed. “Few would argue with the overall thrust of this analysis”, it pronounced, “The question is what to do about it”. People who I like took to podcasts to discuss the issue with other people I like, and always starting from the assumption that Haidt was Right. All that was left was to work out just how much phone banning to do.
At least this is a spasm happening outside the usual culture wars tramlines. Anxious liberal parents are experiencing it in much the same way as angry conservative ones. Since no post of mine would be complete without referencing the National Conservatives, Tory MP Miriam Cates addressing their latest beanfeast in Brussels, stated that “the average child receives 237 notifications a day - that's a focus busting dopamine hit every 4 minutes of waking time”.
The study this claim is based on is available here:
And proves the dangers of politicians let loose on stats. It was a relatively small study of American 11-17 year olds and showed just over half of participants received 237 or more notifications per day. That is not “the average child” and 237 is not the average number of notifications. Oh well, her point could stand in any case. After all, it’s what we all assume.