We Should Be Concerned That Kids Aren't Getting Hurt
Why positive sounding data is actually worrisome and other arguments for the barbarian virtues. Plus one great podcast and three related posts.
Hello Bar-Setters,
Tuesday I argued that The Barbarian Virtues Still Matter:
Today, I wanted to support that contention with some other resources.
The first comes from a fantastic interview with Dr. Jonathan Haidt, whose much anticipated book, The Anxious Generation, came out this week.
The Kids Aren’t Getting Hurt. Here’s Why That’s Concerning:
At about the 19 minute mark, Haidt discusses a few trends that might sound positive: the dramatic decrease in the number of unintentional injuries in children, as well as a significant decrease in teenage car accidents, drinking, and sex. These all sound like good things, but they are indicative of something terrifying—the stamping out of the human spirit—the lost desire to explore, test boundaries, and live fully.
As Haidt explains:
If everything else were equal… I would say of course we want fewer kids with broken arms…
The CDC gives us data on hospital admissions for various causes and one of is unintentional injuries… And… of all the ages and the two sexes, who do you think has by far the highest rate of injuries, you know broken arms, etc? Who would it be? Teenage boys!
And that used to be true. What is stunning is that… teenage boys in America today are slightly less likely to get injured than 50-year-old men. And they’re slightly less likely to get injured than teenage girls were 15 years ago…
So, if someone says: Oh it’s great that they’re not getting injured. I would say, well look at the suicide rate. The injury rate is down, but the suicide rate is way, way up… There is a pervasive feeling of uselessness, of inability to do anything that matters, loneliness. So, we have kids with unbroken skeletons sitting there feeling disconnected, ripe for recruitment by all kinds of politically extreme organizations. This is not a good tradeoff.
This is what happens when you forget about the barbarian virtues!
I made a similar argument, last fall, regarding the decline in teenage sex:
For moral reasons, you may presume that a decrease in sex is a good thing…
But the decrease in sex is not the result of a moral awakening. If anything, the number of young people who are committed to abstinence has declined since 2008.
The reason that young people are having less sex is because other supernormal stimuli are filling their needs and driving them apart.
They’re having less sex because they are spending more time online and less time together. They are connecting less. They are less comfortable with each other. They trust each other less. They understand each other less. And, having avoided socially vulnerable situations throughout their adolescent years, they’re less willing to risk rejection and hurt feelings.
Make no mistake, moral virtue is on the decline in our younger generations. The reason that people under 35 are having less sex is because the drives that would have led to sex are now satiated by technology.
See the rest of that post, here:
To be clear, Haidt and I are not making the case that we should encourage young people to have sex and do dangerous things. We are saying that it is in their nature to do these things, just as it is in a fox’s nature to hunt rabbits and other prey. Something would have to go very wrong for foxes to suddenly stop hunting. Likewise, the dramatic decline in typical teen and young adult behavior is cause for alarm.
The Barbarian Virtues and Sports Safety
I’ve been focused on the importance of the barbarian virtues for some time now, so I thought it would be fun to share some related posts that I wrote back in the twenty-teens, before I’d heard that Teddy Roosevelt quote.
The following are from my days writing for Breaking Muscle:
This last one came after the death of Maryland Offensive Lineman, Jordan McNair. Well before we had all the facts, the public had come to the conclusion that the Maryland football staff must be at fault. A terrible accident happened. Fire them all.
I saw a bit more grey in this.
I began by acknowledging that the Maryland coaches did have a duty to keep their players safe and that there is a tendency among many “hard core” coaches to push the intensity of training sessions too far.
But then I made that case that all coaches at the college level feature challenging “gut check” style workouts, and that they should. I didn’t say that the Maryland coaches didn’t cross a line—just that in the absence of evidence, we shouldn’t presume that they had.
Sometimes accidents just happen. We should be careful not to create a world where coaches feel like they can’t risk pushing their athletes hard or where we suggest, as one prominent strength coach did after this incident, that “…standards of what we can expect can be thrown out the window. Arbitrary training protocols and ‘toughness’ challenges are a thing of the past.”
On the contrary, shared standards bring people together and they motivate us to aspire to become something greater. No society that shuns standards will create great people, particularly in a world of mass temptation.
Sure, we can stop doing blatantly harmful, stupid, and dangerous things, and we should screen for health conditions and accommodate them when they are present. But let’s base society around a mutual expectation of common sense rather than claim every tragedy is another reason to increase regulation and push our kids toward living their lives on VR headsets. Let’s err towards the essential nature of rites of passage, rather than the need to prevent any possibility that accidents could ever happen.
Thank you for reading and sharing!
Carry the fire!
Shane