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 have little opportunity to 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 only 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--Haidt 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--by their own and their parents' perceptions of lurking dangers, in sterile subdivisions, 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. 

Another, 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 subdivisions notable for their sterile landscaping and detachment from places to socialize. 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. 

James Baker Lobbies for Climate Action

A pretty good crowd showed up at Princeton University for James Baker's talk entitled "A Conservative Approach to Climate Change". Years ago, you'd be lucky to get 10 or 20 in an audience for anything having to do with climate.

At 87, Baker looks back on many successes for those he served. He lent competence to the Reagan and Bush 1 administrations, and outmaneuvered the Gore team in the 2000 post-election fight for Florida's electoral votes. Reagan cut funding for climate research, and the Baker-assisted Republican victory in 2000 tragically stalled progress on combatting climate change for 8 years.

Having used his considerable diplomatic and administrative skills in the service of those who sabotaged solutions to the problem, Baker and some of his esteemed Republican colleagues, such as George Schultz, are offering what he calls a "conservative" solution for climate change. He is now, in effect, going up against the monster of denial and political expedience his former employers--Reagan and the Bushes--did so much to create. It's hard to see how even the extraordinary charm and tactical capacity of a James Baker could crack the nut of Republican resistance--a resistance that has served Republicans so well by letting voters off the hook for dealing with a massive problem.

Baker deserves credit for backing a worthy goal--a carbon tax. Essentially, a tax is levied on carbon-based fuels used to create and transport products, whose cost in the marketplace is then affected. The tax would be predictable, starting low and gradually rising. The carbon "content" of imports would be taxed as well. Business would appreciate the predictability, and be motivated by cost incentive to shift towards renewable energy. The tax revenue would be returned to all citizens of the U.S. as a check in the mail. A $40/ton of carbon tax would make that check $2000/year, in Baker's estimation. Regulations--many of which, it should be said, were created because Republicans have resisted solutions like a carbon tax--would be eased as the carbon tax took effect.

Though he claims that he and other conservatives came up with it, the approach sounds remarkably similar to what the Citizens Climate Lobby, a bipartisan group that's been around since 2007, has been working towards. George Schultz is very involved with CCL, and Baker claims to have started speaking about climate change as a problem back in 2004, but it's unclear to what extent they contributed to the development of the approach. There was no mention of CCL in his talk or during Q and A. (Note: I've since been told that Baker's approach gives more emphasis to rolling back regulations, and starts with a higher tax/ton that the CCL proposal.)

Baker doesn't admit that carbon emissions are causing the problem, but instead says the risks are too large to ignore. He declares hyper-partisanship to be a problem, but doesn't admit that much of the partisanship is artificially created by his ideological brethren who deny the overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change poses a huge risk to our future. Truth is an important source of unity. Denying it creates polarization where none need exist. We do not have, therefore, a "both sides are to blame" equivalence when it comes to political gridlock on climate change.

There seems to be a tacit understanding that Baker needs to label the proposal conservative in approach and origin, in order to avoid being labeled an "Other" by the Republicans he seeks to persuade. Therein lies the greatest sadness, that his political party has embraced the political expedience of climate denial, purging itself of any who dare acknowledge reality, so that Baker must still pretend there is scientific uncertainty, as in "carbon emissions may be causing our problem."

At least Baker dares to use words like "tax" and "liberal" in positive contexts, as in his support for a "liberal global order". These are small victories, coming long after the brutal effort, by Newt Gingrich and his progeny, to burden those words with enough negative connotation that no one dare use them, and to demonize liberals to the point that anything they say is rejected out of hand. Thus is political dialogue rendered dysfunctional, and problems like climate change fester for thirty years. 

At the beginning of the talk, Baker joked about a friend of similarly advanced age who told Baker that they were living "in the fourth quarter". No, Baker replied, "we're in overtime." He's happy to be alive, still active, still relevant. If he contributes to an unlikely last minute victory for climate action, we can cheer him on, while being mindful that he spent most of his life serving those who have set the nation up for defeat.

David Brooks Speaks Consiberally at Princeton

David Brooks, the ubiquitous political commentator, gave a fluid talk at Princeton University this past Monday evening, as the audience overflowed beyond the paneled confines of McCosh 50 into another room, and another room beyond that. On Public Broadcasting's News Hour, NPR's All Things Considered, the NY Times opinion page, and no doubt many other venues I'm not aware of, he plays the role of a moderately conservative commentator in an age when we see our politicians mostly through the filter of the punditocracy. Pundits like Brooks speak or write at length, while the words of our leaders are chopped up and delivered to us in sound bytes, with the exception every fourth year of party conventions and debates, and the annual state of the union address. Even on those occasions when political leaders get a chance to speak to us directly and unabridged, we still need commentators afterwards to tell us what we just heard.

But lest my own punditocratic tendencies obscure completely that of which Mr. Brooks spoke, here is an account:

David Brooks is a scintillating speaker who offers up a rich cuisine of anecdote, insight and perspective, sprinkled with humor and recommendations for books and articles worth reading. In a talk, he reveals aspects of his talent that remain largely hidden in his multimedia opinionating appearances. One witnesses a highly mobile and insatiable intellect that can morph at any moment into stand-up comedy.

Sometimes we found ourselves listening in rapt attention to a speaker telling us how messed up we are, as a nation, as a generation or as individuals. Other times, aware he was speaking to a room largely composed of Democrats, he served as go-between, making us privy to conversations he's had with his Republican friends. Much of what he says comes off as oblique criticism of the Republican Party he is hired to favor. Perhaps he could best be called a liservative or a consiberal, or a consiberal liservative, which when fused forms a consiberaliservative sandwich, in which liberalism is squeezed between two containing slices of conservatism and made visible only where it spills out around the edges.

So, again, let me aim to fend off digressions long enough to speak of what he spoke of:

First came an extended and many-angled comparison between 1950s culture and today. We are now more narcissistic, self-absorbed, self-satisfied, with higher self-esteem and lower achievement in math and science. We are worse followers, more obsessed with consumption and self-realization. There is less self-criticism, which might mean that people more often draw a line between good and evil not internally, through the middle of the self, but externally, as in us vs. them. There is a loss of public identity and public virtue. People live in information cocoons--witness Karl Rove denying the election results in Ohio. This most recent presidential campaign, Brooks said, was the most dishonest he had ever witnessed, and the campaign operatives were fine with that. (He preferred to imply that both sides were equally dishonest, which of course rewards the greater offender and punishes candidates who adhere more closely to truth.)

He made it clear he wasn't suggesting we return to the 1950s, but wanted to point out aspects from that time that had worth. Having become well-known and omnipresent in the political media, he somewhat ironically extols the virtues of the self-effacement common back then.

One thing Brooks would clearly like to bring back, though he won't say it explicitly, is the Republican Party of long ago. Republicans, he observes, "missed the shift" in America--the post 1950s changes in demographics, ethnicities, cultural norms. "The job of a conservative party is to conserve," by which he might mean remain the same in the face of change, though he could have noted that the Republican Party has not really conserved itself, but instead shifted dramatically in recent decades to embrace its more radical elements.

Many Republicans, he reports, wanted to quit Norquist's no new taxes pledge years ago, but are only now speaking openly about it. That would suggest a Republican Party under siege of its own ideology, its members afraid to speak their own opinions.

He says Republicans equate government action with dependency, while many growing elements of the electorate look at Pell Grants and community colleges as ways to become less dependent. Brooks calls for Republicans to return to a more Hamiltonian tradition in which government gives people the tools to excel. And he seems to empathize with Democrats trying to lead in a time when public virtue is less valued. He praises scientists for an ethos that shuns hasty conclusion and unsupported conviction. Brooks favors a national service requirement, in part because it would bring people of diverse economic and geographic backgrounds together in the service of the country, promoting a sense of shared destiny otherwise experienced only in times of disaster.

He is most optimistic about the judgement and spirit of those 35 and younger. He jokingly gave some credit for that to the parents of the below 35s, thus absolving just about all of us from his critical appraisal earlier in the lecture.

Despite Brooks' agile intellect, he is in some ways trapped, like those Republicans who can't, given the demands of ideological conformity, speak honestly about taxes or climate change. If Brooks wishes for a more honest, public spirited political discourse, then he must speak out directly and forcefully against the more rightwing elements he is employed to side with, rather than couching his criticisms in a "both sides are equally to blame" gauze of mutual culpability.

One could charitably say he is doing the best he can, as a conservative commentator in a time when conservatism, through radical drift and denial of reality, has mostly lost connection to its original meaning. But it's hard to sympathize. Brooks' mental agility can be used just as effectively to obscure truth as to reveal it, as in his Oct. 18 NY Times column's attempt to blame Al Gore for Republicans' refusal to support action against climate change:

"Al Gore released his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. The global warming issue became associated with the highly partisan former vice president. Gore mobilized liberals, but, once he became the global warming spokesman, no Republican could stand shoulder to shoulder with him and survive. Any slim chance of building a bipartisan national consensus was gone."

After such a statement, conservatism lies eviscerated on the floor, an empty husk of what once may have been. Conservatism cannot preach personal responsibility while blaming others for its own intellectual cowardice. If climate change is real, and poses a grave risk to the country's future, then you don't sit back and blame one of the messengers for not being more lovable. When the status quo feeds radical changes in climate, attempts to "conserve" the status quo become a form of radicalism.

Like Christie in a talk in the same university lecture hall last year (see related post here), Brooks did not mention climate change.

He ended his talk with a final finale of one liners, worthy of a spot on Letterman's Late Show. During the Q and A, Brooks was accused by a morose-sounding fellow of making false assertions based on misleading interpretations of various studies, including a supposed comparison of American and Chinese values based on what they remember from looking at fish in an aquarium. A debunking can be found here, though Brooks refused to concede any error.

It would be a full time job to correct false impressions created by pundits. Their role is to speak authoritatively about myriad issues--an impossible task. Most lack the scientific training needed to appreciate the urgency of climate change, or to see nature as anything other than a distant backdrop for human drama. In fact, their training is not even considered relevant to whether we should take them seriously or not. Brooks' skill at sounding authoritative places him in high demand, but the more time he spends speaking or cranking out the next column, the less time he has to dig deeper into issues. Like a politician, he risks his living if he admits error or strays too far from his established positions. He can seem like an intellectual globetrotter, summoning whole eras for analysis and comment, and yet he is also trapped, struggling to escape from a box of his own making. Not surprising, then, that he's sounding consiberally more liservative with time.

The talk was a Stafford Little Lecture, part of the fall, 2012 Public Lecture Series