I can anecdotally confirm that. I was living in rural Minnesota when the schools started seeing epidemics of self-harm behavior. Before social media, it was a extreme kind of behavior they’d only see with serious mental illness. Basically, cell phones + social media and messaging made bullying super easy and simple. Kids couldn’t escape each other anymore.
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I never had children, so I’ve never had to deal with that situation personally. But I’ve seen startling and horrifying things with children of friends when it comes to phones and computers. My LDS neighbor across the street has 2 teenage girls who stay in their rooms on their phones all day and never go outside. When I see couples with infants, I feel great compassion for those children for what they will have to face in their lifetimes. Not just phones and social media, but climate change too.
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I watched/listened to the film The Social Dilemma yesterday. It was a real eye opener. This is serious, folks, really serious.
For me, one takeaway from the film is that because all of the big platforms have large, complex and ever-refining AI digital models for each user, there is no collective “truth” anymore. Division, fake news and conspiracy theories is exploding and if there is no common ground, civilization is moving into terrifying territory. What’s behind the curtain of tech is leading towards global anarchy.
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Thanks for the reminder. I’m almost afraid to watch it!
I’ve never been active on major platform like Facebook or Twitter, and I’m pretty confident in my grasp on facts and reality, but I’m still susceptible to the cheap gratification offered by electronic communications generally. Replies to sms messages, post likes on “good” forums like this, etc. Undeniably a little intoxicating… hello craving!
But I’ll share some good news. Facebook has announced they are completely banning Qanon and will be looking out for Qanon groups communicating in code.
Also, after a thorough investigation, the US Congress expressed meaningful support for regulating and breaking up Big Data.
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Credit where credit’s due, they finally did it. 
Banning works. Qanon were banned from reddit and they left. Death-wishing against Trump was banned from Twitter—which it should be—although this left the women, LGBTQI, Muslims, and PoC wondering why threats against them have been ignored—even for the women in Congress.
Much stronger banning rules against nazis—I can’t believe we actually have to say this—would cripple their movement. The problem is that their views are often indistinguishable from those of those running for office, not to speak of those who own the platforms.
Another step would be to break up the big companies. Nation-wide bans—like banning TikTok from India—help to prevent the creation of global monopolies and nation-sized corporations.
The far better solution, however, is to use an open-source standard for social media communications. Social media apps should communicate using a universally-accepted protocol (as is done in SMS or the web at large), and should compete on the basis of UX. That way there is less lock-in to a particular company. Don’t like their policies? Use a different app.
Email should be like this, in principle, except we’re all on gmail. Really we should just have personalized email addresses (sujato@bhikkhu.com) and use whatever platform we like.
The fediverse already implements this kind of approach.
Together with much stronger anti-monopoly laws, such technical changes would allow for greater user control of their data and the way they engage with social media. Imagine a world where social media apps were designed with ethics at the heart to condition anti-addictive behavior. There’s no reason we can’t do this: we just decided not to.
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Jonathan Haidt of NYU has had some interesting theories on the relationship between the mental health of modern teenagers, social media and modern child rearing patterns. The following talk, based on his book The Coddling of the American Mind comes to mind (I recall this seemed a very good talk, though it has been about a year since I actually watched it):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi499A4VsN8
There’s plenty of detailed discussion and graphs, but his general theory is that modern children are being raised in significantly more protective environment than the past, have far less unstructured or unsupervised play, generally have less life experience (milestones like dating or driving or drinking/parties or having a part-time job are happening several years later, e.g. a modern 18 year old US teenager has about the same life experience as a past 15 year old), and the extra time not doing these activities is merely being replaced by time looking at phones. This has come in parallel with a significant rise in certain types of mental health problems, particularly depression and anxiety. Teenage boys’ mental health has become somewhat worse since 2010 but rates have risen a lot for teenage girls. He has some theories for this, e.g. bullying amongst boys tends to be more physical and at weekends there’s at least an escape from that, but girls seem to be more sensitive to the type of constant social comparison present in social media (and perhaps bullying for them is less easy to escape).
He also links some of this to some trends in university campuses, which are appearing here too, e.g. last week here in Ireland the debating society of Trinity College Dublin dis-invited Richard Dawkins from a debate (made the news here). Seemingly the auditor checked out his profile on wikipedia, saw mention of his criticism about Islam (not the only religion he criticizes) and supposedly negative comments about women (the disinvitation came with the accompanying public statement that “the comfort of our membership is paramount” 
). It they had dis-invited someone like David Irving, it might be more understandable, but Richard Dawkins? 
These societies seem a lot less edgy than they used to be!
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It’s interesting to consider how in decades past the last sentence may have read "and the extra time not doing these activities is merely being replaced by time watching television.
The difference being that (not too long ago) everyone watched the same television shows. With Big Tech AI, everyone gets a different world view, a different reality narrative on their phones and their internet browsing. If you don’t watch the entire film, watch the few minutes beginning at the 54:45 mark. One point is to imagine Wikipedia where each person gets a different page depending not on objective reality, but based on one’s profile on Facebook or Google.
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The fediverse still has the problem of needing a way to pay for their servers. Big Data pays for it by selling our user data to advertisers, thus making server access and all that comes with it free for users. A hodge-podge of social media companies would have to pay for their servers somehow, and if they weren’t selling users data, they would have to charge users directly, which would push users back towards the no-fee companies. The hodge-podge would also not fix the problem of political balkanization and echochambers.
Block chain provides some interesting possibilities, but block chain-ensured security would be so energy intensive at that scale unpredictably disruptive to the energy sector as a whole.
I think the solution is legislation making it as hard to be anonymous on the internet as it is off the internet. That way Nazi groups can be as big as they want to be and exercise all the free speech they want, but it will be possible to know who’s participating the same as if they were doing it IRL. Areas that need policing can be policed, and laws can be enforced. A “Q,” the actual source of Qanon, could not achieve the influence they have. And of course, the forces of social stigma and taboo will be freed to do their work.
Absolute anonymity is not constitutionally enshrined as a right anywhere, and it’s not in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Privacy can and should be protected, but not anonymity.
Let me know if anyone really wants links to anything. I was eager to stay in the conversation but at the moment am pressed for time.
We have some close friends here in Sydney who run a kindergarten for preschoolers. One day I was at their center and a little boy was crying and screaming when he was dropped off by his parents. I was really uncomfortable, and was like, “Umm, shouldn’t we do something?” But it seems he is like that every day; he has Aspergers. But they said that in the ten + years they have been doing the job, they have seen a huge increase in mental healthy issues among preschoolers. I asked if it was just their center, and they said no, it’s everywhere.
I can’t verify this, but it’s a serious worry.
I think we need to be a lot more sophisticated in our commentary around so-called “cancel culture” is misguided. Much of the commentary is invented or exaggerated as a right-wing scare campaign against wokeness. But to the extent that such things actually happen, the critics of cancel culture show a lack of understanding of how morality evolves.
When people figure out something is wrong, they commonly become overly evangelical and hard around it. Think people who have given up cigarettes or have become vegan. These are genuinely good things to do, and they should be proud of them. They are also things that are perfectly justifiable to encourage in others. But I’m sure we’ve all seen recent converts get pushy and annoying; heck, we’ve probably done it ourselves! I know I have!
Why do people get like this? Because their morality is new, it’s untested. It lacks the wisdom of experience, and for that reason it quite reasonably lacks confidence. So people overcompensate, get dogmatic and pushy.
When this happens, especially among the young, older people start to get defensive. Things they believe are rejected by their kids. The kids have, often for good reason, a new set of moral values, one that in important ways addresses moral lacks of the older generation. So they push back. But it’s the wrong response.
Instead, we should recognize that this is all based on a genuine moral progress. If it is applied without the wisdom and nuance that an older morality has learned, that just means it has to settle in and grow. We should support that, and forgive excesses where we can (although obviously, like anything, there are limits).
Take the event with Dawkins. He has said things that are anti-Islamic or anti-Semitic, and the intellectual movement to which he loosely belongs has done more. Is it so bad that he should actually experience some consequences of his words?
Now, none of this is in isolation. It is just the next step in an intellectual tradition that has long been rife with such prejudice, and too often remains so.
So for an organizer of an event, the question then becomes: should we continue the centuries old bias or push back against it? If you want to push back against it you will face marginal cases, and maybe sometimes make the wrong call. It happens. But if we want to understand whether it’s right to cancel a University talk by someone accused of anti-Islamic views, the first thing to do is speak with some of the Muslims on campus. Understand their experience, listen to their views on the matter, learn the history, and see the problem from the perspective of those who have been harmed by bigotry.
Just the other night, I had been invited to an event hosted by Bluestar, an Islamic interfaith group based in Canberra to discuss racism in religion. I was honored to be invited, and looking forward to it. But I felt uncomfortable as a white man representing an Asian religion. I asked the organizers how many white people were on the panel; turns out, 4 out of 5 were white! So I gave the organizers a few Asian Buddhists to contact, and they ended up getting Ven Juewei Shi from Nan Tien temple; I was so happy, she would have done a great job!
So on this occasion, I cancelled myself. And I did so having learned from examples such as the case of Dawkins, that regardless of what is actually said, representation matters. There is a too-long tradition of white people discussing racism, or men discussing “women”, or on one memorable occasion I saw a couple of years ago, a panel of five white Aussies discussing “China”.
If we don’t push back, it will never change. Once the status quo has changed, and these problems lie in the past, we can relax. But in the meantime, if a famous celebrity scientist gets an occasional event cancelled, I would hope that he takes it as a chance to reflect on his actions and their consequences.
Meanwhile, for the young people evolving this new morality, the key thing to remember is that they are evolving. They are growing and learning. We shouldn’t push back against it, we should nurture it. And we should learn from it ourselves.
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I disagree somewhat with this conclusion, it may be a part of the story, but not entirely.
My observation has been that these kids are lacking something. They are stressed in some form, media, phones, FB, what have you, are a means of distraction and affirmation of their worth.
- Supportive Parent or adult figure , meaningful social interactions
Many children don’t have a consistent adult that they can talk to about their problems etc. Both parents are working, grandparents are not close by etc. Many are in after school care. While there are wonderful people who work with children, my experience is only about 10% actually are dedicated and compassionate.
-
Parents/ caregivers are addicted themselves
I can’t telll you how many times I been to the park and seen kids playing and their parent scrolling on their phone, watching YouTube, shopping, and on FB. Even some of the nannies push the sullen toddler on the swing with one arm whilst scrolling their FB feed on the other. Clearly the child grows up sensing a detachment from them. If you care about the child, you have to show it, they can’t read minds! -
Maternal health
My kids’ school had a “ behaviour” class where kids with authority / anger issues etc were taught. Many of them are victims of fetal alcohol syndrome. Some of them can be very violent; after an incident they moved the program out of the school. Once these kids go to high school, no such support. I can only wonder where they end up. Clearly this is a preventable affliction and another reason more support should be given to education and addiction reduction efforts.
Anyone with knowledge of epigenetics would know that stressful Conditions alter the proteins around you DNA, and these changes are passed on to the offspring.
My first guess reading your anecdote was , that child sounds tired! I have experienced that, and seen it so many times.
Bhante, kids spend so much time in preschool and kindergarten than I did. 6 hour days for a 3.5 year old in jr KG. I didn’t spend 6 hours in school until Year 4!
A preschooler, age 3-4, maybe just out of diapers. Many still nap. In a class with 15 to 20 kids, or even just 10, unless they all sleep, no one naps. Too many distractions. They get tired, cranky, and at some point crash. The. Then the tantrums start. Not all kids are the same ( many schools, education systems and educators want them to be).
Kids with autism and aspergers are SUPER sensitive to their routines, body stress, change in surroundings.
Many parents use technology to babysit their kids, further distrusting their sleep. Sleep deprivation and over stimulation are the worst things you can do to a growing child. I wouldn’t generalize it to just mental health.
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I wonder how wide a net FaceBook and others throws around Nazi and Qanon, to catch in more groups, or if it has just felt pressure to block the biggest players.
I’m shocked that a Junior kindergarten class would be 6 hours long! I didn’t even know there was such a thing as Jr. Kindergarten. I suppose children can’t be children any more. Not ever having had kids or any kid experience, seeing this picture you’ve painted leads me to think that this entire system of “education” is madness. The premise of “success” has been defined wrong from the start and now it’s the blind leading the blind into dysfunctional hell.
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We’ve had the lucky situation that we met some remote frieds from students times and could build up our own children-place having 10 to 16 kids, providing 2 professionals, plus having the agreement that each day one pair of parents would come in the noon, for cooking, and sharing lunchtime with the kids and the personnel, while we kept the house open until 4 pm. Especially the route to have the parents, mostly one but often two, at noon present, as well as to make us parents responsible for cleaning, technique, repairing and conceptualizing had a big impact on the happiness of the children. There would be much more to tell, but here I just wanted to second your “into dysfunctional hell” which is a valid characterization of junior kindergartens where no parents involvement is present. (Disclaimer: I might be taking side because I myself have grown up with 8 siblings, mother (and often grandma) staying home and father a fixed schedule defined by his job, so I’m grown up so-to-say in a “private kindergarten” with parent(s) around all the time.) - but well: I see now, that this steps now far from the focus of the original topic, sorry…
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That’s concerning!
I’d agree with that to a degree. Obviously, it is the right-wing and more conservative elements that are losing out, and tend to complain loudest about such things. I think we’ve been on a gradual transition from one form of morality to another for several generations. I think this is not because human nature has changed or become “better”, but new technologies have allowed new possibilities and societal structures to develop in response. Moralities that developed in more traditional/peasant settings were rather understandable given the rather harsh realities/restrictions/hardships of those lives. I’m also not sure that the moralities of university students would be all that different to their parents (perhaps more so compared to their grandparents).
“Wokeism” is definitely a pejorative term, but we do seem to be getting to the point where there is one fairly dominant morality/ethos in universities these days. When I was at third-level, Christianity and Catholicism were still significant but very much retreating forces in society. These days they are almost figures of fun. In a period of transition I think it was convenient to everyone that free speech was important (prominent speakers could be brought in to represent various sides of issues). Will we get to the point where one dominant orthodoxy has just replaced another, and where it is far easier for people to conform to it as they live their lives or make their careers? Moralisms of any hue tend to have their darker sides. Argument can be good (even if people still hold to broadly similar perspectives, this can make these such viewpoints more nuanced and better thought out).
On Dawkins, I loved his earlier books, e.g. the Selfish Gene (read these as a teenager). Generally, for his later books on religion, I think he has very much moved out of his domain of expertise. Some of those books are bombastic, certainly entertaining, but rather black/white, un-nuanced, and setting up rather cartoonish caricatures of religions and religious figures to take down.
There’s no doubt, he is anti-Islam (as well as anti-Christian). Of course, he would say that is a good thing, that such religions are a bunch of memes (a term coined IIRC in the Selfish Gene) that our minds would be better off without. I suppose he has stuck his neck out in criticizing Islam where many Western writers rather timidly confine themselves to criticizing elements of Christianity they find unpalatable.
Anti-semitism is a (rather understandably given the West’s unfortunate history) rather charged label to slap on someone. Labelling is a common tactic in modern debate (put someone in a category where they are beyond the pale). I don’t think what you link to is anti-Semitism and in Dawkin’s quote:
“When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and (yet they) more or less monopolize American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.”
“monopolize” is arguably too strong a word but the Israeli/Jewish lobby in the US certainly is a very powerful lobby.
That all seems good up to a point. Of course, Islam often does get a free pass because its members are a cultural minority. I suppose they are still unfortunately seen by many as an “other” and people naturally want to go easy on a minority. What you describe above might help them to not be seen as an “other”. But more negative elements of the Islamic world should not be immune to criticism either. It’s a balancing act. There can be too much fear of walking on eggshells on such issues. For example, there are large cohorts of Chinese students in most Western universities these days. There are probably topics that they would prefer (or at least have to be visibly seen to prefer 
) were not debated on campus (Tibet, the Dalai Lama or Taiwan). Often there’s a Confucius Institute on campus also bringing in significant money to the University coffers, which complicates things.
That sounded like a very positive thing to do. You’re out there on the ground doing all this inter-faith stuff, which makes my moaning sound a bit ungracious and trivial. Still, I’ll just press on and argue my points!
It is not the first time Dawkins has gotten cancelled and it probably won’t be his last. To be cynical, controversy sells books! He has often written about how it acceptable in the West to criticize Christianity but not Islam. I assume he’ll shrug his shoulders and think this just all proves his point. I think it would been better for him to be invited and get a good grilling. Some of his arguments are rather weak tbh.
Buddhism does tend to get an easier ride from the so-called “Four Horsemen of Atheism”, e.g. Sam Harris is into Buddhism and meditation (though of the safely secularized kind ).
Sure, these are young adults, and these are only student societies and student politics. Most will grow up and get a broader and more balanced perspective. They are entitled to make mistakes. However, these are the people who will likely be leading and running our societies in 20 or 30 years. This is all part of certain trend. There is a certain possibility that society itself in 20 or 30 years may be more conformist in terms of outlook and morality than it is now (even if possibly improved in other ways).
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The policy is laid out on FB’s site, but there are those who say it’s insufficient. A quick google shows that some some Australian academics have been outspoken – which illustrates how international Qanon has become. Bizarre to me, but what about Qanon isn’t bizarre?
The issue raises some disturbing questions around the justification of the censorship. Censoring calls to violence and hate speech are uncontroversial and are in line with statutory law in most places. Censoring militant and seditious ideologies starts to get a little touchy. Unlike in Germany, Nazis have always enjoyed full rights of free speech and assembly in the US because they were so fringe. Civil society did most of the policing necessary to contain them. But things are clearly getting beyond the control of civil society when the person who holds the office of Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower is knowingly saying things that encourage neo-Nazis.
In the case of Qanon, what seems to be necessary, but what can be justified politically or legally in a liberal society, is top-down policing of consensus reality. Once you start really thinking about how to solve the problem in the long-term if it persists, things get weird fast. Bureaus of True Facts? Ministries of Information? Reeducation… but, like, seriously tho, in a good way this time, we promise?
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FYI. Doesn’t sound like much, although I don’t know enough about the mechanics of Twitter to really know. It’s also temporary, but it’s indicative of a generally positive trend in awareness.
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Am not sure I’d entirely agree on anonymity. The secret ballot was eventually brought in for voting for some good reasons (and IMO some of these are relevant to anonymity in general). It wasn’t necessarily a good thing for your employer or your landlord etc. in the old days to know what way you were voting. Often an order would come down from on-high from a landlord to his tenants or an employer to his employee as to who to vote for (with obvious consequences otherwise).
It probably still holds to some degree today. If people were required to discuss some of the more controversial topics online today and put their identities to them, then they mostly wouldn’t. Of course, often that arguably might be a good thing. Still, on balance, I’d be wary of constraining anonymity too much.
Some of the stuff on Trump in the media gets a bit over the top. I do realize I’m at times in danger of veering into a “moral panic” territory over social media and other topics (like there were “moral panics” over television, video games, even radio far back enough) in the past. I’d be wary of Trump. However, I think he more falls into the category of American populism, which has a long history, rather than Nazism. Still, I hope he’s gone in the next month or two.
Usually, when there is a lot of social inequality, a major recent economic shock/depression, perceptions of corruption in institutions, and high levels of immigration, these movements can arise (usually some demagogic figure takes advantage for some political gain). There have been such conditions in recent times. Were some movements like this in the 19th century and early 20th century in the US in similar conditions. They had political successes, though never capturing the presidency. Though often they succeeded in pushing mainstream parties in a certain way (sometimes in a positive way, e.g. labour laws, eventually fixing many of the issues and inequalities that caused the problems, though sometimes shutting down immigration, e.g. laws restricting immigration from China that expanded to drastically reduce most immigration in succeeding decades; though high-levels of immigration can sometimes impact those on the lower tiers of the labour force).
Arguably the US had the fortune to have of one of its greatest presidents, FDR, guide it through the depression of the 1930s and World War II. Without his “New Deal”, things may well have gone in a far worse direction.
Arguably if Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic nominee, he could have been considered a populist of rather a different hue. It was rather unfortunate that someone like Trump ended up going up against some who at least was perceived as representing the status quo. I suppose Trump is a far more known quantity this time (there have been 4 years to US voters to judge him on; hopefully they will make the “correct” choice this time ). IMO there are some very some definite underlying problems and trends in US society that helped lead to his election 4 years ago, which need to be addressed (will still be there even if Biden is in power in two months time).
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We don’t have Jr Kindergarten here, but we do have pre-school, which can last all day. I think the important factor to remember is that this is not a creation of parental choice or educational goals, it is a creation of economic necessity. In most households (whether single parent or two parent) it is an economic necessity that all adults in the household work. If most jobs require an 8 hour a day (or more) presence, what do you do with your children? And thus children in pre-school from before 9 to after 5 is born–not because parents want to be away from their children that long, or because experts in childhood development would have recommended it given other options, but because it is an economic necessity.
Then many people, not wanting to feel bad about that decision, understandably look for and focus on any benefits children might get. E.g., socialization, etc. Which creates an understandable pushback on challenging that system at times. People experience their parenting choices as being attacked.
Thank you. This is a wonderful reminder.
Thanks again. I had thought of uninviting Dawkins as going to far in limiting opposing views. But I really like your point that even if–in this particular–it was an overreaction (and maybe it wasn’t), it is normal, healthy part of a finding that new equilibrium.
One of the things I’ve found distressing about the Trump years is that opinions that I believed were forever gone from political discourse in the US have returned. I remember when David Duke, a former Klansman turned politician, supported Reagan. Reagan rejected the support and Duke. Reagan, the figurehead of the modern right-wing shift in politics, would not go there. Fast forward to now, the president tells an extremist right-wing group to “stand by.” It is very important to define what speech is beyond the pale in political discourse.
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I suppose modern society comes with pros and cons. Women going out to work and having careers is a positive thing. However, dual income couples compete for mortgages to buy houses. The typical price means usually both have to work (unless one has a really good job). Ideally, the state itself would be providing adequate housing for everyone so this trap wouldn’t exist (or other supports). Of course, this is not the case in most countries, including the one I live in, unfortunately! 
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