According to Jonathan Haidt, the Fault for Everything Lies Neither in the Stars, Nor In Ourselves, but in Social Media.

This Article Annoyed Me

Haidt is a prolific pundit, author, and social psychologist.  His recent Atlantic article has been widely touted (on twitter) as a “must-read.” And especially touted on Haidt’s own prolific twitter account.

Its clickbait title: “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”

Haidt’s answer to his “Why” is social media.

Note the use of the word “uniquely,” which means that Haidt is claiming that today’s America is more stupid than it’s ever been. Quite a claim.

Somewhere along the way, the phrase “biblical proportions” must have made an impression on Haidt, because the metaphor he uses to describe our uniquely stupid society is the story of the Tower of Babel. Babel is Haidt’s leitmotif to illustrate the discord social media has sown, creating, in his words, “…the fragmentation of everything.”

Not satisfied with the bible’s Babel tale, Haidt goes beyond biblical proportions by adopting the “popular rendering of Babel,” positing that missing from the biblical record is God’s obliteration of the Tower. So not just the metaphor of the division of human language, but apocalypse as well.  

Haidt asks the reader to “hold the dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.”

Or another such quote, “But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore…”

It’s a long article, and there’s an embarrassment of such phrases.  

One of Haidt’s complaints about social media is the way it leads people to make extreme statements to seek attention.

Is this unintentional self-irony?

Haidt’s Case and My Comments in Italics

Polls show that the country is more politically polarized than ever.

Polls show that trust in institutions is at an all-time low.

These trends correlate with the rise of social media, accelerated by the introduction of the Like and Re-tweet and other such “buttons.” However, mere correlation is never proof of causation.

The polling trends cited by Haidt that correlate with the rise of social media also correlate with an increase in the partisanship of Cable TV and newspapers, as well as an increase in gerrymandering so that the number of competitive Congressional Districts has plummeted. They also correlate with an increase in inequality of wealth and income. They also correlate with an abysmal past ten years for my New York Jets.

The most frequent posters on social media try to gain attention by being outrageous, rude, or salacious. They are also most frequently politically extreme on both the right and the left.

Social media is mostly people “yelling” at each other about trivial content.

People look to social media for confirmation bias of their views. That makes them think stupid thoughts and do stupid things, thereby reinforcing their extremism.

Extremists are stupid.

To Aristotle, moderation was the ideal approach to behavior. He taught that extremism led to unhappiness in every aspect of life. Extremism was unwise. Neither Aristotle nor his contemporaries were on social media, so we can infer that extremism leading to stupid behavior predates social media by at least twenty-five hundred years.

Haidt’s Proposed Solutions to the Unique Stupidity Caused by Social Media

Harden Democratic Institutions: End closed party primaries, end gerrymandering, and impose staggered, 18 year terms on Supreme Court Justices so that every president gets a nomination every two years. Not sure what these reforms have to do with social media. Sort of a case of “My house is on fire; let’s call the plumber.”

Reform Social Media: Haidt’s “biggest single [proposed] change” would be to verify that every user is a human and of age, while continuing to allow anonymity. If this is feasible, it sounds reasonable to me.

Prepare the Next Generation: More unsupervised play for younger children. Sounds good. Prevent teens from using social media until they’re sixteen That noise you’re hearing is not the Tower of Babel crashing, but rather the world’s largest barn door being shut after a billion horses have already bolted.

Haidt on Education

According to Haidt, one of the malign effects of the Babel-like fracturing of America is, in his words, “…young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people…” 

To this I say, thank goodness! Long overdue! Yes, there has been a messy, contentious backlash against the movement to incorporate “1619” (shorthand for the story of slavery as popularized by Nikole Hannah-Jones) within the teaching of American history alongside the story of “1776.” The American story, properly taught and understood, is a complex one. American history is not coherent, because it’s anything but consistent or harmonious. America has done both great things and awful things. I think students can understand that. (Personally, I think the great outweighs the awful, but I say that from a position of lucky privilege).

Is America Today Uniquely Stupid?

Let me suggest a few top of mind comparisons between the “uniquely stupid” of today to the status quo of certain periods after 1945.

School segregation, no civil rights, no seatbelts, socially acceptable to drive drunk (thank you, Mothers Against Drunk Driving!), most adults smoked, air quality horrible (thank you Nixon for creating the EPA), countless medical advances, huge decline in unwanted pregnancies, being gay no longer stigmatized or discriminated against in many parts of the country.

My Takeaway

There are many problems with social media, but just as many, or more, benefits as well. Social media’s huge scope and success make it a convenient and conventional scapegoat to go after. Haidt’s article is just one more exaggerated and tiresome attack.

My free advice is to be very careful about using the phrase “uniquely stupid.” It’s a very high bar to prove. And a barely resistible target for a critic.