April 15, 2022

Re: Jonathan Haidt, "Like Buttons," and the Need for Philosophy

A few days ago, American social psychologist and business school professor Jonathan Haidt published a new essay in The Atlantic. Entitled “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” Haidt’s piece maintains that the “culture war” currently afflicting American society should not be attributed to social media as such. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are fundamentally “neutral” tools, which can be used either for good or for ill. That the latter has often been the case is an outcome secured by a historically contingent decision, namely, the addition of the “like button” to Facebook in February 2009. In various guises, this option has since become ubiquitous on other online platforms and, in the process, transformed our societal landscape. Conditioned by social media to seek approval (“361 likes and 9 retweets!”), we increasingly seek out audiences that are more likely to agree with and approve of us. This tendency has a flip side. When, despite our best efforts, people nevertheless disagree with us, we perceive it as a threat to our dignity and wellbeing. In order to feel “safe” and “accepted,” we petition for institutional protection—a request that schools, corporations, and governments are all too willing to grant, whether through online feedback portals, evaluation surveys, or formal inquiries. Haidt calls this the “democratization of intimidation,” and it leads to a level of confusion and division that Haidt likens to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:4-9):

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (AJKV)

In a recent interview, Haidt admits that his professional interest in this topic is directly related to his consulting work with corporations:

This is urgent stuff. As Gen Z began to graduate in 2018, they’ve brought all these problems into the corporate world and the corporate world is beginning to freak out. Just in the last year, I’m getting all these calls with corporate people asking, “What the hell is happening? These recent college grads, with them it’s just constant conflicts over some word someone said.”

And yet, the ramifications of this trend may reach far beyond frustrated HR departments in New York City and in the Silicon Valley. Drawing on thinkers such as John Stuart Mill (1806-73) and Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), Haidt argues that what began as a simple addition to social media platforms (the like button) has come to distort how we see the world and, in turn, threaten individual rights. Due to our need to be liked, we can no longer talk. Democracy itself, he insists, is in peril.

Journalist Bari Weiss has called Haidt’s essay “the best explanation I have read to date” of why American society has become so fragmented. I’m not sure I would go that far, though I do think there is merit in his analysis. In fact, as I listened to Haidt’s interview with Weiss, I couldn’t help but think that much of his article could’ve been written by Søren Kierkegaard or other related figures (Heidegger, Marcuse, Ellul, McLuhan, MacIntyre, Postman, Taylor, etc.). This is certainly not to discredit Haidt’s contribution. On the contrary, it may be that Haidt is indirectly underlining the need for people (especially young people) to read, study, and debate “the great books” of the Western tradition. Alas, as colleges continue to devalue the importance of the humanities, it appears that the ideas of “dead philosophers” are not so dead after all. It would be best if people didn’t first encounter them in The Atlantic.