Our June/July issue leads with the US presidential election and two books reviewed by James Bradshaw. The first book, Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, explores the still strong, though increasingly marginalised position of evangelical Protestants in US culture and politics. The second book, Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, has already been in print for fifteen years but as Bradshaw shows, it bears a surprising relevance to the upcoming election clash between Biden and Trump. The Nixon era, like that of contemporary USA, was characterised by the clash of two camps: on the one hand those carrying the mantle of the Sixties’ social liberal upheaval and on the other, a conservative camp attempting to shore up traditional values. Where 1972 presidential hopeful George McGovern embodied the former group Joe Biden does now, and Richard Nixon embodied the latter as Trump does now.
This month Margaret Hickey reviews the latest book by the American psychologist Jonathan Haidt: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. You may have already come across his (with Greg Lukianoff) renowned The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Haidt, like Jordan Peterson and Jean Twenge, author of the excellent iGen (2017), has been carefully tracking what has been going on in the lives of young people (or more specifically young Americans as in the vast majority of these well-known studies). And Haidt, like Peterson, Twenge and others is not optimistic about what he sees. He considers that girls in particular are currently undergoing the greatest mental health crisis in the history of mankind. Like Twenge, Haidt places the blame of this mental health epidemic at the feet of the web, and more specifically the phone, as Hickey points out in her review of The Anxious Generation.
What professional psychologists and sociologists like Haidt, Twenge and Peterson demonstrate with professional rigour, virtually anyone with their eyes open can identify anecdotally. Everyone, and sadly parents in particular, knows girls whose whole world has shrunk to utterly obsessing over their social media profile, or boys who have full blown addictions to online pornography. (Not that such obsessions and addictions are in any way restricted to the young; it is just perhaps that they are more accentuated in the young.)
This is the modern world’s version of the tragic origins of the story of the Pied Piper drawing children behind him into some unknown oblivion – apparently drawn from the Children’s Crusade of 1212 in which thousands of French and German youths were lead off to fight in Jerusalem.
One imagines that future generations will look back at the parents of this generation scratching their heads and asking how did they hand their own children over to the Pied Piper of the twenty-first century? Probably those Medieval kids said something along the lines of “But all the kids in the class are going” to convince their parents to let them go, and of course Medieval mum and dad didn’t want their kids to be the odd ones out in the class, so off they went to the Middle East never to be seen again.