This month, we lead for the first time with a review of a Netflix series rather than a book or even a traditional film. Few Netflix series go beyond mere entertainment, but the mini-series Adolescence is different, addressing as it does the phenomenon of the web and social media in general, and the “manosphere” in particular. While debate continues over whether the series serves as an apologia for the kind of “toxic feminism” against which many young males are reacting – and in some cases perhaps overreacting – it nonetheless tackles the issue of a youth subculture that has grown more anxious, angry, and alienated under the influence of social media, pornography, and online ideologies.
The same issue is also explored in Charlotte Armitage’s recent Generation Zombie: Why Devices Are Harming Our Children and What We Can Do About It, reviewed here. Given the huge success of the mini-series Adolescence, this book couldn’t have been released at a better time. As a UK-based psychotherapist and duty-of-care psychologist, Armitage has had the opportunity to observe closely the impact of screen time on thousands of her clients and their families, and that impact is worrying, to say the least. Thankfully, she sees the problem as surmountable and provides a very practical solution in the form of her 30-step Device Management Plan.
In a previous issue, we carried a review of Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling The Anxious Generation, published in March 2024, and it’s worth bringing this book to mind again, particularly the four recommendations he makes therein:
• No Smartphones Before High School: Haidt advises delaying the introduction of smartphones until at least the start of high school (around age 14).
• No Social Media Before Age 16: He recommends restricting access to social media platforms until children are at least 16 years old.
• Phone-Free Schools: Haidt advocates for schools to implement policies that make them phone-free zones during the school day, from the first bell to the last.
• More Unsupervised Play and Childhood Independence: He emphasises the importance of increasing opportunities for free play and independence, ideally outdoors and with minimal adult supervision.
There appears to be a groundswell of parental action to have these policies enshrined in law. In the US, parents and advocacy groups like Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA) and Phone Free (co-founded by Kim Whitman) are pressing for smartphone restrictions in schools, while grassroots movements encourage parents to delay giving their children smartphones until around age 14. In the UK, groups have emerged to address the problem of the “phone-based childhood.” In 2024, Australia passed legislation banning social media for children under 16, directly aligning with Haidt’s no-social-media-before-16 proposal. Similar moves are underway in France, the Nordic countries, Turkey, and Spain.
However, there is a deeper malaise that cannot be addressed solely by reforming social practices and laws surrounding the use of the web and social media. This is the spiritual malaise stemming from a lack of meaning in a secularised society. In Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy by the prominent journalist Jonathan Rauch – an atheist – the author writes: “I came to realise that in American civic life, Christianity is a load-bearing wall. When it buckles, all the institutions around it come under stress, and some of them buckle too.” When God is absent from a society, everything begins to break down.
Over twenty years ago, Pope Saint John Paul II addressed the need for a new evangelisation of the old Christian West, particularly of Europe:
At the root of this loss of hope is an attempt to promote a vision of man apart from God and apart from Christ… European culture gives the impression of “silent apostasy” on the part of people who have all that they need and who live as if God does not exist. This is the context in which the Church in Europe is called to carry out her mission of proclaiming the Gospel.
Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in Europa, 9
(June 28, 2003)
The fruits of this “silent apostasy” become clearer year by year, and perhaps its effects are most apparent in the young. What I found perhaps most shocking while watching the Netflix mini-series “Adolescence” was the portrayal of a British secondary school in the second episode. It is essentially a picture of nihilistic despair. Of course, there was no religious imagery to be seen anywhere, only the occasional mandatory rainbow – the quasi-religious symbol of the adoration of sexual licence.
How much those young people need to hear words like those of Pope Saint John Paul II to youth in 1995:
Do not let yourselves be deceived by false ideals or misleading ideologies. The modern world wants to convince you that material things – wealth, pleasure, and power – are the key to happiness. But Jesus tells you: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:3). Do not trade your soul for the fleeting promises of a consumer society!
World Youth Day 1995 (Manila, Philippines)
(January 15, 1995)
Two other books we review this month provide, in some way, a blueprint for this new evangelisation of the old, secularised West. The first concerns an important feature of the initial evangelisation of Ireland: monasticism, a significant period of which is explored in Edel Bhreathnach’s Monasticism in Ireland, AD 900–1250. Irish monks, in particular, played a key role during a period of European history that perhaps most closely parallels the current epoch – that of the decline of Roman infrastructure, political fragmentation, and cultural stagnation following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Through their evangelising and educational work, Irish monks were instrumental in preserving classical knowledge, spreading Christianity, and laying the groundwork for the cultural and religious revival of medieval Europe.
The same task faces the Church today. However, it will only come from Catholics who are sufficiently spiritually “fired up” and doctrinally trained. The Irish monks who helped end the Dark Ages were the “crack troops” of their period, living a much more austere form of monasticism than their confrères on the continent. Their monasteries were focal points of faith, learning, and, ultimately, civilisation. Bhreathnach writes: “Like many modern monasteries, which run schools, third-level institutions, farms, healthcare, and social-care institutions with the assistance of government and community support, early Irish monasteries operated on a similar basis… Not only did they own large estates, but the larger monasteries also had guesthouses, hospices, and libraries and were centres of ecclesiastical and vernacular learning.”
The second book is The Rock from Which You Were Hewn: The Lives and Legacy of Holy Irish Men and Women, edited by Patrick Kenny and John S. Hogan. This book takes up the challenge of Pope Benedict XVI in his pastoral letter to the Irish, in which he wrote: “As you take up the challenges of this hour, I ask you to remember ‘the rock from which you were hewn’ (Is 51:1). Reflect upon the generous, often heroic, contributions made by past generations of Irish men and women to the Church and to humanity as a whole, and let this provide the impetus for honest self-examination and a committed programme of ecclesial and individual renewal.” The book briefly explores the lives of a series of Irish men and women whose causes for canonisation are underway or could conceivably be opened in the future, including figures like Fr William Doyle SJ, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, and Dame Judy Coyne.
Such figures from Ireland’s recent past show us that the golden age of the “Ireland of Saints and Scholars” of the monastic period has not been swallowed up by history. Again and again throughout Irish history, Ireland has produced holy men and women who responded heroically to civilisational crises, such as the Dark Ages or the Protestant Reformation. There is no reason why the same cannot happen again in response to the deep cultural malaise portrayed so admirably in “Adolescence”.