Saturday, February 08, 2025

Multiple Entrapments in a Supposedly Free Society: Cellphones, Social Media and a Fossil Fuel Economy

A talk by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (pronounced "height") is packed with data and insights, metaphors and meaning. Blessed with a mellifluous speaking voice and a mind brimming with curiosity and ideas, he fills you with an articulate vision of a deeply troubled world salvageable only through specific collective actions. 

He visited Princeton University this month to deliver a talk entitled "Far Beyond Mental Health: What the New Phone-Based Life is Doing to Human Development, Social Capital, and Democracy." 

According to Haidt, as the power and appeal of the cellphone has increased, young brains in particular have grown around it as a tree's trunk and roots might grow around a rock or a gravestone. This growing attachment, despite considerable benefits, has spawned a long list of maladies, beginning most visibly with pinky fingers deformed from constantly grasping a phone. Myopia has become more prevalent as people spend more time indoors, staring at their screens. 

At the same time, parents perceiving a more dangerous world, have deprived their kids of the chance to explore the world on their own. Largely limited to adult-supervised activities, kids don't learn self-government. As neighborhood connections have broken down, phones have delivered increasingly addictive content, calculated to keep kids continually online. Suicides among girls have increased. Boys interact primarily through their computers, spending hours on customized video gaming maximally experienced on their own computers at home. Though it can be potentially heartening that accidents and injuries have dropped among young people, it also points to a drop in physical activity and risk-taking that are an important part of growing up. 

Young people trapped in cellphone use:

Significantly, surveys show that youth are not necessarily enamored with this constant attention to the screen, but say instead that they are glued to their phones because everyone else is. To put the phone down is to risk social isolation and diminishment. 

At one point, citing young men of the past who made transformative contributions to society in their 20s--Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg--Haight asked the audience for names of young people who have proved transformative more recently, excluding the music world. Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai were mentioned, but no young men, and no one outside of advocacy. His suggestion is that young people's attention is now largely consumed by the phone, leaving no time for the mind to wander and mull things over.

Starting around 2012, Haidt's collection of data shows, youth became increasingly trapped--in barren neighborhoods, by their own and their parents' perceptions of lurking dangers, in schools running lockdown drills due to mass shootings, and most of all by increasingly sophisticated phones and software calculated to suck them in and keep them fixated on the screen. Internal communications reveal that tech companies learned early on the physiology of how to manipulate phone users, providing dopamine-inducing reward with every click. 

A second, even more widespread form of entrapment:

Unmentioned in the talk is a strong parallel here with another form of entrapment that affects people of all ages. We are all trapped in a fossil fuel economy. The drop in happiness among youth coincides with increasing awareness that each one of us contributes in a small but measurable way to the destabilization of the earth's climate. Here, too, the social pressure to participate in this collective rush towards dystopia is overwhelming. Advertisements urge us to buy more, drive bigger cars, fly to appealing destinations. Our primary role in society, we are constantly being told, is to seek fulfillment and happiness through consumption. As with the youth locked onto their phones by social pressure, all of us risk social isolation and diminishment if we unilaterally withdraw from a fossil fuel-dependent lifestyle. Here, too, internal communications in fossil fuel companies have revealed efforts to keep us addicted to their products, regardless of consequence.

Though fossil fuels have enabled us in many ways, the mobility and comfort they make possible has often kept us isolated in our cars and homes. Machine-scaled development spreads us out in barren subdivisions. Unable to get anywhere or see a friend without the assistance of a parent and a machine, kids in particular have been disempowered. 

Also unmentioned in the talk, nature, once a playground and source of refuge and endless fascination for childhood, has changed as well. What woodlands and fields remain have become impoverished and tangled with the dense, thorny growth of invasive species. Exploration carries the risk of tick borne disease.

Haidt cited evidence that those of a more liberal persuasion, and/or lacking in religion, have proved more prone to unhappiness. He quotes about the hole in our hearts that can only be filled by God. I believe he said that past efforts to replace religion with various forms of spirituality lacking God have not been very successful. Though an atheist, Haidt takes his kids to the synagogue, and encouraged the audience to explore the role religion could play in bringing solace in troubled times. 

At this point in an otherwise highly convincing talk, I grew skeptical. Conservatism in many ways has devolved into illusion and irresponsibility. Unchastened by truth and evidence, denying our collective impact on the climate, ignoring massive deficits caused by tax cuts, coddling its own while projecting harsh criticism outward, it excuses its adherents from caring about our collective fate and the plight of others. Conservative happiness appears dependent on being gaslit and let off the hook. 

Religion can foster a similarly dubious happiness, believing God has a plan that will ultimately supersede current earthly suffering. Embedded in denial and passivity is a deeply pessimistic view that we cannot understand nor solve society's problems. A liberal, seeking happiness on earth, feels trapped in a political climate where we are free to collectively create problems, while political sabotage prevents us from collectively solving them.

Haidt has a solution, however, at least for kids trapped in social media: phone-free schools, no smartphone until highschool, no social media until age 16, and encourage real-world independence and play. That might help youth trapped in social media, but all of us will remain trapped in a society destabilized by our machines' emissions and a seemingly uncontrollable proliferation of lies, while collective action to solve problems is stymied. 

It's a sign of just how rapidly our world is unraveling that the title of Haidt's lecture, advertised as "Far Beyond Mental Health," had become the more deeply urgent "Far More Than Mental Illness" by the time he showed up to deliver it. 

Part of a lecture series named for Harold Shapiro, whom I remember as president of the University of Michigan when I was there, the talk was hosted by the James Madison Program, led by Robert George and known to have a conservative leaning. 

Robert George (on the left in the photo) promotes a diversity of views on campus, which is a fine sentiment, but ten years ago, when he hosted columnist George Will, that promotion of diverse views was used as an excuse to deny and delay while climate destabilization continued unchecked.

Haidt seems optimistic that the case he and others are making about smartphones and social media will lead to action. We've seen, though, how even overwhelming evidence of climate change's perils can be resisted and denied. I grew up in an era of free-range childhoods, exploring nature and playing pickup games with no grownups in sight. It was a time when facts still mattered. We enjoyed the comforts and mobility of fossil fuels without the knowledge of the havoc they ultimately wreak. Technological innovation has brought new freedoms, and yet we and kids especially are increasingly trapped, indoors, in social media, in ideological echo chambers, in a fossil fuel economy, with resistance to collective solutions deeply entrenched. 

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Forced and Unforced Lies in Political Discourse

Here's an interesting distinction that is not currently being made by those in the media who report and interpret the news. Broadly speaking, politicians generate two kinds of falsehood--forced and unforced. This distinction is borrowed from tennis, where there are forced and unforced errors. A forced error is due to the pressure an opponent exerts, while an unforced error is the player's own mistake. For example, when a player sends two straight serves into the net, committing a double fault, that is an unforced error, because the opponent was just standing there, waiting for the serve.

Now, in a political context, a forced lie would be the sort of lie that is committed to cover up an embarrassing truth. This is the old style form of lying. A politician lies to cover up something that the opposition will otherwise be able to pounce on and take advantage of. This sort of lie can also be called a defensive lie. Nixon lied about Watergate; Reagan and George H.W. Bush lied about the Iran-Contra affair, and so forth. 

In contrast, an unforced lie is a lie that no one is forcing the politician to make. A false attack on an opponent would be an unforced lie. The perpetrator is not trying to cover something up, but instead using a lie as a weapon. Propaganda often takes the form of unforced lies.

The forced/unforced terminology can be applied to Trump's troubled nomination of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. Among allegations of a drinking problem, sexual impropriety, and financial misconduct, the most provocative was an email written by Hegseth's mother to her son while he was in the midst of a contentious divorce. In the email, she told him "I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man ..." That email can be viewed as an unforced truth. Hegseth's mother didn't need to forward the email to Hegseth's wife, who presumably shared it with others through whom it ultimately was made public. The mother's recent disavowal of the email (“It is not true. It has never been true.”) can be seen as a forced lie, that is, a predictable defensive attempt, given social and political pressures, to contradict the unforced truth she herself had revealed.

An internet search uncovered precious little, but there's an anonymous post on reddit that also divides lies up into forced and unforced. Here it's an atheist's interpretation of God as a Big Lie that spawns forced lies to deal with the inconsistencies between the Big Lie and reality.
"Even if you have reasonable critical faculties in other areas of life, people who have bought into the big lie construct very complex additional lies as part of the apologetics process. These additional lies are forced lies in the sense that they need to be constructed to paper over the (increasingly many) inconsistencies between the big lie and reality. This is somewhat understandable, if one is empathetic enough to accept the power of buying into an ideological big lie in the first place."
Later in the post, the author introduces the concept of a debt to the truth, the idea being that, just as governments can accumulate debt, people can accumulate a debt that expands with each new lie they tell.

"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid."

How satisfying it would be if people who accumulated a debt to the truth ultimately got their comeuppance. It is an appealing notion that speaks to faith in a moral universe, even among those who question the existence of God. What I see, however, as 2024 comes to a close, is a world or at least a nation where lies, now primarily of the unforced variety, are ascendant, tolerated, often rewarded.