First He Came for Cancel Culture. Now He Wants to Cancel Smartphones

When James Comey became head of the F.B.I. in 2013, he sent reading recommendations to his staff, including “Letter From Birmingham Jail” by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg and “The Righteous Mind” by a professor at New York University’s business school, Jonathan Haidt.

Stumbling on that last book, a 2012 best seller, felt, Mr. Comey recalled, as if he were consulting a how-to guide on leading a stuck-in-its-ways Washington bureau. The book’s core lesson is simple: Humans make moral decisions based on emotional intuition, not just reason. When you’re trying to change minds, you have to change hearts as well.

Read through all of Mr. Haidt’s canon and it can be summed up as a guide to changing yourself (“The Happiness Hypothesis,” 2006); changing other people’s minds (“The Righteous Mind,” 2012); changing your own mind (“The Coddling of the American Mind,” 2018); and changing your tech-addicted children (“The Anxious Generation,” on shelves March 26).

Is all that actually possible? He would like to think so. And his work has drawn acolytes who would like to think so, too — including some of the very people in big tech whose work Mr. Haidt seems to hold responsible for the rising generation’s social ills.

Mr. Haidt’s writings promise these power players something elusive: a scholarly, social scientific explanation of the crises they’re facing, combined with a Silicon Valley founder’s level of confidence about how to fix them. (Mr. Haidt often sounds like what might happen if the doomsayer Cassandra swallowed Dale Carnegie: alarmed by the catastrophes humans have cooked up, but stubbornly chipper about our capacity to undo them.)

Toby Shannan, the former chief operating officer of the e-commerce business Shopify, has called on Mr. Haidt for advice on facing ideological battles in the workplace. He said Mr. Haidt got him through a bumpy period in the lead-up to Donald J. Trump’s election in 2016, when some of his employees were fuming about Shopify hosting online swag shops for right-wing groups like Breitbart News. With Mr. Haidt’s counsel, Shopify determined that users could sell merchandise with political commentary, but none with explicit calls to harm.

“He was sort of the philosopher on dial,” Mr. Shannan said.

It was his work on “The Coddling of the American Mind,” diagnosing what became known as cancel culture, that shot Mr. Haidt to the center of a debate that for years preoccupied opinion writers, blue check accounts on Twitter and everybody’s dad. He rode a wave of concern about the rising generation, and became a voice for people who didn’t want to align with right-wing anti-cancel culture warriors, but also felt alienated by the other side. For his readers, Mr. Haidt gave credence to the left’s irritation with the left — and, inevitably, the right’s irritation with the left, too.

Mr. Haidt has been interviewed by the podcast heavyweights — Ezra Klein, Kara Swisher, Sam Harris, Dax Shepard, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Tim Ferris. On Bari Weiss’s podcast, he related the current world’s chaos and confusion to what humanity experienced after the Tower of Babel’s destruction: “We may never again be able to understand each other.”

Priscilla Chan, the co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, enjoyed “The Coddling of the American Mind,” so she reached out to Mr. Haidt, he recalled, and they had dinner with her husband, Mark Zuckerberg. Mr. Haidt also spent a day giving talks at Meta about social media’s effects on mental health and democracy. Patrick Collison, chief executive of the payments processing start-up Stripe, is also a friend, Mr. Haidt said, and has praised “Coddling.” Bill Gates vouched for “Coddling.” Barack Obama, too, appears to be a reader of Mr. Haidt. He gave a speech in 2015 that mentioned the coddling of college students, and seemed to echo the themes of an Atlantic cover story that Mr. Haidt had written, with a co-author, as a precursor to the book.

For “The Anxious Generation,” the book that will be out this coming week, Mr. Haidt says he believes that he has taken a reprieve from the culture wars. Mr. Haidt has seized on a purpose — save the children — and an intervention — lock up their smartphones — that seem not just righteous, but popular.

“It’s a huge relief,” Mr. Haidt said in an interview. “Everywhere I go, I’m pushing on open doors.”

Riding ‘Coddling’ to Fame

Seated on a bench in the Lower Manhattan park that his children used to call the “Giant Playground,” for its sprawling array of climbers and slides, Mr. Haidt, 60, reflected on how, as a social psychologist by training, he fell into the culture wars.

“I don’t understand things unless I seek out the other side,” Mr. Haidt said, adding, as he likes to do, a quote from the 19th century’s anti-cancel culture warrior, John Stuart Mill. “‘He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.’”

Mr. Haidt began his career teaching psychology at the University of Virginia. He studied where morals come from, proposing that morality is like taste, and the human mind has different “taste buds” — care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity and liberty — that help us make decisions.

With the Iraq war raging in 2004, Mr. Haidt, a registered Democrat, took his dog on evening walks around Charlottesville and thought about why his party was waging such a tepid campaign against George W. Bush. He applied his research on morality to America’s political parties, and came to the conclusion that the Democrats seemed to campaign on just three facets of morality: care, fairness and liberty. Republicans, meanwhile, tapped into all of the taste buds he’d identified. In 2012, he published “The Righteous Mind,” which explored the differing moral roots of liberalism and conservatism.

“My original motive was to help the Democrats stop offending American morality so much,” Mr. Haidt said.

But the more widely he read, in an effort to understand Republican messaging on morality, the more he struggled with the limits of his own views, and the narrowness of the two-party system.

“Left and right are like a gas pedal and brake,” Mr. Haidt continued. “If you have a car with just a gas pedal, just progressive, it’s going to crash in a very predictable way. And if you have a car with just a brake, well, you don’t go anywhere.”

In the years after the publication of “The Righteous Mind,” Mr. Haidt became more attuned to what he viewed as a hardening progressive orthodoxy on campuses. It started, in his mind, in 2013 when dozens of students at Brown University protested a speech by Raymond Kelly, the New York police commissioner who had carried out a much-criticized program known as “stop-and-frisk.” The lecture was canceled less than 30 minutes after it started.

Mr. Haidt, along with his co-author, Greg Lukianoff, the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, began to translate into magazine-cover theories the concerns about Gen Z swirling among the people who dealt with them: Young people were being insulated from tough questions, they wrote, a reality that would eventually undermine both academic and corporate institutions.

The pair detailed these arguments in “Coddling,” which resonated in particular because it came from Mr. Haidt. “One of the best ways that you can make a big splash in the ideas industry is if you can say, ‘Look I’m from this milieu but I can be a truth teller,” said Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and author of “The Ideas Industry.” “He can always say, ‘Look I’m a professor, I know of what I speak.’”

As he became the non-Fox News voice of the free speech brigade, Mr. Haidt along with his co-author also attracted critics.

One core critique was that given their identities, these two men didn’t understand the stakes of campus battles over identity politics. “Why are you making such a big deal about identity, Lukianoff and Haidt ask again and again, of people whose identities, fixed to their bodies by centuries of law and bureaucracy and custom, make them vastly more likely to be poor or raped,” the writer Moira Weigel said in a critical Guardian review. Their solutions, she went on, didn’t seem to her to be effective. “Imagine thinking that racism and sexism were just bad ideas that a good debate could conquer!”

Mr. Haidt embraced his new role as a critic of the progressive left. He is part of a social scene of New York’s professed heterodox thinkers — controversial academics, libertarian writers, culture warriors and others who share Mr. Haidt’s anti-cancel culture preoccupations.

Much of it is centered around events planned by Gerry Ohrstrom, an investor on the board of the Reason Foundation, which publishes the libertarian magazine Reason. There are tennis groups on Sundays, which Mr. Haidt attends, as well as parties at Mr. Ohrstrom’s wood-paneled home by Gramercy Park.

“Intellectual life used to be fun,” Mr. Haidt said. “There’s an emergent community, from center left to center right, of people who feel politically homeless and are recognizing that the big division is no longer between left and right, but between people who are on the extremes, who are humorless and aggressive and deluded by their passion and tribalism, versus the middle 70 percent of the country.”

From a Skeptic to an Acolyte

Zofia Fernandini, 21, is a junior at New York University who was voted “most political” at her high school in New Jersey, where she joined the Women’s March and the March for Our Lives against gun violence. When she got to N.Y.U., she heard a rumor that a popular psychology course called “Flourishing” was taught by “the most controversial teacher at N.Y.U.,” Jonathan Haidt. She was intrigued. (Mr. Haidt had in 2011 joined N.Y.U.’s business school, in the “Business and Society” program, where his research bolstered the “and Society” part.)

But during Ms. Fernandini’s time in the class, she found it veered just as much toward self-help as controversy. Mr. Haidt asked the students to turn off notifications for all but five of their phone apps. Over the course of the semester, they resolved to better themselves: Make a new morning routine (no more lounge-and-scroll), ask a crush out (one student got a girlfriend).

Ms. Fernandini found it life-changing. She deleted social media apps from her phone. She sought the class’s advice on her relationship with her long-distance boyfriend and confessed that she worried about their political differences — she’s a liberal and he’s a Republican at the University of Alabama. Mr. Haidt persuaded her that those differences were a virtue, some healthy spice.

“He was very real and not so babying as I feel like a lot of other teachers are,” Ms. Fernandini said. “It was a lot of criticism of Gen Z. It was blatant criticism. But he’s right.”

While Mr. Haidt was conducting his research for “Coddling,” he kept bumping up against a common critique: There’s nothing new about a 50-something decrying “kids these days.” Tom Wolfe described the baby boomers as pathologically self-obsessed in his 1976 indictment of the “Me Decade.” Four decades later, a Time magazine cover about millennials christened them “The Me Me Me Generation.”

Mr. Haidt came to believe, though, that the generation born after 1995, Gen Z, was confronting a novel kind of crisis.

He examined data on Gen Z mental health. He found that young people were experiencing a tidal wave of anxiety, self-harm and suicide. Major depressive episodes have roughly doubled for teenagers since 2010, according to Mr. Haidt’s research.

Parents and teachers sometimes explain this by noting that Gen Z is facing disasters that would make anyone depressed: climate change, school shootings, threats to democracy. But Mr. Haidt argues that young people historically drew a deep sense of purpose when facing thorny challenges, whether World War II or the movement against the war in Vietnam.

The depression Gen Z is experiencing is different, Mr. Haidt concluded. It is connected to smartphone overuse. Mr. Haidt calls it “the great rewiring” of childhood.

Mr. Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation,” comes partly out of years spent on his nonprofit organization Let Grow, which pushes for more childhood independence and play, including by creating school curricula that encourage children to try out new activities on their own. Mr. Haidt co-founded it in 2017 with Lenore Skenazy, 64, a writer who was attacked on cable news in 2008 for her decision to let her 9-year-old find his way home alone from Bloomingdale’s in New York.

Some social scientists are skeptical of the definitive conclusions he draws, noting that much of the research on the impact of social media on society has so far been based on correlation, not causation. “We just have to be careful about blaming social media for the trends that its rise has coincided with,” said Brendan Nyhan, 45, a Dartmouth political scientist whose work has focused on social media and polarization.

With a 14- and a 17-year-old, Mr. Haidt’s household has been something of a laboratory for his smartphone theories. Neither of his children were allowed on social media until well into high school; when Mr. Haidt’s daughter asked to download Snapchat, her father’s N.Y.U. students warned that it was a hotbed for nudes.

Mr. Haidt lays out an ambitious set of interventions in his new book, which include: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16 and no phones in schools. He hopes that legislators, educators, big tech companies and parents can bring these to fruition by — “I should pick a date,” he mused recently over lunch near N.Y.U. “Let’s say by the end of 2025.”

The obvious parallel for this sort of tectonic shift is the campaign against tobacco, which began in the United States in the 1960s, with the first appearances of cautionary labels on cigarette packs warning of health hazards, and by 2015 had cut smoking rates by more than half.

Mr. Haidt has a comparison that’s more ambitious: the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“When you have a system which everyone hates, and then you have a way to escape it, it can change within a year, and that’s what happened in 1989,” Mr. Haidt said. “It’s different from the fall of communism but I expect it to be about as fast as the fall of communism. Because it’s a regime that we all hate.”

Mr. Haidt has a metaphor — one that Mr. Comey loved to cite at the F.B.I. — for the way people make moral choices. Our emotions are like a galumphing elephant, and our conscious reasoning is the rider on top. We may think it’s the rider steering the elephant, but more often it’s the other way around. Our emotions land somewhere, and then we try to rationalize why.

“Almost every social thing I’ve ever tried to do, we had to speak to the elephant, change people’s minds, change their hearts,” Mr. Haidt said. “This is the first time I haven’t had to do that. Almost everybody’s elephant is already leaning my way.”