Haidt's After Babel

Jonathan Haidt's explanations of declines in adolescent mental health

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Adolescent Mental Health and Jonathan Haidt's After Babel

Jonathan Haidt recently started a Substack site, titled After Babel, where he is presenting evidence and arguments for his explanation of why the mental health of young people, especially girls, has been declining over the previous decade.

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The Thesis

Haidt maintains that parental protections have been excessive offline and insufficient online.

Consequently, kids grow up shielded from ordinary challenges of everyday life, which leaves them psychologically unprepared to deal with routine difficulties as they grow older, and yet they are also exposed to artificial impacts of social media that are outright deleterious.

Furthermore, both offline and online influences teach them that anything emotionally hurtful is inherently harmful and evil.

The combined effects of these factors are a major cause, according to Haidt, of the deterioration of adolescent mental health within the last 10 to 15 years.

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Criticism: Neutrality versus Impartiality

Haidt welcomes and invites comments and criticism, and I hope to contribute by concentrating on issues related to statistics and logic in Haidt's argumentation.

I've critiqued Haidt's use of statistics before -- see Blinded by Gender, The Crime of Parsimony, and The Perils of Improper Terminology -- and I will continue to do so. I also plan to occasionally defend Haidt when it is his critics who misuse statistics.

I'm not, however, a neutral critic.

Haidt's arguments are germane to my investigations into the doubling of adolescent suicide and his theories are, in essence, rivals to my tentative hypothesis linking teen suicides to childhood trauma (specifically 'abandonment deaths').

I've also proposed the need to investigate the possibility that mental health declines among adolescents are in large part due to the increasing share of parenting by Generation X -- a generation that had extraordinarily high levels of suicide, violence, and drug abuse as well as other risk behaviors during its youth (see The Fleeting Persistence of Hopelessness).

Furthermore, I consider Haidt's advocacy of mandatory age verification to be outright dangerous (see the EFF position on this issue -- it explains some of my main concerns).

Needless to say, I hope that neither my skepticism about some of Haidt's theories, nor my opposition to some of his proposed solutions, will affect the validity and impartiality of my criticism.

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A Public Intellectual Without a Tribe

Haidt's views on social media have earned him the enmity of libertarians, who oppose governmental regulations, as well as the hostility of those progressives who wish to ascribe the adolescent mental health crisis to various politically correct causes.

In the meantime, Haidt's participation in The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an organization that has been increasingly vocal in damning Republican attempts to constrain free speech, foreclosed any fraternization with conservatives.

It would have been much easier for Haidt to have adopted the position that blaming smartphones and social media is merely a moral panic and that restricting adolescent participation in online activities will have the kind of deleterious effects that he and Greg Lukianoff have warned us about in their book The Coddling of the American Mind.

The fact that Haidt chose the path far more difficult for him to travel earns my respect instead of ridicule.

I wrote the following in one of my past critiques of Haidt:

Haidt is a public intellectual in the best sense of the term -- someone who tries to use his intellect to serve the public, not just his career. He has entered the perilous waters of digital tech debates out of a genuine concern over digital technologies' effects on society, especially its adolescent members.

Haidt is also exceptional in welcoming and encouraging criticism, practicing what he preaches about the necessity of public dialogues. He admits errors without needless excuses and qualifications and he tries to fully understand the arguments of his opponents.

[ Blinded by Gender: A Comment on The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls ]

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For these reasons it will be my pleasure to critique After Babel.

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