What Jean Twenge And Jonathan Haidt Can’t Answer About Digital Technology

Twenge and Haidt Tells Us About Habitual Relations Not Metaphysical Whys

I don't mean this as a critique but as an observation about how we talk about the causal connection between digital technology and mental health.

When I see Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt writing on the relationship between digital technology and mental health, I see them naming associations or Humean causes, not answering the bigger questions of "why."

Let's say 8 hours of digital technology associates clearly with mental health decline. Okay. Why is someone using technology for 8 hours? It's addictive.

Okay, but what conditions allowed that person to use it?

1. Is our technological society simply the material context that enables and empowers it?

2. Does parenting play a role?

3. Do jobs require it? So it's an economic necessity?

4. Does social status now fall digitally, and so we must use digital media to find our social status?

5. Does the cheapness of addictive products and their omnipresent advertisements create an unsatiable desire for it?

Etc.

I could list more WHYS. But then I'd also have to go deeper and ask questions like:

1. Why do we desire digital technology?

2. What end do we think it provides us?

3. Why doesn't the virtue of prudence and self-control prevent us from vicious use of this technology?

Etc.

For me, the brilliant work of thinkers like Twenge and Haidt explains how mental health decline follows from digital technology use often, and so we can infer a habitual relation or Humean cause.

But it doesn't—it can't—answer why in the older sense. It doesn't answer why by explaining all the causal factors involved in the reason WHY this correlation can in fact exist. It names one particular and vital connection but still leaves unanswered WHY the connection exists at all.

I know I am cutting against the grain when I say this, but I still feel strongly that the real virtues of prudence and self-control with their real causal ability (since they are powers to be actualized) can get closer to answering WHY questions.

I think this is the larger question that, If we begin to answer it, will help us to manage the next crisis that comes our way, since it will drive us to answers that—while not answering every possible question—will provide stability since metaphysical WHYS get more directly at the question than Humean WHYS.