A high school memory; Frank Furedi on multiculturalism; Matt Goodwin on same; Simon Cooke on Matt Goodwin; Bari Weiss on the new war with terrorists; Peter Gray on teens and social media
I write to raise the memory, which I wish was otherwise long buried, of 9/12/2001 in New Haven CT.
It was there that the depth of the rot in a place later infamous for 'safe spaces' was obvious to the few who could see - that there was a candlelight vigil in support of doing exactly nothing about the acts of 9/11 because the Muslims were the victims.
The very day after, there was not unity - no, not for the 'Divinity School' (YDS) students, the postmoderns, the union organizers, the Marxists and their sympathizers. The national leadership was taking a very diffident tone, trying to not be inflammatory, discussing investigations, and so on - and already these vigil holders were staking a claim in opposition to their fellow world citizens. They didn't stop there, or then, and they have pushed for a unilateral ceasefire ever since.
I'm a bit surprised by your comment. one could certainly argue that going after Bin Laden and maybe deposing Saddam Hussein were the right things to do after 9-11 but in hindsight I'd say it is A LOT harder to argue that the death and destruction invading Iraq and Afghanistan was the best option. In hindsight, a call for doing nothing, or WAY less, doesn't sound at all unreasonable to me.
Many things were done that were unwise not only in retrospect, but in prospect. On 9/12, an invasion that lasted 20 years wasn't really in the public mind. Hunting down terrorists and their financial backers was the most basic goal; and some other were thinking about a clash of civilizations with Islamic fundamentalism writ large.
Well, we agree on one thing. The public didn't expect a 20 year war. Politicians were telling them it would be quick. I thought that was absurd and it was. Regardless, all I'm saying is that calling for doing nothing doesn't look so bad to me compared to what we got - lots of death and destruction for questionable if any gain.
Re: "teens [...] have been increasingly deprived of opportunities to get together in physical space away from direct adult surveillance and interference"—Peter Gray
True, high school and college—especially residential campuses— have gravitated to dictator-coddler governance.
There is a crucial flip side to the same coin in the larger process of delay of adulthood:
Teens in the higher education track—camp camouflaged as education—don't spend time anymore in workplaces (jobs) doing market-oriented tasks interacting mostly with adults of all ages in real production.
Youths spend some ten years in an ambiguous limbo, between puberty and when they begin to earn a living. And the ambiguity involves a staggering level of consumption.
Gray's thought deserves some consideration. However, I think the cause and effect is that social media has enabled the physical atomization of children's lives rather than being a salve.
Since you mentioned Sam Altman, here is the question that lingers for me about yesterday 's events: why would someone with his level of business experience allow a corporate board to be set up that way? Red flags include:
-- Only six people total.
-- Three of those six are inexperienced outsiders, seemingly chosen for apparent mission alignment and not technical domain expertise or governance expertise, with no real stake, financial or otherwise, in the health of the organization.
-- The bylaws let any four of them meet in secret from the other two and vote to remove the other two from the board (and then to fire the CEO).
This combination seems like an open invitation for any one of the three insider members (in this case, Ilya Sutskever) to more or less unilaterally stage a coup against the two others. All you have to do is backchannel the three outsiders into going along, and they are easily led due to their inexperience and lack of skin in the game.
I would bet that if you read a standard corporate governance best practices handbook it would advise against enabling this. Am I wrong? If not, why would someone as prominent and successful as Altman depart so obviously from best practices in this case?
OpenAI is not and was never intended to be a standard corporation. It's very emergence as something resembling that is itself a kind of stealthy coup d'etat.
You may be under-selling the your 3 axis framework.
When the "oppressed-oppressor" axis is used to communicate it becomes deeper.
It becomes the way to frame one's thinking. It becomes the way of judging moral righteousness.
So as Bari W said in her speech... "Their moral calculus is as crude as you can imagine: they see Israelis and Jews as powerful and successful and “colonizers,” so they are bad; Hamas is weak and coded as people of color, so they are good. No, it doesn’t matter that most Israelis are “people of color.”
The people protesting on behalf of Hamas are not stupid. They fully believe that the "oppressed/oppressor" or "powerless/powerful" axis is the primary way to judge what is morally right.
Anyone capable of genuinely believing that is a monster, and irredeemably untrustworthy. A high-trust society such as ours cannot continue to exist if such people are allowed into it.
This is why multicultural ideology is wrong. It destroys the security mechanisms, older than government, which people have used for thousands of years to protect ourselves.
"Reject oppressor/oppressed framework or accept that you can’t control which one you end up on."
That's right, but notice that in practice it plays out in a seemingly paradoxical fashion.
That is, in the feedback between the ideology's narrative and political expediency in a democracy, the composition of leftist allied constituencies shifts around with demographic circumstances, and the obvious and evolving ranking scheme of how many sacred-victimization points each group has relative to the others and Who trumps Whom in any dispute pops out automatically as a result.
And what that means is that there are "core" groups, totally secure in their position and allegiance, and whose stories become central to the ideological narrative as a kind of ethnogenic mythos. And then there are "marginal" groups who are always in danger of being ejected from the coalition the minute keeping them onboard is more trouble than it's worth, and thus also in danger of having their particular interests thrown under the bus in favor of those who are more "core".
But see now that the structure of leftist ideology by the unfalsifiable logic of "structural discrimination proven by statistical disparity" inherently awards victimization points based on an identity group's need for intervention to achieve a proportionate amount of success. So the marginal groups are going to be the ones who tend to enjoy plenty of success on average and have the hardest time getting their victimization coins accepted as currency. When push comes to shove, it's hard for them to sell the, "Look at us, we're victims just like you!" line.
But the paradox is that upon appreciating the precariousness of their group's status in the coalition, instead of rejecting the basis of membership that places them at an inherent disadvantage, they double-down in making their preposterous "Victims too!" arguments, make them extra often, extra loud, extra persuasively.
The problem is that if your marginal constituencies are marginal *because* they are successful, then that is where the coalitions has its reserve armies of competency and intellectual horsepower, not to mention those groups will supply far more than their fare share of members who are ultra-rich donors. And members of those groups, in their insatiable lust and ambition for status and mimicry of other established elites, will imagine they can use their smarts and money to prove themselves useful and always be able to talk the rest of the allies into sufficient affection and esteem that they will be considered true and legitimate members of the sacred federation.
And they will do this more and more intensely and desperately as they lose more and more status until the very last minute before they are purged wholesale out of the coalition unless they betray each and every loyalty at odds with the new orthodoxy.
Many white feminists thought their feminism and the past discrimination against women would save them and that when they had something to say about girls sports or women's restrooms, the others would listen. Nope. No longer victims -enough-. If you decide to stick around and help out for free - which you probably will in the ideological equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome and defending your abuser - well, that's great, but you will get nothing in return.
Now Jews are learning that to the extent they care about Jewishness and Israel, likewise, they are suddenly redundant and superfluous and no one under 40 thinks they are victims or really cares about millennia of past victimization or even the Holocaust anymore. If you stay Democrats, wonderful, but ... full disclosure here: forget about the party not siding with Hamas against Israel, that's how things are now. You are dispensable.
Right now there are certain "New Jews" / "Model Minorities" elites of East Asian and South Asian origin who also imagine that having more genes for melanin expression and being unable to pass for evil-white is going to get them coded as "People of Color" in some meaningful way. They refuse to believe it, but they are in for the same nasty surprise! Eventually the Hispanics too.
Not so big if you find out you are no longer able to object to new architectural plans for renovations you dislike.
"We are going to take your condo and turn it into the building's gym." - "Um, but where will I ..." - "That's your problem, not our problem." - "But I helped design this building! And I did so such that there would be a nice space that fit in with the rest of the scheme and that was just right for me!" "That's nice, but, also, why should we care about your ancient history when that would stand in the way of our progress, that is to say, our new gym? The old scheme included a place for you, and the new scheme includes a place for a gym. It just happens to be the same place, zero-sum situation and all that." "But! But! ... "
It's not plausible. Notice the "failure of agreement" of scope of abstraction between the specifics of "antisemitism" and the general "stupidity and mental illness".
The implicit argument is that the latter has somehow caused the former. But the latter is far more general because there are infinite varieties of stupidity and mental illness, even plenty of one that code philo-semitic. Outbreaks of just generalized stupidity and mental illness would manifest with random valence on the question of Israel and Hamas, with an average of not caring at all about it. Is that what we see? Please, it's ALWAYS anti-Israel!
It's absolutely antisemitism because progressive ideology -insists- on the outcome that is opposed to semitism and the interests of Jews qua Jews especially as regards the existence, location, and character of a state intentionally constituted and dedicated to the purpose of being the Jewish state of the Jewish people.
For most of its history in most places, the left has been rabidly anti-Semitic toward actual semitism, as opposed to the anti-anti-Semitism, anti-discrimination idea that people of ethnically-Jewish origin should be allowed stop being Jewish and having their nationality count against them in their attempts to dissolve into the liberated egalitarianism of deracinated masses in The New State.
Now look, I get it, the situation is worse than most people ever imagine, indeed, worse than still imagine it to be. It is really, really bad and ugly, and that is psychologically hard to accept, so there is a lot of wishful thinking in grasping at straws for possibly less culpably evil, less gloomy explanations. It is especially hard to accept the reality of such an explanation when one has been working hard for a long time to convince other people from jumping to such explanatory conclusions when erroneous and based in little more than mere tribal antagonism.
But sometimes these explanations are true! "Never Look Away!"
There is no sense at all in minimizing any of this and trying to put lipstick on this pig, certainly not at this particular moment when most people still have not nearly fully opened up their eyes and awakened to the realization of just how far the rot has penetrated.
People, we are living in the last days of any shred of support anyone on the left will even pretend to have for Israel as they converge to openly siding with bloodthirsty maniacs. For Pete's sake, don't try to sugarcoat it!
Unless we haven't been totally clear about what antisemitism is/was. It's not a subject I've delved into, though it seems like an important problem for [whatever discipline] to think about; if I've read anything remotely scholarly about it, it would have been in the stack of years' worth of Commentary magazine that my conservative in-laws took, or maybe their old NYRBs.
Growing up, textbooks, it was either: people treat other people horribly when they perceive that they are "different"; or people make of other people a "scapegoat" for their own troubles, which lacked a certain explanatory power. Why did they blame *them*?
My own view is that the Bible, especially Paul, is probably the origin. But once that subject was briefly touched on in conversation with evangelical friends, and it made my tenderhearted friend cry so I will never go there again.
But in the 20th century, with Christianity on the ropes, I think that changes a bit - while Hitler certainly embraced the historical European urge to demonize the Jews, he puts his own further demented spin on it, persuading himself that there are two master races and only one must survive.
This they didn't tell us in school. I got it from someone who looked into Mein Kampf.
I'm just bloveating - but I'm bloveating honestly - I believe your oppressor/oppressed axis people - [which from a glance at pics of the rallies - consists of radicalized POCs and the children of immigrants and their supporters and various underemployed people] - view Jews as masters, not so much because of Israel, about which they know nothing, but because Jews are viewed as successful and "white", which is a crime.
A strong argument to shrink the population of college-goers, as if we needed another.
Take the mention of Yale, a place I've never seen and with which I have no truck (I'm a middle-America nobody who has never set foot on an Ivy campus) but which it is obvious even to me, that had Yale carried on with an admissions policy that resembled its, say, 1950s iteration - you would never have seen these distasteful outbreaks of hatred.
Would you still be seeing some "Gentleman's Agreement"-type "genteel" antisemitism? Maybe. Maybe you would. That seems unlikely but at this point I think we have to wonder if we are even talking about the same phenomenon. Everybody is "different" from everybody else.
I think Furedi is right. What a dull world without our differences! But to silo people is the opposite of openness - it was *always* cynical. It reminds me of the disputes in my old city. There was an African-American cultural center - an offshoot of a library in a historically black (not now) part of town. A fairly organic origin to the thing. So of course there needed to be a Mexican-American cultural center for all the people who had displaced most of the former. That was a much grander thing, modeled on an "Aztec plaza" or something. It had some of the usual Brutalist problems and had to be expensively rebuilt quite soon. By then we had other ethnic groups in some numbers, and so there was a call for an Asian-American cultural center (this not because there was any local history to draw on in connection with Asians, but just because ... we're here, we want some $ and appreciation). I don't know where this stops, but I can tell you that one fallout is the city had to fund *two* "Offices of Equity and Inclusion", whose functions whatever they are, are otherwise identical. And I see no reason they should stop at having just two.
“If you want to know the truth of what is going on there, your best choice is the Israeli Defense Forces Twitter feed.”
You want people to unironically read military propaganda. To not even recommend a government friendly news org but straight up propaganda from the horses mouth. The people writing those tweets are literal paid soldiers who have sworn allegiance to one side in a conflict.
I wouldn’t even expect Netanyahu to say with a straight face the military “public relations office” to be to be the most accurate source for laymen.
The rise of play dates, no jobs, and a multitude of other factors make kids dependent on parents. Obama with young adult credit cards is another example. Rather than allow young adults to get a credit card and learn how to manage it with a small limit, they regulated it. Taken All together, kids do not ease into growing up, but are protected from it. Kids need to fail, recover, and grow. This includes school.
The problem is perhaps not social media as such but the consumption of junk content in large quantities and the bad associations of people. For the typical parent who does not want to monitor router traffic out of the home and to administer what is allowed to connect to what device, cold turkey is just a lot more straightforward. It is good for children to associate with other good children along with good adults. It is not good to have 16 year old girls texting pictures of her proverbial bobs to louche 25-year-olds with cars. Unless you are monitoring your daughter's device, she is going to be sending pictures of her bobs. Most parents are busy working and do not have time to be the bobs police. And if she is not texting them to others, she's going to listen to someone who tells her to chop them off. So, cold turkey is a more reasonable household rule, and perhaps a better law for everyone.
For the record, I think cable TV very nearly as bad as the internet, it's just that the internet is more available and more optimized. The internet also seems to be at least as bad for older adults as it is for children. My mother's brain has been putrefied by Facebook use. What used to be a relatively thoughtful and cultivated person has devolved into a gutter tier Blu-Anon type. I don't think she's read a book in 15 years and she has an Ivy lit MA. I think we all hoped that the internet would be a bicycle for the mind, but it's mostly popular as a delivery vehicle for digital fentanyl.
The coming out of the woodwork of Hamas policy supporters (important to make the distinction between them and supporters of a separate Palestinian state) may not be, in the long run, a bad thing if it destroys the "no enemies on the Left" mindset of some Progressives.
But in making the contrast fails to recognize the very different disaster that the US response to 9/11 was both internally (TSA, color alerts, metal detectors) and in foreign policy. Iraq and Afghanistan energized a huge wave of illiberalism.
First, without rehashing their whole argument, I remember that when the internet and especially internet search started to become big things with rapidly growing adoption rates in the mass population, a few prescient public intellectuals pointed out that the whole cultural memory would tend to collapse into things that were visible and easily discoverable on the internet. Even if there was plenty of "archival" material placed in repositories here and there, people, especially in our current-moment and past-denigrating culture, would tend to lose awareness of the past in a form of passively-induced mass amnesia. If people don't remember the past, and something isn't on the first few pages of whatever constitutes the mainstream infosphere, it might as well not exist.
I was unsure about their predictions at the time, and because there are other powerful contributing factors to the amnesia (e.g., as Rozin has shown, the tendency towards auto-retconning of memories) it's not clear whether they were correct about the importance of their proposed mechanism, but at any rate, they turned out to be right on the results.
That leads to the second thing I remember, which was at a University when - get this - no one had smartphones and few used the internet AT ALL. Before social media, before 9/11, when people were still uneasy about the Cold War really being over, and when it seemed like there was really some chance of the Israelis and Palestinians making some kind of progress towards a final resolution of their dispute in a peace settlement.
And, I'm telling you from having seen it in person with my own lying eyes - the left on campus was just as openly pro-Palestinian and just as quick to excuse any terrorist atrocity as they were today. Now, keep in mind that the progressive zeitgeist has moved so far on so many other issues that the typical academic leftist perspective back then might well be coded as "typical GOP establishment" today, but not on the Palestine-Israel thing, which is as it ever was. That people think this is some kind of shocking news is totally baffling without resorting to the cultural amnesia "haphazard Ministry of Truth" phenomenon described above.
This is similar to how everybody thinks "Woke" is some kind of purportedly new and recent thing, a "Great Awokening" but that no one can actually articulate a meaningful distinction from the ideas and principles which were already dominant among progressives on campuses as "Political Correctness" over 30 years ago.
Indeed, almost exactly 30 years ago, a hilarious movie called "PCU"* came out, with easily recognizable plot devices such as a focus on pronouns and a proposal "that Bisexual Asian Studies should have its own building". The progressives say that it "hasn't aged well" but actually it's aged better than any other movie around - it's just that the nutty and humorless scolds they were poking fun at then and who naturally thought "That's Not Funny!" got into total power and turned schools into madrassas in which they indoctrinated the two subsequent generations in the orthodoxy of their TNF religion.
Zak Penn helped write PCU based on his experiences as a Freshman at Wesleyan ... IN 1985!
Now -that- fits my not yes culturally amnesia'ed memory of what progressives and campus-left types believed almost 40 years ago, and no, it isn't merely some kind of total reaction to things that people on the 'right' did, or foreign policy mistakes America made, or whatever.
And look - I kind of hate to say this but my impression is that there's more than a kernel of truth to it - one of the reasons that there is so much cultural amnesia about all this is precisely because pro-Israel Jews had a much stronger role and position back then as broadcast cultural content gatekeepers that they tended to use their influence and discretion to, ahem, "reduce the distribution" of messages that would have tended to reveal the affiliations and full strength of the numbers of people with these kind of beliefs.
There was also a lot more effective power of the "Democratic Party Establishment" over the respectable left as a Levin-like "Formative Institution" and with a Gurri-like soft-control / cozy relationship with still-very-limited-outlets media to maintain what we might now call "Narrative Control" to avoid things that would be Kinsley-like political 'gaffes' of accidently revealing ugly truths that would scare the normies.
As a final note, I should also say that at that time - which again is about 40 years ago! - people on the right - especially right-leaning Jews who were Anglo-American-tradition-type conservatives (i.e., not the "Neoconservatives") - were trying desperately to point this out to anyone they could corner - "This is who the left are, this is what they believe, these are the logical implications of the philosophy, this is what they are raising all your kids to believe, etc., etc." - and got nothing but resistance and wishful thinking and naivete and heads-in-the-sand reactions from anybody left of center, and many right of center too.
Cassandra who correctly foresees your future doom but who is cursed to not have her prophecy believed takes no joy or satisfaction when the "I told you so" dark moment finally arrives. The "Fiscal Doom" Cassandras who everyone is ignoring will likewise not smirk for having been correct all along but cry tears along with everyone else when reality crashes our party.
But one should not underestimate the importance of the motivation to never let people on the other side ever get the chance to humiliate you by giving them a "I told you so!" moment. The disgust and recoil reflexive reaction to this prospect is what is posing an even greater danger than the one which has been revealed to everybody in the wake of the Hamas attacks, which is that in order to avoid being told "I told you so!", people who imagine themselves to otherwise be progressives in good standing will face having to bite the bullet of giving up on Israel and siding with Hamas like all the other crazy maniac leftists after all. And unfortunately I predict that a lot of them are going to bite that bullet, and that is going to spell disaster.
*PCU, making fun of PC, eventually became so un-PC, that it is one of the "unstreamables", but a unique one that was once streamed but then unstreamed, and there is lingering controversy on whether or not it is actually some kind of intellectual property issue, and whether the initial streaming was a business legal mistake, or whether it's been, well, 'cancelled by woke capitalism'.
I agree, and think there's a desire to save "multiculturalism", that friendlier thing - but at the time - the few campus conservatives viewed it more or less as Marxism in new dress.
Admittedly everyone was a *lot* more chill back then, and I think we all felt campus politics to be - not exactly a joke - but uh, a thing in miniature, not to be taken too seriously - occupying a certain amount of cultural space but not too much.
Multiculturalism was fake and incoherent nonsense from the start, as Fish pointed out 26 years ago in "Boutique Multiculturalism". First words, "Multiculturalism Does Not Exist".
In fact, on any critical points of argument regarding orthodoxy, the left insists on conformity and uniform adherence to one idea. This is the generalized "Lucy and the Football" game the left plays with everything they try to pass as some kind of abstract philosophy or universal principle like "tolerance" which in fact is nothing more than an illusory double standard with an unlimited number of completely one-sided exceptions. And the moronic Charlie Brown Right which should know better than to take any of these claims at face value after centuries of being played for fools when doing so, still just keeps falling for it, over and over.
I'd say that "multiculturalism" is a European thing. Implicitly the US assumptions that everybody just wants to be Americans. And so far it's worked out, even with the far Right trying to create a "white" identity that immigrants cannot be a part of.
What's worked for America is multi-ethnicities, under just one culture, American (belief in constitution, rule of law, all men born equal, and so on). This is I think an important distinction.
I somewhat agree. It has definitely worked out for us. But what is multiculturalism? I don't see a clear definition in Ferudi's piece.
This is a common challenge. Victor Davis Hanson has similar essays to Ferudi's, but I'm always left completely baffled by what he wants people to assimilate to.
If it's a problem, then it needs a clear statement if it's ever to be solved. Demands that people assimilate are meaningless without a clear request to assimilate to a specific outcome.
The boundary problem is difficult to manage and define, sure. But I see Yascha Mounk, Justin Gest, and Chandran Kukathas doing much better than most who complain about multiculturalism to both define the problems of diversity and propose responses. They're all much more optimistic than Ferudi and those like him.
I got the sense reading Samuel Huntington that even the serious critics of immigration and diversity struggle to create a useful definition of what is being lost. There's a recipe of "American" that they have in mind. But it's always question begging. There are unquestionable Americans who get cut out by the definitions.
It probably shouldn't be surprising from basic public choice scholarship that group definitions get weird.
"The pro-Hamas case is built on layers of lies. Almost all of the reporting out of Gaza is polluted with Hamas propaganda." So true, so sad.
So laughable from an Arnold Kling who seems to believe the anti-Trump case which is built on layers of lies, with NYT & WaPo polluted with Trump hate Dem deep state propaganda. Often written by Jews, Jews who have supported Democrats and whose parents & grandparents always voted Dem.
Bari Weiss gave a GREAT talk. But she didn't mention the NYT years of Russia Hoax collusion lies, night after night. And where was Bari in 2017 until she left in 2020? At the lying NYT. Where they were so full of Trump hate they pumped out dishonest and semi-truth articles to get Dems to protest, to object to MAGA, and America, and capitalism, and pro-life Christianity so as to hate Trump.
Today they're only half full of dishonest articles to support hate against Jews, and Israel.
The Jew hate we see is because the haters have learned, thru lots of practice, that hate is fun. Hating the correct "bad guy" allows one to be full of fury yet also feel secure in total moral superiority. Without humility, and usually without full honesty.
Democrat Derangement Syndrome against Jews is similar to Dem Derangement Syndrome against Trump, which was similar to Dem DS against Kavanaugh, and DDS against Palin, and the first mis-named Bush Derangement Syndrome against Bush43 for his Iraqi war, and Abu Ghraib (remember that?), tho not the better Afghanistan war.
Kling sees this as "mass outbreak of stupidity and mental illness." It's a clear mass manifestation of the ignorant Jew hate, and mental delusions of believing in false realities, but it's not a new outbreak.
It could also be called Democrat Delusion Syndrome, believing obviously false things because it supports the Dem tribal team you're on. (Handle: "We decide what to believe by deciding whose side it helps.")
Kling: "it’s the loss of national purpose and the loss of confidence in liberal values that are the core problem with the West these days." Is being truthful a liberal value? Not bearing false witness? Remember Juanita Broaddrick? The woman raped, not really raped, yes really raped, by Bill Clinton?
His oral sex with Lewinsky was consensual, but Pres. Clinton committed perjury, was impeached yet all the Democrats, and some Republicans, voted "not guilty".
Democrats are allowed to commit perjury by Dems. In 1999, even before 9/11/01. That's a failure to enforce "rule of law" against Dems when Dems have the power to not enforce those rules. HR Clinton's bribery foundation corruption and illegal server - no indictment. Illegal spying on Trump by Obama's FBI? One little indictment without jail time.
Democratic rejection of actual enforcement of the laws is not "loss of confidence in liberal values", it's the essence of the Revolt of the Elites, rejection of those values by elites when inconvenient to (preferred) elites.
And not just the USA, but also the UK with Braverman, as noted by Goodwin and Cooke. Recently fired by honestly pointing out how UK cops rapidly arrest patriotic Brits, but allow mass illegal actions by Jew haters including many Muslims who hate those liberal values.
Non-enforcement of laws & rules is the core problem of the West. Not enough Law and Order -- because criminals become victims of law enforcement if laws are enforced.
Without laws being enforced, equally on all, civilization will collapse.
I'm concerned by what Israel is doing in Gaza but I don't feel I have adequate information or knowledge to judge those actions. That said, I have significant problems with your statements.
I don't like when liberals judge conservatives based on a minority of clearly racist people in the conservative camp. I also don't like it when they interpret or twist comments and positions about race to be racist. I think you are doing the same thing. I don't like when you characterize people as pro-Hamas. Surely there are some, and surely there are some who are anti-Semitic, but I strongly disagree that this is a majority of the protestors. Being against on-going violence killing thousands or tens of thousands might in some way help Hamas but that doesn't make those protestors pro-Hamas. Similarly, being against actions of Israel does not make one anti-Semitic. I strongly believe most of the people protesting simply want the violence to stop. They may not be looking at the bigger picture or they may misunderstand the bigger picture but that is vey different than pro-Hamas and I wish you'd stop using that term, at least not as broadly as you do.
"The difference between 9/11 and 10/7 was that the catastrophe of 10/7 was followed, on October 8, by a different kind of catastrophe....I see it as part of a mass outbreak of stupidity and mental illness."
What is driving the surge in adolescent depression?
I like Peter Gray’s analysis on this problem. I don’t think the problem is as simple as: 1) social media is always bad for adolescents, or 2) social media is THE CAUSE, or even A MAJOR CAUSE of adolescent depression. Ditto with TV and electronic device use. They aren’t always bad, but let’s be honest, TV, video games and social media can become bad habits. They can be a big waste of time.
There is something more fundamental and more universal causing teen depression.
Gray provides evidence throughout his post showing that social media is, more often than not, beneficial. That is, social media, more often than not, leaves teenagers with a positive, uplifted emotional state. Here’s one example.
“In one set of questions the girls were asked whether the effect on their mood of using various social media platforms was primarily positive, negative, or neutral. For every platform, more girls said the effect was positive than negative. For TikTok, 43% said positive, 26% negative, and the rest neutral. For Instagram, these numbers were 38% positive, 19% negative; for Snapchat. 32% positive, 26% negative; for messaging apps 50% positive, 10% negative; and for YouTube 65% positive, 5% negative.”
This is great. Read his whole post for more evidence.
So what’s causing the surge in adolescent depression? I believe his last sentence points in the direction of a universal cause.
“In my next D post I plan to expand on the idea I introduced in Letter D5, that the sharp increase in anxiety, depression, and suicides in teens since about 2008 is caused in large part by increased pressure for academic performance and increased fears about their future. Keep tuned.”
This is inline with my new guess as to the cause.
Teenagers have a sense of what they need to accomplish in their career, even if it’s a sense that: “I’m confused about my career path” or “I’m depressed about school.”
Similarly they have a sense about their long-term health and social standing, even if it’s just a sense that: “I’m not physically fit” or “I’m not socially fit.”
Let’s admit, there are intense career pressures on adolescents and many are working hard, but…what else is going on?
What’s causing the surge in adolescent depression? Here’s my thinking.
Divide activities into two groups: 1) those activities that leave one with a lasting positive feeling, and, 2) those activities that leave one feeling depressed. Ask how activities in these two groups are similar and different.
Those activities that leave one with a lasting positive feeling are activities in which a person is growing stronger, becoming healthier or learning. These activities produce results toward positive longterm goals. We typically call this achievement. We feel self-worth, satisfaction and greater self-respect when we achieve, learn and grow. We need to feel these feelings on a daily basis or almost-daily basis in at least three areas of our lives:
1) physical fitness
2) social fitness (and/or family)
3) academic, intellectual and career fitness.
Making progress in these three areas on an almost-daily basis is important in keeping depression at bay. This is about survival, health and success in life. It’s in our evolutionary nature to want to grow, learn and stay fit. Doing so leads to happiness. Not doing so leads to depression.
Here’s the other group: those activities that leave one feeling depressed. These activities are often a waste of time, do not lead to achievement, and do not face adversity, nor overcome challenge.
These activities are often in the category of distractions. Sometimes they’re called addictions. They could be TV, social media, moping, drugs, drinking, eating, etc.
Both parents and children engage is these wasteful activities.
These activities also include being pampered and coddled. These activities are synonymous with not facing our problems, not taking responsibility, not taking ownership, not making good choices about our long-term interests. To be coddled is to avoid growth. Instead of facing our problems, we’re wasting time in the sense that we aren’t thinking about our long-term development.
These activities also fall into the category of safetyism; that exposure to adversity makes us weaker; that we need to be protected and shielded from challenge; that we are fragile; that exposure to ideas that contradict ours are violent and damaging; that we need safe spaces to recover from micro-aggression; that words are violent; that censorship is justified whenever we feel like it; that my feelings are always true; that my feelings are always right; that self-reflection is too painful; that I can’t tell the truth because I don’t know how to be humble; that I can’t even sit for a few minutes with the idea that I might be wrong.
TV and electronic device use are often distractions from learning, growth, and achievement. They are often wasteful. See this important correlation below found by Twenge, and mentioned on page 152 of The Coddling of the American Mind.
“Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print me-dia, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.”
Twenge and Haidt are probably focusing too much on the difference between screen time vs face-to-face time, but I admit that I have not studied their ideas carefully. It is certainly plausible and maybe likely that social media causes permanent or long lasting changes in the brain during critical years of development. I note feeling somewhat crazed by Facebook and Twitter when I used those services. They seem to have mind-altering properties probably related to the engagement algorithms and lack of face-to-face interaction. Not sure what’s going on with them, but I try to avoid them in favor of more in-person time, more exercise, and more books.
The biggest negative of electronic device use and TV is the waste. It can be a big distraction from our problems; a distraction from learning and growing; a distraction from work and a distraction from achievement.
And conversely, looking at the findings from Twenge, what do the activities that promote positive feelings have in common?
1. Sports and other forms of exercise
2. Attending religious services
3. Reading books and other print media
4. In-person social interactions
5. Doing homework
These five activities all have in common a mindset of achievement, growth and learning. And they are much less likely to be a waste of one’s time.
So the important difference between the two groups of activities - the one group that leaves us with lasting positive feelings and the other group that leaves us feeling depressed - is that, one group of activities leads to wasting time and the other leads to productivity. Some might call this difference time management. When we waste our time and energy we get depressed. When we work to bring more order to our lives we feel good. Work that produces achievement, work that solves problems, work that maintains our health through exercise — leave us feeling positive, satisfied, loved, accomplished and respected.
When we are learning and growing socially, by overcoming miscommunications, by resolving differences, and learning from our moral mistakes we feel a type of achievement - love and self-worth.
And this “work” can be conducted on social media. This explains to some extent the lasting positive feelings of social media use that Gray points to. We can solve our problems on social media. We can learn and grow there, but we can also waste time and get completely demolished there. But political polarization and social media engagement algorithms can distract from our need for daily accomplishments. Over an extended period of time this can lead to depression.
Less often are we productive through TV or video games. Less often are we productive through texting on dumb phones.
This time management explanation - that certain activities promote growth socially, intellectually and physically is inline with the (Adam) Smithian view of human behavior, it matches my own personal experiences and it appears to fit the data that Haidt, Twenge and Gray are examining.
In the books, The Canceling of the American Mind, and The Coddling of the American Mind, the authors point to the cure for adolescent depression. The most general way of stating it, is in the concept of anti-fragility. People are anti-fragile. We grow stronger and feel better, when we overcome challenge and adversity. This takes work.
Conversely, when we waste our time and energy, when we allow ourselves to be distracted and when we avoid our problems we become fragile and depressed. Lukianoff, Haidt and Schlott, point to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) as a helpful technique for promoting positive, motivating thoughts. CBT is nothing special though. One could obtain similar results using good old-fashioned, American optimism and creativity. Or similarly by practicing one of the many religious practices that promote hope, faith, self-reliance, mindfulness, meditation, or prayer. Look at the activities that Twenge found to promote lasting positive feelings
1. Sports and other forms of exercise
2. Attending religious services
3. Reading books and other print media
4. In-person social interactions
5. Doing homework
The decline in religious practice probably plays a part in the surge of adolescent depression. I don’t think religion, Christian or not, is the cure though. Religion can help, but it’s not a panacea. Religion can be wicked. I would love Christianity to receive a significant update. It has lost many customers over the decades due to dogmas, conformity and solidarity. I think we need secular character education that mimics Christian practices, by integrating knowledge of Darwin, evolution, physics and Smithian economics.
We need more people to either read the Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith if you can stand it, or the modern updates by James Otteson, Daniel Klein and Russ Roberts. We need an extended dialogue about the impartial spectator in relation to one’s conscience and God. We need a nuanced interpretation of our conscience that isn’t dogmatic about supernatural forces.
Further, Russ Roberts has mentioned the decline in religious practice on his podcast Econtalk a number of times as a cause of our cultural malaise. The important thing to keep in mind here is that we need to reform and improve our religious practices, not necessarily run from religion. This means being less religious and more reflective; less dogmatic and more humble; more free, dynamic and respectful with our dialogue; more meditative; more open to heresy; more distilling of character education from Judeo-Christian traditions; and more willing to pursue truth.
Similarly, American history education needs a re-boot and an update, especially in K-12 and at the college level. Rare is patriotism for America. Rare is understanding and appreciation for Western Civilization. No longer can we allow censorship of this discussion. We have to be willing to speak truth on the left, right and middle. Let’s get an honest, full accounting of our history and traditions: the Founding, the wars, the slavery, the censorship, the religious persecution, the entrepreneurship, the freedoms, the creativity, the work ethic, the good moral values, everything - all the positives and all the negatives, and everything that just IS. Not positive or negative, just IS. Right now we have two camps dominating the discourse. On one side, we have “America the Beautiful” and on the other, we have “Goddamn America.” Where is the nuance? Where’s the civil dialogue? Where’s the freedom of speech? Where’s the accuracy? Where’s the integrity? Where’s the humility?
DEI and supernatural religions dominate the public and private education space. Both are dogmatic. We need freedom of speech, not DEI. We need dynamism, not conformity to the supernatural. Allow for the eclectic. Allow for viewpoint diversity, not DEI diversity.
We need more anti-fragility, secular character education, self-worth through achievement, entrepreneurship, truth seeking, learning through free play, freedom, discovery, accountability, respect, integrity, humility, natural consequences, wisdom, good character, self-reliance, individuality, and positive thinking.
We need less moping, blaming, dependency, accommodation, distractions, addictions, coddling, pampering, solidarity, helicoptering, force, censorship, group think, and fragility. Cancel culture thrives off these things.
I write to raise the memory, which I wish was otherwise long buried, of 9/12/2001 in New Haven CT.
It was there that the depth of the rot in a place later infamous for 'safe spaces' was obvious to the few who could see - that there was a candlelight vigil in support of doing exactly nothing about the acts of 9/11 because the Muslims were the victims.
The very day after, there was not unity - no, not for the 'Divinity School' (YDS) students, the postmoderns, the union organizers, the Marxists and their sympathizers. The national leadership was taking a very diffident tone, trying to not be inflammatory, discussing investigations, and so on - and already these vigil holders were staking a claim in opposition to their fellow world citizens. They didn't stop there, or then, and they have pushed for a unilateral ceasefire ever since.
Aid and comfort.
I'm a bit surprised by your comment. one could certainly argue that going after Bin Laden and maybe deposing Saddam Hussein were the right things to do after 9-11 but in hindsight I'd say it is A LOT harder to argue that the death and destruction invading Iraq and Afghanistan was the best option. In hindsight, a call for doing nothing, or WAY less, doesn't sound at all unreasonable to me.
Many things were done that were unwise not only in retrospect, but in prospect. On 9/12, an invasion that lasted 20 years wasn't really in the public mind. Hunting down terrorists and their financial backers was the most basic goal; and some other were thinking about a clash of civilizations with Islamic fundamentalism writ large.
Well, we agree on one thing. The public didn't expect a 20 year war. Politicians were telling them it would be quick. I thought that was absurd and it was. Regardless, all I'm saying is that calling for doing nothing doesn't look so bad to me compared to what we got - lots of death and destruction for questionable if any gain.
Re: "teens [...] have been increasingly deprived of opportunities to get together in physical space away from direct adult surveillance and interference"—Peter Gray
True, high school and college—especially residential campuses— have gravitated to dictator-coddler governance.
There is a crucial flip side to the same coin in the larger process of delay of adulthood:
Teens in the higher education track—camp camouflaged as education—don't spend time anymore in workplaces (jobs) doing market-oriented tasks interacting mostly with adults of all ages in real production.
Youths spend some ten years in an ambiguous limbo, between puberty and when they begin to earn a living. And the ambiguity involves a staggering level of consumption.
Gray's thought deserves some consideration. However, I think the cause and effect is that social media has enabled the physical atomization of children's lives rather than being a salve.
Since you mentioned Sam Altman, here is the question that lingers for me about yesterday 's events: why would someone with his level of business experience allow a corporate board to be set up that way? Red flags include:
-- Only six people total.
-- Three of those six are inexperienced outsiders, seemingly chosen for apparent mission alignment and not technical domain expertise or governance expertise, with no real stake, financial or otherwise, in the health of the organization.
-- The bylaws let any four of them meet in secret from the other two and vote to remove the other two from the board (and then to fire the CEO).
This combination seems like an open invitation for any one of the three insider members (in this case, Ilya Sutskever) to more or less unilaterally stage a coup against the two others. All you have to do is backchannel the three outsiders into going along, and they are easily led due to their inexperience and lack of skin in the game.
I would bet that if you read a standard corporate governance best practices handbook it would advise against enabling this. Am I wrong? If not, why would someone as prominent and successful as Altman depart so obviously from best practices in this case?
OpenAI is not and was never intended to be a standard corporation. It's very emergence as something resembling that is itself a kind of stealthy coup d'etat.
So no surprise the structure has some kinks.
You may be under-selling the your 3 axis framework.
When the "oppressed-oppressor" axis is used to communicate it becomes deeper.
It becomes the way to frame one's thinking. It becomes the way of judging moral righteousness.
So as Bari W said in her speech... "Their moral calculus is as crude as you can imagine: they see Israelis and Jews as powerful and successful and “colonizers,” so they are bad; Hamas is weak and coded as people of color, so they are good. No, it doesn’t matter that most Israelis are “people of color.”
The people protesting on behalf of Hamas are not stupid. They fully believe that the "oppressed/oppressor" or "powerless/powerful" axis is the primary way to judge what is morally right.
Anyone capable of genuinely believing that is a monster, and irredeemably untrustworthy. A high-trust society such as ours cannot continue to exist if such people are allowed into it.
This is why multicultural ideology is wrong. It destroys the security mechanisms, older than government, which people have used for thousands of years to protect ourselves.
We decide what to believe by deciding whose side it helps.
Bari can’t bring herself to say “fuck people of color”. No, it has to be “don’t you recognize us Jews as people of color too”.
I just can’t bring myself to care about these people. Reject oppressor/oppressed framework or accept that you can’t control which one you end up on.
"Reject oppressor/oppressed framework or accept that you can’t control which one you end up on."
That's right, but notice that in practice it plays out in a seemingly paradoxical fashion.
That is, in the feedback between the ideology's narrative and political expediency in a democracy, the composition of leftist allied constituencies shifts around with demographic circumstances, and the obvious and evolving ranking scheme of how many sacred-victimization points each group has relative to the others and Who trumps Whom in any dispute pops out automatically as a result.
And what that means is that there are "core" groups, totally secure in their position and allegiance, and whose stories become central to the ideological narrative as a kind of ethnogenic mythos. And then there are "marginal" groups who are always in danger of being ejected from the coalition the minute keeping them onboard is more trouble than it's worth, and thus also in danger of having their particular interests thrown under the bus in favor of those who are more "core".
But see now that the structure of leftist ideology by the unfalsifiable logic of "structural discrimination proven by statistical disparity" inherently awards victimization points based on an identity group's need for intervention to achieve a proportionate amount of success. So the marginal groups are going to be the ones who tend to enjoy plenty of success on average and have the hardest time getting their victimization coins accepted as currency. When push comes to shove, it's hard for them to sell the, "Look at us, we're victims just like you!" line.
But the paradox is that upon appreciating the precariousness of their group's status in the coalition, instead of rejecting the basis of membership that places them at an inherent disadvantage, they double-down in making their preposterous "Victims too!" arguments, make them extra often, extra loud, extra persuasively.
The problem is that if your marginal constituencies are marginal *because* they are successful, then that is where the coalitions has its reserve armies of competency and intellectual horsepower, not to mention those groups will supply far more than their fare share of members who are ultra-rich donors. And members of those groups, in their insatiable lust and ambition for status and mimicry of other established elites, will imagine they can use their smarts and money to prove themselves useful and always be able to talk the rest of the allies into sufficient affection and esteem that they will be considered true and legitimate members of the sacred federation.
And they will do this more and more intensely and desperately as they lose more and more status until the very last minute before they are purged wholesale out of the coalition unless they betray each and every loyalty at odds with the new orthodoxy.
Many white feminists thought their feminism and the past discrimination against women would save them and that when they had something to say about girls sports or women's restrooms, the others would listen. Nope. No longer victims -enough-. If you decide to stick around and help out for free - which you probably will in the ideological equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome and defending your abuser - well, that's great, but you will get nothing in return.
Now Jews are learning that to the extent they care about Jewishness and Israel, likewise, they are suddenly redundant and superfluous and no one under 40 thinks they are victims or really cares about millennia of past victimization or even the Holocaust anymore. If you stay Democrats, wonderful, but ... full disclosure here: forget about the party not siding with Hamas against Israel, that's how things are now. You are dispensable.
Right now there are certain "New Jews" / "Model Minorities" elites of East Asian and South Asian origin who also imagine that having more genes for melanin expression and being unable to pass for evil-white is going to get them coded as "People of Color" in some meaningful way. They refuse to believe it, but they are in for the same nasty surprise! Eventually the Hispanics too.
My understanding is that the recent “Elon musk is an antisemite” stuff is exactely over his pointing out that this is the truth.
"White-adjacent" was invented when, 10 years ago already? He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
"instead of rejecting the basis of membership"
This is a big ask if you are yourselves the architects of the underdogma.
Not so big if you find out you are no longer able to object to new architectural plans for renovations you dislike.
"We are going to take your condo and turn it into the building's gym." - "Um, but where will I ..." - "That's your problem, not our problem." - "But I helped design this building! And I did so such that there would be a nice space that fit in with the rest of the scheme and that was just right for me!" "That's nice, but, also, why should we care about your ancient history when that would stand in the way of our progress, that is to say, our new gym? The old scheme included a place for you, and the new scheme includes a place for a gym. It just happens to be the same place, zero-sum situation and all that." "But! But! ... "
I should be clear that Hitler also thoroughly worked the theme of victimization.
It may be a trope people will always reach for.
"I don’t see this as a resurgence of antisemitism. I see it as part of a mass outbreak of stupidity and mental illness."
This seems plausible. And very depressing.
It's not plausible. Notice the "failure of agreement" of scope of abstraction between the specifics of "antisemitism" and the general "stupidity and mental illness".
The implicit argument is that the latter has somehow caused the former. But the latter is far more general because there are infinite varieties of stupidity and mental illness, even plenty of one that code philo-semitic. Outbreaks of just generalized stupidity and mental illness would manifest with random valence on the question of Israel and Hamas, with an average of not caring at all about it. Is that what we see? Please, it's ALWAYS anti-Israel!
It's absolutely antisemitism because progressive ideology -insists- on the outcome that is opposed to semitism and the interests of Jews qua Jews especially as regards the existence, location, and character of a state intentionally constituted and dedicated to the purpose of being the Jewish state of the Jewish people.
For most of its history in most places, the left has been rabidly anti-Semitic toward actual semitism, as opposed to the anti-anti-Semitism, anti-discrimination idea that people of ethnically-Jewish origin should be allowed stop being Jewish and having their nationality count against them in their attempts to dissolve into the liberated egalitarianism of deracinated masses in The New State.
Now look, I get it, the situation is worse than most people ever imagine, indeed, worse than still imagine it to be. It is really, really bad and ugly, and that is psychologically hard to accept, so there is a lot of wishful thinking in grasping at straws for possibly less culpably evil, less gloomy explanations. It is especially hard to accept the reality of such an explanation when one has been working hard for a long time to convince other people from jumping to such explanatory conclusions when erroneous and based in little more than mere tribal antagonism.
But sometimes these explanations are true! "Never Look Away!"
There is no sense at all in minimizing any of this and trying to put lipstick on this pig, certainly not at this particular moment when most people still have not nearly fully opened up their eyes and awakened to the realization of just how far the rot has penetrated.
People, we are living in the last days of any shred of support anyone on the left will even pretend to have for Israel as they converge to openly siding with bloodthirsty maniacs. For Pete's sake, don't try to sugarcoat it!
Even more depressing.
Unless we haven't been totally clear about what antisemitism is/was. It's not a subject I've delved into, though it seems like an important problem for [whatever discipline] to think about; if I've read anything remotely scholarly about it, it would have been in the stack of years' worth of Commentary magazine that my conservative in-laws took, or maybe their old NYRBs.
Growing up, textbooks, it was either: people treat other people horribly when they perceive that they are "different"; or people make of other people a "scapegoat" for their own troubles, which lacked a certain explanatory power. Why did they blame *them*?
My own view is that the Bible, especially Paul, is probably the origin. But once that subject was briefly touched on in conversation with evangelical friends, and it made my tenderhearted friend cry so I will never go there again.
But in the 20th century, with Christianity on the ropes, I think that changes a bit - while Hitler certainly embraced the historical European urge to demonize the Jews, he puts his own further demented spin on it, persuading himself that there are two master races and only one must survive.
This they didn't tell us in school. I got it from someone who looked into Mein Kampf.
I'm just bloveating - but I'm bloveating honestly - I believe your oppressor/oppressed axis people - [which from a glance at pics of the rallies - consists of radicalized POCs and the children of immigrants and their supporters and various underemployed people] - view Jews as masters, not so much because of Israel, about which they know nothing, but because Jews are viewed as successful and "white", which is a crime.
A strong argument to shrink the population of college-goers, as if we needed another.
Take the mention of Yale, a place I've never seen and with which I have no truck (I'm a middle-America nobody who has never set foot on an Ivy campus) but which it is obvious even to me, that had Yale carried on with an admissions policy that resembled its, say, 1950s iteration - you would never have seen these distasteful outbreaks of hatred.
Would you still be seeing some "Gentleman's Agreement"-type "genteel" antisemitism? Maybe. Maybe you would. That seems unlikely but at this point I think we have to wonder if we are even talking about the same phenomenon. Everybody is "different" from everybody else.
I think Furedi is right. What a dull world without our differences! But to silo people is the opposite of openness - it was *always* cynical. It reminds me of the disputes in my old city. There was an African-American cultural center - an offshoot of a library in a historically black (not now) part of town. A fairly organic origin to the thing. So of course there needed to be a Mexican-American cultural center for all the people who had displaced most of the former. That was a much grander thing, modeled on an "Aztec plaza" or something. It had some of the usual Brutalist problems and had to be expensively rebuilt quite soon. By then we had other ethnic groups in some numbers, and so there was a call for an Asian-American cultural center (this not because there was any local history to draw on in connection with Asians, but just because ... we're here, we want some $ and appreciation). I don't know where this stops, but I can tell you that one fallout is the city had to fund *two* "Offices of Equity and Inclusion", whose functions whatever they are, are otherwise identical. And I see no reason they should stop at having just two.
“If you want to know the truth of what is going on there, your best choice is the Israeli Defense Forces Twitter feed.”
You want people to unironically read military propaganda. To not even recommend a government friendly news org but straight up propaganda from the horses mouth. The people writing those tweets are literal paid soldiers who have sworn allegiance to one side in a conflict.
I wouldn’t even expect Netanyahu to say with a straight face the military “public relations office” to be to be the most accurate source for laymen.
The rise of play dates, no jobs, and a multitude of other factors make kids dependent on parents. Obama with young adult credit cards is another example. Rather than allow young adults to get a credit card and learn how to manage it with a small limit, they regulated it. Taken All together, kids do not ease into growing up, but are protected from it. Kids need to fail, recover, and grow. This includes school.
The problem is perhaps not social media as such but the consumption of junk content in large quantities and the bad associations of people. For the typical parent who does not want to monitor router traffic out of the home and to administer what is allowed to connect to what device, cold turkey is just a lot more straightforward. It is good for children to associate with other good children along with good adults. It is not good to have 16 year old girls texting pictures of her proverbial bobs to louche 25-year-olds with cars. Unless you are monitoring your daughter's device, she is going to be sending pictures of her bobs. Most parents are busy working and do not have time to be the bobs police. And if she is not texting them to others, she's going to listen to someone who tells her to chop them off. So, cold turkey is a more reasonable household rule, and perhaps a better law for everyone.
For the record, I think cable TV very nearly as bad as the internet, it's just that the internet is more available and more optimized. The internet also seems to be at least as bad for older adults as it is for children. My mother's brain has been putrefied by Facebook use. What used to be a relatively thoughtful and cultivated person has devolved into a gutter tier Blu-Anon type. I don't think she's read a book in 15 years and she has an Ivy lit MA. I think we all hoped that the internet would be a bicycle for the mind, but it's mostly popular as a delivery vehicle for digital fentanyl.
The coming out of the woodwork of Hamas policy supporters (important to make the distinction between them and supporters of a separate Palestinian state) may not be, in the long run, a bad thing if it destroys the "no enemies on the Left" mindset of some Progressives.
But in making the contrast fails to recognize the very different disaster that the US response to 9/11 was both internally (TSA, color alerts, metal detectors) and in foreign policy. Iraq and Afghanistan energized a huge wave of illiberalism.
I remember two things from long (+25 years) ago.
First, without rehashing their whole argument, I remember that when the internet and especially internet search started to become big things with rapidly growing adoption rates in the mass population, a few prescient public intellectuals pointed out that the whole cultural memory would tend to collapse into things that were visible and easily discoverable on the internet. Even if there was plenty of "archival" material placed in repositories here and there, people, especially in our current-moment and past-denigrating culture, would tend to lose awareness of the past in a form of passively-induced mass amnesia. If people don't remember the past, and something isn't on the first few pages of whatever constitutes the mainstream infosphere, it might as well not exist.
I was unsure about their predictions at the time, and because there are other powerful contributing factors to the amnesia (e.g., as Rozin has shown, the tendency towards auto-retconning of memories) it's not clear whether they were correct about the importance of their proposed mechanism, but at any rate, they turned out to be right on the results.
That leads to the second thing I remember, which was at a University when - get this - no one had smartphones and few used the internet AT ALL. Before social media, before 9/11, when people were still uneasy about the Cold War really being over, and when it seemed like there was really some chance of the Israelis and Palestinians making some kind of progress towards a final resolution of their dispute in a peace settlement.
And, I'm telling you from having seen it in person with my own lying eyes - the left on campus was just as openly pro-Palestinian and just as quick to excuse any terrorist atrocity as they were today. Now, keep in mind that the progressive zeitgeist has moved so far on so many other issues that the typical academic leftist perspective back then might well be coded as "typical GOP establishment" today, but not on the Palestine-Israel thing, which is as it ever was. That people think this is some kind of shocking news is totally baffling without resorting to the cultural amnesia "haphazard Ministry of Truth" phenomenon described above.
This is similar to how everybody thinks "Woke" is some kind of purportedly new and recent thing, a "Great Awokening" but that no one can actually articulate a meaningful distinction from the ideas and principles which were already dominant among progressives on campuses as "Political Correctness" over 30 years ago.
Indeed, almost exactly 30 years ago, a hilarious movie called "PCU"* came out, with easily recognizable plot devices such as a focus on pronouns and a proposal "that Bisexual Asian Studies should have its own building". The progressives say that it "hasn't aged well" but actually it's aged better than any other movie around - it's just that the nutty and humorless scolds they were poking fun at then and who naturally thought "That's Not Funny!" got into total power and turned schools into madrassas in which they indoctrinated the two subsequent generations in the orthodoxy of their TNF religion.
Zak Penn helped write PCU based on his experiences as a Freshman at Wesleyan ... IN 1985!
Now -that- fits my not yes culturally amnesia'ed memory of what progressives and campus-left types believed almost 40 years ago, and no, it isn't merely some kind of total reaction to things that people on the 'right' did, or foreign policy mistakes America made, or whatever.
And look - I kind of hate to say this but my impression is that there's more than a kernel of truth to it - one of the reasons that there is so much cultural amnesia about all this is precisely because pro-Israel Jews had a much stronger role and position back then as broadcast cultural content gatekeepers that they tended to use their influence and discretion to, ahem, "reduce the distribution" of messages that would have tended to reveal the affiliations and full strength of the numbers of people with these kind of beliefs.
There was also a lot more effective power of the "Democratic Party Establishment" over the respectable left as a Levin-like "Formative Institution" and with a Gurri-like soft-control / cozy relationship with still-very-limited-outlets media to maintain what we might now call "Narrative Control" to avoid things that would be Kinsley-like political 'gaffes' of accidently revealing ugly truths that would scare the normies.
As a final note, I should also say that at that time - which again is about 40 years ago! - people on the right - especially right-leaning Jews who were Anglo-American-tradition-type conservatives (i.e., not the "Neoconservatives") - were trying desperately to point this out to anyone they could corner - "This is who the left are, this is what they believe, these are the logical implications of the philosophy, this is what they are raising all your kids to believe, etc., etc." - and got nothing but resistance and wishful thinking and naivete and heads-in-the-sand reactions from anybody left of center, and many right of center too.
Cassandra who correctly foresees your future doom but who is cursed to not have her prophecy believed takes no joy or satisfaction when the "I told you so" dark moment finally arrives. The "Fiscal Doom" Cassandras who everyone is ignoring will likewise not smirk for having been correct all along but cry tears along with everyone else when reality crashes our party.
But one should not underestimate the importance of the motivation to never let people on the other side ever get the chance to humiliate you by giving them a "I told you so!" moment. The disgust and recoil reflexive reaction to this prospect is what is posing an even greater danger than the one which has been revealed to everybody in the wake of the Hamas attacks, which is that in order to avoid being told "I told you so!", people who imagine themselves to otherwise be progressives in good standing will face having to bite the bullet of giving up on Israel and siding with Hamas like all the other crazy maniac leftists after all. And unfortunately I predict that a lot of them are going to bite that bullet, and that is going to spell disaster.
*PCU, making fun of PC, eventually became so un-PC, that it is one of the "unstreamables", but a unique one that was once streamed but then unstreamed, and there is lingering controversy on whether or not it is actually some kind of intellectual property issue, and whether the initial streaming was a business legal mistake, or whether it's been, well, 'cancelled by woke capitalism'.
Handle wrote:
"And unfortunately I predict that a lot of them are going to bite that bullet, and that is going to spell disaster."
This is also my prediction.
I knew a guy in the college republicans who was choked by a professor over an Israeli flag in 2002. It was at this school... https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/12/04/university-settles-suit-alleging-bias/92daebf7-b091-480d-adca-2f33491e07f3/
I agree, and think there's a desire to save "multiculturalism", that friendlier thing - but at the time - the few campus conservatives viewed it more or less as Marxism in new dress.
Admittedly everyone was a *lot* more chill back then, and I think we all felt campus politics to be - not exactly a joke - but uh, a thing in miniature, not to be taken too seriously - occupying a certain amount of cultural space but not too much.
Multiculturalism was fake and incoherent nonsense from the start, as Fish pointed out 26 years ago in "Boutique Multiculturalism". First words, "Multiculturalism Does Not Exist".
In fact, on any critical points of argument regarding orthodoxy, the left insists on conformity and uniform adherence to one idea. This is the generalized "Lucy and the Football" game the left plays with everything they try to pass as some kind of abstract philosophy or universal principle like "tolerance" which in fact is nothing more than an illusory double standard with an unlimited number of completely one-sided exceptions. And the moronic Charlie Brown Right which should know better than to take any of these claims at face value after centuries of being played for fools when doing so, still just keeps falling for it, over and over.
Ferudi,
I'd say that "multiculturalism" is a European thing. Implicitly the US assumptions that everybody just wants to be Americans. And so far it's worked out, even with the far Right trying to create a "white" identity that immigrants cannot be a part of.
What's worked for America is multi-ethnicities, under just one culture, American (belief in constitution, rule of law, all men born equal, and so on). This is I think an important distinction.
I somewhat agree. It has definitely worked out for us. But what is multiculturalism? I don't see a clear definition in Ferudi's piece.
This is a common challenge. Victor Davis Hanson has similar essays to Ferudi's, but I'm always left completely baffled by what he wants people to assimilate to.
If it's a problem, then it needs a clear statement if it's ever to be solved. Demands that people assimilate are meaningless without a clear request to assimilate to a specific outcome.
The boundary problem is difficult to manage and define, sure. But I see Yascha Mounk, Justin Gest, and Chandran Kukathas doing much better than most who complain about multiculturalism to both define the problems of diversity and propose responses. They're all much more optimistic than Ferudi and those like him.
I got the sense reading Samuel Huntington that even the serious critics of immigration and diversity struggle to create a useful definition of what is being lost. There's a recipe of "American" that they have in mind. But it's always question begging. There are unquestionable Americans who get cut out by the definitions.
It probably shouldn't be surprising from basic public choice scholarship that group definitions get weird.
"It has definitely worked out for us."
What worked out for us?
Assimilating various white people into white people. Yeah that worked. It also worked for Switzerland.
It didn't work with blacks. And it probably won't work with the other brown people.
To be fair, it also worked out pretty well with Japanese-Americans.
"The pro-Hamas case is built on layers of lies. Almost all of the reporting out of Gaza is polluted with Hamas propaganda." So true, so sad.
So laughable from an Arnold Kling who seems to believe the anti-Trump case which is built on layers of lies, with NYT & WaPo polluted with Trump hate Dem deep state propaganda. Often written by Jews, Jews who have supported Democrats and whose parents & grandparents always voted Dem.
Bari Weiss gave a GREAT talk. But she didn't mention the NYT years of Russia Hoax collusion lies, night after night. And where was Bari in 2017 until she left in 2020? At the lying NYT. Where they were so full of Trump hate they pumped out dishonest and semi-truth articles to get Dems to protest, to object to MAGA, and America, and capitalism, and pro-life Christianity so as to hate Trump.
Today they're only half full of dishonest articles to support hate against Jews, and Israel.
The Jew hate we see is because the haters have learned, thru lots of practice, that hate is fun. Hating the correct "bad guy" allows one to be full of fury yet also feel secure in total moral superiority. Without humility, and usually without full honesty.
Democrat Derangement Syndrome against Jews is similar to Dem Derangement Syndrome against Trump, which was similar to Dem DS against Kavanaugh, and DDS against Palin, and the first mis-named Bush Derangement Syndrome against Bush43 for his Iraqi war, and Abu Ghraib (remember that?), tho not the better Afghanistan war.
Kling sees this as "mass outbreak of stupidity and mental illness." It's a clear mass manifestation of the ignorant Jew hate, and mental delusions of believing in false realities, but it's not a new outbreak.
It could also be called Democrat Delusion Syndrome, believing obviously false things because it supports the Dem tribal team you're on. (Handle: "We decide what to believe by deciding whose side it helps.")
Kling: "it’s the loss of national purpose and the loss of confidence in liberal values that are the core problem with the West these days." Is being truthful a liberal value? Not bearing false witness? Remember Juanita Broaddrick? The woman raped, not really raped, yes really raped, by Bill Clinton?
(Had to check her name, I follow her on X: https://twitter.com/atensnut )
His oral sex with Lewinsky was consensual, but Pres. Clinton committed perjury, was impeached yet all the Democrats, and some Republicans, voted "not guilty".
Democrats are allowed to commit perjury by Dems. In 1999, even before 9/11/01. That's a failure to enforce "rule of law" against Dems when Dems have the power to not enforce those rules. HR Clinton's bribery foundation corruption and illegal server - no indictment. Illegal spying on Trump by Obama's FBI? One little indictment without jail time.
Democratic rejection of actual enforcement of the laws is not "loss of confidence in liberal values", it's the essence of the Revolt of the Elites, rejection of those values by elites when inconvenient to (preferred) elites.
And not just the USA, but also the UK with Braverman, as noted by Goodwin and Cooke. Recently fired by honestly pointing out how UK cops rapidly arrest patriotic Brits, but allow mass illegal actions by Jew haters including many Muslims who hate those liberal values.
Non-enforcement of laws & rules is the core problem of the West. Not enough Law and Order -- because criminals become victims of law enforcement if laws are enforced.
Without laws being enforced, equally on all, civilization will collapse.
That story about your high school is terrific!
I'm concerned by what Israel is doing in Gaza but I don't feel I have adequate information or knowledge to judge those actions. That said, I have significant problems with your statements.
I don't like when liberals judge conservatives based on a minority of clearly racist people in the conservative camp. I also don't like it when they interpret or twist comments and positions about race to be racist. I think you are doing the same thing. I don't like when you characterize people as pro-Hamas. Surely there are some, and surely there are some who are anti-Semitic, but I strongly disagree that this is a majority of the protestors. Being against on-going violence killing thousands or tens of thousands might in some way help Hamas but that doesn't make those protestors pro-Hamas. Similarly, being against actions of Israel does not make one anti-Semitic. I strongly believe most of the people protesting simply want the violence to stop. They may not be looking at the bigger picture or they may misunderstand the bigger picture but that is vey different than pro-Hamas and I wish you'd stop using that term, at least not as broadly as you do.
"The difference between 9/11 and 10/7 was that the catastrophe of 10/7 was followed, on October 8, by a different kind of catastrophe....I see it as part of a mass outbreak of stupidity and mental illness."
I don't think that is completely true:
https://nypost.com/2015/12/03/the-video-of-revelers-cheering-911-that-no-one-got-to-see/
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/september11twintowersworldtradecentrenewyorki-knewmuslimswhocelebratednaive-a7238081.html
The stupidity (and maybe mental illness) has always been there. We're seeing new ways to use that stupidity for political ends.
Thanks once again for the helpful links Arnold.
What is driving the surge in adolescent depression?
I like Peter Gray’s analysis on this problem. I don’t think the problem is as simple as: 1) social media is always bad for adolescents, or 2) social media is THE CAUSE, or even A MAJOR CAUSE of adolescent depression. Ditto with TV and electronic device use. They aren’t always bad, but let’s be honest, TV, video games and social media can become bad habits. They can be a big waste of time.
There is something more fundamental and more universal causing teen depression.
Gray provides evidence throughout his post showing that social media is, more often than not, beneficial. That is, social media, more often than not, leaves teenagers with a positive, uplifted emotional state. Here’s one example.
“In one set of questions the girls were asked whether the effect on their mood of using various social media platforms was primarily positive, negative, or neutral. For every platform, more girls said the effect was positive than negative. For TikTok, 43% said positive, 26% negative, and the rest neutral. For Instagram, these numbers were 38% positive, 19% negative; for Snapchat. 32% positive, 26% negative; for messaging apps 50% positive, 10% negative; and for YouTube 65% positive, 5% negative.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/petergray?r=nb3bl&utm_medium=ios
This is great. Read his whole post for more evidence.
So what’s causing the surge in adolescent depression? I believe his last sentence points in the direction of a universal cause.
“In my next D post I plan to expand on the idea I introduced in Letter D5, that the sharp increase in anxiety, depression, and suicides in teens since about 2008 is caused in large part by increased pressure for academic performance and increased fears about their future. Keep tuned.”
This is inline with my new guess as to the cause.
Teenagers have a sense of what they need to accomplish in their career, even if it’s a sense that: “I’m confused about my career path” or “I’m depressed about school.”
Similarly they have a sense about their long-term health and social standing, even if it’s just a sense that: “I’m not physically fit” or “I’m not socially fit.”
Let’s admit, there are intense career pressures on adolescents and many are working hard, but…what else is going on?
What’s causing the surge in adolescent depression? Here’s my thinking.
Divide activities into two groups: 1) those activities that leave one with a lasting positive feeling, and, 2) those activities that leave one feeling depressed. Ask how activities in these two groups are similar and different.
Those activities that leave one with a lasting positive feeling are activities in which a person is growing stronger, becoming healthier or learning. These activities produce results toward positive longterm goals. We typically call this achievement. We feel self-worth, satisfaction and greater self-respect when we achieve, learn and grow. We need to feel these feelings on a daily basis or almost-daily basis in at least three areas of our lives:
1) physical fitness
2) social fitness (and/or family)
3) academic, intellectual and career fitness.
Making progress in these three areas on an almost-daily basis is important in keeping depression at bay. This is about survival, health and success in life. It’s in our evolutionary nature to want to grow, learn and stay fit. Doing so leads to happiness. Not doing so leads to depression.
Here’s the other group: those activities that leave one feeling depressed. These activities are often a waste of time, do not lead to achievement, and do not face adversity, nor overcome challenge.
These activities are often in the category of distractions. Sometimes they’re called addictions. They could be TV, social media, moping, drugs, drinking, eating, etc.
Both parents and children engage is these wasteful activities.
These activities also include being pampered and coddled. These activities are synonymous with not facing our problems, not taking responsibility, not taking ownership, not making good choices about our long-term interests. To be coddled is to avoid growth. Instead of facing our problems, we’re wasting time in the sense that we aren’t thinking about our long-term development.
These activities also fall into the category of safetyism; that exposure to adversity makes us weaker; that we need to be protected and shielded from challenge; that we are fragile; that exposure to ideas that contradict ours are violent and damaging; that we need safe spaces to recover from micro-aggression; that words are violent; that censorship is justified whenever we feel like it; that my feelings are always true; that my feelings are always right; that self-reflection is too painful; that I can’t tell the truth because I don’t know how to be humble; that I can’t even sit for a few minutes with the idea that I might be wrong.
Continued in my reply to this comment.
TV and electronic device use are often distractions from learning, growth, and achievement. They are often wasteful. See this important correlation below found by Twenge, and mentioned on page 152 of The Coddling of the American Mind.
“Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print me-dia, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.”
Twenge and Haidt are probably focusing too much on the difference between screen time vs face-to-face time, but I admit that I have not studied their ideas carefully. It is certainly plausible and maybe likely that social media causes permanent or long lasting changes in the brain during critical years of development. I note feeling somewhat crazed by Facebook and Twitter when I used those services. They seem to have mind-altering properties probably related to the engagement algorithms and lack of face-to-face interaction. Not sure what’s going on with them, but I try to avoid them in favor of more in-person time, more exercise, and more books.
The biggest negative of electronic device use and TV is the waste. It can be a big distraction from our problems; a distraction from learning and growing; a distraction from work and a distraction from achievement.
And conversely, looking at the findings from Twenge, what do the activities that promote positive feelings have in common?
1. Sports and other forms of exercise
2. Attending religious services
3. Reading books and other print media
4. In-person social interactions
5. Doing homework
These five activities all have in common a mindset of achievement, growth and learning. And they are much less likely to be a waste of one’s time.
So the important difference between the two groups of activities - the one group that leaves us with lasting positive feelings and the other group that leaves us feeling depressed - is that, one group of activities leads to wasting time and the other leads to productivity. Some might call this difference time management. When we waste our time and energy we get depressed. When we work to bring more order to our lives we feel good. Work that produces achievement, work that solves problems, work that maintains our health through exercise — leave us feeling positive, satisfied, loved, accomplished and respected.
When we are learning and growing socially, by overcoming miscommunications, by resolving differences, and learning from our moral mistakes we feel a type of achievement - love and self-worth.
And this “work” can be conducted on social media. This explains to some extent the lasting positive feelings of social media use that Gray points to. We can solve our problems on social media. We can learn and grow there, but we can also waste time and get completely demolished there. But political polarization and social media engagement algorithms can distract from our need for daily accomplishments. Over an extended period of time this can lead to depression.
Less often are we productive through TV or video games. Less often are we productive through texting on dumb phones.
This time management explanation - that certain activities promote growth socially, intellectually and physically is inline with the (Adam) Smithian view of human behavior, it matches my own personal experiences and it appears to fit the data that Haidt, Twenge and Gray are examining.
In the books, The Canceling of the American Mind, and The Coddling of the American Mind, the authors point to the cure for adolescent depression. The most general way of stating it, is in the concept of anti-fragility. People are anti-fragile. We grow stronger and feel better, when we overcome challenge and adversity. This takes work.
Conversely, when we waste our time and energy, when we allow ourselves to be distracted and when we avoid our problems we become fragile and depressed. Lukianoff, Haidt and Schlott, point to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) as a helpful technique for promoting positive, motivating thoughts. CBT is nothing special though. One could obtain similar results using good old-fashioned, American optimism and creativity. Or similarly by practicing one of the many religious practices that promote hope, faith, self-reliance, mindfulness, meditation, or prayer. Look at the activities that Twenge found to promote lasting positive feelings
1. Sports and other forms of exercise
2. Attending religious services
3. Reading books and other print media
4. In-person social interactions
5. Doing homework
The decline in religious practice probably plays a part in the surge of adolescent depression. I don’t think religion, Christian or not, is the cure though. Religion can help, but it’s not a panacea. Religion can be wicked. I would love Christianity to receive a significant update. It has lost many customers over the decades due to dogmas, conformity and solidarity. I think we need secular character education that mimics Christian practices, by integrating knowledge of Darwin, evolution, physics and Smithian economics.
We need more people to either read the Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith if you can stand it, or the modern updates by James Otteson, Daniel Klein and Russ Roberts. We need an extended dialogue about the impartial spectator in relation to one’s conscience and God. We need a nuanced interpretation of our conscience that isn’t dogmatic about supernatural forces.
Further, Russ Roberts has mentioned the decline in religious practice on his podcast Econtalk a number of times as a cause of our cultural malaise. The important thing to keep in mind here is that we need to reform and improve our religious practices, not necessarily run from religion. This means being less religious and more reflective; less dogmatic and more humble; more free, dynamic and respectful with our dialogue; more meditative; more open to heresy; more distilling of character education from Judeo-Christian traditions; and more willing to pursue truth.
Similarly, American history education needs a re-boot and an update, especially in K-12 and at the college level. Rare is patriotism for America. Rare is understanding and appreciation for Western Civilization. No longer can we allow censorship of this discussion. We have to be willing to speak truth on the left, right and middle. Let’s get an honest, full accounting of our history and traditions: the Founding, the wars, the slavery, the censorship, the religious persecution, the entrepreneurship, the freedoms, the creativity, the work ethic, the good moral values, everything - all the positives and all the negatives, and everything that just IS. Not positive or negative, just IS. Right now we have two camps dominating the discourse. On one side, we have “America the Beautiful” and on the other, we have “Goddamn America.” Where is the nuance? Where’s the civil dialogue? Where’s the freedom of speech? Where’s the accuracy? Where’s the integrity? Where’s the humility?
DEI and supernatural religions dominate the public and private education space. Both are dogmatic. We need freedom of speech, not DEI. We need dynamism, not conformity to the supernatural. Allow for the eclectic. Allow for viewpoint diversity, not DEI diversity.
We need more anti-fragility, secular character education, self-worth through achievement, entrepreneurship, truth seeking, learning through free play, freedom, discovery, accountability, respect, integrity, humility, natural consequences, wisdom, good character, self-reliance, individuality, and positive thinking.
We need less moping, blaming, dependency, accommodation, distractions, addictions, coddling, pampering, solidarity, helicoptering, force, censorship, group think, and fragility. Cancel culture thrives off these things.
Suggested reading below.
https://www.challengerschool.com
https://www.thalesacademy.org
https://www.thefire.org
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Canceling-of-the-American-Mind/Greg-Lukianoff/9781668019146
https://open.substack.com/pub/petergray?r=nb3bl&utm_medium=ios
https://jamesotteson.com/publications-videos-presentations/
https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/klein/
https://www.econtalk.org
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300228816/a-little-history-of-religion/
https://substack.com/@betonit?r=nb3bl&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile
https://cafehayek.com
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QzbEkXGd7Ms
https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Gain-Disorder/dp/0141038225?nodl=1&dplnkId=51b6fbee-5182-435a-929a-82b7e8673639