Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, puts forward a well-supported thesis that the potent mix of ubiquity of smart phones, and relentless social media saturation have significantly contributed to the decline in wellbeing for adolescents, and the wider population at large.
Haidt hones in on the period of 2010-2015 and argues that it was largely due to these two factors that this period heralded a significant decline in psychological wellbeing among adolescents, especially adolescent girls. He terms this group-level phenomenon as "The Great Rewiring" within which “...social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity, and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast." This in turn, significantly impacted levels of depression and anxiety within adolescents.
In Chapter Eight, he reflects on the ways in which this new normal (within the Anglosphere at least) is causing spiritual degradation. Haidt, a self-described atheist, defines spirituality in terms of both the divine, but also concepts that are not necessarily divinely-rooted, such as sanctity and purity. For the sake of ease it could be said that divinity of those who believe in God centers around their relationship to Him, while for those who do not, divinity pertains to their spiritual self.
Haidt outlines six spiritual practices that have been negatively impacted by smart phone and social media use.
Haidt cites Emil Durkheim’s “collective effervescence,” a term used to describe the collective phenomenon of an energized state of belonging brought on by humans acting in unison. Be it Christians singing hymns, Muslims circulating the Kaaba, or even protestors chanting together, Haidt points out that they occur in real life and between bodies of flesh and blood, rather than within the virtual world.
There is also affordance to sanctity within time, place, and within objects; this is contrasted with the virtual world within which, according to Haidt, “everything collapses into an undifferentiated blur…these is no consensual structuring of time, space, or objects around which people can use their ancient programming for sacredness to religious or quasi-religious communities. Everything is available to every individual, all the time, with little or no effort”.
Drawing back again to Durkheim, Haidt sees this as a space that foments anomie. (The work of philosopher Charles Taylor would however argue that this process of desacralization began long before smartphones, and has been developing since the Reformation.)
Haidt cites changes in day to day life that move away from the real, or from embodiment. When Christians kneel in prayer, or when Jews “daven” – a form of prayer which is done out loud while the praying one rocks in a certain way, embodiment can be said to occur. A similar movement to the daven is also sometimes witnessed which Muslims recite the Quran. Such acts of communal movement promote synchrony, which is believed to aid groups in forming stronger bonds. Haidt broadens this concept and proposes that even physical sports promote this. In Haidt’s word, “humans are embodied; a phone-based life is not. Screens lead us to forget that our physical bodies matter.”
Stillness and focus also play important roles in connection to self and other. Mindfulness meditation is the most in vogue, but not the exclusive, expression of this. Passive and spontaneous moments of quietness also serve a purpose. Passive moments of staring, thinking, and holding our attention on a flow of aimless thought, or the flow of the world around us, occur less often as the moments that would have once hosted these instances are instead filled with phone use.
“In a phone-based life, we are exposed to an extraordinary amount of content, much of it chosen by algorithms and pushed to use via notifications that interrupt whatever we were doing.” Within Haidt’s words here is a reminder that what we consume on our phones is not neutral or by chance, but is being shaped increasingly by human decision making, or AI, rather than by our own deliberation. Whether it is humans or AI who are computing and tinkering with the algorithms, the equation is serving a function which might not be in our best interests.
Haidt puts forward the importance of losing the self, and embracing something greater than the self’s narrowness. He points to research which shows this can occur when praying, meditating, or during psychedelic experiences.
At the heart of this is the moral emotion of awe; when felt, it is believed this emotion leads us to be taken aback by something much greater than us, a state that shrinks the ego. While our sense of ego is diminished, we feel more interdependent and connected to people and forces around us. Contrasting this, social media seems to be centered on the self; who are you? What do you like? What do you think? Who do you follow? All interspersed with invitations to spend money on products and experiences, invitations that are increasingly personalized so as to be most persuasive to you.
“Social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world’s wisdom traditions: Think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgmental, boastful, and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers.”
Haidt cites the Bible’s “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged,” the Torah’s “Love your neighbor as yourself,” Seng-ts’an’s “Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear,” while he might have added Al-Ghazālī’s “the hypocrite looks for faults, the believer for excuses.” Within most moral traditions is the idea of not rushing to judgement, being kind in interpretation, and generous in forgiving. According to Haidt, “Social media trains us to do the opposite. It encourages us to make rapid public judgements with little concern for the humanity of those we criticize.” It invites judgement without consideration or contextualization, with an apparent skewing towards shaming.
Haidt cites Psalm 19’s “The heavens are telling of the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork”; the Quran echoes this sentiment with the “heavens, the earth, and all that is within them give glory to Him.” There are two important facets to awe: witnessing something vast, and it being something that you cannot subsume within an existing mental structure. It evokes pleasure and something of fear, given its power, whether expressed or latent.
Witnessing the beauty of nature is among the means that this emotion is experienced; I remember my own feeling of sheer awe on looking up at the night sky, while in Galway on the west coast of Ireland, and seeing the abundance of stars that make up the Milky Way for the first time. These are moments that typically draw expressions such as “glory be to God.”.Awe is not necessarily restricted to the religious, though, with devout atheist Richard Dawkins speaking of a feeling of “awed wonder” when taking in the natural world’s beauty.
Haidt concedes that smartphones can evoke feelings of awe, though, for example, through watching awe-inspiring videos. However, he warns that “phones drown us in quantity while reducing quality.” One video might evoke a positive emotion, but it will likely be quickly followed with something that evokes anger, sadness, or indifference. This level of break-speed changes in emotional valence is not typical of the non-virtual world, but seems to be a theme within the virtual one.
Haidt’s reflections are an interesting invitation to consider how smartphones and social media might be impacting our spiritual self, and our relationship with divinity or spirituality.
References
Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation. London: Penguin Press.
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