2024-03-30 04:09:00
When James Comey was appointed head of the FBI in 2013, he sent reading recommendations to his staff. Along with a book by Martin Luther King and Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, the list contained The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haight, a professor at the New York University School of Business Administration.
Coming across the book, which was a bestseller in 2012, Comey says the main lesson is simple: Humans make moral decisions based on emotional intuition rather than just logic. When trying to change their minds, you have to appeal to emotion.
Jonathan Haidt’s books can be read as a checklist for self-change, changing the minds of others, changing our own minds, and changing the behavior of our technology-addicted children, in his new book The Anxious Generation, which hit the shelves on March 26.
Is it possible to change the behavior of young people addicted to technology? Haight thinks so. His work has gained followers that include people from the technology companies responsible for the social ills of the younger generation.
Haight presents a learned and social science-based explanation for the crisis facing the technology industry. He sounds like a cross between the prophetess Cassandra and Dale Carnegie, the priest of American self-improvement: he is concerned about the catastrophes that humans bring upon themselves, but optimistic about our ability to overcome them.
Toby Shannan, the former chief operating officer of Shopify, turned to Haight for advice on ideological battles in the workplace. He said Haight advised him how to successfully navigate a difficult period before the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, when some of the company’s employees were outraged by the sale of right-wing items on the site. His advice , Shopify stipulated that users could sell products with a political message, but not those that called for harm to someone. “He was a philosopher on speed dial,” Shannan said.
In his book The Coddling of the American Mind, Shannon diagnosed the erasure culture. The book catapulted him into the heart of a debate that has occupied commentators for years. He became the voice of people who did not want to identify with the right-wing culture warriors who came out against the erasure culture, but felt that they did not belong on the other side. He expressed the leftists’ frustration with the left.
Haight has been interviewed by well-known podcasters from across the political spectrum: Ezra Klein, Kara Swisher, Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson. In Barry White, he expressed the confusion and chaos the world was experiencing: “We may never be able to understand each other.”
Priscilla Chan, co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Venture with her partner Mark Zuckerberg, turned to Haight after reading The Coddling. The three dined together, and Hyatt then lectured at Meta on the effects of social media on mental health and democracy. Patrick Collison, CEO of payments startup Stripe, is also a friend of Haight’s. Bill Gates has praised Coddling, and Barack Obama has also read it.
In his new book, The Anxious Generation, Haight claims to have taken a break from culture wars. He has a goal that seems self-righteous perhaps, but popular: to save the children by taking away their smartphones. “The doors are open to me,” he says. “that’s a relief”.
The 60-year-old Haight is interviewed in Manhattan, on a bench in a playground where his children played. How did a social psychologist come to the field of culture wars?
“I don’t really understand things until I explore the other side,” Haight said. He quotes John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and economist who was also an erasure anti-culture fighter. “Those who only know their side of the argument don’t know much about it.”
Haight began his career as a psychology lecturer at the University of Virginia. He researched the origin of morality, and claimed that it is like a sense of taste, and the human mind has different “taste buds” – caring, fairness, loyalty, authority, holiness and freedom – that help us make decisions.
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Professor Jonathan Haight. Children need to experiment and be independent Photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Professor Jonathan Haight. Children need to experiment and be independent Photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times
During the Iraq War in 2004, Haight wondered why Democrats were fighting so weakly against George W. Bush. He concluded that the Democrats promote only three aspects of morality: caring, fairness and freedom. The Republicans, on the other hand, touched on all the types of “moral tastes” he identified. In 2012 he published “The Righteous Mind” which explores the moral roots of liberalism and conservatism. “My first motive was to help the Democrats stop hurting American moral sentiments so much,” Haight said.
His delving into Republican messages showed him the limits of his own positions, and the narrow horizons of the two-party system. “Left and right are like a gas pedal and a brake. If there is a car with only a gas pedal, only a progressive one, it will crash for sure. If there is a car with only a brake, it will not get anywhere.”
Haight began to notice the hardening of the progressive attitude on campuses. He believes it began in 2013 when dozens of students at Brown University protested a speech by Raymond Kelly, the New York police chief who was notorious for implementing a policy of strip-searching suspects. The lecture at the university was canceled 30 minutes after it started.
Haight, along with his co-author Greg Luckianoff, head of the Institute for Individual Rights and Expression, began to publish articles that raised the concern that young people are protected from dealing with difficult questions, a reality that will eventually cause the academic and corporate world to be undermined. They laid out their reasoning in Coddling, which resonated perhaps because it was written by someone from within the progressive establishment itself.
Haight has become a spokesperson for free speech outside of Fox News, but has also been criticized. Their opposition to an obsession with identity was one source of criticism. Haight, however, warmly embraced his role as critic of the progressive left. He is part of a social scene of heterodox thinkers – controversial academics, libertarian writers, culture warriors and others who, like him, oppose the erasure culture. The scene includes the libertarian magazine Reason and investor Gerry Ostrom’s events, even tennis games and parties.
“Intellectual life used to be fun,” Haight said. “There is an emerging community, from the center-left to the center-right, of people who feel they have no political home and recognize that the gaps are not between left and right, but between extremists on both sides, humorless and aggressive people who are mistaken in their tribal illusions and zeal, and the rest of the public, which is 70% of Americans “.
Basically, it’s about self-help
Zofia Fernanidini, a 21-year-old student at New York University with a penchant for political activism, joined a course called “Thriving” taught by “the most controversial lecturer at NYU.” She found Haight’s lectures to be more self-help than controversial. Hight asked the students to turn off all notifications on their phones except for five apps. During the semester, his students worked to improve themselves: create a morning routine for themselves without being idle with the smartphone, and propose to someone they are interested in going out with them (one of the students did find a relationship that way).
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Zofia Fernandini. His course changed her life Photo: Gianfranco Tripodo for The New York Times
Zofia Fernandini. His course changed her life Photo: Gianfranco Tripodo for The New York Times
Fernandini says the course changed her life. She deleted the social networking apps from her phone. She asked Katta for advice on her relationship with her partner who is in a distant place, and admitted that she was worried about the political gap between her and him – she is a liberal and he is a Republican at the University of Alabama. Haight convinced her that differences are a virtue, a healthy spice.
“He was very genuine and didn’t treat us like babies like other lecturers,” Fernandini said. “There was a lot of criticism, sharp, about Generation Z. But he was right.”
When Haight conducted the research for Coddling, he came back and encountered some criticism: 50-somethings always complain about “the younger generation these days.” Tom Wolfe described Baby Boomers as self-obsessed in his Me Decade in 1976. Four decades later the cover of Time dubbed millennials the Me Me Me Generation.
Haight believes that the generation born after 1995, Generation Z, is facing a unique crisis.
He examined data on the mental health of Generation Z. He discovered that young people are experiencing a tsunami of anxiety, self-harm and suicide. The number of major depressive episodes has doubled for teenagers since 2010, according to his study.
Parents and teachers explain this by saying that Generation Z does experience severe disasters: climate change, school shootings, threats to democracy. But Haight argues that historically, young people have found a sense of purpose when faced with difficult challenges, whether it was World War II or the anti-Vietnam War movement.
The depression Gen Z sinks into is different, Hight concluded. It is related to excessive use of smartphones. Haight calls it the “great rewiring” of childhood.
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Young people use a smartphone Photo: Lifestyle / Getty Images / iStoc
Young people use a smartphone Photo: Lifestyle / Getty Images / iStoc
He drew inspiration for the book from years running his nonprofit Let Grow, which promotes more independence and play in childhood, including through a curriculum that encourages children to try new activities on their own. Haight founded it in 2017 with Lenore Scanzie, 64, a writer who was attacked in 2008 for her decision to allow her 9-year-old son to walk home alone from a New York City store.
There are colleagues in the field of social sciences who express skepticism in the face of his decisive conclusions, and say that the findings regarding the effects of social media are mainly correlational rather than causal. “You have to be careful about blaming social media for trends that its rise happened to fit into,” said Brendan Nyhan, 45, a political science researcher from Dartmouth whose work focuses on social media and polarization.
Haight, who has 14 and 17-year-olds at home, sees his family as a kind of laboratory for theories about smartphones. His children were not allowed to use social media until they reached high school; When his daughter asked to download Snapchat, his students warned him that the site contained many nude photos.
Haight lists in his book an ambitious list of steps to prevent harm from smartphones: no smartphone before high school, no social media before age 16 and no phones at school. He hopes that legislators, teachers, large technology companies and parents will be able to implement the recommendations. “I would recommend until the end of 2025,” he suggests.
The clear parallel to this struggle is the campaign against the tobacco companies, which began in the US in the 1960s, with the first appearance of warning labels on cigarette packs against harm to health. From then until 2015, the number of smokers was cut by more than half.
Haight has a more ambitious comparison: the fall of the Berlin Wall. “When there’s a system that everybody hates, and there’s a way to escape it, it can happen in a year. That’s what happened in 1989,” Haight said. “It’s different from the fall of communism, but I expect it to happen just as quickly. It’s a regime we all hate.”
Haight has a metaphor that Comey liked to cite at the FBI for moral choices. Our emotions are like rushing elephants, and our logic is a rider sitting on their back. We think it’s the rider who steers the elephant, but often it’s the other way around. Our emotions bring us somewhere, and then we try to explain it with logic.
“Every social thing I’ve tried to do has required that we talk to the elephant first, change people’s minds, their feelings,” Haight said. “This is the first time I haven’t tried to do that. Almost all the elephants are racing with me.”
For an article in the New York Times
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