For the stern-minded, pessimism of the intellect can coexist with optimism of the will. “I’m also not a cynic,” Coates wrote in the same 2013 essay. “Those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can’t guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us.”
But it should not be a surprise that some of those “night travelers on a great tundra” might incline a bit more than past left-wingers to despair. Nor should it be a surprise that amid the recent trend toward increasing youth unhappiness, the left-right happiness gap is wider than before — that whatever is making young people unhappier (be it smartphones, climate change, secularism or populism), the effect is magnified the further left you go.
The smartphone theory of increasing youth unhappiness has been especially in the news this past week, thanks to Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” And it’s been striking how certain critiques of Haidt’s theory from the left seem to object to the idea that youth unhappiness could be anything but rational and natural.
Take the prominent review for Nature by a child development scholar, Candice L. Odgers, which cited American “access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation” as plausible causal alternatives to Haidt’s social-media diagnosis.
The tone of the review suggested that kids really ought to be a bit depressed. Wouldn’t you be, growing up amid “school shootings and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence”? And for an answer to this unhappiness, with neither Providence nor scientific socialism available, Odgers turned to the therapeutic process, lamenting the dearth of school psychologists to help kids process “their symptoms and mental-health struggles.”
This seems like where a good portion of the American left finds itself today: comforted by neither God nor history, and hoping vaguely that therapy can take their place.
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