The Russell Moore Show - Jonathan Haidt Says Social Media Is Making America Stupid

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello this is russell moore and you're listening to the russell moore show brought to you by the public theology project at christianity today every week we explore questions and conversations from a christian perspective and i've been looking forward to this uh conversation uh all week long because y'all know i've been asking this of of multiple people lately both on this program and just in life which is are things as crazy as they seem and the reason that i ask that is because i have i've seen people read people from the past who sort of started out really optimistic and forward-looking and then by the time by the time the years go by they become really get off you kids get off my lawn sort of curmudgeonly and we're at the twilight of american democracy and everything's falling apart and so forth and so i often wonder is that just what's going on here is this just life or is something uniquely different and so i i brought this up in our conversation with david brooks a while ago and that actually came out of a uh a book club meeting that that both of us are in with our guest today who was uh who was with us that day to talk about uh some of his books and that's jonathan height who is the social psychologist at the new york university stern school of business and has written uh one of the books that i recommend when someone says what do i need to read it's one of the best and most important and informative books i think of the last 20 years and that's the right righteous mind um really changed my entire paradigm of thinking about why people disagree and how to talk across those divides of disagreement but jonathan height has an article this week in the atlantic i always read what he writes but i was especially intrigued by this one because he's talking about the tower of babel and the title of it is why the past 10 years of american life have been uniquely stupid which is one of the questions that i asked him in our book club is are things really crazy and i was intrigued because he said yes and not only could he say yes he dated it to 2009 and explained it and a lot of that is being explained in this article so i wanted to talk to him about it with all of you jonathan hi welcome to the program today thanks so much russell it's always such a pleasure to talk with you you know i was interested in the tower of babel analogy because what you did with it was not what many people do which is just this is um a moral lesson about overreaching technology sort of a mary shelley's frankenstein sort of a story instead you got to a a deeper level here with what's going on with fragmentation and and asked that question are things really uniquely stupid you think they are why is that the case i do i do um so the um so i'm a i'm a college professor i'm a professor at new york university stern school of business i've been a professor since 1995 i love being a professor i love universities i love my students and yet something changed in 2014. something changed like we thought it was just with the students my friend greg lucianov who is the president of the foundation for individual rights and education he came to me in may of 2014 and said john something weird is happening students are suddenly they're the ones asking for protections from speech saying we can't have the speaker come to campus this person's views are dangerous harmful violence and he'd never seen it before and i'd never seen it before but i just started to see it at nyu a little bit and i was reading about it it wasn't like this in 2012. if any of your listeners graduated from college in 2012 they didn't see any of this stuff and if they started college in 2013 through 2017 they saw the arrival of safe spaces microaggressions trigger warnings cultural appropriations like the students were freaking out finding offense everywhere and prosecuting filing charges launching investigations and suddenly we were all like on the back foot like wait but you know i just gave a lecture and i used a word and now you're like reporting me for you know what is this um and we thought it was just the students we thought uh in our original atlantic article that coddling the american mind we thought that colleges were somehow teaching students to think in distorted ways that make them depressed but we were wrong it turned out that this was happening everywhere and we were just the canaries in the coal mine we got the first batch of students who had been shaped by social media because the young people they went on it right away um after it changed in 2009 um and so now after 2014 2015 it became clear no this isn't just college it's affecting journalism and the arts and media and hollywood and by now everybody has changed this and church that's right it took a few more years but boy has it affected affected churches um and so um i've been trying to try and figure what the heck has been happening since 2014 it was like something changed in the fabric of space time and i i love metaphors and the first time i tried to figure this out i wrote an atlantic article in 2019 where i said i opened with a metaphor and i hope your listeners won't find this blasphemous but the metaphor was you know what if god has been sitting up there all this time and watching the universe and it's kind of boring you know the planets move as they move and it's just been doing the same thing for many billions of years and he says let's just double the gravitational constant well you know it'll it'll shake things up and so if god one day in 2014 just doubled the gravitational constant of the of the entire universe it would be chaos like planets would move closer to the sun and the temperature would rise and planes would fall from the sky and that's what it felt like after 2014. so that was the metaphor i used to open that article and i if that wasn't a fully satisfactory answer and it was when i i don't remember why but i looked back at the story of the tower of babel uh in genesis and it's a very short story a very powerful story and the key line is this god says after saying and you know and look this is only the beginning of what they will do and yes hubris and um your pride but the key line is god doesn't just punish them he says let us go down and confound their language so that they may not understand one another and that was it when i read that i reread that i said oh my god that's what happened to us and so that's what really brought me to understand social media was supposed to connect us it was supposed to make it effortless to talk to everybody anyone and one giant community and it's gonna be great that we thought as late as 2011. um but by 2014 it it was clear no it's actually fragmenting us into little bubbles little shards that we can't communicate it is basically knocked over the tower of babel what's interesting to me about the tower of babel is that there really are two motives here uh one of them is is personal glory sort of personal uh or national platform building let's make a name for ourselves um and the other is protection and fear uh so that we might not be scattered and we look at uh we look at what's happening with social media and then the ripple effects of social media you point to 2009 to 2011 as being a point of a big shift that maybe showed up later in in 2014 what happened yes so so we have to go back to the origins of social media in 2003 2004 that's when myspace and facebook and friendster come out and they're just glorified address books you know you can post photos of your kids and your vacation and you can link to other people's pages so it was more fun than an address book um it was playful it's not harmful to democracy not harmful to mental health uh but then facebook and other platforms or twitter develops the news feeds now you're getting feeds okay fine i can see my friends new photographs that's all very nice but it becomes more about news and politics and that goes on until 2009 which is when everything changes because facebook adds the like button before then you just had to read stuff you couldn't you couldn't like press a button you like it but then twitter the same year adds the retweet button which is incredibly powerful because now someone sends you something that is makes you angry and you click one button that anger goes out to you know your 500 followers or friends and if if you know if only 10 of them forward it before you know it that's it spreads like wildfire so 2009 is when the architecture of the platforms change but they don't instantly get nasty it takes a little while for the for for people to begin to use them to to perform to broadcast to show how righteously angry they are um and as you said and so so yes let's get into this i i read your uh your recent essay that the cross contradicts our culture wars and i was so interested to read the two motives that you said so i'd like to ask you because when i read the story and you know i'm a free listener i'm i'm a jewish atheist that is i'm raised jewish i i feel jewish i identify as jewish but i don't i don't personally believe in god um but i really respect religion and i think that's why many christians and jews and others have responded to the righteous mind because i actually say religion is part of our origin it makes us better it's essential for the moral order so what little reading i was able to do on the tower of babel's story i i wasn't sure what the motive was because right there's one line that suggests it's you know we're going to make a tower to the heavens and we're so arrogant and and we're proud but then some other commentary i read said it was well you know god had just flooded humanity killed almost everybody and the reason they built the city i can't remember if it says walled city in the text but the reason they built the city was to prevent being flooded again and of course the tower you know you can't possibly be flooded if you can climb up the tower so can you help me what do what do biblical scholars say about the motives tell me more about it well most people see it as a um as a cigarette as a a way to commune with the gods and and almost to um as a way to channel power uh there and and the reason i think in the text is that sense of uh let's make a name you see that with nimrod you see that with lamech you see it other places in genesis where it's almost a not just a personal glory i think but similar to honor culture of a kind of i have to be powerful and threatening enough that you won't attack me and so that we won't be fragmented i think that's what's going on there which i think is is so similar um to to many of the impulses taking place even even what you mentioned about anger because i mean you mentioned in the article and i've seen this elsewhere that it's not just that people's anger shows up in social media but that anger uniquely motivates people to share and to pay attention to uh to what's on social media is that true so here we have to distinguish between most people and the people who post and this is really crucial a lot of people don't get this because we evolved we have the sense of like read the room like you get a sense of most people believe this or that and that you can have that when you're in a room with 30 people because you can see facial expressions you just get a sense um but what happens with social media is you know millions hundreds of millions of people are on it and and in any in any communication there could be seven people watching seventy seven thousand you don't know how many people are watching uh and of the people watching almost nobody is saying anything now most people my rule is almost everybody is decent almost everybody uh uh doesn't want to hurt other people um people are generally generally good although human nature is complicated and we're tribal and we're competitive we have all these good and bad motives but when we interact on social media platforms and they're called platforms for a reason it is a stage upon which people choose to perform so it's as if it's as if there had been human interaction but then suddenly in the early 2000s or late 2000 you know 2009 2012 in that arena we said how about if we stop talking to each other how about instead let's all meet in the roman coliseum and groups of people will go down in the middle and they'll fight it out and we'll cheer it'll be really fun and and and that obviously isn't terrible for democracy and my god is it terrible for youth for young people's mental health so um so it's not that people love to spread anger it's that some people love to spread anger because they're paid by the tweet they're paid by the post and what i say in the article is that social media did not give us all voice that's what mark zuckerberg keeps saying how could it be wrong to give more people more voice but it didn't give more people more voice the the four groups of people who use it uh most uh to spread especially to spread anger but the four groups are the far right the far left trolls or almost all men not women men who who get prestige from attacking others and tearing them down so trolls and russian intelligence agents the russian internet research agency has been very skillful um they launched their campaign they began 2013 but it really heated up in 2014 they began a really concerted campaign to divide us make us hate each other think that everybody's racist fascist sexist um so social media is not about what most people do it it doesn't make most of us into jerks but it super empowers the jerks and it super empowers the political extremists that's not a democracy when you have a public square owned by a corporation incentivized to make us fight like the roman coliseum and four groups are using it you can't have a democracy if that's what your public square is you know i have noticed this dynamic at work in real life in churches congregations where there was a time when i would say to people okay you've got maybe 10 of your congregation that's angry or disgruntled or sowing division 90 of the people are with you now uh that that dynamic just doesn't work because the 10 are able to really govern what goes on in the congregation and so if you have um i i said to someone one time it's it's almost like a homeschooling co-op that i knew one time that had some flat earthers uh you know okay and what they started doing was just not saying things like global just because they didn't want to go through the you know i always don't want to go through the treatment at all and i thought you know this is exactly what often goes on in churches is that most people are just saying you know can we really afford six months of just warfare over whatever it is and so you just yield to it and self-censor and and then before you know it that is actually controlling the the atmosphere that is a great example i'm going to use that if i may uh because that really gets at the central dynamic um so there have been 100 articles written on how social media is destroying society and democracy what i hope is new about my essay is that i'm a social psychologist and i was really going down deep into the social motivations how do our social motivations change when you change the architecture of the platform you change the payoffs to different subgroups of people that's the question and one of the many metaphors in the piece is so there's this great quote from one of the engineers who developed the retweet button at twitter and years later he was interviewed in wired magazine and he said he regretted what he had done because he said they watched the twitter mobs for me and he said he thought to himself we've just handed a loaded gun to a four-year-old and that really stuck with me and that's the metaphor that i took it's not actually that twitter's a gun or you know facebook is not a gun it doesn't kill people i mean there are some exceptions but we won't even talk about that it's more like a dark gun it's more like you get to shoot a little dart into somebody's arm and it hurts like you're not going to die but you know i've never been shot with a dart but we've all gotten shots at the doctor imagine a really painful metal thing shooting that would hurt plus if you get shot with a dart there could be a hundred more comment you just don't know it could be zero more it could be a hundred more you just don't know so now imagine that you're leading anything you are leading a congregation you're leading a homeschooling group you're president of university and you've always known you've got some difficult members um and you've learned how to deal with them and and how to sort of you know keep the reasonable people in charge and that's the way it's always been they've always been unreasonable people but now suddenly around 2011 2012 when when the platform the participation in these hyper-viralized platforms is skyrocketing around 2012 let's say somebody passes out dart guns everywhere billions and billions of dart guns everyone in the world gets a dart gun and most people don't want to shoot anyone they don't even they just put it away in the closet they don't use it but these four groups of people the far left the far right the trolls and the russian agents these four groups of people are totally excited like wow we actually get the more we shoot the more money we get oh sign me up and so these four groups or the more shooting or the more status because that's what you have if i attack people who i consider to be uh more significant in some way or the other then i'm i'm actually gaining prestige exactly that's right so the metaphor i didn't i didn't mean literally money what i meant was like social currency and especially for young people they don't care that much about money they care much more about their follower account and their prestige so you get this this prestige economy and whoever shoots and especially right it's not just shooting anyone if you shoot a high-value target you get more prestige so people shoot their leaders so what happens to all of our institutions imagine a pastor with a congregation with a few extremists who make life difficult and suddenly those extremists have dark guns and they can shoot anyone they want they don't they mostly shoot the pastor they mostly shoot the leader so people leading every organization tv networks the new york times yale all these organizations got stupid at the same time because the dark guns were passed out the ability of a nobody disgruntled nobody to publicly humiliate or accuse anybody of anything with no proof the rules on twitter are you must take things out of context you're not allowed to put things in context it's just in a very short screenshot so this is why this is my diagnosis that america became structurally stupid all of a sudden between 2014 and 2018 it hit all of our not all of our institutions but certainly things that lean left became all left things that lean right became all all right because the people dark guns they're shooting the leaders and they're shooting the moderates so if you're center left and you say well now wait a second maybe it's not a good idea to defund the police boom boom boom you get shot up yeah if you're center right and you say well now wait a second maybe donald trump is leaning down a path we shouldn't go on boom boom boom you get shot up and once the moderates go quiet everything it's the extremists who now control that is so interesting i i was talking to a a very liberal a professor in the humanities who was talking about the way that the far left was holding uh sort of his department captive and he said most of us you know we're we're kind of um we're liberals but we're we're we're sort of um hubert humphrey liberals or or maybe to the left of that but but not um but you have this very far left that can control everything because they will do anything and everyone else just sorts of things he thinks you know if you just sort of let this go and live with it for a while it'll work itself out and i said to myself that's that's almost exactly what goes on in sort of my uh conservative evangelical circles except with the far right and it's the exact same strategy that is at work that's right so let me suggest that your listeners and i'm going to so let me suggest some terminology here that will help we we tend to think about left versus right and as you said far left versus may be moderate left that's not quite the right term i'd like to suggest that we really resurrect and focus on the terms liberal and conservative as good things as philosophical traditions and the liberal tradition says um we need individual rights individual liberty free speech freedom of religion free economic freedom that's the liberal tradition it's sometimes called classical liberal and that's a good thing and you can be on the right or the left politically and believe that and conservative is is is also an incredibly wise tradition i i dated i think edmund burke is the brilliant conservative who didn't say don't change he said you have to change slowly and carefully we should operate on society as if we were operating on our father so it's don't just rip everything down and he noted the french revolution ripped everything down and now look and he said that before before the terror he said this is going to go badly and the next year or two it went off the rails so liberal and conservative we can call those left right if you like but those i think are essential for a liberal democracy you need a gas pedal looking for change and you need a break saying not so fast and that's the that's the healthy left right dynamic but then we get two other groups we get the radicals on both sides radicals want to burn things down radicals want to tear things down the radical right is authoritarian um an illiberal uh they want to use state power to punish their enemies so don't say far right just say we could say radical right the radical right is not conservative donald trump was not conservative it's not conservative to want to tear things down to violate constitutional process to advocate for unconstitutional means so it's not a straight line it's almost as if you got the liberals and the conservatives and then you've got this vertical dimension of authoritarianism where the far right is authoritarian now the far left is not liberal the far liberal it's not liberal to tell people what words they must use and to destroy them if they don't use the right word at the right time that's not liberal the the far left doesn't want free markets they they hate christianity they hate religion in general um so the far left is not liberal now here's the key thing the far left sometimes people say they're authoritarian and that word kind of works but what i'm finding more and more is that the far left or the radical left is actually egalitarian to a fault that is they believe in equality of outcomes regardless of inputs and this is the hallmark of all of the worst revolutions in human history the revolutions that kill millions of people so the french revolution descended into a bloodbath the russian revolution the chinese communist party especially at the cultural revolution these are authoritarian in a sense but really they're radical egalitarian and what they do is they don't try to lift up the bottom you create that's hard to do we've been trying it for a long time but they aim to do is pull down the top the more you can literally kill the people on top not in america that's not happening here but in france russia and china you round them up and you kill them in cambodia same thing so so i think the true liberals and true conservatives and that might include you and me i'm sort of a center-left person i'm a classical liberal i think true liberals and true conservatives i'd call that the middle 80 percent of the country i think we need to realize you know what we need to make common cause here if we want this country to survive if we believe in liberal democracy and the us constitution we you know the the left needs to stand up against the radical left and the right needs to stand up against the radical right is that too simple or do you do you agree no i think that's right and i i think that one of the one of the surprising things to me i was talking to a a group of uh conservative evangelical college students who are on a very secular very progressive campus and they were really they were asking me almost everyone that would come up would ask me about one of two things one of them was how do i sort of operate in this environment where i'm holding to a basic christian uh ethic and i'm going to be accused of being transphobic or something else even though these these kids would be in their home churches would probably be considered um dangerously liberal on those issues just because they you know they're they're getting along with people they're not making a big deal about these things but they know that if they just by holding the views that they hold they're going to be accused of that and they're asking how do i deal with my parents who have been radicalized by social media and they're into all of these conspiracy theories and so forth and i'm just thinking both of those cross pressures coming at the same time yeah how do you navigate that yeah what did you tell them well i would deal with each of them individually but the but the main thing was to say i kind of had almost opposite advice i said to the um dealing with their secular um their secular classmates i would say you know most of them actually don't hate you the way that you think they do and if you're not as intimidated as you are you're going to find that there actually are a lot of people who are curious about people who hold alternative views whether parents i said there's not a lot you can do other than you can't fix your parents you can just say hey i want to i want to have a relationship with you i want to be connected i don't want every conversation to be an argument about whether or not pedophiles are running the department of educator or whatever the the conspiracy theory is and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't but that's an incredibly difficult situation to to be in and almost everybody is in it in some way or the other right oh that is fascinating and that makes a lot of sense i like your advice let me see if i can just go a little further um so i think you're right on the parent front i think you're right put the relationship first you can't with students you can take risks of of damaging a relationship your parents your family put the family first and if that means we don't talk politics i i approve of that um but when i have i've never i've i've never spoken to students in quite that situation getting on both sides but the advice i give and this tends to be more conservative students who feel like they have to you know watch what they say is first read dale carnegie how to win friends and influence people read ben franklin's autobiography because ben franklin was a kind of a jerk when he was young but he was so smart he could put everyone to shame and his friends said ben stop it you're alienating everyone and he learned how to be an incredible gentleman how to be so persuasive he persuaded france to come in on our side against their interests and my god what a what a success that was for us uh anyway so there's skills of conversation that everyone should learn and these are skills every young person should learn no matter what and the key ideas are look at it from the other person's point of view and actually this is the central idea of the righteous my book the righteous mind look at it from the other person's point of view start by acknowledging that they're right about something and they always are there's always something and if you do that you're halfway there because you've shown you're not here to attack you actually think they're not crazy you actually find some value so start by acknowledging um and then by the power of reciprocity often they will acknowledge something that you're right about or at least they'll be willing to grant something so that's the first thing is just basic communicate basic persuasion skills basic communication skills which require you to look at it from the other person's point of view and grant them some legitimacy the second principle is never talk on a platform no good can come from that um platform yeah i mean yeah because there's an audience and so if you can imagine uh you know you disagree with a friend or you're just one of your college classmates and you have two options you you know you you say to them option one how about we let's let's go out for coffee we'll sit at a nice cafe and we'll talk and option two is hey i can get a 1 30 slot at the coliseum we can be center stage and we let's have our talk with a lot of people jeering at us i mean it's kind of obvious what's going to happen both ways yeah well what advice would you give to pastors who are because i mean if someone is is actually teaching through the bible um they're not going to be able to with it with any integrity anyway adapt that into one of the ideological silos so you have to be uh speaking one day about kind of personal morality another day about public justice and and and so you're going to have people who are going to be you know looking for all of these tribal markers uh all the time how do pastors learn how to communicate in teaching and preaching in a way that that factors all that in okay well so i'll offer my advice and i'd like to hear yours mine is is this what i've seen in talking to university presidents and ceos of companies is that you can't beat something with nothing people are coming at you with a really intense moral story from the right or the left and it's really clear about who's good who's bad and what do we have to do and you can't beat that by saying well actually your story is wrong here's why you can't beat something with nothing you have to have your own moral resource you have to have your own moral platform to stand on and in secular universities it's often hard for them to find it at the university of chicago the president bob zimmer did find it because chicago i went there for my postdoc chicago really prides itself on being the place where people argue and deeply intellectual so he had a platform to stand on to say no we're not doing this we're not canceling speakers we want you know people can come and make their case but secular schools and the president of yale i think was completely bereft he had no platform to stand on and he basically just succeeded to all of the all of the demands um and so but i but clearly pastors anyone speaking within the christian tradition has enormous moral resources to stand on um and so first what are the values what are the scriptural resources what are the virtues and my goodness you've got humility grace giving people the benefit of the doubt i mean you've got such rich moral resources so anything you do that that is that links to your your moral foundations your moral resources and that activates a superordinate identity we are all one congregation we are all all one in christ whatever it is this is the oldest social psychological trick in the book a superordinate identity makes the makes the divisions at a lower level fade away this is why when a country is attacked people drop the culture war right away and they come together at least uh you know after 9 11 we did that so that's it know your moral resources uh link to them activate support and identity and at that point oh and also reach out me and also talk to people privately so you get some allies especially on both sides of any sort of schism and try to get them to come up with you try to show that you've got their support in that way you're modeling you're modeling the very virtues that you're trying to encourage in the congregation so there you go that's my advice from the outside without really knowing anything about what it's like to to run a church what would you say well i i'm interested in in knowing um what you think about i don't know if you've read amanda ripley's high conflict oh yes i loved that book yes yes i did too and i absorbed it we look for it yeah it's great i found it really fascinating how she talked about uh breaking the binary that when there are two options in front of people you're always going to end up with polarization and those two options are almost always artificial uh that if you come in with more than one option that you actually then have some uh some move toward consensus do you think she's right about that oh my goodness she it's a brilliant book um it's called a high conflict and the the key phrase is complicate the narrative she had this amazing article i first came across her i think i first came across her she had this amazing article um and if you google uh complicating the narrative um in which as a journalist she was saying you know we've got this both sides tendency you know you cover this side and then wait for a contrary review we got the other side binary two views and what she discovered based on social psychological research and her own experience is if you say well you know on the on the pro gun control side like it's actually more complicated here's some of the divisions and they're all you know and on the pro gun side if you if you show that there's more com complexity within each side that forces people out of the good versus evil framework and into a more analytical like oh it's an interesting how do we balance this um and in a sense that's what i just tried to do you know a few minutes ago by saying we normally think about left versus right as though it's like a binary it's not one dimension and and that's why i'm trying to for those listening on the to the audio you can't see me waving my hands around but i'm trying to illustrate it's not a left-right thing it's more like a horseshoe thing where the the true liberals and the true conservatives are sort of like the bottom left and the bottom right and then you go up on the authoritarianism dimension and so you get the sort of the activists at both extremes so it's complicated it's not a single dimension and when you do that people can be pretty smart yeah and that's i mean biblically speaking you have some things that are clear either or is good versus evil and then you have many other things where in the life of jesus for instance he's he's often being pressured to decide between the zealots and the and the collaborators the pharisees and the sadducees and and he's always saying you're you're you're either ores here don't work because that's not the story i'm telling you can you give me a uh it's it's it's all through i mean you think about the uh when when uh when jesus holds up the coin the denarius and says render unto caesar that which is caesar's and unto god the other very very famous saying that comes because you have some people trying to trap him into either saying pay taxes which means you're you're okay with uh with occupation by rome or don't pay pac taxes which means you're in insurrection against rome and he just he says this is not the uh this is not the uh the actual story that i'm telling right he complicates the narrative excellent excellent yeah you know i i wonder as i was reading your article um you gave you gave multiple suggestions policy suggestions and personal suggestions for how to get through this but you weren't you weren't very optimistic uh at the at the end of it you say things are going to get worse and i wonder i mean i think about for instance joe biden who was elected largely because people were exhausted with donald trump i mean i think that's yes that's clear but now seems to be taking a great deal of a hit because he's not um the sort of person who is dominating the news cycle uh in in some way or the other and so do you think that going forward it's just going to be a series of january 6th versus defund the police stuff yeah yeah or will be or is there a bottom where people eventually say we're just tired of all this we want to try something so i recently started reading a very powerful book called how civil wars start by barbara walter and it's really frightening because when i first heard of this i thought like no i don't think we're headed for civil war that sounds crazy i think we're headed for latin america we're headed you know latin america has tried for 200 years to have democracy with weak institutions we have strong institutions derived from british institutions which are very good and of course we've improved them over the years you know that's what progress is about um but if we lose trust in our institutions they become less trustworthy our our newspapers our universities our uh oh religion i mean look what happened to the catholic church with the abuse scandal so if we lose trust in our institutions i think would be like latin america a lot of political instability more political violence bombings assassinations which we had in the 60s we've experienced it already so i thought that was our future but reading this book about how civil war starred in the modern year at least since world war ii um it tends to be you get militias on the right um and when militias start forming and they generally form they can form right or left but in america they're on the right uh and then also you get a move to focus on identity ethnic identity or religious identity when that becomes central um that's also a real a red light flashing and here both sides are to blame we do have some white identity politics on the right and we have the left promoting a really toxic form of identity politics in which everyone should unite around hatred of whiteness and white supremacy so when you get militias and identity-based politics these are these are flashing red lights that we could find ourselves in far more violence than we've experienced since the civil war so i'm very very alarmed that's why i decided to write this article i'm supposed to be writing a book my publisher thinks i'm writing a book on this and it's it was supposed to be due in august and i told her there's no way i'll make it because i need to write this article because i'm in panic mode frankly i think our country is headed for collapse unless we can take some major steps and so i hope let's just go through them because i think your listeners have there are some things that everyone can do um so in the in the essay i break it down into three buckets or three areas that we have to have to have to start working on so the first is we have to adapt our democratic institutions so they can survive in the post-babel world when there's a lot less trust and a lot more anger the second is we have to reform social media so it's not so toxic it doesn't dissolve the mortar of society and the third is we have to prepare kids so that they can handle this crazy divided democracy that we're leaving them and on all three there's so much we need to do um so on the uh on the reformed democracy side um so i think we need to um we need to end closed party primaries because our congress people aren't legislating for their constituents they're only concerned about the people who vote in the primary that's crazy no country no other country does this closed party primaries are a horrible idea alaska passed by referendum um a move to open primaries with ranked choice voting afterwards for the top four finishers it's a it's a much more sane system moderates now have much better chance to to to win into lead and to govern so there's a lot we can do to improve our political institutions around around voting around uh the supreme court appointments we have to prepare it's like the storm is coming much more violence i think is coming we need a democracy that can function during that the second is changes to social media and there i think the big one is just as banks have know your customer laws you can't just walk up to a bank with a bag of money and say here open an account for joe smith uh you have to actually your bank has to know who you are and i think the same should be true for social media platforms um they're they are having such huge effects i'm not saying that you need to post with your real name but before you have access to the incredible viral amplification of twitter or facebook or tick tock the company should be required to prove to to ascertain that you're a real person you're not a bot you're in a particular country such as the united states and you're old enough to be using the platform i think they should actually actually find out your actual identity which they don't publish but that's another complicated question anyway there's a lot we can do to make social media less toxic the third and this is where i think your listeners will have the most the most ability to make a difference is we've got to stop messing up our kids as we're doing kids born in the 80s are doing fine the millennials are actually doing fine in terms of mental health but if your kid was born after 1996 probably they and their friends got on social media when they were in middle school and get it being on it in puberty is what seems to be most damaging to the brain it it all the anxiety all the worse parts of middle school you amplify so so it's hard to just say to your kid you can't be on social media even everyone else is but if you work with your community you work with other parents find out your your kid's best friend talk to their parents if you get a few kids to a few families to say none of this until high school or none of this until 16. you don't get to go on instagram until you're 16. if a few kids could do it together or a t or a school or a congregation put out the message then what do the kids do they'll have to actually get together which is a lot more fun because they're not performing they're playing so we've got to keep kids off social media until 16 and we have to stop blocking their development by keeping them inside we've got to let kids go outside and play without supervision that's the way they learn skills of democracy that is what are the rules we're going to use for this game what do we do when someone breaks the rules hey you know i think you hurt me you know i'm mad at you well you have to defend yourself so basic skills of conflict resolution this is stuff that kids don't learn at soccer practice when the coach is telling them what to do kids have to go out to play unsupervised the way they always did before the 1990s um so if there are any parents listening um please go to letgrow.org lenorescanazi and i a few others created this site to help parents give their kids a free range childhood where the kids will develop basic social skills i wonder if you've seen this book wayfinding i've heard of it tell me yeah yeah we evolved to navigate we're good at navigating yeah and the argument is that one of the one of the things that has really harmed kids is gps because there's such a um there's such a pattern of the human brain in learning by that tension between familiarity and unfamiliarity that comes with just being lost oh i love it and and and finding your way through something and the argument was really compelling to me because i mean that's i spent all of my time as a kid in the woods you know unsupervised sometimes you get lost you have to figure it out yeah that's right that's right i just want just just to just to build on that point i i need to read this book that sounds great um but you know i teach in a business school and we're always talking about you know the importance of taking risks about you know the people who made big breakthroughs took risks and almost pretty much all the great people failed over and over again you need to take risks you need to fail um especially in a low stakes environment and i think what we're beginning to see is that gen z is so anxious they're not going to take risks so this is actually putting our economy in danger we have a generation that isn't suited for capitalism that plays it safe that is afraid that sees the world as threatening that hasn't learned to find its way through the world i mean this isn't just a tragedy for the kids and their families i think america could lose its economic vitality and preeminence yeah and in a uh conservative evangelical christian context one things i find is that the is that often people are lamenting things about the next generation that are the opposite of what the problem actually is so you'll have people worried about all of the hedonism and and so forth going on it's actually not that it's it's more this sense of anxiety and even with christian kids i mean the the number one uh issue that i get from gen z christians is not what it would have been 10 years ago which would have been you know i'm really hemmed in by this christian morality i want a kind of prodigal son now it's this sense of um of kids thinking that god's mad at them all the time and having to come in and say i i've got to tell you you're not condemned by god god loves you and it's very very difficult and sometimes with kids what i find is they're actually doing really well and they're doing what in in our concept is repentance of sin but they think that they're failing and there's this sense of um there's this sense of of judgment that i my hypothesis is is fueled quite a bit by social media because you have that middle school sense of always being judged and watched uh in a way that one has to perform uh 24 hours a day that i think is projected onto god sometimes yeah so i think there might be two things going on there there is the perfectionism uh they've been raised in a in a world in which failure is very dangerous you want low stakes failure you want kids to fail a lot of time where the consequences are minimal so there is a fear of failure there's a perfectionism but what i'm hearing what you're telling me is could also be signs of depression and this goes back to the early findings of aaron beck the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy is what's called the depressive triad it's a set of beliefs that i'm a bad person the world is a bad or dangerous place and my future is bleak or dark those three beliefs those interlocking beliefs if you believe all those three things why would you try you're everything's terrible and so i've always thought of that in a secular context but if you're if you're a devout christian and you're depressed it makes sense that you would think that you know i'm a bad person god is mad at me and therefore my future is dark yeah yeah and i mean the old testament prophets warn that there are two ways to get to moral anarchy one of them is to say there's no accountability god doesn't see but the other is to say judgment's going to happen no matter what so therefore let me just yield to to the anarchy either way it gets you to the same same sort of place and i think we said it's kind of a moral fatalism i guess you'd call it wow that's powerful i have one more question for you and i know i've kept you longer than i told you please keep me uh you mentioned in a righteous mind at one point my column in christianity today next month is actually reflecting on this uh before before this article came out i know that this was going to to come but you had mentioned about uh awe and about the section about what it takes to sort of break the hive mind um and that sense of tribalization and one of those things you said is this sense of smallness before an overwhelming a kind of reality and it really intrigued me as i was rereading righteous mind because it was something i think i probably just just read right over at the time and now i think that is exactly where a lot of this i think is coming from the anger is second step it's coming from boredom uh and there's this sense of tedious kind of boredom and lack of meaning in life even sometimes in in church uh circles and the way that the way that one gets this sort of feeling of aliveness is often coming through this kind of coliseum type uh combativeness and and other things would you would you still say that that finding those awful in the right sense of that moments is key here yes i've recently been thinking a lot about depth versus shallowness i read a wonderful book by cal newport called deep work yeah and he talks about how to do anything great anything creative you need time you need hours of uninterrupted time um and the great writers the great artists you know great human achievements are generally done in times of depth of course sometimes we have to just be answering email making dinner responding to the kids diapers whatever multitasking uh but not much of value is created when you're just an air traffic controller so the more of our lives we spend in that shallow state it's not just that we don't do anything great it's also that we feel spiritually empty because it's in depth it's only in depth that you really can feel that you're part of something larger that your life has meaning that you're doing something important it's only when you're not bombarded by all these shallow inputs crying out for your immediate attention and paying this and respond to this and notify this that you are open to the the deeper frequencies of life and this is one of my big fears for young people and maybe i sound like one of the you know old people get off my lawn kids today um but when when kids got on what we what might call experience blockers when we when they got phones that engage them all the time they have no no room for any other experiences i fear that their spiritual development is warped too because it's all shallows all the time tick tock is really funny there's lots of stupid shallow stuff that makes you laugh and if there's no room for even parental input let alone let alone spiritual experience or communication with god if all the input channels are jammed up then i think you have a kid growing up in the shallows always in the shallows and so i think that unplugging and time in nature i think time time in church time uh uh time basically opening yourself up to feelings of awe and moral elevation i think is is key for healthy development for spiritual development for maturity for death so yeah i think there's a lot that christian families can do to resist the pull into the shallows that all kids are subject to around the world um and to create more depth i would just urge again i don't you know i'm talking about my knowledge here but it often doesn't work as i know for my own kids it doesn't work if you just tell them i'm doing this for your own good and you know but but one thing i found about gen z is that they're not in denial they know what's happening to them they know the platforms are bad for them they know that their generation is messed up anxious suicidal self-harming they know that um and if you can engage them if you say you know what what can we do what can we do together um and especially what they're most concerned about is other kids and judgment of other kids so if you you know if you have an ability to get a small group together you know three to six kids to talk about this you know what policy should we have at our school what should our phone policy be uh what would be healthier um if you engage them in this is the crisis of their generation and a lot of them are really interested in it and thoughtful jonathan height he is the author of a new uh essay in the atlantic why the last 10 years of american life have been uniquely stupid this has been a fascinating not stupid at all conversation and so john i'm just really thankful for you taking the time to be with us today my pleasure russell thanks so much for inviting me on thanks for listening be sure to subscribe on apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts leave a review there helps for people to find the show and if you're listening on a smartphone tap the cover art you'll find some show notes with some resources for you including a link to this essay and to jonathan heights books but don't stay on the smartphone after that put it away and do something deep and check out christianity today bounded by billy graham it has all sorts of resources for you spiritually as a christian click on the cover art to find out how you can get a free trial membership this is russell moore and you're listening to the christianity today public theology projects [Music] the russell moore show is a production of christianity today eric petrick is our chief creative officer russell moore is the executive producer and our host mike kosper is our director of podcasts administration for ct by christine kolb pam vodanova and abby perry production assistants by coremedia beth 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Channel: Christianity Today

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Length: 55min 6sec (3306 seconds)

Published: Thu May 19 2022