Do Our Kids Need a Moral Equivalent of War?

The evidence of human devolution and why it is more important than ever that we set the bar for ourselves, our communities, and our children.

Sep 19, 2023

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Hello Bar-Setters!

A recent report from the Council For a Strong America found that “77% of American Youth Can’t Qualify for Military Service.”

At no fault of their own, the majority of today’s youth, never gain access to the basic physical capacities that have defined human lives for centuries. This strips them of the ability to experience basic human joys and aspirations.

They will find less enjoyment from physical games and feel less confident in their capacity to rise to an occasion. They won’t be empowered to hike up to a beautiful view. They will not feel inclined to ride bikes on the beach, to walk on a nice day, or to launch their kids up in the air while at the pool. They are set up for lives of physical limitation and poor health.

This is evidenced further by a 2016 Harvard Study which found that over 57% of youth between ages 2 and 19 would be obese by the time they were 35:

The physical devolution of our children coincides with other disturbing devolutions.

Mental Devolution:

For example, it has become more common for my athletes to ask for help when figuring out how much weight they need to put on a barbell to add up to the total weight they’re supposed to lift. Even many of my most intelligent “AP-type” students appear overwhelmed when confronted with basic mental arithmetic.

Attentional Devolution:

Similarly, there has been a dramatic devolution in the average person’s ability to focus. As Dr. Gloria Mark, author of Attention Span, explains:

“… back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes... Throughout the years it became shorter… around 2012 we found it to be 75 seconds… And then in the last five, six years, we found it to average about 47 seconds.”.

You’ve almost certainly encountered young people who seem incapable of watching a movie or TV show without feeling the need to distract themselves with their smartphone. One source of entertainment is not enough.

These effects aren’t just reserved to younger generations. Andrew Sullivan, one of the most prolific journalists of our time, has discussed how he finds it much harder to sit and read a book than it was in the days prior to the smartphone. Perhaps you’ve found the same…

The Trajectory of Civilization

In a staggering number of arenas, it would appear that modern humans are losing some of the basic capacities that, not long ago, would have been expected of every adult. I make this case in my book, with reference to two movies, Idiocracy and Wall-E:

In the 2007 comedy, Idiocracy, Joe Bauers is selected for a one-year hibernation experiment after a battery of tests indicates that he is the most average person in the entire armed forces. Bauers is cryogenically frozen, but soon thereafter the officer in charge of the experiment is arrested and Bauers forgotten. He remains frozen until 2505 when the collapse of a gigantic garbage pile awakens him to a world he hardly recognizes. People named after corporate brands spend their days in plastic homes, seated on chairs that have built-in toilets, watching television programs that would make Beavis and Butthead look refined. Bauers assumes that he must be experiencing hallucinogenic effects from the hibernation experiment so he checks into a hospital. This eventually leads him to take a 2505-style IQ test, which reveals that the once-average Joe is now, by far, the smartest person alive.
Similarly, the 2008 Disney and Pixar film Wall-E features a robot garbage compactor of the imagined future. Wall-E patrols the now-toxic earth centuries after humans have been evacuated by Buy-N-Large (the corporate giant who came to own everything). Wall-E eventually finds his way onto a starliner where we see the devolved, morbidly obese human population of the 29th century. People are conveyed across the spaceship on loungers. Screens hover in their faces, prompting them to consume, as robots zoom around to meet their every need.

Light-hearted as these films are, they convey something about the trajectory of civilization that we’ve all felt. Humanity en masse is growing less capable of an increasing number of basic human skills—from navigating, to running and climbing, building shelter, adding numbers in our head, and dealing with boredom or pain. Technological progress is creating a level of convenience, security, and distraction that seems to be making us less human. And if this lack of development makes us less human, the indication is that some level of skill-development is fundamental to our humanity. Without something pulling us up, we become a lesser version of ourselves—less capable, less activated, less engaged, and less likely to pursue the transformative experiences that might change us. This all might somehow be palatable if it wasn’t also killing our spirits.

Fulfillment comes from the pursuit of self-actualization—the pursuit of becoming the fullest, most complete, and best version of yourself. From a spiritual perspective, it comes from the process of becoming the person you are supposed to become.

It’s been said that hell is when the person you are meets the person you could have been.

In a world of supernormal temptations, we need something that pulls us to strive towards our potential. What might that be?

A Moral Equivalent of War

In 1906, the philosopher and “father of psychology,” William James, gave a speech at Stanford where he argued that society needed a “Moral Equivalent of War.” James was an ardent pacifist, yet, he warned that a future with too much peace and safety would have grave costs to our society and our humanity:

Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a type of military character which every one feels that the race should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority. The duty is incumbent on mankind, of keeping military character in stock…

.”...human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible.”

I tend to agree. As did our boisterous 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, who put it this way:

Oversentimentality, oversoftness, in fact, washiness and mushiness are the great dangers of this age and of this people. Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.

James would have been aghast if he lived to witness the atrocities of World War I and II. But the character cultivating effects of these wars seem to prove his point. It is no coincidence that we refer to the generation most affected by this chaotic era as the Greatest Generation.

Many people have observed the following historic trend:

Hard times create strong people.
Strong people create good times.
Good times create weak people.
And weak people create hard times.

This seems to be the case, historically, but I’m not sure that it holds true today.

We’ve reached a point in history where we can continue to increase comfort, safety, and convenience without needing the vast majority of people to contribute in any way. AI and a small techno-elite can guarantee us perpetual comfort and entertainment. How terrifying…

The Disease of Ease

War is awful, but the absence of risk, duty, personal responsibility, and physical standards has also been devastating to our society. Psychologist Rob Henderson makes this case well:

Today, poverty is lower than it’s ever been in the U.S. And yet happiness is falling.
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal reports, “Americans reported being less happy in 2018 than in 2008. Other wealthy countries saw similar decreases, including Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Japan...depression increased 50% between 1990-2017, with the highest increases in regions with the highest income.”
People have been making friends and getting married and forming social bonds for millennia, back when they lived on the edge of death. That’s how they survived in a dangerous world.
A recent study investigated the happiness of the Hadza (modern hunter-gatherers) compared with modern western people. The hunter-gatherers reported higher levels of happiness.
Hunter-gatherers are significantly happier than Americans, Austrians, Italians and citizens in other developed countries.

Americans today are more alienated, depressed, medicated, and unhealthy than ever before. This would have been no surprise to Roosevelt and James. We have not appreciated the duty “...incumbent on mankind…” to keep “…military character in stock.”

Along with this, comes another sense of morality, which rarely occurs to most modern people—what the British philosopher Herbert Spencer called physical morality:

Perhaps nothing will so much hasten the time when body and mind will both be adequately cared for, as a diffusion of the belief that the preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality. Men's habitual words and acts imply the idea that they are at liberty to treat their bodies as they please. Disorders entailed by disobedience to Nature's dictates, they regard simply as grievances: not as the effects of a conduct more or less flagitious. Though the evil consequences inflicted on their dependents, and on future generations, are often as great as those caused by crime; yet they do not think themselves in any degree criminal.

The evil consequences inflicted on their dependents, and on future generations… we’ve talked about that here.

In many ways, we are witnessing the effects of a rapid devolution in humanity. The negative effects of our incessant comfort and ease are wreaking havoc on the human spirit. This momentum will only accelerate as AI transforms society and takes over more of the jobs that once required human capacity.

For the sake of our children, we need to remember that there are essential values, which are not always compatible with increased safety, efficiency, and convenience. As the philosopher Matthew Crawford brilliantly states in his book, Why We Drive:

Safety is obviously very important. But it is also a principle that, absent countervailing considerations, admits no limits to its expanding dominion. It tends to swallow everything before it.... one must venture beyond the mental universe of risk reduction…. That universe takes its bearing from the least competent among us. This is an egalitarian principle that is entirely fitting in many settings, a touchstone of humane society that we rightly take pride in…. But if left unchallenged, the pursuit of risk reduction tends to create a society based on an unrealistically low view of human capacities. Infantilization slips in, under cover of democratic ideals. I will insist on the contrary, that democracy remains viable only if we are willing to extend to one another a presumption of individual competence. This is what social trust is built on. Together they are the minimal endowments for a free, responsible, fully awake people.

Why We Need to Set the Bar

I’m often encouraged when I remember that America found itself in a similar moment in the late 1800s and early 1900s. As technology changed the nature of work and life, obesity, alcoholism, and mental health disorders increased. In his amazing essay, A Call for a Strenuous Age, Brett McKay describes the zeitgeist of late 19th century America:

Rather than wrestling with the soil, men managed abstractions. Rather than experiencing life directly, they read about it secondhand in newspapers and books. Rather than focusing on building character based on action, they worried about developing the right kind of personality based on charm.
The result of this growing sense of disembodiment was a life that began to feel “curiously unreal.” People found themselves in a culture that seemed hollowed out, that lacked a vital gravity, and had become, as Nietzsche put it, strangely “weightless.”

As always, however, pockets of American society began to adapt. There was a movement to form gyms, public parks, recreational sports teams, and organizations like the Boys Scouts.

The same can be found today in the rise of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Crossfit, and adventure races like the Spartan, Tough Mudder, and Go Ruck challenges.

Still, these challenges, while wonderful, do not have enough influence on most people’s daily lives. Families and their children need a more explicit path to offset the black hole that is pulling humanity towards its own devolution. Parents cannot rely on the public school system or the public sphere to fill this need for them. It will take some intentionality.

This will be my mission with the Setting the Bar Newsletter this year. In addition to my typical essays I will hone in on more specific expectations, milestones, artifacts, heuristics, norms, and rites of passage. I want to help parents offset the momentum of human devolution by setting a clear vision of a certain kind of person—an ideal that they and their children can rally towards.

As I’ve said before, most of the problems in parenting and schools today come from a lack of clarity. To navigate modernity, we need a clear vision of the type of person we are trying to create.

What makes you an adult?

What should we expect of adults?

What does it mean to live a good life?

What traits make you admirable?

What matters?

We need more solid answers for these questions.

But before we identify more of the specifics, I want to spend a couple weeks clarifying the context and foundational principles that should inform this vision. Stay tuned…