Jonathan Haidt's warnings for spiritual leaders

Here's your first reading assignment: "On The Degrading Effects of Life Online"

It’s time for a new semester at New York University, which means Jonathan Haidt has (for the most part) finished his summer-long blitz of public appearances and media gigs promoting “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”

The book went straight to the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list and, to say the least, Haidt has been busy. If you want to swim in some of the raging debates about this bestseller, dive into this Google search — with roughly 129,000 articles, videos and commentaries linked to Haidt’s work.

At the same time, there has been a dramatic surge in public officials discussing ways to control or even ban the use of smartphones in schools. And we are not talking about legislation backed by believers in the Bible Belt. This issue is now on the political front burner in places like California and New York (CLICK HERE for news coverage of these efforts).

Several months ago, Haidt’s staff promised to find me an interview slot once the summer media tour was over. They managed to do that, slipping me into the small gap before the start of his fall classes as NYU’s Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership.

I will begin transcribing parts of that interview today, while preparing to write this week’s national “On Religion” column. Once that is done, I will post a Rational Sheep piece that includes both the column and additional thoughts from Haidt. It was an interesting conversation, seeking common ground between his research and my experiences in Christian higher education (including the Denver Seminary experiment in the early 1990s), religion-beat journalism and church life

Haidt describes himself as an atheist who lives and works in the context of Jewish culture, including education. At the same time, “The Anxious Generation” includes a chapter — “Spiritual Elevation and Degradation” that openly addresses the impact of digital-screens addictions on matters of faith and spirituality.

Please hang in there with me as I work to get the interview ready for public use. I told him that the national column would come first. However, let me offer two glimpses of the issues we discussed.

First, Haidt and his team are very concerned about the breakdown of community life — the ties that bind — in the age of smartphones. They have concluded that children raised in strong religious communities are faring better than those living in intensely secular environments.

Second, we discussed what preachers and religious educators need to know about the impact of digital screens on the young. That’s complex territory, but — translated into blunt English — prepare for sobering thoughts about short attention spans, at the very least. Let’s say that a minister, in the pulpit, has the attention (theoretically speaking) of children and teens for about 20 minutes a week. How does that number compare with their use of social-media apps? You get the picture.

In the meantime, let me suggest that Rational Sheep readers read two things. First, there is this candid review of the book from Emily Harrison in her Dear Christian Parent newsletter here at Substack. Harrison offers quite a bit of background about other sources as well, since more than a few authors — serving as “canaries in the coal mine” — have been sounding alarms for a decade or more.

Second, Haidt suggested that readers concerned about the spiritual impact of screen-culture start with this post at his team’s After Babel website: “On The Degrading Effects of Life Online — How social media makes us worse people.” This is a two-part feature with material by Haidt and the London-based writer Freya India, whose work (“That kind of scary stage beyond selfies,” for example) I have perviously noted here at Rational Sheep.

But here are a few chunks of what Haidt had to say. Writing about his experiences during a London visit, he offered direct quotes from Gen Z young people, drawn from a feature in The Times: “What British teenagers are really up to on their smartphones.”

Every social media app is toxic. There are a lot of nasty people on there — and nasty stuff. The TikTok For You page and Instagram Reels are the worst for showing really gruesome videos, like people getting seriously hurt or their arm being cut off. (Charley, age 17).

It’s hard to tell what’s real on social media, because you can so easily fake stuff now. Sometimes my friends show me stuff they’ve seen on Discord: people being hurt, injured or getting run over (George, 16).

When I was 11 or 12 years old, my friends and I would go on this weird trending thing called Omegle [a random online chat service], where you see videos of arbitrary people, and it could be a guy masturbating. We’d laugh about it, but now that I’m a bit older I look back and am like, that is not normal. You could be eight years old and go on Omegle and nobody would know (Sienna, 15).

I was talking to people online when I was ten. If I could go back in time and change anything, I would change that. (Jasmin, 15)

Dealing with the nuts and bolts of technology in the past, as well as the present, Haidt added:

When I was a child in the 1970s, there was a lot of concern about sex and violence on television. Is social media any worse than that? Yes, emphatically yes, for two reasons. First, the sex and violence on TV were limited and policed before being put on the air. There were rating systems, there were adults in charge, and there were companies against whom regulators or parents could take action if they messed up and showed pornography or beheadings to 9-year-olds. 

Social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube use a very different model: Anyone can post anything, from an anonymous unverified account, and then AI (supplemented by thousands of workers in developing nations) tries to take down some percentage of the most awful stuff. The heads of these companies assure us that they take down billions of pieces of harmful content each year, but that just indicates the mind-boggling size of the problem. Even if they could magically catch 99% of the stuff, our kids would still be getting sent beheading videos in choir practice. Oh, and in the U.S., thanks to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, we parents can’t do anything about it. The companies have been granted immunity from lawsuits for what they show to our children, even underage users (under 13) because the companies have also been granted freedom from any duty to check or verify ages. 

The spiritual impact of this digital diet? Haidt added:

Children can’t unsee the things they are exposed to, but over time, as with all exposure therapy, they can habituate. They can stop feeling horror. They can come to see it as just another form of entertainment. Back when I studied moral disgust, I was drawn to a quote from the ethicist Leon Kass:  “Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.” 

Does this have any implications for parents, pastors, teachers and counselors? I think the answer is rather obvious.

In her half of the package, India describes the moral impact of screen-culture lives in terms that will be familiar to anyone who knows a thing or two about the “seven deadly sins” and temptations linked to them.

In ancient forms of Christianity, such as Eastern Orthodoxy, believers are urged to wrestle with the uncontrolled desires known as the “passions.” It’s easy to see that India is talking about some of the same spiritual issues:

… I’m becoming convinced that our most pressing concern isn’t that social media makes us feel worse about ourselves. It’s that social media makes us worse people.

Social comparison, for example. This is one of the main problems people mention when talking about the harms of social media. Constantly comparing our beauty, our success, our lifestyle, our popularity, to infinite streams of other people makes us feel anxious and inadequate, yes. But I also think it makes us resentful. Bitter. Competitive. Quietly wishing for others to fail. We talk constantly about what like, follow and comment metrics do to our self-esteem — but don’t they also make us so shallow? We hate when people judge us by numbers on a screen, but aren’t we doing it all the time, to everyone else, even subconsciously? We talk endlessly about how editing apps and filters give girls and young women anxiety and body dysmorphia, which is important, but never about how they make us competitive, envious, vain. Sometimes it’s not my self-esteem I’m worried about. It’s who I become when I obsess over my profile and image and what everyone else is doing. 

But social-media users can learn to control these weaponized temptations, right? Maybe so, to some degree. But here are some of the Rational Sheep questions I keep raising:

* How can believers, young and old, wrestle with these digital passions without help from the leaders of their spiritual communities?

* If religious congregations and schools will not address these spiritual issues head on, then who will? The secular media?

* At what point will seminary leaders, to be specific, realize that it’s next to impossible for congregations to wrestle with life-and-death issues of this kind without the permission (at the very least) of pastors? Yes, I am referring to spiritual death and, in some cases, physical death.

Let’s end this installment with one final word from India:

… Actually, I’m losing hope for people taking accountability because all this has accelerated so much and so fast that we can’t seem to see what it’s doing to us, let alone make better choices. Having a camera roll full of thousands of selfies is now completely normal. So is checking how many likes your tweet has while someone is talking to you. So is swiping through human beings like you’re on Amazon. Most of us do things like this sometimes and we feel that it’s weird, we know it’s a bit bleak, but more and more people don’t seem to even see a problem. They spend five hours a week taking selfies and don’t see it as vanity. They talk about people’s follower counts like it’s a measure of worth without a thought of what’s becoming of them. They are so obsessed with their digital reputation they can’t see how they are degrading their real life one for it. They can point to all the ways social media is killing their mental health but never their humility. And so many of us delude ourselves that these platforms are harmless and light-hearted, all while we can feel them destroying us on the inside. All while we are becoming steadily more self-absorbed, in ways that play out in our real relationships and I think eat away at us and our respect for ourselves. Maybe that funny feeling we get from social media isn’t always anxiety. Maybe sometimes that feeling is shame.

Oh well! We’re having fun, right? We’re entertained! We’re all more connected, apparently. But who said I want to be connected to people like this? I don’t even feel connected to myself when I behave this way.

Yes, can you say “sin”?

That isn’t a common word in the social sciences, but I think we can agree that it’s relevant in this material from Haidt and India. By all means, Read. It. All.

I will now go back to working on the “On Religion” conversation with Haidt. Hang in there.

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