Latest / Language of God / 167. Jonathan Haidt & Francis Collins | Technology, Mental Health, & the Role of Faith

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167. Jonathan Haidt & Francis Collins | Technology, Mental Health, & the Role of Faith · Language of God

• 0:00
  Music.
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  You know, after writing seven chapters, laying out in horrible detail the devastation
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  of our kids, I was almost done with the book. And I was, you know, on deadline.
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  I was behind deadline. I should finish up the book.
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  But I felt like, you know, I've said all this stuff about kids,
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  but there's like so much else going on.
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  And so I just took one chapter to say what's happening to adults.
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  And the organization that came out, I don't remember how I did this,
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  but suddenly it occurred to me, wait, the unifying principle here really is
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  spiritual wisdom, spiritual practices.
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  And I kind of made a list of like, here's all the ways that a phone-based life
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  for an adult blocks spiritual progress.
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  Music.
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  Welcome to Language of God. I'm your host, Jim Stump.
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  But only for a minute on this episode, I'm passing host duties off today to
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  the very capable hands and mellifluous voice of Francis Collins.
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  Most of you will know that Francis Collins was the founder of BioLogos about
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  15 years ago now, and that he had to leave the organization to become the director
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  of the National Institutes of Health.
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  He also wrote the book, The Language of God, from which we took the title of this podcast.
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  So it's all very appropriate for us to hand the reins over, even more so because
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  our guest for today's episode is the well-known social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt.
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  Haidt first came onto my radar with his book, The Righteous Mind,
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  Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
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  It's been a very influential book in showing how the arguments in society between
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  groups are less about the reasons that are given.
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  Than about more deep-seated moral values.
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  This is important for anyone to understand, but given the work we do at BioLogos,
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  it's been really relevant and challenging for us to consider.
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  Francis Collins has a new book himself coming out this fall,
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  which draws on some of Haidt's work in this regard, and they talk about that in this conversation.
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  Also, Haidt isn't himself a Christian, but he is friendly toward faith and understands
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  the importance of religions for counteracting some of the more detrimental trends in society.
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  In particular, he too has a new book that's just coming out called The Anxious
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  Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
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  It's primarily about social media and the demonstrable harms it causes to young people.
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  Haidt and Collins talk about that and what religion has to offer.
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  And Francis does his best to get Haidt to more seriously consider religion for himself.
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  And Haidt does his best to get Francis to think a little more about the nature
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  of scientific rationality.
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  They both throughout exhibit curiosity and graciousness in their conversation,
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  which makes it a pleasure to listen to.
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  Let's get to the conversation between Francis Collins and Jonathan Haidt.
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  Hello jonathan heights wonderful to see you and to have a chance to chat with
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  you in this biologos podcast,
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  I've been a fan of your writings for quite a while, and it's really a privilege
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  to have a chance to talk with you about the work that you're about to put out
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  in just about a week, a new book called The Anxious Generation,
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  something that I think a lot of the public is going to want to look at carefully
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  because it has a lot of insights about what's happening, particularly to youth
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  at this moment where we're all kind of worried about the kids.
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  So we're going to get to that.
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  But first, maybe we could help people who are listening who don't already know
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  you to know something about your trajectory that got you to this point.
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  You're a social scientist.
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  You've written a bunch of other things in the past. I guess I look back a bit
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  at your pathway and notice that back in the days where you were beginning to
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  define your area of greatest interest,
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  you seemed interested in something called moral foundations theory.
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  Say a bit more about that. Again, welcome to this podcast.
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  Okay, well, thanks so much, Francis. I'm a big fan of the human genome and of
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  your service to the country in so many ways.
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  And so, yes, I'm a social psychologist who studies morality.
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  I picked my topic when I was in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania
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  in the late 80s, early 90s. Morality and culture.
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  Morality and emotion and how they vary across cultures.
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  What was so fascinating to me was, you know, whenever you find something that
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  appears in all societies, but in somewhat different form, but yet with a lot of overlap,
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  As a psychologist, you've got to say, like, wow, there's something really interesting
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  going on here. There must be something in the brain, something in evolution that makes us do this.
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  So language is the quintessential example.
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  You know, clearly it's innate. It's part of our nature. But yet it varies.
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  And then there's a lot of research on how that works.
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  And, you know, religion is similar, too. You know, everyone has gods,
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  but the gods are different. Worship is different, but yet similar.
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  And morality is that way, too. and a lot of people were proposing,
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  oh, morality must be like language and there's an unconscious grammar,
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  there's universal grammar of morality.
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  But I actually, I was always a fan of David Hume, the philosopher David Hume,
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  who said, reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never
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  pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
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  In other words, our emotions our
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  gut feelings our intuitions they happen quickly
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  they're powerful and then they drive our reasoning
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  that was just that was really clear to me in graduate school we
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  can never see this in ourselves but boy we see it in everybody else right everybody
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  else is making up post-hoc reasons to defend whatever ridiculous position they
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  took in the first place so so as i was trying to say okay i've got this theory
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  about how you know intuitions drive morality moral judgment judgment,
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  what are the intuitions?
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  And so then I was looking around the world and looking at all the theories of
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  different theories of how morality varies.
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  And I could just kind of put them all together and said, for which ones do we
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  have the best evolutionary story?
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  So that's what we did. This was work with Craig Joseph and Jesse Grimm.
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  And I was a graduate postdoc under Richard Schwader at the University of Chicago,
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  a brilliant cultural anthropologist.
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  So we were drawing on his work very much. In any case, what we came up with
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  is that there are originally, we said, five best foundations for being the taste
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  buds of the moral sense, and they are care, fairness, loyalty.
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  Authority, and purity or sanctity.
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  And then more recently, we've added liberty, and I think property or ownership
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  also. You see that in other animals as well about territory.
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  So, there are a whole bunch of different moral foundations, but there are six
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  that we've studied the most. We'll be right back.
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  Yeah, those are a very helpful way to organize this whole concept of moral foundations.
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  Of course, believers, and we're going to come to that in a bit here in terms
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  of how does this fit together with people of faith.
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  Many of the people listening to this Biologos podcast are of that mindset.
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  They might be inclined to say, well, what about that first chapter of C.S.
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  Lewis's book called Mere Christianity, which is entitled Right and Wrong as
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  a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe?
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  Well, maybe that's something we can agree on, but exactly what the clue is pointing to.
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  Right, right. Well, tell me, you know, I think I didn't get right.
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  I read part of that first chapter many years ago. Tell me what the clue is.
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  I'm sure your listeners will know this, but please tell me exactly what that is.
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  Let's see. Let's see whether, you know, how I would take that as a naturalist.
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  Just to be clear, I was raised Jewish.
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  I'm not a believer. I'm secular. secular. I belong to a synagogue that's relevant,
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  that I believe very much in the importance of religious communities.
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  And I'm very much a fan of religion. That kind of differentiates me from the
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  new atheists. I had a lot of battles with them.
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  But please tell me, what exactly did Lewis say about that in that first chapter?
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  Oh, he makes the case, which is not entirely original with him,
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  but he was very good at portraying it in fairly straightforward terms.
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  That when you see a child at a birthday party somehow complaining because that
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  other child got more cake than they did. And they say it's not fair.
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  Where does this idea come from, that there should be such a thing as fairness?
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  Lewis goes through many other simple examples of how we as basically all kinds
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  of humanity that we know anything about down through history have had this notion
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  that there is something called good and there's something called evil, and we are called,
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  despite ourselves to try to do the
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  good things and if we actually break that
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  rule which he even calls a law then we find excuses to say well i was tired
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  or you know that person wasn't very nice to me or that simply proves that we
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  believe that we should have been good or we wouldn't need an excuse nobody says
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  i don't care about your idea of good and evil these very few people do unless
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  they're really a sociopath.
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  So Lewis's argument would be, that's interesting. Now, he didn't have the full
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  bore experience of the way in which psychology,
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  and particularly evolutionary psychology, has provided interesting insights
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  to that for things like kin selection,
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  reciprocal altruism, maybe group selection, which continues to be a hot topic.
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  He would instead say, if you were looking for some indication,
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  A creator who cared about human beings.
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  Wouldn't that be an interesting sign that you find within your own heart this
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  somewhat inexplicable calling to do things that are unselfish when you want
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  to be selfish? And maybe we should pay attention.
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  Hmm. Hmm. Yes. So, I think where that gets at is an aspect of human experience that we do feel this.
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  We feel as though it's a force, it's a calling, it's not our decision or our
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  choice, and it feels like it has power over us.
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  And so, I'm reminded instantly of two things. One is Immanuel Kant's famous
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  line, I believe it's something like, two things inspire awe,
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  the starry sky above and the moral law within. That's exactly right.
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  Or what he basically said is, it's actually from society, but we perceive society
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  as God, that God is actually society.
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  And that when we come together and we create a community,
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  especially if we bind ourselves together around beliefs or ways of living,
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  and I would say especially around sacred objects, people, times,
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  places, something happens.
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  Happens, we form a community.
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  In The Righteous Mind, I called it a moral matrix. We form a moral matrix.
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  In the movie The Matrix, in the novel Neuromancer, William Gibson says,
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  the matrix is a consensual hallucination.
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  That's what we're all living. We're all living in a consensual hallucination,
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  thank God, because life would be impossible if we couldn't imagine something
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  together and then live in it together.
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  That's fascinating. So that's my naturalist explanation of Louis's observation.
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  And I think, yeah, this kind of comes down to your priors, doesn't it?
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  Yes. Starting with a naturalist perspective, particularly if it's full-born
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  metaphysical naturalism, you're going to have a hard time saying that calling
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  is actually coming from God because you Google that out at the start.
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  That's right. when it opens one's mind to the possibility that it might actually
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  be God, that's an interesting set of explorations that many of us,
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  I started out as an atheist, so I recognize all of these priors,
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  and at once had a different set than I do now.
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  So, John, this is fascinating. I'm glad you mentioned The Righteous Mind,
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  because people who are hearing this who have not seen that book,
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  this is another one of your really fundamental contributions that I think,
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  particularly now, with so much of our society having trouble, it seems,
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  telling the difference between rational thoughts and emotions.
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  Well, you have the wonderful metaphor of the rider and the elephant,
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  which many of us have adopted in our own thinking and our own speaking.
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  Say what that metaphor is, just in case people haven't fully integrated into
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  their minds what you said about David Hume and the passions.
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  Right, right. So, my first book was called The Happiness Hypothesis.
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  It was about 10 ancient ideas. I read all the wisdom literature I could find,
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  East and West. and I took out all the psychological claims and I organized them
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  into chapters and let's see how ancient wisdom does.
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  And so there were 10 chapters and chapter number one, the most basic psychological
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  insight that you find all over, the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict.
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  So, you know, St. Paul, the flesh lusteth against the spirit and the spirit
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  against the flesh that ye cannot do the things ye would.
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  Well, you know, why don't you just do the things that you would like what's stopping you?
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  Okay, but, you know, there's an architecture in there that the ye that is wanting
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  something that is wanting to do something, or wanting you to be a certain way,
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  isn't actually in control of your behavior. behavior.
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  And there's all kinds of reasons for that. Our minds are pattern matchers.
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  Again, we're going to come back to evolution a lot in this discussion.
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  Animal brains are 500 million years old. Language is very new.
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  We only got reasoning very recently, probably the last million years really for language, I think.
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  So our reasoning centers are very new, and the brain didn't rewire to hand control,
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  to hand the reins over to this new ability.
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  The control of our behavior is still largely in the hands of our automatic processes
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  that have been running animals for 500 million years.
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  So anyway, the metaphor that I live in metaphors, I love to write in metaphors,
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  and I wanted a metaphor to convey the true relationship between reason and emotion or intuition.
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  And most people have gone with, say, a horse and a rider. I wanted an animal
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  that was much bigger and smarter, and so obviously, an elephant.
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  Now, that's the metaphor that Buddha used, and I might have taken the metaphor
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  from Buddha. I really don't remember because I read Buddhism in college.
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  I've always been interested.
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  In any case, Buddha says something like a man must tame his mind as an elephant
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  trainer trains an elephant.
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  And that for me was the right metaphor that, you know, like right now you and
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  I were both very conscious of the words that we're saying.
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  You know, there's a controlled thinking part of us.
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  That's the rider. But the rider, imagine a a small rider on the back of a very large elephant.
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  And if the rider kind of, you know, pulls on the elephant's ear or the reins,
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  he can kind of tell you, hey, let's go to the right or let's go to the left.
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  And if the elephant doesn't care, he'll go.
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  But if the elephant wants something, he's going to go. And a small boy on his
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  back really can't do much about it.
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  So that's the way it felt to me. Now, I should say, that was when I was a much
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  younger man. You know, when your passions are much stronger.
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  You know, now that I'm a little older, I feel a little more stoic, a little more calm.
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  But if you keep that in mind, and I must say, like, of all the things I've written,
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  that metaphor seems to be the stickiest.
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  That's the one that especially psychologists and psychotherapists say to me,
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  they find that very valuable. that we are like a small boy on the back of a large elephant.
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  And if you think about that, you'll understand a lot of the weirdness of human behavior.
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  Well, it certainly helped me as a scientist, I guess, until it really was forced
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  upon me to see just how strong the elephant could be.
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  I was of the mind that the rider just does their job right. Everything will turn out fine.
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  You can't be a scientist without believing that rationality is important and
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  you can't discover things about nature if you're a postmodernist and think that
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  it's just anybody's opinion as good as anybody else's because there's no absolute truth.
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  So I was maybe more a bit of a Cartesian until I sort of fell into a hole.
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  And a big part of that happened in COVID where it was pretty clear that having
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  the facts was not a sufficient circumstance for a lot of the rational behavior
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  that one would have hoped would happen.
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  It was very painfully obvious there, and I learned a lot.
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  And reading your book helped me see exactly where the flaws were in my probably
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  overly rationalist perspective.
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  Okay. But then, Francis, let me ask you, first of all, okay,
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  where do you think rationality comes from? Hmm.
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  You know, I'm not sure I've ever tried to quite answer that question.
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  It seems to me we are given a creation, a universe that is intrinsically rational.
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  It follows remarkable, beautiful mathematical laws that means that there's order.
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  Astounding, beautiful order, whether it's something like how the nucleus holds
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  together other, or how gravity does what it does, or in the simple terms of
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  chemistry, how you could end up with something that can be self-replicating.
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  All of that as a scientist, it's like the universe is just full of rationality
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  because of this order in the way that matter and energy are behaving.
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  And so that seems to sort of drive you to the question about,
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  okay, what else can we discern that has that same logic, that same rationality?
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  Isn't that also part of our calling?
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  And certainly for scientists, that's what drives you. You want to be able to
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  somehow discover even more logic, elegance, rationale in the universe that you're able to see.
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  Okay. So we live in a world that is governed by causal laws and everything does
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  what it must do and the heavens turn and the chemical reactions happen.
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  And that is the world other than human human beings.
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  Now, how is it then that human beings are rational? Because for us to be rational,
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  it's a very different thing from the universe being rational.
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  And you've spoken as a scientist about how scientists are rational or try to be.
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  And here I would come in, what I've found very useful, maybe it's a little annoying
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  to other academics, but to say, well, as a social psychologist,
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  I get to weigh in and say, whatever we're talking about, let's just make it more more social.
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  So you can show me this image of a scientist who's rational,
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  and I'm going to say to you,
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  No, he isn't, and he could possibly be, unless he's embedded in a scientific
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  community that makes rationality emerge from their interaction.
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  We may live in a rational universe, but we are not rational creatures as individuals.
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  Science is a miracle because from this crooked timber, I guess that's another
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  Kant quote, from the crooked timber of humanity, you can actually construct
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  a community that is rational. rational.
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  And then I would posit that that's what went wrong with COVID,
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  during COVID, that the passions were so strong, and many of them were political.
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  So if Donald Trump said, close this, said, open the schools,
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  people on the left were going to say, no, don't open the schools.
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  And it's not as though the scientists were all rational, and the people were
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  crazy, because look, a lot of the scientists got it right, and were excoriated for getting it right.
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  So, and by it, There's a lot of different things together. I'm just saying the scientific community,
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  and please argue with me on this, but my view is that the scientific community,
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  which was generally not well-trusted by the right, made a number of mistakes
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  that really alienated the right.
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  And that was because they didn't stay true to their principles.
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  And the principles would be, always be truthful, never, ever,
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  ever lie, and never ban dissent.
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  This is straight John Stuart Mill. He who knows only his own side of the case
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  knows little of that. We have to welcome dissent, and we didn't welcome dissent during COVID.
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  So anyway, that's my bit. Please tell me.
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  Here we go. You tell me what you think I got wrong. I think you got a lot of it right.
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  I think what we're talking about is scientists are of the mind that there is
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  such a thing as objective truth.
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  I think that's where it comes down to.
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  That drives you to want to be a rationalist who can discover.
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  And then when it is discovered, to say, that is truth that doesn't care how
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  I feel about it. It just is.
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  And that can't be one of those things where it's true for you and not true for me. It is just true.
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  There is that sort of central constitution of knowledge, as Jonathan wrote.
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  Oh, I love that book. Yes. Yes, I do too, which basically is something that
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  we all should try to agree to and not try to blow up and not say,
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  well, it's just your opinion.
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  I think when it comes to COVID, yeah, there were plenty of mistakes,
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  and I made some of them, and I've been appropriately criticized for it,
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  especially recently, where I think it backs what we didn't do oftentimes when
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  there was a crisis, as to say, here's the recommendation for today.
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  But we didn't say, and that's the best we can do right now.
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  And it might be wrong because our information is totally inadequate to really
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  be sure we're on the right track.
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  That statement of uncertainty was often left out.
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  And that caused people to, when it changed a month later, to begin to think,
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  these young folks don't know what they're doing.
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  That was a big part of it. Now, it was to be, you know, giving a little break
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  to the public health experts.
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  They were in a crisis where thousands of people were dying every day and trying
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  in many instances to do the best they could in a 20-minute soundbite on the news.
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  But certainly there's some lessons there that could be learned.
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  I couldn't agree more. And then there was a whole massive amount of misinformation,
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  which was being very effectively spread, much more so than the facts,
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  which made it really hard for a lot of people to sort out what to believe and what not to believe.
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  And some of that misinformation was actually disinformation.
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  It was intentional conspiracies and lies that made it very hard for scientists
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  to figure out how to get back on the constitution of knowledge of path.
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  And we should bring in here the role of social media which you sure was yeah
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  this will actually this would make a good transition over to over to my new
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  book because you know what i've been so so it seemed to me you know i used to
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  be a techno optimist you know i loved you know the internet and computers and
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  i always loved gadgets when i was a kid,
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  and i was very optimistic in the 90s about the role of the internet and society society.
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  But something, you know, and then social media comes along around 2003,
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  the major platforms are created.
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  And they're not terribly nasty at first. But then sometime in the early 2010s,
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  everything gets really nasty.
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  And it felt like something changed in the fabric of social space time,
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  like in the fabric of the universe, something changed.
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  And my work since 2014, 2015 has largely been on that. What the hell happened
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  to us? Why did everything go so terrible?
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  And a lot of the answer, I believe, is that we rewired the basic fabric of society
• 24:07
  and communication and social life.
• 24:10
  Once we all got connected, we were all connected by telephone long before then. That was great.
• 24:17
  There was no problem with being connected by telephone. But we got connected
• 24:20
  by platforms that originally were called social networking systems because they connected people.
• 24:26
  But in the early 2010s, they changed and we began calling them social media platforms.
• 24:32
  Because once you got the retweet button, the like button, now you had hyper-virality.
• 24:38
  Now anything you say, you could become famous by tonight. night.
• 24:42
  So there's an enormous incentive to be provocative, to get angry,
• 24:47
  to show emotion, to make accusations.
• 24:50
  And all of this gels. So even though the like and retweet buttons come in in
• 24:54
  2009, but it takes a little while for norms to change, for platforms to change.
• 24:59
  So it's really around 2012, 2013.
• 25:01
  And that things get explosive, they get nasty. That's when the Russians start
• 25:06
  really messing with us, which of course they've been doing since the 1950s.
• 25:09
  But now they don't have to fly over here and put swastikas on synagogues. They can just sit in St.
• 25:16
  Petersburg and make us believe that we're all racist and we all hate each other.
• 25:20
  So everything kind of goes crazy around 2013
• 25:23
  2014 is when everything breaks out and we're
• 25:26
  still in the through we're still in throes of that today but i
• 25:29
  just bring it up now as a segue because that's the that is the conditions under
• 25:34
  which we were in 2020 already insane because of trump and anti-trump already
• 25:41
  scared and insane because of covid already then angry and divided because of
• 25:46
  George Floyd and the reaction to that.
• 25:49
  So what an insane year 2020 was for so many reasons. And social media made it all so much harder.
• 25:57
  A metaphor that I used to understand how radical this change was is like,
• 26:03
  imagine if you're the California Department of Forestry and you know how to fight fires.
• 26:09
  You have 100 years, you know about wind conditions, you know everything about dryness.
• 26:15
  You can model forest fires.
• 26:18
  And then one day, God decides to play a joke.
• 26:21
  And he says, oh, you know that 80-20 mix I was playing with on earth,
• 26:25
  80% nitrogen, 20% oxygen?
• 26:27
  Let's flip that. Let's make an 80% oxygen, 20% nitrogen. Let's just see what
• 26:31
  would happen. Okay, so that happens on one day.
• 26:34
  And then, now you're the California Department Department of Forestry, what happens?
• 26:38
  All your knowledge is out the window because any spark turns into a conflagration.
• 26:43
  That, I think, is what happened to us in the 2010s. Well,
• 26:48
  let's talk, though, about the current book that you're about to put out,
• 26:52
  which focuses on a particularly troubling aspect of what's happened with social
• 26:57
  media, and that's the young people, and particularly,
• 27:00
  but not uniquely, the girls.
• 27:02
  I think we are all very concerned when we look at the mental health crisis that's
• 27:08
  afflicting our young people, with so many of them, of depression.
• 27:13
  Anxiety having gone up rather steeply, thoughts of suicide and sometimes actual
• 27:18
  suicide, much more than it should be.
• 27:21
  And your conclusion is, while there may be a lot of factors here,
• 27:26
  that social media is a major contributor to what has happened.
• 27:31
  And you also think there are some things we should do about that and not just bring our hand.
• 27:35
  So, yeah, frame it, if you would. The Anxious Generation, your book coming out
• 27:40
  on March 28th, has a lot of data.
• 27:42
  26. It comes out March 26th. oh sorry
• 27:46
  got the date march 26th has and you're
• 27:49
  a data guy you're not one of those like oh well here's how
• 27:52
  i feel you're actually quite determined to
• 27:55
  survey hundreds of publications that are out there and see can you really draw
• 27:59
  a rigorous conclusion you're you're being a rational guy you're trying not to
• 28:03
  let that elephant run away with you so tell us a bit more about how did you
• 28:07
  land on this was that your intention when you were actually studying the social
• 28:11
  media thing to focus on the kids?
• 28:13
  No, it really wasn't. So, what happened was, I wrote this book,
• 28:18
  The Coddling of the American Mind, with my friend Greg Lukianoff.
• 28:21
  And it's about why everything went crazy on college campuses around 2014, 2015.
• 28:26
  We had essentially a cultural revolution, new morality taking over,
• 28:30
  mob dynamics, people are afraid, talking on eggshells, walking on eggshells.
• 28:35
  And that's continued on to the present day.
• 28:37
  And so, our book was about, about,
• 28:40
  it was like a social science detective story. What the hell happened?
• 28:44
  You know, universities were these paragons of reason, and we became really stupid,
• 28:48
  and we put in all these policies that backfire, and we, you know,
• 28:51
  punished people for just doing their research or teaching.
• 28:55
  How did this happen? And we laid out six causal threads, you know,
• 28:59
  polarization, bureaucratization, declining viewpoint diversity,
• 29:03
  the absence of conservatives.
• 29:04
  We've gotten more and more or homogeneous progressive.
• 29:07
  One of the threads was rising anxiety and depression, because as we were writing
• 29:12
  this up as a book, it was an Atlantic article originally in 2015,
• 29:15
  but we expanded it into a book 2018.
• 29:18
  While we were writing that, it was really clear rates of anxiety,
• 29:23
  depression, and suicide were rising rapidly. And that all began in the early 2010s.
• 29:27
  Suicide begins rising a couple of years earlier, but almost everything is sort
• 29:31
  of stable until around 2011. 11.
• 29:32
  And then by 2013, everything's going up, especially for girls. So,
• 29:37
  We published this in the book, and then some researchers said,
• 29:40
  oh, it's just a moral panic.
• 29:43
  It's not really an epidemic. It's just that kids will say that they're depressed.
• 29:48
  But no, we showed in the book that it wasn't just self-report.
• 29:51
  It was also self-harm, hospitalizations for self-harm, and suicide.
• 29:56
  So especially if you look at pre-teen girls, this is the most stunning.
• 30:01
  10 to 14-year-old girls, that age range, they did not used to cut themselves. cells.
• 30:06
  They did not used to pick up knives and razor blades and cut their wrists or
• 30:10
  cut gashes. They didn't used to do that.
• 30:12
  Now they do. The rate at which they do that tripled. It tripled between 2010 and 2019 before COVID.
• 30:20
  Same thing for suicide. Preteen girls did not used to kill themselves.
• 30:24
  Their rate also tripled. It's up three times.
• 30:29
  So something big happened. Something something huge changed in the lives,
• 30:33
  especially of girls and young women in the early 2010s, what could it be?
• 30:38
  Well, you know, I'm following Jean Twenge here, who was the first psychologist
• 30:42
  who really, she had a book called iGen, and she had an Atlantic article of smartphones
• 30:47
  destroyed a generation.
• 30:49
  And she was roundly criticized by psychologists at the time,
• 30:52
  2017, for getting ahead of the data.
• 30:55
  Come on, it's just a little trend. You know, you're exaggerating.
• 30:58
  And she did take take a risk in putting that story out. But it turns out she
• 31:01
  was absolutely right. Every year, things have gotten worse and worse and worse.
• 31:06
  We are now in a full-blown catastrophe for youth mental health.
• 31:09
  So I've been engaged in a debate with other researchers about what's happening and what caused it.
• 31:14
  And one of the fun things about that is I've developed a way of working where
• 31:19
  I show my work. Everything's done in public Google documents.
• 31:22
  I invite people to criticize them. So if listeners go to jonathanhite.com slash reviews,
• 31:28
  you can find we have about 15 Google Docs going through the literature on depression,
• 31:33
  anxiety, suicide, what's the role of video games, what's the role of pornography,
• 31:38
  like we've got everything there. Please criticize us, that will help us.
• 31:42
  And so it's now clear that there's no longer any debate.
• 31:46
  There is an epidemic of mental illness in American kids.
• 31:51
  It started in the early 2010s. It's still continuing today to rise.
• 31:56
  For girls, the numbers in like 30 or 40 percent, you would say,
• 32:00
  have clinically serious depression or anxiety, depending on how you measure it.
• 32:05
  And so now what caused it? Well, I've been saying, along with Gene Twenge and
• 32:10
  along with my lead researcher, Zach Rausch, that we think the evidence is very
• 32:14
  clear that social media is very clearly linked for girls.
• 32:17
  It's not so much for boys, but for girls, it's very closely linked,
• 32:21
  both correlationally and experimentally.
• 32:23
  And other people argue back they say no the links are too small too weak to
• 32:27
  explain this so we say okay what do you think it was and they say oh you know well maybe it was,
• 32:32
  school shootings you know because the the the horrible horrible shooting the
• 32:36
  first grade class in connecticut newtown in 2012 so that fits the timing that
• 32:42
  you know since then kids have lockdown drills it's you know you but why then
• 32:47
  did the exact same thing happen the exact same time in Canada,
• 32:52
  the UK, Australia.
• 32:54
  New Zealand, and the Scandinavian countries.
• 32:57
  In all these countries, we see
• 32:59
  rates of mental illness go up suddenly and sharply, especially for girls.
• 33:04
  So nothing, there's no other theory. I keep waiting for someone to come up with
• 33:07
  a theory that can explain the timing and the international scope. No one's done it.
• 33:11
  So- Help us to distinguish then the studies that have shown correlation,
• 33:16
  which is interesting, and hypothesis-generating versus those that really show
• 33:20
  causation, the experimental studies.
• 33:22
  I know you've reviewed both, and there's probably more studies that are large-scale
• 33:26
  on correlation, but how strong is the causation?
• 33:30
  Yes. So the correlational studies are clear. If you just look at how much time
• 33:34
  kids spend on social media and what the state of their mental health is,
• 33:38
  what you find is that for girls,
• 33:40
  it's a curvilinear relationship where where if you spend two,
• 33:43
  you know, two hours or three hours a day,
• 33:46
  you're twice as depressed as if you're not on it.
• 33:48
  And if you spend four hours or more, you're three times as depressed.
• 33:52
  So you always find that relationship where the heavy users are really doing
• 33:55
  bad. And that's true for all the technologies.
• 33:57
  Same for video games. Video games are not as harmful as social media,
• 34:00
  but the kid, the boys who play it, you know, you know, seven,
• 34:03
  eight hours a day, they're messed
• 34:05
  up compared to the boys who are only playing two or three hours a day.
• 34:08
  So, but that's all correlation. And, you know, listeners will hear journalists
• 34:11
  say, say, oh, well, but, you know, it's just how can we know?
• 34:15
  Correlation doesn't prove causation. That's right. That's why we do experiments.
• 34:18
  And so there are a lot of experiments. Now, we have about 30 or 35 cataloged on our Google Docs.
• 34:23
  And experiments take several forms. One is you assign people to get off of social
• 34:29
  media for an amount of time.
• 34:31
  And some of the studies find that it helps, some find it doesn't.
• 34:35
  And so people say, my critics say, well, see, the experiments are not consistent. But guess what?
• 34:41
  If you divide them up by the amount of time that people are off.
• 34:45
  So some studies, they make people get off for a day or a week.
• 34:49
  Those don't find a benefit. it. No, they're probably furious and upset.
• 34:54
  No, they're going through withdrawal. They're going through withdrawal.
• 34:59
  So if you have a bunch of heroin addicts and you say, you know,
• 35:02
  I think let's take you off heroin for a week. That should make you feel better.
• 35:06
  No, it makes you feel worse, but let's do it for a month and you're going to feel a whole lot better.
• 35:11
  So the experiments in which people get off for at least three weeks,
• 35:14
  that's the amount that Anna Lemke at Stanford says it tends to take three or
• 35:18
  four weeks to overcome withdrawal.
• 35:21
  Those that get people off for a while do find a benefit.
• 35:24
  And that's an experiment with control condition random assignment.
• 35:28
  So that does show causality.
• 35:29
  There are all kinds of other experiments exposing girls to Instagram versus other kinds.
• 35:35
  Instagram is the worst, by the way. Instagram is the worst for girls.
• 35:38
  And Facebook's own data said that Instagram is the worst because it focuses
• 35:43
  on the face and in the body, whereas TikTok is more about like,
• 35:46
  you know, it used to be about dancing and things like that.
• 35:49
  So there's now a lot of evidence of causation. And beyond that, you talk to the kids.
• 35:56
  I have been looking, again, you know, I'm a fan of John Stuart Mill.
• 35:59
  I want people to tell me where I'm wrong.
• 36:01
  If you ask the world to make you smarter, it will oblige. So world,
• 36:04
  please tell me where I'm wrong.
• 36:06
  And I've gone looking for articles or essays or anything by young people people
• 36:11
  defending social media. I can't find them.
• 36:14
  You'd think that if adults are trying to ban social media, you'd think that
• 36:18
  some young people somewhere would write in defense of it, but they don't.
• 36:22
  When you read what Gen Z writes about social media, it's devastating.
• 36:26
  They write about how it's destroying their generation.
• 36:29
  So what's happened is we are caught in a trap, and the kids are caught in a
• 36:34
  trap, in a social dilemma.
• 36:36
  Why do they spend five hours a day on social media platforms because everyone
• 36:40
  else does so they have to keep up that's it.
• 36:42
  Music.
• 37:03
  So what do we do? Your book is not just making a diagnosis.
• 37:07
  It's offering some therapeutics, some of them pretty explicit and not going
• 37:12
  to be easy necessarily to implement, but certainly every parent who's worried
• 37:16
  about this ought to look at what you're recommending.
• 37:19
  So give us kind of a snapshot. Sure.
• 37:23
  So it might seem like parents, so the universal feeling when parents is just just powerlessness.
• 37:32
  We struggle, we try, we wrestle, we fight. It's very hard to keep the kids off.
• 37:36
  And even if you do, they'll often find a way around.
• 37:41
  Because as individuals, we are weak. As individuals, our kids are in a trap.
• 37:45
  They care a lot more about their popularity than they do about their future
• 37:50
  health or about their future jobs or anything else.
• 37:53
  And so what I do in the book is after going through all the evidence for all
• 37:57
  the different kinds of harm, it's not just mental illness.
• 38:00
  And we'll come back to that, all the other kinds of harm.
• 38:03
  After going through all the different harms, and the different harms for girls,
• 38:07
  and the different harms for boys, and the different harms for adults,
• 38:09
  which I hope we'll talk about, the last section of the book is on pairing for
• 38:15
  collective action. And this is the key.
• 38:18
  We're stuck in this trap because social media is not like any other consumer product.
• 38:23
  Social media doesn't just affect the person who who consumes it.
• 38:27
  It changes the world in which kids live and forces all the kids to be on it.
• 38:32
  And that's why we feel so powerless.
• 38:35
  But once we realize that, now we can break out of the trap, but we have to do it together.
• 38:41
  So the way to get out of a collective action problem, these are well-studied in the social sciences.
• 38:47
  There are a few routes. One is government. That's one of the reasons we have
• 38:51
  government is to solve commons dilemmas, put limits on fishing and pollution
• 38:55
  and all sorts of other things.
• 38:57
  So having a minimum age, the government should raise the age for opening a social media account to 16.
• 39:03
  Then that would give kids time to have normal childhood, let their brains develop,
• 39:07
  let their frontal cortex develop before being thrown into this whirlpool and cesspool.
• 39:12
  So what i'm suggesting in the book is four norms that are so simple and they're
• 39:16
  free like we could We could solve this problem within two years for basically zero dollars,
• 39:23
  Here's how we do it One so the four four norms that break us out one No smartphone
• 39:29
  till high school It's so simple and people think oh, but how will I communicate
• 39:34
  with my kid? You know, what what if something happens?
• 39:37
  Give them a flip phone. That's what the millennials had and they were okay okay.
• 39:41
  The millennials were texting each other, but you had to do like press the S
• 39:46
  key three times to whatever, or the seven key.
• 39:48
  It was slow. So millennials did not want to spend hours texting each other.
• 39:53
  It was like, see you at the mall.
• 39:56
  Okay. And then they meet up. So for them, phones helped them get together.
• 40:03
  But once kids traded in their flip phones for smartphones around 2012,
• 40:06
  12, then the phones became their life.
• 40:10
  A phone is essentially an experience blocker. Once a kid gets it,
• 40:13
  it's going to block out all other forms of experience. They'll all be cut way down or eliminated.
• 40:18
  So that's why it's so important. If you want to give your kid a phone,
• 40:22
  give them a flip phone until high school.
• 40:24
  Now, I think you probably wait until 16, but what we need is a norm,
• 40:28
  a clear and doable norm, and that's high school.
• 40:30
  At the beginning of high school, you can and get a smart smartphone,
• 40:33
  but for God's sakes, let's clear this crap, this garbage out of middle schools.
• 40:39
  Let's save middle school kids.
• 40:40
  So, that's norm number one. It's free, it costs nothing, doesn't even require
• 40:44
  any government. Let's just have parents do it.
• 40:47
  And if even a third of parents would do that,
• 40:50
  Well, now a kid can't say, Mom, I have to have a smartphone.
• 40:56
  Everyone else has one. I'm isolated. Like, no, no. You know,
• 41:00
  what about your friend Billy? What about Mary? They don't have smartphones. They have flip phones.
• 41:04
  So now parents can actually do what they think is right. And that's norm number one. Cost nothing.
• 41:10
  Norm number two. How is that being responded to as you've been promoting this?
• 41:15
  Because this is in the book, but
• 41:16
  it's something you've also put in other places, like the in some sense.
• 41:20
  Parents go, yeah, I'm with you, or like, oh, I don't think I can do it.
• 41:24
  Well, I just started talking about it very recently, these specific four norms.
• 41:31
  I just really, they crystallized as I was finishing the book.
• 41:35
  And it's the sort of thing where a parent can't just do it themselves,
• 41:38
  but I'm going to make a huge publicity push for this all over the country,
• 41:42
  all over the world, once the book comes out.
• 41:45
  And at that point, I'm going to try to make it just obvious common sense.
• 41:48
  Just give them a flip phone until high school. That's all.
• 41:51
  Norm number two, no social media until 16.
• 41:55
  Now, the minimum age currently is 13. That's the age at which a company can
• 41:59
  make a deal with a child and take their data without parental permission.
• 42:04
  That was set in law in 1998 when the internet was a much less weird and awful place.
• 42:09
  It has not been changed. We've got no additional protections for kids since 1998.
• 42:14
  And that that so-called protection was weak because it was written so that as
• 42:19
  long as a company doesn't know that a child is under 13, they're okay.
• 42:23
  And that's why Facebook could say, you know, what's your age?
• 42:27
  And it helpfully suggests as the default year, used to until recently,
• 42:30
  the default year is 13 years ago.
• 42:32
  So that, you know, if you're 10, yeah, yeah, that's when I was born, 13 years ago.
• 42:38
  So Facebook has been encouraging underage use from the beginning because they
• 42:42
  desperately need need to get kids, young kids, otherwise they'll lose them to
• 42:45
  TikTok and other platforms.
• 42:47
  So the second rule is just let's raise the age to 16.
• 42:51
  It's already 13. Let's raise the age to 16 and enforce it. Make the companies
• 42:55
  liable for underage use.
• 42:57
  We make bartenders and bar owners liable for underage drinking.
• 43:01
  We don't say that the problem of underage drinking is entirely for the parents to police.
• 43:07
  Kids are out in the world. They'll try to go to a bar. We expect the bar should
• 43:11
  should have some restrictions.
• 43:13
  Pornography sites should have some restrictions. They don't.
• 43:16
  Any child can immerse him or herself, and they do.
• 43:19
  They're all exposed to pornography, and some of the boys get addicted in their early teens.
• 43:24
  There is no safeguard, no obstacle, no nothing. This is insane.
• 43:29
  This is insane that this is the world we're raising our kids in.
• 43:32
  So rule number two is no social media until 16. I'm hopeful the government will
• 43:36
  help us here. Utah and a few other states are raising the age to 16 or 18.
• 43:41
  Or, you know, 18 without parental permission. So that's rule number two.
• 43:45
  But even if we don't get government help, if enough parents,
• 43:49
  if even a third or half of parents say, no, you're not getting Instagram until
• 43:53
  you're 16, that would take a lot of pressure off everyone else.
• 43:56
  And it would make it much easier for the rest of us to tell our 11-year-old
• 44:00
  daughters, like, no, you're not getting it until you're 16.
• 44:02
  That's what we're doing, that thing that most people are doing.
• 44:05
  Norm number three. This is so simple and so powerful.
• 44:09
  Phone-free schools. schools yeah just just you know these things are distraction
• 44:14
  machines they're experience blockers,
• 44:17
  when kids are sitting in the classroom and they
• 44:20
  have their phone in their pocket and most of them are addicted they're going
• 44:23
  to check and their notifications are always going off and if anyone is texting
• 44:28
  during the day if anyone is texting or posting everyone else has to check in
• 44:33
  otherwise they're going to be out of the loop at lunch everyone will be laughing
• 44:36
  about this thing that that so-and-so said about the teacher,
• 44:39
  and I didn't know about it, I better check my text too during class.
• 44:42
  So it's insane, insane that we have schools in which kids can have their phones
• 44:47
  in their pockets. Completely insane.
• 44:50
  So the rule should be, when you come in in the morning, phones are useful for
• 44:54
  getting to and from school, of course.
• 44:56
  You come in the morning, you put your phone in a phone locker,
• 44:58
  a place that you can put it in, and it's protected.
• 45:02
  You have no access to it during the day. And then you get it back at the end
• 45:06
  of the day when you leave.
• 45:07
  A Yondra pouch is also very good. The kids know how to open those,
• 45:11
  but it still makes the norm is clearly like, no, you don't have access to your phone.
• 45:17
  Do schools have rules like this? I mean, schools must know this is a problem.
• 45:21
  Why haven't they fixed this?
• 45:23
  No, because two reasons. One is that they almost all have rules against it.
• 45:28
  Rules, nothing else. else. So
• 45:31
  one study found that 72% of American schools ban phone use during class.
• 45:38
  That means that kids are supposed to hold their phone down low or in their lap
• 45:44
  in order to use it. That's what that means.
• 45:47
  If the teacher is very vigilant, it means that kids must go to the bathroom
• 45:50
  to use their phones during class.
• 45:52
  And teachers tell me kids go to the bathroom a lot more than they used used
• 45:54
  to in order to use their phones.
• 45:57
  So a rule about not using your phone during class is nonsense.
• 46:02
  It's not helpful. It's nothing.
• 46:05
  Plus, all it does is say, even if you could enforce it, okay,
• 46:09
  the bell rings, all the phones come out.
• 46:11
  Kids are walking through the hallway on their phones.
• 46:14
  Now, our kids are dying of loneliness. A loneliness epidemic has been brewing
• 46:19
  and it it especially accelerated, oh, in the early 2010s, just like everything else.
• 46:23
  Our kids are so lonely. The more time you spend on social media,
• 46:26
  the lonelier you are because you don't spend time with friends.
• 46:30
  And the one time that we know kids could be,
• 46:34
  be with friends. They could be talking face-to-face at school.
• 46:37
  So any school that lets kids be on their phones between classes and at lunch and at recess is insane.
• 46:43
  Insane. Listen, people, if you're hearing my voice now, if you have kids in
• 46:48
  school, K-12 school, and if your kid's school allows your kids to keep their phones on them,
• 46:55
  please, please contact the principal now and say,
• 46:59
  say please go phone free the evidence that
• 47:02
  it distracts kids they learn less they feel more lonely
• 47:05
  they feel less included there's more drama more fights the
• 47:09
  teachers hate it the principals hate it everyone hates it except for the small
• 47:15
  number of parents who freak out at the prospect that they can't always be in
• 47:19
  touch with their child and so this is what principals tell me i wish we could
• 47:23
  ban the phones but you know some of the parents would be so angry so upset we don't don't dare try.
• 47:28
  But again, it's a fact of action. Is that because of the safetyism,
• 47:31
  the fear that somehow if they don't have immediate connection to their kids,
• 47:34
  something terrible will happen?
• 47:35
  You should talk a bit about that too, because that does seem like it's played
• 47:38
  out in a very negative way in other aspects of childhoods.
• 47:43
  Absolutely. That's right. There's really two pieces to this story,
• 47:45
  the loss of the play-based childhood and the arrival of the phone-based childhood.
• 47:51
  So let me finish my four norms, because the fourth one is actually about the
• 47:54
  play-based childhood. childhood.
• 47:56
  So the first three were about phones. No smartphone before high school,
• 48:00
  no social media before 16, phone-free schools.
• 48:03
  The fourth foundational norm is far more childhood independence and free play.
• 48:11
  And so the key here is that play is the most important thing that kids do.
• 48:17
  If you're a mammal, the mammals have these long childhoods.
• 48:21
  The mammals have these large brains.
• 48:24
  Mammals play, all mammals play, and that's what they do in order to wire up the brain.
• 48:30
  And so from maybe a few tens or hundreds of millions of years ago,
• 48:36
  whenever mammals emerged, until around the 1980s, kids played. That's what they did.
• 48:41
  But in the 1980s, we began to freak out.
• 48:43
  We had new media exposing us, cable TV exposing us.
• 48:48
  There are a few cases of true abduction every year in this country.
• 48:51
  I mean, there's a few dozen cases in the whole country.
• 48:54
  Your risk of your kids being abducted is way, way, way less than being struck by lightning.
• 49:01
  But suddenly, we were all faced with the stories, and people freaked out for a lot of other reasons.
• 49:06
  We began locking up our kids, especially in the 90s, thinking if an 8-,
• 49:12
  9-, 10-year-old kid walks to a park, like something terrible will happen.
• 49:17
  By the early 2000s, nobody had seen a child unescorted in so long that if a
• 49:22
  child ever did walk to a park alone, a neighbor would call 911.
• 49:26
  Look, there's a thing out there. It's got two legs, but it's not a full person.
• 49:30
  I don't know what it is, but someone come pick it up. You might get hurt.
• 49:35
  My own neighborhood, Silver Spring, had this national case of parents who let
• 49:39
  their 6-year-old and their 10-year-old walk to the playground alone.
• 49:43
  And neighbors called the police, and the children were actually taken into custody
• 49:48
  for several hours without the parents even knowing where they were.
• 49:52
  And then they were threatened by social services that these children might have
• 49:55
  to be fostered out to other families because they were squarely ignoring the
• 49:59
  safety of the 6- and 10-year-old who were maybe four blocks from their own house.
• 50:04
  Just an astounding example of the new safetyism that has become so widespread
• 50:10
  on the basis of really tiny risks that somehow seem to dominate the entire system. Exactly.
• 50:17
  It's a great example of irrationality, that a vivid risk, you know,
• 50:21
  a few stories about kids who are abducted is enough to make parents cling to
• 50:25
  their children, deprive them of experience.
• 50:28
  They are going to get harmed if you don't let them grow up. They are going to
• 50:31
  get harmed if you don't let them play.
• 50:32
  If you don't let them learn how to be self-governing, they're not going to end
• 50:37
  up being independent adults. adults.
• 50:38
  So we had this irrational freak out, not just in the US, it also happened in the UK and Canada.
• 50:44
  It didn't happen as much in Scandinavia or most of Northern Europe.
• 50:48
  But it happened in all the English-speaking countries. We deprived our kids of freedom in play.
• 50:53
  And there's good evidence that, here I'm drawing on the work of Peter Gray,
• 50:56
  a really great psychologist who studies play at Boston College,
• 51:00
  that if you deprive kids of play, there's a lot of evidence from other animals
• 51:05
  and humans that they become more anxious.
• 51:08
  They're not as bold in exploring new places. So if we want to set our kids to
• 51:13
  discover mode and out of defend mode, we should give them a lot of independence.
• 51:17
  They must take risks, and kids will seek out risks.
• 51:21
  They'll climb up to the top of a wall, and then they'll climb higher on a tree,
• 51:27
  and they'll ride a bicycle, and they'll ride it over a jump ramp.
• 51:31
  Kids are trying to give themselves risk because that's what they need to develop
• 51:35
  their brains. And we stopped all that in the 90s.
• 51:38
  So that's the backstory to all this. I don't want to blame the whole mental
• 51:41
  health epidemic on the phones.
• 51:43
  That explains the timing. The phones explain why it's 2012.
• 51:47
  But the backstory is the loss of normal, healthy human childhood.
• 51:51
  So what I say in the book is that our big mistake was that we have overprotected
• 51:57
  our children in the real world and underprotected them online.
• 52:01
  We need to reverse that. That makes total sense. You know, I was growing up
• 52:04
  on a farm with a brother who was a year and a half older than me.
• 52:08
  We would leave the farmhouse at some point and not be seen for hours and climb
• 52:13
  trees and occasionally encounter snakes.
• 52:15
  And occasionally somebody fell in the pond or got a cut or a scrape and went
• 52:20
  back and got patched up and you went back out again.
• 52:23
  Exactly. And you figured out how to negotiate things with your brother because
• 52:26
  you didn't always agree and how to recognize what's a risk that maybe you shouldn't take.
• 52:32
  All of that was part of the learning process. It just seemed so normal at the
• 52:35
  time. Now, it would seem like, wow,
• 52:37
  You're allowing your kids to do that. That's right. That's right.
• 52:40
  And what you said about working through conflicts and working things out with
• 52:43
  your brother is so important now.
• 52:45
  So there's this, there's this
• 52:47
  ridiculous idea and safety isn't the worship of safety above all else.
• 52:50
  This ridiculous idea that if kids have fights or conflicts, if they call each
• 52:53
  other names, well, that could be hurtful.
• 52:56
  We don't want that to happen, which is again, insane because kids need to tease
• 53:01
  each other. They need to argue and fight. They need to do all this.
• 53:05
  So, in the book, I show these photographs from a playground in Berkeley, California.
• 53:10
  A friend of mine, Robert Strand, took these wonderful photos of a playground
• 53:15
  where they have instructions for the kids on how to play tag.
• 53:20
  Tag, and it explains the rules. And it says clearly, resolve disputes with rock, paper, scissors.
• 53:27
  Don't argue about it. Don't state your case. Otherwise, you might learn how
• 53:30
  to actually persuade people. No, no, no. Rock, paper, scissors,
• 53:33
  then there won't be hurt feelings.
• 53:34
  It says one finger tag, because you don't want anyone to tag someone hard with
• 53:39
  their whole hand, so one finger.
• 53:40
  Are the kids that stupid and fragile that we have to tell them how to play tag?
• 53:44
  And for the football, so of course not tackle football, but for touch football,
• 53:49
  the rules include football, touch football cannot be played unless an adult is there to referee.
• 53:57
  That's insane. It's like the most nutritious part of playing a game is the fights,
• 54:03
  is the disagreements. That's the best part for child development. element.
• 54:06
  But what we're doing is we're trying to take out all the nutrition from children,
• 54:10
  just give them experiences where they won't be upset.
• 54:13
  And what do you get? What you get is young adults who can't handle the real
• 54:17
  world. It's not their fault. We did this to them.
• 54:19
  So that's a fascinating conversation. And again, both very troubling in terms
• 54:25
  of how far we seem to have fallen from a healthy society, but also encouraging
• 54:29
  in terms of things that we could to turn it around.
• 54:32
  We haven't talked as much about the adults who've also been caught up in the
• 54:37
  same social media traps.
• 54:39
  And we haven't talked about how this might be relevant, particularly to people
• 54:43
  who listen to Biologos podcast, where people of faith, maybe I'd like to take
• 54:47
  you to that topic, which I know is, let's do that. Yeah.
• 54:51
  And it's, it's having had a chance to look at the galley proofs of your book.
• 54:55
  There's a wonderful chapter, chapter eight about this that I want to ask you you about.
• 54:59
  I know you are not yourself a person who would call yourself a believer,
• 55:03
  but somehow you seem to have some pretty interesting insights here about faith
• 55:08
  and its role in flourishing.
• 55:10
  So say a bit more about how you frame all of that. Sure.
• 55:14
  So, you know, when I was writing my happiness hypothesis and I was looking for
• 55:20
  what are like the universal human insights,
• 55:22
  sites, nearly all societies order themselves on it with a moral dimension of up and down.
• 55:31
  And it's not just good, bad. It's actually divine good.
• 55:35
  Is up. God is up. Goodness is up. And the devil or sin or carnality or something is down.
• 55:43
  And it varies a little around the world what exactly the dimension is,
• 55:46
  but it's very, very common.
• 55:48
  And Christians say, what would Jesus do? That's a categorical imperative.
• 55:53
  It's a very simple rule for deciding what's right. How should I act? How should I live?
• 55:57
  What would Jesus do? Back to the moral law, where we start. Yeah,
• 56:01
  that's right. That's right.
• 56:02
  And there's one in Hinduism. This
• 56:05
  is from Vivekananda, a Hindu sage in the 19th century, I think it was.
• 56:09
  He said, any action that makes us go Godward is a good action and is our duty.
• 56:16
  Any action that makes us go downward, he said, downward, is a bad action, and we should not do it.
• 56:24
  And so once you see that people have this dimension, and we should say I spent
• 56:29
  three months in India in 1993 doing research on purity and pollution,
• 56:34
  and I began to get just a little bit of a feeling for this, even though I'm a secular person.
• 56:39
  I began to get a feeling for a world in which things are not just made of matter
• 56:44
  and that's all there is to it, but a world in which, say, an American flag isn't
• 56:49
  just cloth. that actually has, there's something in it that should be protected.
• 56:54
  You should not use it as a floor mat.
• 56:57
  You should not use it to wipe your counters, that somehow there's an invisible moral essence.
• 57:04
  And I hadn't really seen that before. And a feeling of certain places should be kept pure.
• 57:11
  In a Hindu home, there's always the puja room. There's an area where the shrine is.
• 57:15
  And you don't go, you have to bathe or cleanse yourself before you go in there.
• 57:20
  And, you know, just simple things like realizing like, oh, you know,
• 57:23
  when I walk into my apartment, I should take off my shoes, which people do all
• 57:27
  over Asia, but Americans don't do.
• 57:29
  You know, we march around the world, get our feet dirty, walk into our house
• 57:32
  because we don't think about contagion as much.
• 57:35
  In any case, there's lots of small examples, but the point is that people,
• 57:42
  whether you believe in God or not,
• 57:45
  to be a human is to have these feelings of sometimes being elevated or lifted
• 57:50
  up, ennobled, sometimes to be degraded.
• 57:53
  When you watch reality TV, like the old Jerry Springer show from the 1990s,
• 57:58
  you watch people turned into animals.
• 58:00
  It's entertaining.
• 58:03
  It's fascinating. But the face that you're making right now is a cringe, a disgust face.
• 58:09
  Yes, because it brings us down. It's degrading. So that's my background as a
• 58:14
  secular social scientist, is really taking divinity seriously as an experience,
• 58:20
  as a psychological construct.
• 58:23
  Whether or not God exists, this is just a fact about human beings.
• 58:27
  And now what i did in chapter eight was
• 58:30
  you know after writing seven chapters laying out in horrible detail what would
• 58:34
  the devastation of our kids i was almost done with the book and i was you know
• 58:38
  on deadline i was behind deadline i should finish up the book but i felt like
• 58:41
  you know i've said all this stuff about kids but there's like so much else going
• 58:46
  on and so i just took one chapter,
• 58:49
  to say what's happening to adults and the organization that came out as i remember
• 58:53
  how how I did this, but suddenly it occurred to me, wait, the unifying principle
• 58:57
  here really is spiritual wisdom, spiritual practices.
• 59:02
  And I kind of made a list of like, here's all the ways that a phone-based life
• 59:07
  for an adult blocks spiritual progress.
• 59:11
  And so, well, here, let's just go through them and just pull it up in the manuscript here.
• 59:16
  Let's see. Okay, so the first thing is, you know, I've already mentioned Emile Durkheim.
• 59:22
  Human beings need to be planted in communities, and the best communities,
• 59:27
  the strongest, the most binding, are those that hold something sacred in common.
• 59:31
  They have a reason for being. They have a moral compass or purpose.
• 59:35
  And so, a religious community or a country that has a religious basis would be a good example.
• 59:41
  And what we do in such communities is we define space and time to—we define
• 59:47
  holy times and profane times.
• 59:49
  So, there are holy days. There is a Sabbath.
• 59:52
  And then there's ordinary days on which you work. That's what profane means, is ordinary.
• 59:57
  And it's the same for space. There are sacred spaces and there are profane spaces.
• 1:00:03
  And if we all respect that and we all do things in synchrony,
• 1:00:07
  like we do, we go about our business, but on Sunday morning,
• 1:00:10
  we all go to church or if you're Muslim, five times a day, you bow towards Mecca,
• 1:00:15
  whatever else you're doing.
• 1:00:17
  That is what people do to create a strong binding community. community.
• 1:00:21
  Now, let's suppose you're raised instead in networks, not communities.
• 1:00:25
  A young person, a Gen Z, born after 1995, they don't have much experience in communities.
• 1:00:32
  They've been on their phone or a screen most of their lives.
• 1:00:35
  They went through COVID. They didn't leave the house.
• 1:00:38
  All they know is screens.
• 1:00:40
  There's no ordering of space or time. On the internet, there's no no holy days.
• 1:00:46
  There's no Sabbath. Nothing ever closes. Everything is the same.
• 1:00:50
  There's no ordering of space. Everything
• 1:00:52
  is open. Any child can go onto Pornhub. Any child can buy drugs.
• 1:00:56
  Well, there you need a credit card or Bitcoin or something.
• 1:00:59
  But it's a structuralist world, and that is a recipe for anomie or normlessness,
• 1:01:04
  which leads to depression.
• 1:01:06
  So that's just one, is having shared sacredness. And in the online world,
• 1:01:12
  imagine growing up with but no shared sacredness, nothing that you have in common
• 1:01:16
  with other people that orders your life along this dimension.
• 1:01:20
  A second dimension that I write about here is embodiment. So there's lots of spirituality online.
• 1:01:27
  There's lots of websites for believers.
• 1:01:29
  There's a huge number for spiritual but not religious, meditation sites,
• 1:01:33
  all sorts of things you can do.
• 1:01:36
  But you're alone in your room. And when you look at how spiritual practices
• 1:01:41
  play out in the world, world, so many of them are people moving together in
• 1:01:46
  time, bowing together, and especially singing together,
• 1:01:49
  clapping together, dancing together.
• 1:01:52
  Yes. Yeah. Zoom worship just doesn't do it. It doesn't work.
• 1:01:55
  That's right. It doesn't.
• 1:01:56
  That's right. It's missing because we're physical creatures.
• 1:01:59
  We're embodied creatures.
• 1:02:00
  But life online is not embodied. It's disembodied.
• 1:02:04
  And the fact that you can communicate with people who have no body is frightening because,
• 1:02:10
  Artificial intelligence now is so good. People are falling in love. You can make a chatbot.
• 1:02:16
  You can turn up the dial on sexiness or intellect or humor.
• 1:02:21
  You can give her a face. You can give her a breast size.
• 1:02:25
  Whatever you want, you can customize this person. And then young men are falling
• 1:02:28
  in love with these avatars.
• 1:02:30
  And this is going to impede their ability to learn how to talk to young women.
• 1:02:35
  It happens the reverse as well, but I think boys are especially susceptible.
• 1:02:40
  Oh, I should just take a moment. Sorry, just a little timeout just to say we
• 1:02:43
  talked a lot about girls. For boys, it's not social media.
• 1:02:46
  It's them getting just sucked away from the real world and pulled into the virtual world.
• 1:02:54
  Boys are dropping out of school. They get worse grades. They don't go to college.
• 1:02:58
  They're working less. They're living at home with their parents.
• 1:03:00
  Where boys are dropping out of life because it's not nearly as exciting as multiplayer
• 1:03:05
  video games and pornography.
• 1:03:07
  So boys are, it's not that they're on social media so much, it's that the electronic
• 1:03:12
  appeals of fake sex and violence are so good that boys are not developing the
• 1:03:20
  skills that will turn them into men.
• 1:03:23
  So anyway, well, I could go on.
• 1:03:26
  I'll just maybe just list some of of the others stillness silence and focus
• 1:03:30
  like meditation but when you live when you grow up online you've got stuff coming
• 1:03:34
  in all the time it's just it's just an ocean of stimulus of of ephemera of trivia
• 1:03:40
  and and i'll just stop with this one transcending the self.
• 1:03:45
  The one of the most important or central aspects of spiritual practice here
• 1:03:50
  i'll throw this over to you but me as an atheist it seems to me that the essential
• 1:03:54
  characteristic the most important characteristic is overcoming the self and,
• 1:04:00
  It's a technology or a set of traditions or ways or practices to make you stop
• 1:04:06
  valuing yourself and putting yourself forward and putting yourself first.
• 1:04:10
  It's a way of losing the self so that you're open to communion, to merging.
• 1:04:15
  Mysticism is always about losing the self and feeling a sense of oneness with
• 1:04:19
  the universe or with God.
• 1:04:20
  And the first line of that mega bestseller, The Purpose-Driven Life,
• 1:04:26
  if I remember correctly, Rick Warren's book, the first line was, it's not all about you.
• 1:04:32
  So let me just stop there. What would you say is, you know, what is central
• 1:04:38
  to spiritual progress or spiritual development?
• 1:04:41
  Oh, transcendence, absolutely.
• 1:04:44
  Various words have been used to describe that. Again, coming back to Lewis, he would call that joy.
• 1:04:49
  This experience, which comes across sometimes when you didn't expect it,
• 1:04:53
  of being lifted outside of yourself.
• 1:04:55
  Yes. This intense feeling of belonging and of being merged and of just some
• 1:05:01
  sort of hunger to hang on to it.
• 1:05:03
  And then ultimately it slips away.
• 1:05:06
  For me, it's the experience sometimes brought on by music, something that just
• 1:05:10
  gets into your very soul and lifts you into a place that you otherwise can't get to.
• 1:05:16
  And for a believer, that is also a glimpse of what you think we are all called
• 1:05:22
  to do in relationship with God. So, yeah, hence the importance of that,
• 1:05:27
  I think, in the spiritual life.
• 1:05:29
  I have to say, John, if your prior was not zero on there being a God,
• 1:05:34
  wouldn't the transcendence part of this be a particularly interesting example
• 1:05:39
  of maybe a bit of a calling to find that relationship through that transcendent moment?
• 1:05:47
  Yes, I would say it is. And I get that feeling from nature, from mountains, from vistas.
• 1:05:56
  I've gotten it from music. I'll never forget the first time in college in a
• 1:06:01
  classical music course that I didn't end up taking, but I went to a few lectures
• 1:06:04
  of playing Beethoven's Seventh.
• 1:06:06
  There's a movement that I'll never forget the feeling in that classroom,
• 1:06:11
  that auditorium with the powerful, powerful, the rising intensity and the violins.
• 1:06:17
  And the... So I have these experiences.
• 1:06:22
  Maybe it is that my priors were... I'd say they were zero for a while.
• 1:06:27
  I used to be sort of an angry atheist when I was in high school and college.
• 1:06:31
  They're not zero now. They're very low, but they're not zero now.
• 1:06:35
  I'm open to the world being a lot... There being a lot more to the universe than we could ever know.
• 1:06:43
  That's really interesting to hear. You know, I was close friends with Christopher
• 1:06:47
  Hitchens in his last couple of years, and we talked a lot about this whole business
• 1:06:52
  of priors and how close to zero are they.
• 1:06:55
  He would never allow that his were more than like 10 to the minus 12,
• 1:06:59
  but maybe yours is a little bit higher than that.
• 1:07:03
  I'm sure all the people listening to this for believers will now pray for Jonathan Haidt priors.
• 1:07:08
  Maybe it will. will.
• 1:07:11
  So I know we've spent a lot of time here, but I don't want to finish this conversation
• 1:07:15
  about faith without hearing from you,
• 1:07:18
  sort of your perspective of how people of faith maybe are in a stronger position
• 1:07:22
  than they realize to actually deal with the current crisis we have of alienation
• 1:07:28
  and separation and of loss of a sense of what's true and what's not true.
• 1:07:32
  I want to say a bit more about that.
• 1:07:35
  Yes, actually, you know, I'm
• 1:07:36
  so glad you asked me that that because this isn't actually in the book.
• 1:07:39
  This is a set of findings that, well, we say a tiny bit in the book,
• 1:07:43
  but there's a set of findings we have even since I finished writing the book.
• 1:07:47
  There's this astonishing and very consistent finding that, okay,
• 1:07:52
  so we've known for a long time that people who are religious are a little happier
• 1:07:58
  than people who are not. That's been known for a long time.
• 1:08:00
  People who are on the right, politically, are a little happier than people on
• 1:08:04
  the left. That's been known for a long time.
• 1:08:05
  And if you look at the graphs of teenagers, and you see those differences up
• 1:08:11
  to about 2011, 2012, and then as we go along through the 2010s,
• 1:08:15
  some of the lines go up, like for depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide.
• 1:08:19
  Some of the lines go up. It's especially the lines for progressives more than
• 1:08:23
  conservatives, and especially for for atheists and agnostics,
• 1:08:27
  rather than religious kids or kids in religious families.
• 1:08:32
  And so, I think multiple data sets show this. And Zach Rauch,
• 1:08:36
  my researcher, has found that across European countries, which countries are
• 1:08:42
  the ones where kids are getting more depressed?
• 1:08:45
  What would you say? Can you guess? If you had to guess between Protestant,
• 1:08:48
  Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox, where would you expect kids would get washed
• 1:08:52
  away by this new technology?
• 1:08:56
  I would guess it would be those that really don't have much of a spiritual anchor,
• 1:09:01
  which in Europe, the Protestants are not actually sticking too closely to the
• 1:09:06
  spiritual part of it. You got it. And that's what Durkheim observed too.
• 1:09:10
  Emil Durkheim observed that the more you're bound into a community,
• 1:09:14
  the less you kill yourself.
• 1:09:15
  And he said back in, you know, whatever, 1902 or whenever it was written,
• 1:09:19
  you know, that it was the Protestants who had the highest suicide rates and
• 1:09:24
  the Orthodox Jews and the religious Catholics had lower rates.
• 1:09:27
  So what we see over and over again is that kids need to grow up in a community
• 1:09:32
  where they are bound in, there's a moral sense,
• 1:09:35
  there are stable people that are there for years and years that give them moral
• 1:09:41
  guidance, that act as moral exemplars.
• 1:09:44
  That's a healthy way for kids to grow up. And that's the way that everybody
• 1:09:48
  used to grow up practically. But now that's largely gone for secular folk.
• 1:09:53
  Secular folk are on their devices a lot more than religious folk.
• 1:09:57
  So, yes, I can definitely say that to listeners,
• 1:10:02
  if you are a religious Christian or if you are a religious member of any order
• 1:10:07
  and you have some structure to your week or your month and you go to church
• 1:10:13
  and you have a community and your kids are exposed to adults who have their best interests,
• 1:10:20
  if that's the way you're raising your kids,
• 1:10:22
  you're probably pretty insulated from the mental illness epidemic that is sweeping the Western world.
• 1:10:29
  Whereas if you are a secular progressive and you give your kids very little
• 1:10:37
  moral guidance, who am I to tell them what to believe or what to do?
• 1:10:41
  And your kids are not exposed to a constant and stable group of adults,
• 1:10:45
  but rather they're They're spending most of their time looking at weirdos on
• 1:10:49
  the internet who were chosen because some algorithm thought that this would engage your child.
• 1:10:53
  If that's the way your kid is growing up, your kid is at very,
• 1:10:56
  very high risk for serious depression, anxiety, self-harm, and at much elevated risk of suicide.
• 1:11:02
  So, you know, as I said early on, while I'm not a believer myself,
• 1:11:06
  the social science evidence on the benefits of religion is so powerful and has
• 1:11:13
  gotten so much more powerful since 2012 that, as I said, I'm a fan of religion.
• 1:11:20
  And I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about this over the next couple
• 1:11:25
  of years because the data, the findings, people weren't talking about this a
• 1:11:28
  couple of years ago, but I think this is going to come out as a big part of
• 1:11:32
  the story of who's gotten washed away and who's doing okay.
• 1:11:35
  Well, people who are listening to this podcast who are people of faith,
• 1:11:39
  I hope, are reassured and encouraged by that.
• 1:11:42
  And they would would also say, as I would, not only is it kind of good for your
• 1:11:46
  mental health, it's actually true, which is important, I think. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:55
  Okay, so if I could just add on then, because moral truths feel like objective truths.
• 1:12:01
  And so, especially for those who are raising their kids in a Christian community
• 1:12:08
  or who or go to a Christian school, if you have any kind of religious-based school,
• 1:12:12
  you're in a really great position to enact all four of the foundational reforms.
• 1:12:18
  And so, what I find is I gave a talk to a collection of Jewish day schools,
• 1:12:21
  and they are so gung-ho about this, because they think about it.
• 1:12:24
  Jews already have built in the Sabbath.
• 1:12:28
  Jews already have built in a day on which you have to turn your devices off.
• 1:12:32
  And what do you do? The kids run around and play They play with each other like
• 1:12:35
  crazy. That's what they do on the Sabbath. They run around.
• 1:12:38
  So Jews already have the ability to say, "'We're shutting these things off for 24 hours.
• 1:12:43
  And the schools who are trying to raise kids with moral character and a biblical
• 1:12:49
  orientation and knowledge of the Torah.
• 1:12:52
  So, religious schools, I think, are the best places in the country to enact
• 1:12:58
  all four reforms, because you can actually say to parents, please don't give
• 1:13:02
  your kids a smartphone before high school.
• 1:13:05
  You can say that. that. A secular school isn't going to say that.
• 1:13:08
  My kids go to New York City public schools. There's no way the principal is
• 1:13:10
  going to say, parents, please don't give your kids a smartphone,
• 1:13:13
  even though perhaps he'd want to.
• 1:13:15
  But you can say no smartphones till high school.
• 1:13:18
  You can say no social media till 18. You can say, let's just keep our kids off
• 1:13:23
  till they're 18 or at least 16.
• 1:13:25
  You can say we're going phone free. You can say nobody should have access to
• 1:13:28
  a phone from bell to bell during the school day.
• 1:13:31
  And you can give your kids a lot more independence because they'll be with each
• 1:13:36
  other, and there will be other adults around.
• 1:13:39
  There will be watchful eyes in the community. So I think religious communities
• 1:13:43
  can lead the way in reversing the mental health crisis and showing the rest
• 1:13:48
  of us, here's how you raise kids in the digital age.
• 1:13:52
  That's a wonderful way to conclude our conversation.
• 1:13:56
  John, I just want to say it's wonderful that you're not only a really good social psychologist,
• 1:14:01
  you've been willing to put yourself into this role of a communicator,
• 1:14:05
  doing the kind of work that relatively few people do, and no doubt finding yourself
• 1:14:11
  sometimes being shot at with arrows from both sides of all of this.
• 1:14:15
  But I think we are all in your debt now that you've done the hard work of coming
• 1:14:19
  up with this conclusion about social media, which may not be an easy one for
• 1:14:24
  people to hear, but it's critical for us to recognize and then to act upon.
• 1:14:29
  So I'm glad in your book, which is coming out March 26th, The Anxious Generation.
• 1:14:34
  People will have a chance to see all of what lies beneath the arguments you've
• 1:14:39
  made so compellingly in this podcast.
• 1:14:43
  I just want to say thank you. It's wonderful to have a chance to have this conversation.
• 1:14:48
  Well, thank you so much, Francis. If I could just add just a couple of notes
• 1:14:52
  to direct listeners on where to go.
• 1:14:55
  Of course, I hope you'll buy the book. I hope you'll buy 10 copies and give
• 1:14:58
  Give them to all your friends and the principal of your teachers and your kids'
• 1:15:01
  school, et cetera, et cetera.
• 1:15:02
  But I hope everybody will also subscribe to my sub stack, which is free.
• 1:15:06
  Just go to AfterBabble.com. I'm going to subscribe.
• 1:15:09
  This is where we put out, we put out, you know, we have a huge variety of posts,
• 1:15:15
  not just data, but advice for parents and schools. So AfterBabble.com.
• 1:15:21
  And I co-founded an organization called Let Grow with Lenore Skenazy,
• 1:15:25
  the author of Free Range Kids. kids.
• 1:15:27
  So if you want advice, especially if your kids are K through eight or just under,
• 1:15:31
  you know, under 13 or so, please go to letgrow.org.
• 1:15:34
  We have all kinds of advice and programs and simple things to do to give your
• 1:15:39
  kids a play-based childhood and to give them more independence.
• 1:15:43
  And then lastly, the website for the book is anxiousgeneration.com.
• 1:15:48
  We have a lot of resources there, including all the Google Docs that I mentioned.
• 1:15:51
  So, those are my last words. Francis, I'm very grateful to you for giving me
• 1:15:56
  this chance to talk to a religious-leaning audience.
• 1:15:59
  I've always enjoyed it. You and I have met a few times. We've had a few conversations.
• 1:16:03
  I've always enjoyed my time with you. And just your attitude,
• 1:16:06
  you know, here you are, a man of faith in science.
• 1:16:08
  That must be hard at times. It must have been at times. So I think you seem
• 1:16:12
  to have managed it quite well.
• 1:16:13
  Oh, well, you're very kind. I've been a fortunate person, and it gives me a
• 1:16:18
  chance to have conversations like this and then to reflect on it.
• 1:16:21
  And I hope everybody listening is doing some reflecting as well.
• 1:16:24
  We can figure out how to turn this problem around.
• 1:16:27
  You're really helping us. Thank you, John. Thank you, Francis.
• 1:16:29
  Music.
• 1:16:36
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