My Silent Spring: “Defend Mode” in the Humanities Classroom
After a “silent spring” in my World Civilization classes this past semester, I am convinced that Jonathan Haidt’s concept of “defend mode” has deep resonance for teachers in the liberal arts. As defined in The Anxious Generation (2024), Defend Mode is a “scarcity mindset” in which young people prioritize detecting danger and seeking safety over pursuing discovery and growth.[1] Applied to university teaching, the idea that students are broadly conditioned to avoid a sense of risk and prioritize a feeling of security does much to explain how classroom disengagement and epistemological confusion has become a default for many undergraduates – even at smaller, mission-guided universities with clear faith commitments. As I reflect upon the past year, moreover, I am persuaded that the “great rewiring of childhood” that Haidt reconstructs for Gen Z (born 1995-2005) does much to explain the ebbing vitality of my survey courses in the smartphone era at large. In response, the following essay proposes that by recognizing Defend Mode as a compulsive new normal for many undergraduates – and by treating it as a symptom of the deeper confusion that they bring to learning itself – Christian educators will be better-equipped to counteract the decline of humanities education in the twenty-first century.
In 2015, Haidt’s essay “The Coddling of the American Mind” argued that “trigger warnings” were a cultural symptom of a precipitous mental-health decline on US campuses as the members of Gen Z headed off to college en masse.[2] A decade later, The Anxious Generation probes the causes, helping us to better understand why undergrads of the 2020s struggle – or worse, do not seem willing to struggle much at all – to engage with their “core” or “gen-ed” courses in history, literature, religious studies, and similar fields. As a social psychologist, Haidt argues that for human beings, our “basic mindset” heavily conditions our perception of the world, and we have two biologically determined options when we confront any new or unfamiliar stimuli. Defend Mode – our instinctive “behavioral inhibition system” – is dedicated to identifying (and escaping) possible threats and is “chronically activated” in cases of “chronic anxiety.”[3]
This is the new default setting for Gen Z, Haidt suggests, because its members comprise the first generation in history to grow up with smartphones, selfie-equipped cameras, and a full-fledged social media universe. Their experience marks a sharp change from Millennials (born c. 1981-1996), whose smartphone-free childhood still naturally cultivated “discover mode”: a “behavior activation system” that exists to help humans identify opportunities and benefits, and which produces positive emotions around learning, growth, and even healthy risk-taking. On college campuses in particular, the wholesale replacement of the latter by the former means that “the previously exuberant culture of millennial students in discover mode gave way to a more anxious culture of Gen Z students in defend mode” about a decade ago.[4]
The old “magic classroom” – my metaphor for teaching as an uplifting, mutual learning event – could be elusive even before smartphones. To 18- and 19-year-olds, an 8:00am discussion class has always been something of a tough sell, and some topics (e.g. the “Golden Age of Piracy” as a testing ground for early democracy) simply grab a non-specialist audience better than others (like the competing social theologies of the early Reformations). That said, I taught a hundred successful classes between 2007 and 2013, and I am a much more knowledgeable and effective instructor today than I was fifteen years ago, because I learned the hard way: I spent six years teaching high school before returning to college teaching in 2023. And at the risk of conjuring a halcyon past, I do not recall ever having to work this hard, whether on a Big Ten campus or at community college, to get a solid discussion going about interesting material: the idea that the “absolutism” of monarchs like Louis XIV should be seen as a new invention that just claimed to be ancient, for example, or the tragic ironies of the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, and their links to today’s opioid epidemic. Previously, a few thoughtful questions got students talking, and when they did not, I could rely on some response assigned at the start of class, not just as do-the-homework motivation, but because it gave everyone, from naturally shy students to the occasionally unprepared, a clear script to work from. When I returned to college teaching last fall, however, I found that my go-to techniques had stopped working. Faced with what I began calling my “silent spring” during the second semester, I began using office hours and small-group review sessions to ask students to reflect on the phenomenon directly.
I have always taken attendance, so when someone misses a class, there is a soft expectation that they contact me about it. For over a decade, my standard reply to the iconic “what did I miss?” query has been “get the notes from a reliable classmate,” but that admonition now garners a new reply with troubling frequency: “[but] I don’t know anyone in the class” – and this at a small, faith-based university where student connection is a priority, not a state research institution where anonymity is the norm. Yes, this is still an excuse, but it is an excuse that now has a certain cultural legitimacy. For a start, I can corroborate what The Anxious Generation observes about today’s decline in face-to-face socializing among emerging adults: a class of thirty or forty undergraduates now often prefers to sit in scrupulous, screen-based silence while waiting for class to start, rather than engage horizontally (with each other) or vertically (with instructors).[5] Even when students talk before class, they seem gripped by silence when I pose questions during the session, even broad existing-knowledge questions, and even when I wait well beyond the comfortable threshold of silence. When I have brought it up in smaller groups, they quickly identify a self-aware refusal to engage that goes beyond social reluctance – “oh, yeah, people aren’t going to talk in class” – is a paraphrase that reflects common sentiment.
What has changed? Haidt’s thesis explains such refusal as a cultural consensus around a necessary act of self-preservation vis-à-vis the Tiktok-and-Instagram standard of public perfection; in broader sociological terms, it is a new form of shame-based subculture that does not require universal buy-in, but only critical mass to dominate a social setting.[6] The result is avoidance behavior writ large, because nobody wants to become a “fail” – such things go viral and last forever online – and young adults who grew up with phones in school now have to assume that someone is always waiting to capture their failures. If Haidt is correct, all of this obtains as a kind of totalizing experience, with instructor abilities, class format, and supporting materials making little difference vis-à-vis an ingrained imperative to avoid any behavior (no matter how vital to learning) that requires a social risk.
Disengagement and Dishonesty
In educational terms, normalizing such pervasive social anxiety leads to a snowball effect of disengagement, making once-foundational rituals of undergraduate life like asking questions, visiting office hours, and getting the notes a mental bridge too far. However, there is an accompanying epistemological problem that goes well beyond our shared quality of (academic) life. That problem is commonplace cheating in core courses, or a broad incidence of tertiary academic dishonesty that is the dark side of approaching core courses in “defend mode.” In the 2020s, “cheating” is never so quaint as smuggling crib notes into an exam or copying from a neighboring student’s test. These were already passé when I grew up in the 1990s, after all, and as a veteran high-school teacher, I employ a range of hedges, including requiring students to remove smart watches on test day, creating multiple versions of each assessment, and continuing to administer tests on paper (I have yet to find a “lockdown browser” that I really trust for a major assessment). But with the testing space reasonably secure for a low-tech field like history, new forms of academic dishonesty have bloomed outside the lecture hall, in the form of highly patterned online behaviors that betray a concerning weakness in how the anxious generation perceives basic questions of knowledge and truth.
When grading exams this May, a colleague and I were surprised to find that students in several course sections wrote about dictator Mao Zedong and China’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward” in a strangely abstract and admiring tone. While both of us consider it a pedagogical duty to problematize easy “heroes and villains” approaches to history, readers may be assured that our lectures were not the source of this hot take on a regime that killed forty million people. When groups of students across different classes miss the point so consistently and dramatically, we hypothesize that it is because they bypassed the teaching completely, and relied upon ChatGPT, or an analogous artificial intelligence, to generate their study materials for the final exam. The footprint of such tools is easy to recognize, once you understand the experience: artificial text generators can string together factual identifiers and basic chronological narratives in a cogent response to any question, but they fail dramatically in their ability to state why those things matter historically.
Even more conspicuously, AI cannot hope to integrate the unique viewpoint of an in-person human instructor, and the stratagem takes on a tragic air when that same instructor explained these facts in class at the start of term. This represents a new evolution in academic dishonesty beyond indifferent preparation and poor time management: such technological flailing bears witness to the immediate costs of taking on the challenge of college in “defend mode,” in which Haidt’s four opportunity costs to phone-based living – “social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction” – combine to create an abnormally low panic threshold in chronically-anxious students, who rush to what they feel is most accessible and comforting for a solution.[7]
In 2024, this place is assuredly not the professor’s office, their classmates, nor the academic-support services that have proliferated in recent decades, but rather the vast and lonely non-place of algorithms and AI content that Jonathan Rauch, in The Constitution of Knowledge (2021), identifies as the breeding ground of our broader “epistemological crisis.”[8] Rauch’s book suggests clear links between our mass recourse to such digital non-thought and the decline of modern social institutions, because absent a discursive, embodied consensus as to basic norms and values, isolated individuals much more readily allow themselves to be talked into virtually anything that engages their fears, or fuels their sense of outrage. Meanwhile, professors are finding that such digitally bred relativism also helps students talk themselves out of essential actions like taking quality notes, avoiding plagiarism, and studying for exams; embracing AI as a learning strategy is only really feasible where knowledge is understood as a pure commodity, with no accompanying ethical or moral claims.
For today’s undergrads, all this means that the chronic weariness and abstracted fear induced by Defend Mode compound a flawed, digitally-skewed conception of knowledge itself to persuade many students a priori they cannot possibly hope to learn the material as assigned, regardless of the abilities or approachability of their instructors.[9] Caught up in such anxious solipsism, exacerbated by daily-life and exam-week stressors, it becomes all too easy to discard one’s own convictions alongside the university rules, taking the low road not as a matter of choice, but of perceived survival according to the malleable laws of the digital jungle.
Engaging Defend Mode
I am a social and cultural historian, which means I tend to think in terms of group engagement with social structures, and how these incorporate broad cultural shifts. In my teaching career, it is easy to detect four distinct stages or modes of encountering the new digitized lifestyle that has, in Haidt’s memorable phrase, “hijacked the minds” of a generation since about 2010. A brief survey of these stages will, I hope, resonate with other instructors who find their students increasingly fragile and inhibited, and steer us toward a bolder approach to meeting the practical and metaphysical needs of learners whose primary socializing is to pursue their momentary wants.
My first stage of engaging Defend Mode was ignorance and ignoring, in which I assumed that well-resourced students at a private high school would follow the clearly articulated rules. Looking back, my naiveté was astounding, and my ensuing frustrations richly affirm what Haidt concludes: that any “phone ‘ban’ limited to class time is nearly useless,” in part because such policies “make phone policing into a full-time job” for teachers.[10]
While I never fully gave up on enforcement, I progressed after a frustrating year to attempted co-option, which many student-focused teachers will experience either as a natural impulse, or as a function of institutional imperatives to integrate technology in the classroom. As members of a profession, we enter this second stage when we think we can appropriate the attention-demanding power of the digital experience to drive the classroom forward, usually by having students look up and share information in a “flipped classroom” model, or by relying on allegedly-educational software programs (e.g. Kahoot) that try to sugar-coat the work of learning by reframing it on the lines of a digital gaming app. Cooption has its surface-level charms – it looks good to have a class of teens engaged, however superficially, in the same basic inquiry – but for me, the self-evident decline of adolescent mental health in the pre-COVID years soon raised ethical questions about such attempts. Specifically, I worried that such strategies amounted to enabling behavior vis-à-vis the attention diffusion and increased anxiety innate to heavy smartphone use, and today I believe that stage two is also little better than pedagogical self-sabotage, as teachers undermine their own classroom presence every time they rely on a smartphone or tablet screen to buffer students’ real-world engagement.
These frustrations led me to a burnout-adjacent interval of “blaming the victim” (encompassing all variations of the reductionist gripe “these kids and their phones,” as well as blaming parents) that can last the rest of one’s career if not meaningfully addressed. This third stage is where a thousand digital relics of stage two, such as dedicated Instagram accounts for US History or AP Lit, are abandoned by well-intentioned but worn-out teachers. While student choices and parent attitudes can and do exacerbate the problem, The Anxious Generation offers a sympathetic rebuttal to the non-solution of blaming addicts for their compulsions. As Cal Newport and others have convincingly demonstrated, the problem is corporate in its genesis, both in terms of “attention engineering” knowingly perpetrated by tech companies and app developers, and in view of the tectonic shifts in youth culture that have accompanied the phone-based childhood.[11] These changes make the social cost of eschewing the phone-based life prohibitively high for kids, leading Haidt to diagnose a “collective-action problem,” requiring concerted action from administrators, parents, and legislators to have any hope of success.[12]
For my part, as digital behavioral addictions became increasingly well-documented around the time of the COVID lockdowns (and as my sense of compassion kicked in), I shifted into disapproval and dialogue, the longest and most fruitful stage of my journey by far. In this, I was fortunate to be informed by a broad recent literature on trauma and addiction, and to have the support of administrators for my chosen approach as we returned to in-person classes after lockdown. The fourth stage began when I expressed my disapproval of the assumption that effective learning must accommodate itself to reflexive and pervasive digital media use. From here, I placed clear boundaries on all devices in my classes and invited students to respond in a structured and appropriate manner – meaning that I required discussions to be in-person in nature and civil in tone.
I was intrigued to find that students willingly engaged in dialogue about the problems these policies sought to address, even with the caveat that such discussions would not induce me to change the policy in the short term. Feedback was naturally mixed, but in one elective course for older teens, the topic of digital living and its implications shifted from being an introduction to the course in the first week, to become a main thread of the course after the first month. Returning to college teaching, I have found that the “digital media and personhood” trope, sympathetically addressed, is perhaps the one topic that is a reliable exception to the silent classroom, proof of the immediate and pressing status of these issues in the lives of students.
Disembodiment as Default
Today, I do not allow phones or computers in my classes (with documented accommodations the exception), and I explain that this is because I want students to have the opportunity to retain as much of their core humanity as possible during the hours we spend together each week. This hyperbole reflects my conviction that creating an engaged or embodied learning environment demands that we acknowledge pervasive metaphysical change; namely, that when given the choice, a majority of students will choose, whether actively or by compulsion (the net effect is the same), to inhabit a digitally-generated simulation rather than embrace real life in the present moment. In other words, I now accept that when many young people are socialized by means of an addictive simulacrum for embodied living, they come naturally to inhabit a broader culture of addiction, with the result that no in-person classroom experience can ever reasonably hope to compete with the digital world for the limited resource of their attention. To be sure, physically controlling devices is more palliative than therapeutic; this has not by itself restored life to my “silent spring.” That said, committing to such a counter-cultural policy has at least set my classes on the path toward engaging the whole person as a fundamental goal of study in the humanities.
In his recent essay “Finding a (Real) Christian College,” Jeffrey Bilbro, a professor at Grove City College, suggests that Christian education’s accommodation to “consumerist anthropology” – “the belief that people are essentially consumers” – has exacerbated the challenges facing faith-based education.[13] In response, he advocates a broad return to “theological anthropology,” in which institutions “don’t imagine students as consumers who need to get a marketable degree,” but rather as “people bearing a tarnished Imago Dei…that can be burnished through disciplined, focused effort.”[14] Accordingly, he calls on administrators to replace consumerist concessions with bold “formational anthropology” that will inculcate the “moral virtues and practical skills that enable us to rightly love God and our neighbor.”[15] In so doing, Bilbro issues a broad challenge that leaves little room for ignoring obvious hazards to student formation in the classroom.
For me, this means that I will begin the fall term not by casting myself in the role of marketing professional, trying to “sell” students on the benefits of studying history. Instead, my courses will start by addressing Defend Mode, with its well-documented harms to individual virtue and life skills, as a central challenge of teaching and learning. I expect that starting this dialogue will be relatively easy: technology and personhood are a pressing topic for all of us, and Gen Z students are generally keen to discuss their digital lives. It is facilitating and sustaining the search for Discover Mode exuberance in 2.5 classroom hours per week, alongside a full syllabus, that poses the true challenge.
Bilbro’s call to more virtuous learning finds corroboration from an unexpected source. The urgency of recovering intrinsically human modes of attunement lie at the heart of a new literature confronting our culture of mass addiction in the twenty-first century. This genre has been a decade in the making: the trope of an addicted America links exposés of the opioid epidemic [Dreamland by Sam Quinones (2015) Beth Macy’s Dopesick (2018) and Raising Lazarus (2022)] to works by celebrity trauma specialists like Bessel Van Der Kolk [The Body Keeps the Score (2014)] and Gabor Maté [The Myth of Normal (2022)].[16] Key elements of their critique flow into Haidt’s book via the growing corpus of studies on digital behavioral addiction, especially by Newport [Digital Minimalism (2019)] and Anna Lembke [Dopamine Nation (2021)].[17]
When these works are placed in dialogue, it is striking how many non-religious writers have become vocal in advocating unimpeachably religious worldviews and practices as the antidote to our autodestructive ethos. The Anxious Generation offers a capstone to the trend, as, like Newport and Lembke, Haidt posits an ultimate choice between “spiritual elevation and degradation” in our engagements with the digital world and offers venerable elements of religious anthropology as the remedy. Despite his professed atheism, Haidt’s “six ancient practices” (“shared sacredness,” “embodiment,” “stillness, silence, and focus,” “transcending the self,” “be[ing] slow to anger, quick to forgive,” and “find[ing] awe in nature”), draw on Buddha and the Tao in roughly equal measure to Jesus, and such a cure certainly seems to place faith-based colleges at a major advantage.[18] However, as mass digital compulsion erodes traditional distinctions between (often illegal) hard-chemical addiction and (typically legal) behavior addiction, the remedies these authors prescribe seem to demand that we re-frame our core assumptions about both faith practice and higher education.
A decade of studies uphold community as the foremost solution for an American mainstream beleaguered by addictive compulsions to an ever-growing range of stimuli.[19] In his compelling afterword to Dreamland, Quinones presciently wrote that “I believe more strongly than ever that the antidote to heroin addiction is community” and enumerated local and society-wide applications of the concept as the true prevention for mass death by drug overdose.[20] For Lembke, meanwhile, functional and intentional collective bonds are essential to foster the virtues that undergird recovery, e.g. honesty, altruism, and “self-binding” practices. The case studies in Dopamine Nation demonstrate that both clinical psychology and institutional Christianity have erred pervasively by assimilating a broad cultural trend, namely, treating addiction and recovery on the hyper-individualized terms of the prevailing culture. The isolating effects of digital living are in fact a cause, not just a symptom, and Lembke indicates that therapies that rely on pure self-actualization are often foredoomed for this reason.[21] By contrast, twelve-step practices like “radical honesty” rely on the “pro-social shame” of the group conscience, where recovery is ipso facto a communal project.[22]
The Anxious Generation concurs, suggesting that the distorted childhood of the smartphone is a “collective-action problem” demanding a social solution, in which schools and communities place our innate human need for “attunement” – our basic “wiring to connect with others” – over and above the sort of addictive socialization that purports to turn us all into “solitary, depressed hyper-consumers.”[23] For me, it follows that breathing life into my “silent spring” will require some more tangible commitment to fostering community in my classrooms this fall. The only problem is that this insight contravenes our fundamental assumptions about American higher education, where the learning encounter has been a thoroughly individualized prospect since long before the smartphone.
From Motivation to Invitation
Teachers at faith-based universities should own a pastoral obligation to student well-being that goes beyond professional ethics or basic human decency. At the same time, they face unique cultural and institutional challenges that can justify a temporizing response when confronted with Defend Mode and other generational shifts. Some Christian faculty, for instance, will be inclined to reject Haidt’s findings on the grounds of his professed atheism, or because the book relies on evolutionary biology to explain innate human social needs. Those with administrative responsibilities – especially for enrollment – naturally worry about striking the wrong kind of counter-cultural tone: confronting Defend Mode, or a broad cultural trend like smartphone addiction, might negatively inflect student-satisfaction reporting, or garner unwanted publicity and negative social-media traction. Such concerns are genuine, and they help to explain why students often experience a pastiche of Bilbro’s “consumerist” and “formational” anthropologies at the level of university practice: certain divisions, departments, and faculty members inevitably seem inclined toward the former, while others appear more driven by the latter. Worse, the panacea of “community” offered by the addiction literature does not offer a quick fix, as a participatory sense of belonging cannot be inculcated from the top-down, nor required in any meaningful sense on a course syllabus. It can only be engaged as part of the educational process itself, which requires re-thinking the roles at both ends of the teaching-learning axis.
For me, a meaningful start to addressing Defend Mode begins by taking on a two-fold challenge. First, it demands that we recognize and transcend our accustomed thinking on student motivation; second, it requires us to assess the relational shortcomings in our hard-earned teaching practices to foster regeneration. Ultimately, this is what I have learned from my “silent spring”: while I have achieved basic buy-in for certain counter-cultural policies in my classes, and seen the value of creating a dialogue on humane living in a digital world, the real challenge is to integrate the work of growing the human spirit, in its own right, as a core practice and essential outcome of my work with students.
Describing my four-stage teaching journey has illuminated an important shortfall in my own teaching practice. Like many of my colleagues, I have made tireless revisions and improvements to both my classroom style and course content over the years, engaging earnestly with broad strategies and specific tactics offered by the “professional development” sector of the education publishing industry. These efforts have undoubtedly made me a better instructor; however, I have failed to critically examine my own “social imaginary,” that is, my basic assumptions about student motivation in the kind of core courses I teach.[24] As a result, my courses retain a logic of opportunity cost and material reward that relies on the same two paradigms of social imagination – what might be called an institutional coercion model, on the one hand, versus a digital enticement model, on the other – that the shift to digital living has now placed in flux at a civilizational level.[25] The result has been a misplaced faithfulness to an imagined concept of “the real world” that now demands replacement with the invitation model that pervades the Gospels (e.g. Matthew 22:1-14; Mark 2:15-17). This is a daunting prospect for history, because in Bilbro’s terms, it requires me to stop treating the knowledge and skills that history inculcates as commodities on the consumerist model. Understood correctly, my job will be to guide students to encounter the human experience more fully through a vast range of contexts, and to somehow frame the distant past as an intervention to what Newport has called “a diminishing of the soul’s authority” in the digital decades.[26]
The pragmatic religiosity of addiction literature suggests that the journey to a more communal learning experience must begin by transcending the digitally driven isolation and self-obsession we experience as a cultural default. To effect this, addiction authors are unanimous in prescribing embodied rituals – from primary-group membership in community, civic, or recovery-group contexts on one hand, to in-person socializing, hospitality and table fellowship on the other – as the vital corollary of revised ideas. Such emphasis on common ritual action as the corollary of intellectual assent recalls the critique of individualist concepts of cultural regeneration found in James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World (2010).[27] It follows that bringing back the “magic classroom” requires something akin to the “cultural liturgies” that James K.A. Smith defines as practices and perspectives aimed at “making the familiar strange.”[28]
As I plan my courses, I naturally find myself clarifying policies and choosing new readings, but my main efforts are now aimed squarely at the human element of humanities teaching, while accepting the fact that there is no clear, surgical solution. As a broader strategy of invitation, however, I have devised three modes of action. Instead of starting the course with my sales pitch for taking global history seriously (and then rushing into that history ASAP), I have reserved the early classes for a shared inquiry into the “gen-ed” humanities course itself: what it originally was, how we perceive it today, and what it should be. Selections from the digital-addiction literature will invite students to probe their assumptions about liberal-arts education in the twenty-first century and encourage them to frame the course as a shared project in assessing human living itself, in individual, technological, and social components. Hopefully, this practice will create the foundation for a second ritual: a sustained thread of in-person discussion on the sacred and metaphysical, particularly as detected in historical conceptions of the divine, the self, and the human, animal, and natural relationships that are pervasively de-stabilized by an information-based society.[29]
The third practice is to act out the antidote to Defend Mode directly, through regular peer interactions that transcend the typical ad hoc function of group work. In crafting these, I will have the opportunity to offer new college students the best of my teaching experience – without replicating past mistakes vis-à-vis technology or teaching philosophy. If I succeed in any meaningful way, then I will have entered the fifth stage of my journey, compassionate intervention, and will have begun to re-capture the lost enchantment of the pre-smartphone classroom.
Notes:
[1] Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin Random House, 2024).
[2] Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Trigger Warnings are Hurting Mental Health on Campus,” in The Atlantic (September 15 2015), available online: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/.
[3] See Haidt, Anxious Generation, 69-72 on “discover mode versus defend mode” and its implications for education.
[4] Haidt, Anxious Generation, 69-72.
[5] Haidt, Anxious Generation, 122-23.
[6] See Haidt, Anxious Generation, 115-20.
[7] Haidt, Anxious Generation, 113-41. The author’s notes as to the benefits of social media for adolescents are an important counter-point; see 136-39.
[8] Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2021).
[9] Cf. Byung-Chul Han, Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. Trans. Daniel Steuer (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2022), 37-44 on the knowledge-generating potential of artificial intelligence, and its limits: “Big data provides a rudimentary knowledge. It remains limited to correlations and pattern recognition, in which, however, nothing is understood” [italics original].
[10] Haidt, Anxious Generation, 249.
[11] See Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (New York: Portfolio, 2019), 3-25, on the corporate phenomenon he calls “a lopsided arms race.”
[12] See Haidt, Anxious Generation, 222-26, on “collective action problems,” also known as “social dilemmas.”
[13] Jeffrey Bilbro, “Finding a Real Christian College,” in Christianity Today (May 1, 2024), available online: https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2024/may-web-only/finding-real-christian-college-formational-education.html?share=Idbnfr8SKjEGDFC0Il9OnDjF9%2b0aYH6J.
[14] Bilbro, “Real Christian College.”
[15] Bilbro, “Real Christian College.”
[16] Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2018), and Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2022); Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin, 2014); Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (London: Ebury, 2022).
[17] Newport, Digital Minimalism, n. 11 above; Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (New York: Penguin Random House, 2021).
[18] Haidt, Anxious Generation, 202-15.
[19] On the banal nature of addiction today, see Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (New York: Penguin Random House, 2021), p.1 ff. “The smartphone has become the 21st century hypodermic needle, capable of delivering doses of dopamine 24/7 to a wired generation.”
[20] Quinones, Dreamland, 353.
[21] Lembke, Dopamine Nation, 34: “Even acts of kindness toward others,” Lembke writes of the self-help psychological literature distributed to students at campus wellness facilities, “are framed as strategy for personal happiness. Altruism … has become a vehicle for our own ‘well-being.’”
[22] Lembke, “Running from Pain,” in Dopamine Nation, 31-46.
[23] Haidt, Anxious Generation, 5-58, 222-25.
[24] Charles A. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
[25] The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has asserted the rise of disembodied, digital living has served as a catalyst for the “disciplinary regime” of the twentieth-century nation-state to fade into the “seductive and permissive” regime of neoliberal consumerism and unlimited self-aggrandizement: “I distinguish between the disciplinary regime and the neoliberal regime. The disciplinary regime works with commands and restraints…the neoliberal regime on the other hand is not oppressive, but seductive and permissive. It exploits freedom instead of suppressing it. So we don’t live in a disciplinary society but in a meritocracy…The subjects of neoliberal meritocracy, believing themselves to be free, are in reality servants. They are absolute servants, exploiting themselves without a master.” Quoted in Gesine Borcherdt, Byung-Chul Han: ‘I Practice Philosophy as Art’: The philosopher on how we might respond to a world of digital alienation.” Art Review (2 December 2021), available online: https://artreview.com/byung-chul-han-i-practise-philosophy-as-art/.
[26] Newport, Digital Minimalism, 25.
[27] James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
[28] James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 19-27.
[29] For Byung-Chul Han, the “disappearance of the other” as a consequence of digital living is of primary metaphysical importance; see Han, Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. Trans. Daniel Steuer (Medford, MA: Polity Books, 2022), 7, 18-21; cf. n. 25.
Jason Strandquist
Associate Professor of History | Union University