Steeped in Fragility
Written by Carolyn D. Gorman |
Monday, April 1, 2024
For the vast majority of children, mental-health treatment will not be necessary. Kids are resilient. Just as a smoker who quits will immediately boost his life expectancy, kids who spend less time and attention on platforms designed to be addictive and anxiety-inducing have a chance to bounce back. Haidt’s proposals can help give them that chance.
In 2018’s The Coddling of The American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt contended that kids are inherently “antifragile”—that is, they benefit from adversity. But instead of “preparing the child for the road, not the road for the child,” parents have surrendered to bad ideas and practices that foster a culture of emotional fragility, with its calls for safe spaces, trigger warnings, and censorship.
Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, is a thematic extension of this argument. It describes how Gen Z—those born after 1995, the first “to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets”—has been made fragile by the transition from a play-based to a smartphone-based childhood. The virtual environment of social media, Haidt contends, amplifies extreme ideas and worsens cognitive distortions, swelling this cohort’s rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and self-harm.
Haidt chronicles how the shift to a phone-based childhood affects learning. It deprives children of experiences that make them productive participants in a democratic society. One reason that kids play is to practice adult skills like independently resolving conflicts. Virtual environments don’t offer this practice—kids can just log off or leave a chat to avoid disputes—while crowding out time spent on real-world activities that do. Unsupervised physical play, with opportunity for low-cost mistakes and even some criticism and teasing, are crucial for learning interpersonal skills and building resilience.
Ironically, while we overemphasize protecting children from the slightest physical or emotional harm in the real world, the virtual world has greater potential for danger. In this realm, parents can’t reward kids with increasing levels of responsibility and independence as they get older. Age does not exist online; little more is needed than, say, checking a box without verification to access a webpage meant for those over 18.
Social media exploits our natural sensitivity to others’ opinions and actions. Haidt describes how evolutionary pressures have rewarded those who learn to conform and who pick the right people to copy. Millions of followers or likes on a post tell young people what they should do to fit in. Social media’s architecture is designed to make the most extreme content go viral. It’s easy to see how constant exposure to the pseudo-norms of a virtual environment, whether radical political ideas or unattainable standards of wealth, beauty, and success, can lead to sustained negative feelings.
The virality of social media presents other dangers. A social miscalculation among a few kids on the playground can help children calibrate their behavior; the same mistake on the Internet can result in thousands—or even millions—of harassing comments and will live online forever.
Haidt also recounts concerning examples of social contagion, such as viral posts by users with Tourette Syndrome prompting an exploding number of teenage girls to develop tics.
-
Belief Predicts Behavior
The Christian faith is an intimate relationship of the heart and mind, yet we live in a physical world that requires our bodies being brought into subjection and being yielded to the lordship of Christ. The Christian life is a war, and that war must be waged in our bodies (Eph. 6:10-18; 2 Cor. 10:3-6; 1 Pet. 5:8-10). It would help us to understand the basics of spiritual warfare; otherwise, we will be rendered useless in the area of service through our spiritual gifts. The Bible teaches us that there is a battle going on for control of our soul. The center of our being is our soul. Your body, which houses the soul and spirit, becomes subject to temptation of the world and the devil.
That belief predicates behavior is an axiom of truth I learned early on in my ministry. It was a favorite phrase of my mentor. The concept behind the thought is thoroughly biblical. Proverbs 23:7 says, “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.” Clearly, from a scriptural point of view, what we believe determines the way in which we behave. It therefore greatly behooves us to believe correctly in order to behave correctly.
Justifying Sin
The Scriptures are explicit in their declaration that the properly attuned mind is critical to living the Christian life in a manner that would please God. Sadly, we are living in days where in order to justify certain sins the mindset of some professing Christian leaders has been to dismiss any reasonable responsibility for the way one thinks.
We should consider that within the ranks of the evangelical church there have been a number of leading pastors and theologians who have come to the false conclusion that sexual orientation (a state of mind) is something that individuals cannot control. In other words, they believe that a person who has same sex attraction (SSA) is born with that as an orientation. If this is so then it means that they should not be held accountable for thinking in accordance with their alleged orientation.
Thinking Like Christ
This needs to be examined in light of Scripture which clearly contradicts that conclusion. For example, we know that if we are to follow Christ, we must strive to be more like Him. The key to acting like Christ is thinking like Christ which is one of Paul’s main points in the book of Philippians. He says, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus” (2:5).
Paul was admonishing us to think like Jesus and to develop the same type of attitude that He had. Another version translates the verse, “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus” (NIV). Bob Utley frames it this way: ““have this attitude in yourself” – This is a PRESENT ACTIVE IMPERATIVE. Believers are commanded to continue to think (phroneō) like Christ. The goal of Christianity is Christlikeness in thought and deed” (emphasis mine).
Renewing Our Minds
The only way we can have the transformation necessary to live in a Christ honoring manner is to renew our minds (Rom. 12:1-2). This is the only way we can fulfill the will of God for our lives. Paul tells believers here not to be conformed (suschematizesthe) to a worldly standard but rather to be transformed (metamorphousthe) by that renewal. In Second Corinthians, Paul clarifies that the renewal of the inner man should take place, “day by day” (4:16).
We know that thought precedes action and that is why Paul was insistent on this point: you can never live the life of a Christian until you genuinely have the mind of a Christian. How we think is critical to our success in living the way Paul instructs us to live. The truth is, the only One to ever measure up fully to the standard was Christ Himself, so Paul sets forth the mind of Christ as our supreme example (Phil. 2:1-17). He will follow this instruction by using Timothy and Epaphroditus as examples, showing us that we, too, can live godly lives that honor the Lord (Phil 2:19-30). The excuse that many have is, “Well, I’m not Jesus.” No, you are not, but with the help of the Holy Spirit you can grow to be more like Him. We should never lose sight of the goal, being “conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29).
Read More
Related Posts: -
American Students: Dumber and More Woke
The upshot of this decline will be that many Americans enter adulthood without having been intellectually challenged. The phrase “mind expanding” will exclusively apply to psychedelic drugs, not higher education. Professors for their own survival will play it safe and avoid anything that might, somehow and in some way, offend those who complain when their cherished beliefs are disputed. The triumph of woke dullness. Absent this exposure to the give and take of competing ideas and all else that defines intellectual debate, honest disagreement will become “hate.” It all adds up to a perfect recipe for killing serious public discussions.
Professors often complain about the current crop of students being less intellectually talented than when they began their careers decades back. Such griping is, of course, easy to dismiss — it has occurred for millennia. Unfortunately, this time around the grumbling may be true and not the usual nostalgia for “the good old days.” The anecdotal evidence from textbook reading levels, shortened college syllabi, scrapbook-like research assignments, proliferating college remedial classes, grade inflation, and the popularity of “gut” college majors such as Gender Studies, is indisputable. We have also invested hundreds of millions in our schools yet test results such as the SAT are flat over the past half century. Add the countless stories of illiteracy among high school “graduates” despite falling class size and expensive reforms. Judged by the standards of evolution, Americans may be going backwards.
The best evidence of this decline are data from the highly respected General Social Survey on mean IQ by decade among graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students (a tip of the hat to Charles Murray on Twitter). This is a complicated subject given how America’s demography has altered, and measuring IQ via surveys might be iffy, but the numbers, even if a bit unsure, are alarming.
These data are divided into three groups: those with high school diplomas, undergraduate degrees, and graduate degrees. Then the data are then divided by decades beginning in the 1960s through to the 2010 onward decade. The overall pattern is a steady decline in IQ scores for each group from decade to decade. For example, high school graduates in the 1960s had an average IQ of 99.3 but this figure declined so by 2010 and onward, it was 93.5. A similar drop occurred among college graduates — from 113.3 in the 60s to 100.4 in the 2010 decade. For those with graduate degrees, the fall was from 114.0 to 105.8.
These are depressing numbers. That in 2010 the average college student had an IQ of 100.4 (almost exactly our national average) signifies that we are miles away from trying to educate the brightest youngsters. Worse, with an average of about 100, many of those enrolled must score below 100 and thus suitable only for low-skill occupations. This picture may even be worse than these numbers suggest if we subtract out the many smart international students now enrolled in U.S. higher education.
This decline has wide-ranging implications for college teachers. Save at the most selective schools, many undergraduates are incapable of grasping complicated arguments, even unable to distinguish what the teacher explained as opposed to what the teacher personally believes. The statement “Many Germans thought Hitler a savior” becomes “the Professor said that Hitler was a savior.” Nor can many of these intellectually challenged youngsters grasp the idea that something can simultaneously be both good and bad. Try explaining that for a statement to be scientifically correct, it must in principle be amenable to falsification. Even a lame joke about affirmative action may be misunderstood as a hostile remark.
Read More
Related Posts: -
Is it Unspiritual to be Discouraged?
To be free from the possibility of discouragements would be more “spiritual” than Jesus—and therefore not truly spiritual at all. Psalms 42 and 43 teach us the biblical approach to discouragement: we feel it, we recognize it for what it is, and we analyze the reasons for its presence.
From time to time over the centuries some Christians have taught, sometimes with tragic consequences, that a truly spiritual person never gets discouraged. To be cast down is, by definition, to be “unspiritual.” Unless we are well-grounded in Scripture, it is very easy for us to be overwhelmed, confused, and even more discouraged by such teaching.
This teaching certainly seems logical: if the gospel saves us, it must save us from discouragement! It also appears to be wonderfully spiritual. After all, are we not “more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Rom. 8:37)?
But this is not biblical logic, nor is it true spirituality.
Read More
Related Posts:
