Wresting Their Neighbor to Their Will

 A friend of mine gets annoyed with me every time we talk about social media, and the host of related topics that are often linked to it in the zeitgeist: such as the alleged crisis of mental illness and loneliness among teenagers and young adults. He thinks society needs to do a better job of regulating digital media—and no doubt he is right, up to a point. He is persuaded by the studies and whistleblower reports that have mounted up in recent years indicating that excessive use of social media correlates with mental health problems among the young; and he argues that we would be better off limiting or controlling access to these websites rather than allowing them rage like a brush fire through the minds of the impressionable youth. 

Whenever I express my skepticism of these claims, he accuses me of being needlessly contrarian and refusing to follow the evidence. And I admit that I haven't read the studies and reports that undergird the present legislative push to protect young people and teens from social media. All I'm really going on—just as my friend suggests—is a gut instinct. But I insist that there is something to it. As a character in Goethe's Elective Affinities says at one point, intuition is often just a shorthand for the accumulated experience of many prior others placed in similar situations. And so, I insist, my instinctive skepticism toward the alleged "youth mental health crisis" is actually informed by historical experience. 

Mostly, I don't like the current discourse about youth mental health because it sounds like a moral panic. Every few decades, after all, the young people of America are observed to be living their lives differently from how their elders would choose to organize their time. And whatever that difference is, it soon becomes elevated in the public consciousness as the defining social evil of our times. It hardly matters what the behavior is. It could be shopping malls, or hard drugs. In my own generation—that of the Millennials—we even managed to have a moral panic about young people spending too much time revisiting the cartoons of their Nineties childhoods. Yet what could be more non-threatening than that? 

Today's young people, likewise, are getting pregnant and blackout drunk less frequently—and making a point of going to sleep at 9 PM every night in order to get enough rest—which you would think would mean they are delivering up less fodder to the panic artists. But this would be to misunderstand the protean nature of panic. For, the young people are still spending their time differently than their elders, so we are managing to have a moral panic about it all the same. 

Apparently, famous social commentator Jonathan Haidt is now piling on too. In a recent interview with Politico, based on his latest book, he tells us that smartphones and video games are destroying America's youth. Platforms like Instagram are causing a mental health crisis among girls, he alleges; and meanwhile, boys are simply "dropping out of life" entirely; they're playing too many video games; they're disappearing into virtual environments: "[I]t’s causing them to [...] not cultivate skills, like flirting or courtship or working for pay."

And here is where we start to give the game away. What we're actually outraged about here is plainly a species of sexual and social nonconformity—not participating in the romance scene or the employment scene as prior generations defined it. The young people are not dating or sleeping with each other enough. Having been condemned for generations for having sex too early and too often, young people are now to be condemned for not having it enough. Here again, we see that the target of the moral panic can shift every few years. All that is required is that the behavior we are panicking about be different from how older generations organized their lives; beyond that it doesn't matter what specifically the point of difference is. So long as it marks a change, we can start to panic. 

You may say that these commentators are merely trying to help the young, not stigmatize them; but this is how it starts with all moral panics. They always masquerade under the guise of "concern." They claim to be trying to protect the young people—mostly from themselves. And protecting them from themselves quickly turns out to require stigmatizing and criminalizing them. The panic artists label the non-conforming behavior they want to stop as criminal, and therefore, it is criminal. As William S. Burroughs talks about in his collection of interviews, The Job, if the U.S. government in his era had actually enforced all the drug laws on its books against every offender, they'd have the entire generation of youth and young adults behind bars. There would be no one left to fight in Vietnam. So they would never arrest everyone: just enough to confer the stigma of criminality; to label the culture of opposition and resistance presumptively criminal. 

They may not be readying laws to ban people from remaining single, to force people to date and get married. But it is a logical progression of the current moral panic about the alleged teen "loneliness" epidemic (do they not know that truth and wisdom flow only from the "lonely"; from those who "stand most alone," as Ibsen put it?—no; how could they know it, as Yeats asks, those who themselves "have no Solitude"?). How many think-pieces and Surgeon General reports will need to be published, wringing their hands about how the young people are not pairing off and mating in sufficient quantities anymore, before someone starts proposing government marriage incentives as a solution; a points system based on the number of dates attended? And how long before this in turn escalates to compulsory romantic attachments? 

I admit I worry about this because I have a dog in this fight. I have been trying for years to carve out a tiny niche for myself in which I might be permitted to remain single. And look, I agree that other people do not need to live this way, if they don't want to. I guess someone has to participate in the whole loathsome system of sex competition—in the same way that we probably need economic competition for the market to function. But that doesn't mean I have to like either one. And it doesn't mean that everyone has to participate. 

Why can people not be permitted to simply opt out if they so choose? Why can there not be room for a few "conscientious objectors" (as a friend of mine recently called it), who decide that the whole system of dating, romance, sexuality, and reproductive advantage is not for them (maybe because—and I won't press the point, since I am merely pleading here for tolerance—but maybe because they regard that whole system as fundamentally unfair—privileging traits like physical attractiveness that people have no control over and which there is no intrinsic moral basis for favoring—maybe because, that is, it is quite literally social Darwinism, in short) and that they'd rather have nothing to do with it? Why can we not be permitted to renounce? 

If this is the solution that the young people are coming to, I say: more power to them. All they are really asking for, then—all I am really asking for—is the right to be permitted to live life according to one's own idiosyncratic values and preferences in peace. What objection could anyone have to that? I don't see that it concerns them. Why then are the social commentators and the Jonathan Haidts and the panic artists still hounding me? 

And in thinking about this, my gut all in a turmoil, my fear all in a rage, the old poem of Housman's came back into my mind. The speaker in that poem, I was reminded all over again—that was me. C'est moi! "If my ways are not as theirs/ Let them mind their own affairs."—Yes, you hear that, Jonathan Haidt?! You hear that, panic artists?! What's it to you? What skin is it off your backs if I reject the sex-marriage-family system? "But no, they will not," Housman knows. The panic artists never quit. They never leave well-enough alone. They never live and let live. "[T]hey must still/ Wrest their neighbor to their will./ And make me dance as they desire/ With jail and gallows and hell-fire."