The Anxious Generation (3) - Spiritual Elevation and Degradation

In “The Happiness Hypothesis”, Jonathan showed that one perceives 3 dimensions of social space. People distinguish between those they feel close to and those who are more distant; that is the horizontal dimension, the x axis. Then there are those who are higher in rank or social status and who are owed deference by those who are lower; that is the vertical dimension, the y axis.

Jonathan defined the z axis as the divinity axis. Many cultures wrote explicitly that virtuous actions bring one upward, closer to God, while disgusting actions bring one downward, away from God. Whether or not God exists, people simply perceive some people, places, actions, and objects to be sacred, pure and elevating; others are disgusting, impure, and degrading.

Thus, he drew on wisdom from ancient traditions and modern psychology to try to make sense of how the phone-based affects people spiritually by blocking or counteracting 6 spiritual practices:

1）Shared Sacredness

To enable the adherents to share collective experiences, religions mark off certain sacred things. The faithful must protect them from desecration. Living in a world of structureless anomie makes kids more vulnerable to online recruitment into radical political movements that offer moral clarity and community, thereby pulling them further away from their in-person world.

2）Embodiment

Religions prescribe some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional and adds to its symbolism, such as Muslims prostrate themselves toward Mecca. The simple act of eating together strengthens that bond and reduces the likelihood of conflict. When everything is done on a screen, you cannot activate the neural circuits that evolved along with spiritual practice. 

3）Stillness, Silence, and Focus

Studies on Buddhist monks suggest that their intense meditation practices alter their brains in lasting ways, decreasing activation in brain areas related to fear and negative emotionality. Yet, smartphones and social media smash the levee, flood consciousness with alerts and triviality, fill the ears with sounds, fragment attention, and scatter consciousness.

4）Self-transcendence

A social media “platform” is a place that is all about you and a fountain of bedevilments. You stand on the platform and post content to influence how others perceive you. It trains us to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world's wisdom traditions. Think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgmental, boastful and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers.

5）Being Slow to Anger, Quick to Forgive

For phone-based life, we are too quick to anger and too slow to forgive. We are hypocrites who judge others harshly while automatically justifying our own bad behavior, as if a cyber shaming.

6）Finding Awe in Nature

Dacher Keltner collected thousands of accounts of awe experiences from people and sorted them into “eight wonders of life”: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spiritual and religious awe, life and death, and epiphanies. Yet, adolescents now spend far less time outside, and when they are outside, they are often looking at or thinking about their phones.

In a phone-based life, one is exposed to an extraordinary amount of content, much of it chosen by algorithms and pushed to us via notifications that interrupt whatever we were doing. A lot of it pulls us downward on the divinity dimension. If we want to spend most of our lives above zero in that dimension, we need to take back control of our inputs, and take back control of our lives.

Title: The Anxious Generation

Author: Jonathan Haidt

Year: 2024

Region: USA

Publisher: Penguin Press

Genre: Social Sciences

Score: 7/10

IMG: https://populationeducation.org/world-population-by-religion-a-global-tapestry-of-faith/