When Russia started this aggression, they looked at the world as if they were looking at themselves in a mirror. They thought that everyone in the world was cynical and despised people in the same way as the owners of Russia do. But the world is different – the world helps us protect life. And anyone who goes against the world will become marginal. Russia will gain nothing and lose everything. Glory to all who defend our state! Glory to all who help!
Saturday, May 27, 2023
The World is Not a Mirror
Poets!
Hannah Sullivan, reviewing three new books about T.S. Eliott in the March 3 TLS:
English literary history provides few opportunities for generalization. In fact, on the basis of the past two or three centuries, there may be only one maxim that can be ventured with confidence: poets have bad lives. High rates of fatal illness (tuberculosis, typhoid), suicide, death by misadventure (drowning, brawling, buggy accidents, falling from bar stools) and alcoholism ensure that many are short. When they are longer – and they are almost never very long – other problems present themselves: Milton's blindness, Pound's treason and imprisonment, Auden's face. Intense sexual jealousy, broken marriages and adultery comprise one vein of misery; depression, mania, psychosis, addiction and hypochondria another. Poverty, often extreme when compared to non-poets of the same period and social class, is a grinding near-constant. Publication is much harder to achieve for poets than for almost all other kinds of writer. The one obvious positive is that the actual work – the writing of the poems – is enjoyable and, once under way, quick to do. (The agony of getting started should be added to the debit column.)Because it so reliably provides material for poems, poets tend to have complicated relationships with the devastation around them. One mark of a great poet might even be the ability to find and describe "a new kind of unhappiness" (Thomas Wyatt's boast, 500 years ago.) T.S. Eliot's contribution was "an aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a lifelong affliction." By "aboulie" – the quotation is from a 1921 letter to Richard Aldington, written shortly before Eliot handed over the drafts of The Waste Land to Ezra Pound – he meant something like failure of the will, an inability to execute one's own intentions. His early poetry examines this state of mind forensically. . . .
Eliot himself encouraged the idea that his misery and his poetry were closely intertwined. Of his disastrous first marriage he wrote, "to Vivienne, the marriage brought no happiness . . . to me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."
Some people have thought, or maybe hoped, that since the writing of all those poems in the late 1910s and 1920s was associated with so much misery, maybe Eliot's poetic productivity later on declined because he was actually happier. But the release of letters from his later life, and the publication of a memoir by one of his close friends, shows that this was not so:
Taken together, these books dispel the idea that Eliot's middle years were an improvement on his early ones. If anything they seem to have been worse, saturated with small privations, physical discomforts and duties he found onerous.
Hypochondria was a constant theme of Eliot's middle and later life, as was an abiding hatred of the jobs he took to pay the bills. He had long, complicated, romantic but apparently not sexual relationships with at least two women but instead of marrying one of them he twice married women he barely knew and who turned out to be crazy. It's a sad tale.
If you want to be happy, stay away from poets.
Romain Langlois
"Walking naturally after spinal cord injury using a brain–spine interface"
Here's some truly amazing medical science:
A spinal cord injury interrupts the communication between the brain and the region of the spinal cord that produces walking, leading to paralysis. Here, we restored this communication with a digital bridge between the brain and spinal cord that enabled an individual with chronic tetraplegia to stand and walk naturally in community settings. This brain–spine interface (BSI) consists of fully implanted recording and stimulation systems that establish a direct link between cortical signals and the analogue modulation of epidural electrical stimulation targeting the spinal cord regions involved in the production of walking. . . . The participant reports that the BSI enables natural control over the movements of his legs to stand, walk, climb stairs and even traverse complex terrains. Moreover, neurorehabilitation supported by the BSI improved neurological recovery. The participant regained the ability to walk with crutches overground even when the BSI was switched off. This digital bridge establishes a framework to restore natural control of movement after paralysis.
To back up a bit: Scientists, including the ones responsible for this work, had previously built similar systems to pick up signals within the spinal chord and transmit them past the damaged section to a receiver on the other side. But this never worked very well, and the subjects never felt like they were walking naturally.
So this time they implanted their sensors in the brain. Scientists had previously identified the precise brain regions that formulate instructions to the legs, and the article makes it sound like implanting electrodes to pick up signals there was no big deal. The impulses were converted to a digital signal and transmitted directly to receivers below the spinal damage, which converted them back into analog electrical stimulation of the lower spinal chord. This, they find, works far better than the old method, restoring at least one person to something like natural walking.
In a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers in Switzerland described implants that provided a “digital bridge” between Mr. Oskam’s brain and his spinal cord, bypassing injured sections. The discovery allowed Mr. Oskam, 40, to stand, walk and ascend a steep ramp with only the assistance of a walker. More than a year after the implant was inserted, he has retained these abilities and has actually showed signs of neurological recovery, walking with crutches even when the implant was switched off.
“We’ve captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan, and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement,” Grégoire Courtine, a spinal cord specialist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, who helped lead the research, said at the press briefing.
Amazing. Even more amazing would be if such a system could restore control of the arms to people who have lost the use of all their limbs, and I can't think of any reason why that wouldn't be possible using this technology.
Friday, May 26, 2023
Gothic Art at the Met
Links 26 May 2023
Album of Tournaments, c. 1546, now in the Met
Evidence of romantic kissing in Mesopotamia 4,500 years ago. There is a lot of debate about kissing; not all societies practice it, and there have been multiple different theories positing that it was invented at some particular time and place. I am not impressed by any other them; seems too obvious to need inventing.
And now, "post-rationalism," the people disillusioned by the Rationalist movement and getting interested in religion or spiritual practices. The wheel keeps turning.
Uber suspends their diversity chief after she arranged a session focusing on white women and how offensive the word "Karen" is, which black employees thought was insensitive to them. (NY Times, Yahoo) There is this idea out there that the way to solve social problems is honest conversation, but, well, here we are.
Interesting article about the Bruderhof community, a Christian commune; they use technology in their work but are very intentional about which technologies to adopt. "We ought to approach technologies with the same skepticism we'd show an untrustworthy used car salesman."
Is "raiding" ever a really useful military activity?
The biggest goal of most Brexit supporters was to reduce immigration to Britain, but since Brexit immigration has remained at about the same level. Immigration from EU nations is indeed way down, to net zero, but there has been much more immigration from Africa and Asia. Some of this is due to the decision to welcome citizens of Hong Kong. British conservatives are starting to get angry about this, complaining that the government doesn't know any way to improve the economy other than welcoming migrants.
Boring report: an app that uses AI to strip all emotional words from the news.
The US surgeon general issues a report coming down hard against social media for young people: "There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents."
This 17-minute video will explain to you the "rotating detonation engine", which may power the missiles of the future.
Vox piece attempts to trace the rise of puritanical fandom on Tumblr and other online spaces. Many young people see pretty much all sex in media as harassment.
The unemployment rate for black American men falls to 5%, its lowest level ever. (NY Times, Biden administration press release)
From around 1900 to 2000, women tended to marry men with more education than themselves, and they still tell dating apps that they want a man with more education than themselves. But now that young women have, on average, more education, is this ruining women's chances of marrying? No, says Scott Siskind. What hurts people's marriage prospects is trying to do things that are weird, and once it became normal for the woman to have more education it stopped being a problem. As a general point, this is very much worth pondering.
Also this, from a detailed British study: "physical attraction cannot have been a very significant factor in marriages in any period 1837-2021." Which is something else I have often pondered; beauty feels so important to us, but so far as anyone can tell it makes no difference in whether people get married or any other important thing in life.
In naval wars, the side with the bigger fleet almost always wins. Advanced technology does not help much. Obviously this was written with an eye toward a possible US/China naval clash.
Very short primer on Charles II and his mistresses, actually includes two stories I did not know.
Lots of angst about book banning, but really very, very few people are trying to get books banned; one recent study found that a majority of requests to remove books from school libraries had been filed by 11 people.
Why rents are lower in DC than in other booming Metro areas: because DC and Arlington, VA decided decades ago to allow massive building of new apartments around transit hubs.
This week's random past post is Memories of China, 2008, in which I mused over the trip to China our whole family had made the year before to adopt our daughter. Who is, incidentally, about to graduate from high school. This post refers to her by the Chinese name she has very much left behind, at least for now. At that time I was very hopeful about China's ongoing transformation, which is one reason why recent events sadden me.
Ukraine Links
Reuters is reporting that "Vladimir Putin's chief envoy on Ukraine told the Russian leader as the war began that he had struck a provisional deal with Kyiv that would satisfy Russia's demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO, but Putin rejected it and pressed ahead with his military campaign."
Grim New Yorker story on conditions for Ukrainian soldiers in Bakhmut.
Long thread on the pluses and minuses of F-16s in Ukraine.
RUSI report on how the Russian army has changed its tactics in the second year of the war: "An overview of Russian adaptation reveals a force that is able to improve and evolve its employment of key systems."
Amazing little video of a Russian MT-LB vaporized in an explosion.
Russia finishes taking Bakhmut despite recent Ukrainian advances on the flanks of the city. A statement from Wagner is here (translated). The fighting in the city lasted (according to Wagner) 224 days. Thomas Theiner points out that Bakhmut is about the same size as Grande Prairie in Alberta, Canada, and just about as important, so it was quite stupid for the Russians to suffer 70,000 casualties taking it (100,000, according to Biden). Igor Girkin's friend Sergey Rusov calls this a Pyrrhic victory that really only shows the weakness of the Russian state. And Girkin himself here. Dmitri of War Translated notes that with Bakhmut taken we are looking at the first period in 15 months in which Russia is not advancing anywhere in Ukraine.
Apocalyptic video of what the city looks like after the battle.
Macron: "Peace cannot be turning the situation into a frozen conflict... experience teaches us that a frozen conflict will be a war for tomorrow...peace must...respect the UN charter."
British MOD says Russia seems to be creating an elite aviation unit to operate over Ukraine, offering bonus pay to experienced pilots.
Interesting that both Ukrainian and Russian soldiers constantly complain that the other side has much more artillery and fires many more shells.
Just a note that the "Freedom of Russia" guys who invaded Russia with Ukrainian backing include some famous neo-Nazis, including a guy who was arrested for handing out copies of the Christchurch shooter's manifesto. So maybe is the Ukrainian government thinking that by sending them to attack Russia they are both tweaking the Russians and getting rid of one of their own problems? Are they hoping a lot of these guys don't come back?
And another note that several people on Twitter have called this the first cross-border invasion carried out mainly for purposes of online trolling. See, e.g. this interview. this tweet, or this statement.
Prigozhin says that Putin's goal of "de-militarizing" Ukraine has failed utterly, since now Ukraine has one of the strongest armies in the world. (Better video with subtitles here: "Fuck knows how, but we've militarized Ukraine.")
Last week the FighterBomber Telegram said four Russian aircraft had been shot down by friendly fire after a failure of their Identify-Friend-or-Foe system; this week they say those aircraft were actually all shot down by Patriot missiles. People who know about these missiles say this means Ukraine's batteries must be using data from other types of radar because the shoot-downs were beyond range of their own radar. If it can be to linked to radar on planes or in remote ground locations a Patriot battery can defend an enormous area. And while Ukraine might run out of the PAC-3 missiles that are used to shoot down missiles NATO has an enormous supply of the PAC-2 missiles used against aircraft, easily enough to shoot down every Russian plane.
Thread on Wagner losses in Bakhmut, says a reasonable estimate might be 10,000 convicts killed plus around 6,000 regular Wagner mercenaries. Prigozhin said 20,000 KIA but he has reasons to exaggerate.
Defense spending in Europe: Germany has developed a new version of the Leopard II tank, dubbed A8. The first buyers are Germany, which is buying 18, and the Czech Republic, which is buying 70. Germany still has no real desire to defend itself.
Thursday, May 25, 2023
The More Things Change, Etc., Ukraine War Edition
William Owen is the editor of Military Strategy magazine and many military types consider him a very wise man. In his most recent editorial he says we should scorn all talk of how war has changed and go reread Carl von Clausewitz, whose most famous line is "War is merely the continuation of policy with other means":
The only real insight the War in Ukraine is revealing to serious students of strategy is War does not change and warfare can change only slowly. . . .
War is a product of politics, and Ukraine is showing this truth as clearly as possible in terms of the nature of the warfare observable, reflecting the political choices made by both sides. The fighting and bloodshed in Bahkmut is not an inevitable outcome of some objective truth about fighting in the 21st century. It is an outcome of political choices made by both sides, as emphasised by the report that the US Army advised the Ukrainians to abandon the town. The political, not military, leaders of Ukraine said no. It is of little comfort to tell the cold, wet and wounded that they are fighting for a space on the map with little to no military value, but then what is “military value?” Such value can only come from its relevance to policy or politics. An officer of the Prussian Army of 1815 would see nothing in the current war that would make him think that mankind has evolved to such a degree that War was now somehow different.
The book referenced is On War, published in 1832 and based mainly on the campaigns of Napoleon and Frederick the Great.
One of my biggest takeaways from the war has been that everything still depends on the willingness of soldiers to fight and die. Putin's initial invasion plan was based on the belief that Ukrainian soldiers had no such willingness, so they would throw down their guns at the sight of Russian tanks. Turns out they have an immense willingness to struggle, suffer and die in defense of Ukraine. Meanwhile I am also impressed that Russian soldiers have mostly also shown a great willingness to fight in die in this war. Which is why it has gone on so long and been so deadly. Short wars and easy victories only happen when one side gives up.
I suppose another lesson of the war is that the western democracies have much more appetite for throwing money into the pit of this war than Putin and others suspected. There may be a limit, and we may hit it within another year, but for now western aid remains massive and there has been very little whining about the cost.
Some Interesting Educational Experiments
Here's a UPenn professor with ideas about how to shake up education (NY Times). First, a class based on monastic practice:
On the first day of class — officially called “Living Deliberately” — Justin McDaniel, a professor of Southeast Asian and religious studies, reviewed the rules. Each week, students would read about a different monastic tradition and adopt some of its practices. Later in the semester, they would observe a one-month vow of silence (except for discussions during Living Deliberately) and fast from technology, handing over their phones to him. . . .
The class eased into the vow of silence, first restricting speech to 100 words a day. Other rules began on Day 1: no jewelry or makeup in class. Men and women sat separately and wore different “habits”: white shirts for the men; women in black. (Nonbinary and transgender students sat with the gender of their choice.) Dr. McDaniel discouraged them from sharing personal information; they should get to know one another only through ideas. “He gave us new names, based on our birth time and day, using a Thai birth chart,” Sophie Ouyang, who also took the class and just graduated with a major in nursing, said. “We were practicing living a monastic life. We had to wake up at 5 a.m. and journal every 30 minutes.”
And then this, which really intrigues me:
Dr. McDaniel also teaches a course called Existential Despair: Students meet once a week from 5 p.m. to midnight in a building with comfy couches, turn over their phones and curl up to read an assigned novel (cover to cover) in one sitting — books like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and José Saramago’s Blindness. Then they stay up late discussing it. “The course is not about hope, overcoming things, heroic stories,” Dr. McDaniel said. Many of the books “start sad; in the middle they’re sad; they stay sad.”
As this article notes, many more professors are trying to reach students through their phones, with class Discord channels and what not. But McDaniel's anti-tech classes both have long waiting lists.
There is among some students a hunger for old-fasioned education, cut off from the world, intensely diving into intellectual activity. I don't know how many students would want a whole college like that, but I think many more would sign up for a taste of it if it were offered. Those one-month short winter terms some schools offfer seem like perfect opportunities for this; what about a one-month philosophy retreat focusing on one topic like personal ethics? Or, following McDaniel, a one-month immersion in difficult novels? Or poetry? Or how about a six week monastic retreat over the summer? I see a lot of possibilities here.
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
The Halifax Explosion and Post Apocalyptic Human Behavior
Halifax, December 8, 1917
On December 6, 1917, a cargo ship full of munitions exploded in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Some people say it was the most powerful human-made explosion before the atomic bombs. Every building within a mile was destroyed; the ship's two-ton anchor landed two miles away. About 1,800 people died and 9,000 were wounded in a city of 60,000.
Among the witnesses to the explosion was a pastor named Samuel Prince, and three years later he published a book about the event called Catastrophe and Social Change. This book helped to inagurate the serious study of catastrophes and the human response to them. You can read the whole thing online here, or check out the article by Sam Knight in the May 22 New Yorker. Knight:
Prince's church was hit by shrapnel. It served as a temporary hospital and morgue during the disaster. Prince observed throughout the city a "very general consciousness which seemed to draw all together into a fellowship of suffering." Social distinctions fell away. Wounded solliders gave up their beds. Cafés and drugstores handed out goods for free. The people of Halifax looked after one another, preferring their initiatives to "the intrusion of strangers." Afterward, Prince discerned a link to the work of the Peter Kropotkin, a Russian anarchist, who used the term "mutual aid" to describe an alternative, cooperative model of human society. . . . "Catastrophe and the sudden termination of the normal which ensues become the stimuli of heroies," Prince wrote, "and bring into play the great social virtues of generosity and kindness."
Now there's a zombie apocalypse scenario somebody should explore, in which the surviving humans are inspired to form an anarchist commune based on Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist.
Since I read Knight's article, which actually focuses on a contemporary disaster expert, I have been perusing Prince's book. I find that while Knight captures the overall theme that Prince drew from the experience, Prince saw a lot more than simple cooperation. The first thing that impressed him was that despite the scale of the disaster, nobody cried:
Here again the unusual degree of stimulation which catastrophe induces brings about a behavior other than that which commonly attends the experience of grief. A phenomenon associated with wholesale bereavement is the almost entire absence of tears. A witness of the San Francisco disaster said it was at the end of the second day that he saw tears for the first time. At Halifax, where the loss of life was many times greater, there was little crying. There seemed to be indeed a miserable but strong consolation in the fact that all were alike involved in the same calamity.
There was “no bitterness, no complaint, only a great and eager desire to help some one less fortunate.” Another observer said: “I have never seen such kindly feeling. I have never seen such tender sympathy. I have never heard an impatient word.” And this was amongst men “who were covered with bruises, and whose hearts were heavy, who have not had a night's sleep, and who go all day long without thought of food.” Another visitor remarked “there is not a more courageous, sane and reasonable people. Everyone is tender and considerate. Men who have lost wives and children, women whose sons and husbands are dead, boys and girls whose homes have been destroyed, are working to relieve the distress.” A Montreal clergyman reported that “Halifax people have been meeting with dry eyes and calm faces the tragedies, the horrors, the sufferings and the exposures which followed the explosion.”
So, yes, lots of mutual aid. Also extraordinary amounts of work, done by people who hardly ate or slept for four or five days but reported no fatigue. But also this:
Few folk thought that Halifax harbored any would-be ghouls or vultures. The disaster showed how many. Men clambered over the bodies of the dead to get beer in the shattered breweries. Men taking advantage of the flight from the city because of the possibility of another explosion went into houses and shops, and took whatever their thieving fingers could lay hold of. Then there were the nightly prowlers among the ruins, who rifled the pockets of the dead and dying, and snatched rings from icy fingers. A woman lying unconscious on the street had her fur coat snatched from her back.... One of the workers, hearing some one groaning rescued a shop-keeper from underneath the debris. Unearthing at the same time a cash box containing one hundred and fifty dollars, he gave it to a young man standing by to hold while he took the victim to a place of refuge. When he returned the box was there, but the young man and the money had disappeared.
Then there was the profiteering phase. Landlords raised their rents upon people in no position to bear it. The Halifax Trades and Labor Council adopted a resolution urging that the Mayor be authorized to request all persons to report landlords who “have taken advantage of conditions created by the explosion.” ... Plumbers refused to hold their union rules in abeyance and to work one minute beyond the regular eight hours unless they received their extra rates for overtime; and the bricklayers assumed a dog-in-the-manger attitude and refused to allow the plasterers to help in the repair of the chimneys. And this during days of dire stress ... when many men and women were working twelve and fourteen hours a day without a cent or thought of remuneration. One Halifax newspaper spoke of these men as “squeezing the uttermost farthing out of the anguished necessities of the homeless men, women and children.” Truckmen charged exorbitant prices for the transferring of goods and baggage. Merchants boosted prices. A small shopkeeper asked a little starving child thirty cents for a loaf of bread.
The stimulus of the same catastrophe, it thus appears, may result in two different types of responses—that of greed on the one hand or altruistic emotion on the other. One individual is spurred to increased activity by the opportunity of business profit, another by the sense of social needs. Why this is so—indeed the whole field of profiteering—would be a subject of interesting enquiry.
Prince goes on to explain that the city government quickly cracked down on all this profiteering and ordered that rents and prices be set back to pre-crisis levels. It struck me that this is another side of the mutual aid response after a catastrophe, an increased willlingness to ignore business and markets and slap down anybody seen as profiteering. Maybe part of what encourages people to pitch in is knowing that anyone trying to profit on the sly will get tossed in jail, and maybe all that working together brings with it an increased willingness to forget about individual freedom.
I was also impressed by Prince's account of how quickly utilities and other services were restored to most of the disaster zone. Most electricity was restored in a day, gas within three days. The local newspaper printed a reduced edition the next day. The largest morgue in Canada was set up by 40 soliders within 36 hours. The first school re-opened on December 10, five were open by January 10, and things were pretty much back to normal by May 20. Even the biggest bomb in history couldn't knock out one small Canadian city.
Another angle, which Knight alludes to, is that while the people of Halifax worked very happily with local police, firemen, and government officials, they wanted nothing to do with "experts" sent down from Toronto or from outside charitable organizations:
The merest touch of “cold professionalism” soon became fuel for the burning disapproval which spread through the city regarding the methods of relief. Letters to the press gave vent to the indignation of the sufferers. One of the judges of the Supreme Court was as outspoken as anyone. In criticizing the food-distribution system he wrote very plainly of the “overdose of business efficiency and social service pedantry.”
They were also intensely suspicious of reporters from out-of-town newspapers.
So a fascinating event, showing a human response with a lot of complexity, some outright thuggery, but a willing collaboration that turned at least one witness into an anarchist hopeful of the human future.
Bouncing Checks
Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov on politics and history:
In a recent interview pegged to the International Booker Prize, Gospodinov said Time Shelter looked beyond his country’s borders and was inspired by the global turn toward populism. “I come from a system that sold a ‘bright future’ under communism,” he said. “Now the stakes have shifted, and populists are selling a ‘bright past.’
“I know via my own skin that both checks bounce,” Gospodinov added. “They are backed by nothing.”
Sunday, May 21, 2023
Byzantine Art in the Met
The chalice's plain silver interior bowl was then ambitiously identified as the Holy Grail, the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper. The elaborate footed shell enclosing it was thought to have been made within a century after the death of Christ to encase and honor the Grail.So some rich New Yorker bought and gave it to the Met. These days it is dated to the 6th century and may actually be a lamp, not a drinking vessel. It isn't particular exciting as a work of art, but what a great story. Incidentally questions still hover around a lot of the stuff the Met's donors purchased in those decades, and several pieces they used to think were Byzantine are now dated to the 19th or early 20th century.
Youth Mental Health in America
Ezra Klein recently interviewed psychologist Jean Twenge about teen mental health. Klein began like this:
I’m going to start today’s show with some numbers. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of teens and young adults with clinical depression more than doubled — more than doubled. Between 2007 and 2019, the suicide rate for those in their early 20s rose by 41 percent. And the suicide rate for 10 to 14-year-olds — 10 to 14-year-olds, think about how young that is — it tripled, and it nearly quadrupled for girls.
A C.D.C. survey found that in 2021, almost 60 percent of high school girls experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year, and nearly 25 percent — I just, this number, man — nearly 25 percent made a suicide plan.
Twenge's first comment included this:
Around 2012, more and more teens started to say they felt lonely and left out. And more started to say they felt like they couldn’t do anything right, or that they didn’t enjoy life. Those last two are classic symptoms of depression.
Then, other data started to pop up. Clinical level depression that requires treatment started to rise. Emergency room admissions for self-harm started to rise in C.D.C. data. Same thing for suicide attempts and completed suicides. So at first, I thought it might be a blip, a year or two of data. But it kept going. So for example, between 2011 and 2019, well before the pandemic, clinical level depression among teens doubled. Emergency room admissions for self harm tripled in 10 to 14-year-old girls.
Twenge is one of the people who thinks this is all about smart phones and social media. As she notes, the period between 2009 and 2013 when most of these bad indices started getting much worse corresponds very closely with the cell phones and social media becoming nearly ubiquitous. She justifies her view like this:
I think for the recent rise in mental health issues, we can look at it this way, that this is a generation where violent crime is a lot lower than it was in the early ’90s. Teen pregnancy was lower. They’re even less likely to get into car accidents or get into physical fights at school. Incomes were up for that period. There’s all these things that were going right, yet still, mental health among teens suffered. So there must have been some big mechanism.
The reason why I think the smartphones and social media explanation has held up is because that is what had the biggest impact on the day to day lives of teens.
That's true, which is what makes this a compelling theory. The problem with it is that several detailed studies of the amount of time teens actually spend on their phones or on social media have found that it makes no difference. Twenge pushes back on this and says that re-analysis of the data shows that there is a big effect from social media in particular, but data science is not really her speciality. I am certainly willing to grant that this is a hard topic to study and that we should be cautious with these claims.
But it strikes me that the other thing happening in that period is that the mood of the nation turned much darker. Despite the economic situation being generally good and crime going down and and the fear of terrorism fading and all that, we elected Donal Trump, whose whole schtick amounted to saying that the nation is going to hell so fast, with the connivance of the whole political elite, that only someone completely outside the system had a chance to reverse the slide. And his rise inspired his opponents to talk about fleeing the country.
Klein asks Twenge about studies that show liberal teens are much more depressed than conservative teens, which I think fits the doomster model, since liberals seem to think everything is getting worse. Twenge counters that liberal teens spend more time on social media and less time together in person, which may be true, but I don't think the data is really good enough to show it.
I am left where I was before this. Cell phones and social media fit the timeline of the increase in depression so well that it's hard to believe they are not involved. But I am not convinced, mainly because I see a darkening of the mood in the whole country–when was the last time you read a rosy, cheerful piece about the future?–and I think that might be very important.
Saturday, May 20, 2023
A Belt from Fourteenth-Century Italy
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
