I've mixed feeling about the work of Jonathan Haidt. He's been difficult to avoid in the last couple of years, after his book The Anxious Generation came at just the right time to scratch an itch the western public had been developing for a decade, articulating a facile, though maybe not entirely inaccurate argument to elucidate a shared disquiet about kids-these-days.

The Anxious Generation's thesis is dual: we over-protect our children in the analog world, and under-protect them in the digital one. Many have traced a direct connection between this latter part and the recent efforts, in many juridictions, to restrict minors' access to social media platforms. Then again, it may be like saying that the weathervane changing direction is what made the smoke cloud drift in said direction. The impetus came from the winds of public opinion, but it did give pundits and policymakers a text on which to anchor the idea. The former part, which if one believes the thesis of the book, ought to be given equal importance, has been quietly forgotten.

On the digital side, many have noted that the evidence is not nearly as unequivocal as Haidt purports it to be; my beloved If Books Could Kill has a solid two hours of critique I heartily recommend. On the IRL side, the most notable voice which joined Haidt has been that of Kirstie Allsopp, who once took an inordinate amount of online flak for the parenting crime of letting her 16 year old son travel in Europe on his own.

Missing from Haidt's discourse, however, is the fact that the over-dependency on addictive surveillance platforms, along with a loss of spaces and opportunity for real-life connection and community building is something which affects adults too. Since adults can vote, this, in turns, has had dire consequences for liberal democracy. But, no, The Anxious Generation restricts its scope to being the latest iteration of the well-word, and long proven erroneous, 'kids-these-days' schtick.

Considering Haidt's previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind was an equally reactionary centrist formulation of the mid-2010 campus snowflakery moral panic (here again, IBCK's take is worth a listen), it goes without saying I take his claims with an ample serving of salt. Still, he does have some points, as illustrated in the conversation with Allsopp linked above. I'd also file under this category his recent appearance on the Atlantic's (speaking of reactionary centrism!) Permanent Questions, whose promise of 'Conversations from the deep end' firmly position it as the dumb person's idea of an intellectual podcast.

It it, Haidt roundly critiques rationalism, although he refers to a broader and older conception of the philosophy than the TESCREAL flavour called out by Cal Newport. As with the Silicon Valley iteration, though, classical rationalism fails in his account of human behaviour, let alone its normative claims, and by its very nature cannot acknowledge, let alone overcome, its own limitations. He makes a case for banning chatbots for the under-18s, and describes AI as a 'neutron bomb' for education, and the only way in which I disagree is in finding Thalidomide is a much better simile. This felt a lot like that one time I found myself fully behind the very words of late Republican Congressman Lindsay Graham.