Smartphones vs. Smart Kids
Plus, how print beat song and the fallout when leaders do not resist evil.
Welcome to Three Things.
This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.
Smartphones vs. Smart Kids
Jonathan Haidt on the great rewiring of childhood
Perhaps you, like me (Phillip), watched with glee last week as five social media CEOs appeared before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee for a bipartisan grilling about child safety on their platforms. It was deeply satisfying to watch such powerful figures called to account so directly and relentlessly.
Despite the seriousness of social media damage, the concerns raised by last week’s hearing are just one aspect of what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “the great rewiring of childhood.” It happened somewhere between 2010-2015 with a decisive shift from play-based childhood to phone-based childhood, not simply in America but across the world.
Take forty minutes to watch Jonathan’s Haidt’s talk from last year’s National Summit on Education (see video above). Speaking to educators, Haidt marshals the data to show that the great rewiring has unintentionally resulted in a mental health epidemic, spikes of social and sleep deprivation, behavioural addictions, and a litany of distinct harms for girls (perfectionism, emotional contagion) and boys (retreat from reality, porn addiction).
But it’s not all bad news, thankfully. There is a way out via collective action and the creation of new foundational norms. Haidt suggests four:
No Smartphone Before High School (give only flip phones in middle school)
No Social Media Before 16
Phone Free Schools (all phones go into phone lockers or Yondr pouches)
Far more free play and independence (e.g., more and better recess, and giving students the “Let Grow Experience”)
Watch Smart Phones vs. Smart Kids. It’s a summary of the work Haidt has been doing over at After Babel and in a forthcoming book called The Anxious Generation.
How We Lost the Ability to Listen
Ted Gioia on the rise of print and the eclipse of song
We live in a world of text and images, but what if ours were a world of song? This was the world before the printing press, writes music historian Ted Gioia — a time where even laws were put to music, a place where accumulated wisdom was received not primarily through the eyes but through the ears.
After the printing press, however, bards and singers have been replaced by scribes and scholars. In this world (which is our world),
When you sought enlightenment, you no longer went on a vision quest and brought back songs of magic and wisdom. Instead you found a book store or library, where every branch of learning had its assigned place on the shelf.
Even in a world of text and image, a world where we have lost the ability to listen and sing, there is still a yearning for a heroic quest that goes beyond a bookshop or Google search — and brings back a song. That is why every screen-based hero has a song or theme.
And yet these songs and themes are not ours. They do not result from our quest but from the quest of a fictional other whose creators are after our money:
Heroes once sought wisdom and transcendence, and their music was a pathway to another world. Brand franchise heroes are instead obsessed with fights, chase scenes, and special effects.
This situation has created an unresolved cultural tension. The profit-driven heroes can bring in billions at the box office, but still not fill the huge gap in the modern psyche created by the erasure of the vision quest and the marginalization of the transcendent music that once empowered it.
Read How We Lost the Ability to Listen over at
— and keep reading as Gioia seeks to resolve that tension in future posts.
Power Plays in Church and State
Hannah Anderson on what happens when those with authority refuse to exercise it
“Despite an assumption of separation, church and state politics often run in tandem,” writes Hannah Anderson of the United States. On her mind are two events in recent months: Donald Trump’s victory at the caucuses and the Southern Baptist Convention’s settlement of the case against Paul Pressler. Both men rose to great heights within their constituencies, despite their alleged sexual predation.
Why does this happen? A too-simple answer is to blame the individuals in the voting booth and convention floor. In both church and state, the locus of complicity lies elsewhere:
Too often, our calculus assumes a great deal of individual agency. This, in turn, leads us to flatten moral responsibility, to democratize guilt and redistribute it widely. In fact, this leveling is part of what fuels online call-out culture wherein anyone with the slightest link to a given situation can be made responsible for the whole of it.
When it comes to elections, this guilt by association also means that we often deem individual voters directly responsible for the actions of the candidate they vote for. But this understanding misses the fact that complicity correlates to power and privilege. Because our systems were not designed to distribute power equally among the citizenry, responsibility is not equal either. The individual voter may be the last chance to stop a predator, but she should never be asked to do this in the first place.The people most responsible for the crises in our churches and in our nation are leaders who have the ability to resist evil yet choose not to.
Read Parallel Power Plays in Church and State. For more from Hannah Anderson, keep an eye out for her column over at The Dispatch.