A crucial, defining smartphone-era essay

Flashback: Please read Jonathan Haidt's early post on changes that began with young liberal women

The first time that I read this Jonathan Haidt essay back in 2023, I was thinking about starting a post-GetReligion website, but I really didn’t know what it would be about.

But I knew that this was important. I also know that it was important that it was written by Jonathan Haidt, a secular Jew on the faculty of New York University. I knew that it was important that it WAS NOT written by someone linked to a conservative think tank or religious group.

The headline: “Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest.”

Because this material was written by Haidt, I knew that there was an outside chance that the word “liberal” in that headline would be interpreted in cultural terms instead of many readers automatically assuming that he was talking about mere politics.

It’s also important that the drama in this piece starts at the very start of the smartphone era, which helps Haidt demonstrate that there were troubling trends in the culture that predated the tsunami caused by the 2007 introduction of the iPhone. This essay begins with trends that experts were already spotting between 2011 and 2013, specifically on college campuses. On my own timeline, that’s right at the end of my two decades of work in college classrooms.

To be specific, this was the start on an era in which many college students started attacking the First Amendment, while — as Haidt wrote — “pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them.”

I saved a copy of this essay, because I knew that it was important. Recently, Haidt reposted the link to this essay at After Babel — which helped me realize that I needed to urge Rational Sheep readers to read it.

Why? This is, in many ways, the overture to so many issues that pastors, parents, teachers and counselors are facing now — from smartphones to mental health, from the failure of young adults to form marriages to the global fertility crisis.

A key term in this piece is “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,” or CBT. In this discussion, a key player is Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression). That’s a pro-First Amendment group that supports what call “old liberalism.”

Here is a key passage, connecting the campus trends to what Haidt and Lukianoff call “reverse CBT.”

Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. …

The fall of 2015 marked the beginning of a period of protests and high-profile conflicts on campus that led many or most universities to implement policies that embedded this new way of thinking into campus culture with administrative expansions such as “bias response teams” to investigate reports of “microaggressions.” Surveys began to show that most students and professors felt that they had to self-censor. The phrase “walking on eggshells” became common. Trust in higher ed plummeted, along with the joy of intellectual discovery and sense of goodwill that had marked university life throughout my career.

Now, here is the next act in this drama: