Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University, also pushed back on the idea that Common Core is the primary cause of mental-health problems among American kids. “This is a common trap that we fall into when trying to figure out what’s going on with those declines,” he told me. “We try to answer the question of ‘What one big thing can explain this?’ The answer, in my view, is that there isn’t one big thing.” This was generally the thesis of Etchells’s own book Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (And How to Spend It Better), which came out the week before The Anxious Generation did, sold only a few thousand copies, and received hardly any attention at all.
Come September, the fight over that “one big thing” will be renewed. Which change that happened 15 years ago was the real source of so much misery for children? “You can’t run experiments on history,” Haidt said, so we’ll never be able to prove that smartphones and social media caused the steep decline in youth mental health. “We just have to say which hypothesis is more plausible,” he said—and he’s yet to hear one more plausible than his own.
When I met with Gray, he said that he has total confidence in his idea: “The evidence is really very overwhelming.” Later on, I tried to press the issue: Couldn’t there be some other factors in the mix? What if Common Core had been just one of many causes of the problem? “It would be nice” if there really weren’t any one big thing, he said, but he simply didn’t feel that this was the case. “So far, I haven’t heard of any other possibility that has the same plausibility.” He’d been studying the numbers and considering the alternatives, and he didn’t see how his theory could be wrong.
Definitely one of the more interesting critiques I’ve read, mostly for the schism-sketch between Jonathan Haidt and Peter Gray. Gray’s hypothesis seems pretty unconvincing and much more stubbornly motivated to me, at least at face value. And Haidt has been, to my reading, pretty nuanced in handling the “multifactorial” angle.
I don’t have chapter and verse, but I’m fairly certain Haidt himself has said repeatedly that the biggest damage of cell phone use — and therefore the biggest part of the whole thing — is the “lost opportunity” for kids. (And that probably for adults as well.) And opportunity loss can cover anxiety at school (à la Gray), anxiety from social media and real-world dangers (à la Haidt), and even, to name a few more, the social anxiety of divorce, global warming, political indoctrination, and the lack of felt meaning and purpose in life (à la whoever you like).
Some notes I don’t feel like organizing:
- There will always be a category of “unnecessary suffering” for us humans — especially when it comes to kids. Which means that we will always need to ask, “What might we be doing wrong?” — especially when it comes to kids.
- Contra Gray, I have no idea how anyone could make the case for untrammeled internet freedom for kids. The internet is about as human-made as anything can get. I don’t deny some knowledge and communication benefits, but how scrolling and clicking about in it amounts to a gain of opportunity for a developing mind in a world that is not anthropocentric is beyond me.
- Not surprisingly, I want to take every chance I can to plug one of my favorite Arendtian notions within what she called “natality.” As her biographer put it, “Adults must not, she urged, forgo their responsibilities for children as children, they must not refuse to children a sheltered period for maturation, for being at home in the world.” (emphasis added)
- I’ve mentioned before the possible synergistic effect that phones might play, and how our limited but ever-overestimated ability to “study” culture will continue to complicate the correlation-causation debate. In that way, pocket-computers designed for addiction and control are certainly not the only thing preventing people from feeling at home in the world, but they may uniquely compound those things. And they may be one of the fastest growing and most ubiquitous factors contributing to such perpetual homesickness. As a combination of human assumption and human ignorance, they may also be something of an apotheosis.
- Again, the phones are designed more than anything else for addiction. They don’t have to be designed for addiction, but they are designed for addiction. And that means distraction. And you don’t need a conclusive study, nor do you need a doctorate in anthropology, nor do you need to read Jonathan Haidt in order to have the wisdom to say that these devices are robbing us of essential things and essential loves.
- Sven Birkerts:
Marcel Proust wrote somewhere that love begins with looking, and the idea is suggestive. But if that’s the case, the reverse might also be: that true looking begins with love. There’s the quote that I used to repeat like a mantra to writing students, from Flaubert: ‘Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.’ Again, the distinctions, the questions of priority. Is it that the looked-at thing becomes interesting, or that its intrinsic interest gradually emerges? Is the power in the negotiable thing or in the act of looking? If the latter, then the things of the world are already layered with significance, and looking is merely the action that discloses.