Digging deeper into spiritual issues in screens culture

From tmatt's Jonathan Haidt interview: Waves of technology are altering young hearts and minds

Folks who have never worked in journalism would be amazed how many words an articulate expert can say during a 30-minute interview about a complicated subject.

Thus, producing a 700-word column about an interview of this kind is, in many ways, an exercise in deciding what NOT to write about. Trust me on this, since I have spent nearly 36 years writing a nationally syndicated column that — week after week — has to fit into that word length, plus or minus maybe 10 words.

In my “On Religion” column last week — “Jonathan Haidt: It's time for clergy to start worrying about smartphone culture” — I focused on what the author of “The Anxious Generation” had to say about the decisions faced by religious believers in the age of digital-screens culture. Even though I write a column that appears in mainstream news publications, I knew that many of my readers would be (to use the Rational Sheep mantra) parents, pastors, teachers and counselors. Here is a key byte of that column:

… (In) the smartphone age, clergy need to realize that the odds of making a spiritual connection have changed – radically. Young people who spend as many as 10 or more hours a day focusing on digital screens will find it all but impossible to listen to an adult talk about anything, especially in a religious sanctuary.

"As long as children have a phone-based childhood there is very little hope for their spiritual education," said Jonathan Haidt, author of a bestseller — "The Anxious Generation" — that has raised the heat in public debates about controlling or banning smartphones in schools.

"An essential precondition is to delay the phone-based life until the age of 18, I would say. Don't let them fall off into cyberspace, because once they do, it's going to be so spiritually degrading for the rest of their lives," he said, in a Zoom interview. "There's not much you can do in church if they are spending 10 hours a day outside of church on their phones." …

While Haidt's work has ignited debates among politicians, academics and high-tech entrepreneurs, reactions have been muted among religious leaders who are usually quick to spot threats to children. Then again, clergy may not be used to a self-avowed Jewish atheist issuing warnings about the "spiritual degradation" of young people.

Before I dig deeper into my interview with Haidt, allow me to offer a few words about some Rational Sheep “business.”

Even though this Substack project is now operating in “paid” mode, I am sending this follow-up Haidt interview post to all subscribers (“free” as well as “paid”) because in recent weeks I told my readers that this would be heading their way. My plan, at this point, is to keep sending “free” subscribers content on Mondays and Fridays, with posts heading to “paid” subscribers at midweek and on weekends.

Clicking the paid-mode button was, to be honest, kind of scary for me. To be honest, I am hoping to see enough pledges of support in the next few weeks to make it possible to carry on with this project in the next stage of my work. After six months in “free” mode, I am more committed than ever to writing about faith, family and the digital-screens culture in which we live.

OK, moving on. For me, the hardest decisions I made while writing about the Haidt interview were linked to two words that I thought would be hard to handle in the context of a short column written for mainstream readers.

Those two words were “degradation” and “dopamine.”

That first word made it into the column, but Haidt had much more to say on that topic in the interview (once again, see this earlier post about an After Babel feature: “Jonathan Haidt's warnings for spiritual leaders”).

Some readers may have been surprised that Haidt — a self-proclaimed Jewish atheist — included a chapter in “The Anxious Generation” focusing on the importance of spiritual health and, yes, the ties that bind inside religious communities.

With that in mind, here are a few chunks of my interview transcript (obviously edited for length and focus) on why this spiritual angle matters to him. Let me know if you spot typos in these transcript excerpts.

Let’s start with the recent changes in wider screens-culture world.

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HAIDT: "What seems to have happened gradually over several decades, and then suddenly after 2012, is that young people were sort of cast out into space, disconnected, floating in cyberspace. The kids who made it through are especially those who are locked into binding communities and religious communities are the prime example."

Researchers have found that it is "really the secular kids and the kids in progressive families, they're the ones who got washed out to sea, where kids from religious and conservative families, they're a little worse off. Everyone is affected, but they were not washed out to sea to the same degree.

"So, I think about the church, or any religious community -- I've done a lot with Jewish day schools. I think about it as a community, very focused on children, often around a school and a house of worship. Those are the two main institutions that will make up life … in a religious community. … I guess that it's really, school, house of worship and then family life. With respect to liberal kids, all three of those are less binding. For religious conservatives, all three are much more binding and constraining."

TMATT: Rational sheep has focused on “parents, pastors, teachers and counselors.” Haidt asked why I included "counselors." I said that I have tried to move this discussion directly into religious schools, as well as congregations. Many now have “counselors” on staff, or a telephone call way.

To be blunt, the pastoral-care elements of this crisis are impossible to avoid. However, I noted that many clergy seemed scared to address painful, obvious issues. I asked him to describe — from a clergy perspective — the key issues in this crisis.

HAIDT: "I would say distraction and degradation. The smartphone has transformed life for everyone. That transformation is especially damaging for children -- because you only get one childhood. You only get one chance to take your brain from a child's from to an adult form, so it's crucial that we get that transition right, that transition called puberty. …

“Smartphones interfere with that transition in many, many ways. There are some very simple and obvious ones, such as, if the brain is getting less sleep, less sunlight, less time in direct social interactions -- those (trends) will interfere. If the child is learning less, because they are very distracted -- half of American teen-agers say that they are online 'almost all the time.' That means that they are never fully present -- never, ever. They are always partly living in terms of what is happening on their posts, what's happening online. So, the distraction effects of that are overwhelming, especially with educational content.

"Then, I would say that there is a degradation effects are overwhelming, but most people haven't noticed. I am seeing, and I'm hoping that, religious communities will both notice it and be able to counteract it. But you can't counteract it if the kid still has the phone in that pocket -- the phone is that powerful."

TMATT: How is he defining “degradation”?

HAIDT: "I have tremendous respect for religion, for religious communities. I think we need religious communities. If we don't have religious communities, we end up making some other community quasi-religious and that often works out very badly.

“So, when I say spiritual 'degradation,' I am referring to a general sense that you find around the world that people can behave in a more elevated, noble, ethical way or a more degraded, carnal and selfish way. All of us can move up and down on this dimension (of life). Some people are instinctually high on this, even saints, or somehow closer to God, or somehow above us.

“At the bottom are people who spent all of their lives down in the lower levels. We see them as monsters, ultimately. But most of us are in the middle somewhere and we move up and down depending on various factors. For example, one of the simplest factors is, are we rushed? If we are under time pressure, we are not very generous, we don't listen to people, we don't have time for anyone else." …

"Since young people are spending nine out of 10 hours a day on their devices -- on average, just the average -- if you take out 10 hours a day from anyone's life, there isn't really any time left. That's pretty much all of it, other than the stuff that you have to be doing. So, just the subtraction of all time and attention means that we have a generation being raised that doesn't have time for other people -- offline, at least."

TMATT: How does this differ from the role that television played in many homes in the decades before the smartphone?

HAIDT: "Television was created by adults who worked for companies that could be sued for certain things. Whereas, what our children are being raised with now is much more addictive, targeted exclusively to them, created by people of all ages -- including by other children and teen-agers -- and these people have absolute immunity from any kind of punishment, not just for what they say and do, but for the platforms that use algorithms that tease certain kinds of things to (attract) your children. …  Smartphones and social media are so much more powerful than televisions ever could have been."

TMATT: That reference to “addiction” led to the ways in which screens culture shapes the brains of children (and adults). I mentioned this Nicholas Carr book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.”

At this point, the term “dopamine” entered the conversation. Many call it the “feel-good” hormone that offers a sense of pleasure. In this context, it’s also crucial that it gives people the motivation to do something over and over and over when they are feeling pleasure.

HAIDT: The key is when young people are using digital screens, in one way or another, the majority of the hours that they are awake.

"That 10-12 hours is using the most powerful learning technique known, which is behaviorist conditioning. Do an action, get a reward. If you do an action, you get a reward. Not every time, it's on a variable-ratio schedule. … That's the way you train a rat. That's the way you train a dog.

“So, an hour a day on TikTok is likely to be more influential than an hour a day in church, because in church you're just talking to people. … You don't have, like, a button that allows you to give them a little reward -- a reward, a little bit of dopamine."

TMATT: How is this process different for boys and girls?

HAIDT: "It's a very different trap. If you want to trap a girl, the way you do it is you offer them information about their social network -- who is dating who, who is angry at who, who is saying what about who. That's what the companies did, and they are very good at trapping girls and then girls can't get off these programs.

"Girls' lives are governed by social media much more than boys. … For boys it's a different story. They are not nearly so addicted to social media. For boys the addictions are video games and pornography. Even though most boys are not addicted, a lot are. …

“If you add porn and videogames, we are surely somewhere between 10 and 20%, and that's a horrific number of boys to lose. These are boys who will be spending five to 10 hours a day on videogames and pornography. That pushes out everything else in their lives -- even if those were not harmful.

“But they ARE harmful. They set up the brain to expect such high levels of dopamine that everything else is painfully boring -- especially church. Church or anything where you are sitting and listening. That is very, very hard for them to do. …

“It's not just attention span. It's a low level of stimulation. Boys, especially, need very high levels of stimulation. In fact, many members of Gen Z cannot watch one screen at a time -- it's too little stimulation. They literally have to have two screens going at the same time. This shows a brain whose dopamine circuits have been rewired to need much more stimulation to get to the normal level."

TMATT: How have video games changed in recent decades, other than the immersive graphics and the rise of online communities of linked players?

HAIDT: "As the games got better and better, more and more kids got addicted -- because what 'better' means is more engaging, more entertaining. A quantum leap, a gigantic increase, in engagement was as highspeed Internet came in. It wasn't common, in 2005 or 2007 -- you didn't have Internet speeds that allowed you to do multiplayer video games. But by 2010 to 2012, in that range, you did.

“The lives of boys have always had video games in them … The lives of boys were really transformed by much more engaging video games, especially the multiplayer games -- which are quite beautiful and amazing. All praise to them for creating something beautiful, but they have all kinds of tricks to keep boys online.

“The problem for pastoral care is pay a lot of attention to boys' dopamine circuits -- meaning boys who are taking in hours of high-stimulation content every day, they will find offline life to be PAINFULLY boring and you won't be able to get through to them as long as they are on video games and porn for much of the day."

"It's really disturbing what is happening. What this life online does to our kids, and it pulls them away from any kind of spiritual development -- it really drags them downward."

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Yes, I would welcome feedback from parents, pastors, teachers and counselors on all of that. But let me end with a final word from Haidt that is a direct challenge to the leaders of religious communities.

Let us attend. Haidt noted:

"Adolescent development needs to be guided by elders in their community. That's how you pass on a culture. That's how you shape a child to become an adult in that culture. Once you get a phone-based childhood, now there's very room for mentors of any kind -- offline. There's just no room. So, what they get, in essence, are mentors online who are chosen by an algorithm for their extremities."