Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
Atlantic | Jonathan Haidt
In this buzz-generating piece, Haidt explains “The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.” Haidt’s primary focus is the polarizing and fragmenting impact of social media. He also discusses the “structural stupidity” of the Right and the Left, and the hope for change from, as Tocqueville observed, the “American habit of forming voluntary associations to fix local problems.”
It’s a catastrophic view of America today. “Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.”
The hope for our global society was reached in 2011, he argues. This is when we saw the internet as something that would connect us all in a positive way…”a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement…[and also] when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones… For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.”
And then came a shift driven by social media that had started in 2009 with the introduction “likes” on Facebook and the Twitter “retweet” button, followed by Facebooks “share” button. “As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, “ Haidt says, “…the newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking. It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution.”
In sum, “The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare.”
Haidt calls social media “more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities,” and shows the three ways its most effective in delivering the pain— “First, the dart guns…give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens… Second..[they] give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority… Final…[they] deputize everyone to administer justice with no due process.”
He explains the “structural stupidity” of the Republican Party and leftwing institutions. He describes the Republican Party as susceptible to conspiracy theories and authoritarian leanings, while he says in the Democratic Party, the “moderates win,” but it’s the leftwing cultural institutions such as universities and Hollywood that have fallen prey to stifling dissent. On the left, the infighting is played out in social media where moderates are pilloried.
Haidt warns that things will only get worse with the use of Artificial Intelligence not only by factions within the U.S. but also from efforts by our adversaries.
“If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis,” he warns, suggesting three reforms if democracy is to remain viable. “We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.”
And how will these major changes happen? Haidt returns to Tocqueville’s observation of the “American habit of forming voluntary associations to fix local problems…That habit is still with us today. In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide… We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.”
Related: Musk Poll: Is Tic Toc (or social media in general) Destroying Civilization?
