I’ve always liked Jonathan Haidt’s work. I read The Righteous Mind (which still sounds like some sort of beatnik novel to me) when it first came out, or shortly after. I was just finishing up college at the time, and it felt like a good bit of “worldly advice” that unfortunately no American for the rest of the 2010s would heed. All the same, I became a bit of a fan. Even when I didn’t agree 100% with something he said, Haidt never came across as anything but sincere to me, and I always got the sense that his goals (a more pluralistic, less reactive society) were aligned with mine.
So I stuck with Haidt for a while. He kind of lost me during the late 2010s when his main fixation seemed to be on campus culture war stuff, which hadn’t really interested me since I left my own campus behind, and even seemed slightly trivial compared to other things going on at the time.
But now he’s got a new book, and it’s about how smartphones have laid waste to basically everyone younger than me. Eh, maybe me too. Like a human brain, I think of my smartphone as one of those highly complex machines that can help or hinder me depending on how it’s used and how well it’s understood. But of course, I didn't grow up with a smartphone, so according to Haidt, I’ve been largely spared. Thanks, Nokia flip-phone.
Haidt is currently touring the podcast circuit, spreading the word about his book, so if you want to hear more about that, there’s plenty of material. Personally, after listening to him talk about it and hearing his recommendations for how to solve the problem, the question that I came away fixating on was, “Can we literally even do that?”
Here’s what I mean. The primary prescription Haidt offers to phone-based childhood is basically a conservative one. Just raise your kids the way people used to, not in the ugly sense of beating them for disobedience or shunning them for their sexual preferences, but simply giving them more freedom in physical meatspace and less freedom in cyberspace. Let your kids (from a young age) go out on their own and explore more often, and don’t let them anywhere near a smartphone before 16.
I’m hardly a conservative in any sense of the word, but this really does sound like solid advice to me. While I didn’t always love growing up in a small town, one advantage it certainly did provide was the ability to leave my parents’ house and go for a walk/run/hike pretty much any time I wanted, and as someone who’s subsequently felt the icy hands of depression, I cannot emphasize enough what an absolute privilege that was. It’s hard for me to imagine having coped with my teenage angst deprived of my precious walkability. I know myself now well enough to know that I don’t do well without it.
But that brings me to the 50-foot hurdle. Not only do most Americans not live in a walkable neighborhood, such neighborhoods are illegal to build in most of the United States!
I’m not going to go off on the full rant about why YIMBY is good and land use policy is broken, though it’s always mighty tempting. For fear of getting distracted, I’ll just reiterate the main point - how are we supposed to build a world for free-range kids over top of the car-centric hellscape we spent the entire back half of the 20th century building? How do we “do things the way we used to” in an environment that’s totally unlike the way it used to be?
It’s not that I disagree with Haidt’s argument on principle, I just think there are some major pragmatic obstacles to what, at first glance, looks like the easy “common sense” answer to a complex and multi-faceted problem. Ironically, attaining the conservative result he wants might require some pretty radical land use and zoning reform. But hey, maybe that’s just another means for getting more right-leaning people into the big YIMBY tent.
And if you’re a devout lefty questioning all of this big-tentiness, I’ll refer you back to this snarky cartoon you love about climate change. Snark aside, I think the same basic point stands here: “What if we make places more affordable while also reducing their traffic fatalities and their carbon emissions and it’s all for nothing?”
At any rate, I still like Jon Haidt and I’m glad he’s adding his voice to discussions of consequential issues again. I just hope that the future he seems to want, where Americans of all ages can get outside and do stuff, is actually attainable. If you live anywhere near a place like this, that prospect might sound like a utopian dream.