I recently skimmed Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. In case you are not familiar with him, this guy sucks up to Jordan “Benis” Peterson, is a “public intellectual”, and part of the “intellectual dark web”, whatever that is. It also happens that he is a secular Jew but I am not sure if this has anything to do with anything.

Haidt makes the claim that excessive smartphone usage is really bad for women but also bad for boys, yet not nearly to the same degree. Thus, we need to do something, Marge Simpson style. As he does not have a quantitative background, he is prone to using numbers and charts in order to bolster his claims, not quite realizing that all his numbers are at best pseudo-scientific. The entire book could probably be condensed into an article, which is ironic, considering that it started as an article.

I do not want to bash Jonathan Haidt too much, but I do want to point out one example of him being either incredibly deceitful or hopelessly naive. In his data, he noticed that certain trends, such as children spending less time outside, already began in the 1990s, when hardly any children had access to the Internet. He muses that something must have happened then but he cannot quite put his finger on it. His main explanation is that there was a “breakdown of solidarity among parents”, meaning that you could no longer trust other adults, and parents, in the neighborhood to watch out for your children.

Well, why might there have been a sudden and inexplicable breakdown of solidarity? I wonder if it could be tied to an increase in all this wonderful “diversity” we have been hearing so much about. From one of the most hypocritical countries in the world, Sweden, we know that the indigenous population packs up and moves if more than a trace amount of diversity appears in the neighborhood, leading to staggering rates of segregation.

Obviously, people trust people who look like them. The same is true for all the people our hostile elites let into our countries so eagerly. These people also flock to where their coethnics already live, leading to some Canadian cities being essentially Indian enclaves or Turks crowding out Germans from entire districts in Berlin, Germany. Race is not just “skin deep”. Instead, people are a bit weary if there are people moving into the neighborhood who have customs quite unlike the locals, for instance parking their cars on the sidewalk or dumping their trash bags on a street corner.

To me, it is not a mystery that people in the West started to feel less comfortable about letting their kids play outside without adult supervision in the 1990s. Instead, it is puzzling to me why a hyper-educated secular Jew like Jonathan Haidt not even mentions this hypothesis in order to ridicule it, which used to be a standard approach of the left when dealing with common-sense objections. They used to speak of “simplistic explanations for complex problems”, insinuating that people who made such statements just were not smart enough to dream up a nonsensical explanation that is seemingly plausible. Well, Haidt cannot do that either so he just speaks of a “mystery”. Sometimes, it really helps to just open your eyes and take in all the marvels of modernity. This will teach you a lot about society and even observations that puzzle leading public intellectuals will suddenly be trivial to explain.

There is also an interesting counter-hypothesis to Haidt’s claims about the addictiveness of smartphones and social media: what if people spend more time online because they feel less safe in the real world? Thus, even if we did not have smartphones and social media, kids would most likely prefer to spend time in the safety of their homes. Maybe someone who sees nothing but his gated community and works at a university with extensive campus security perceives the world a bit differently. Anyone else who is familiar with the typical larger Western city, however, is surely not very enthusiastic about sending their kids outside to play. Instead of playing soccer with the neighborhood kids, chances are much higher that children would get robbed, beaten up, or, in the case of girls, get sexually harassed if not raped by gangs of immigrant youths. This is the reality. Jonathan Haidt is seemingly not aware that it exists.