The Patriot Post® · In Brief: The Increasing Stupidity of America
Most folks generally understand that social media has a lot of detrimental effects on society, but millions keep right on participating. In a lengthy piece for The Atlantic, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores why social media has played a huge role in why he says “the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid.”
We know — the Atlantic is a leftist rag. And Haidt is no conservative, though at least he’s a liberal with some integrity and a lot of fascinating insight into human social behavior. We’ll excerpt only brief parts of his exploration of the story of the Tower of Babel, which he calls “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.
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But 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.
Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?
The short answer is social media. “By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform,” Haidt notes, “with more than 100 million monthly users, on its way to roughly 3 billion today.” Even worse, the platform eventually introduced the “like” and “share” buttons.
Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions — especially anger at out-groups — are the most likely to be shared.
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. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” …
The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare. Many authors quote his comments in “Federalist No. 10” on the innate human proclivity toward “faction,” by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”
But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”
Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous.
There is hope, Haidt says. Ween yourselves off of social media and “talk with our neighbors directly.” Send your children — gasp — outside to play instead of parking them in front of a screen. “We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us,” he concludes. “We must change ourselves and our communities.”