The Pulitzer-winning author of The Overstory on how ocean life inspired his latest novel – and why we need to rewrite our relationship with nature

His new novel is dedicated to his sister, who died in 2022. In common with the acclaimed and Pulitzer prize-winning The Overstory, which related several characters’ stories in the context of trees, their habitats and their precarious future, Playground plunges us into the complex and frequently unfamiliar world of the ocean with a radical purpose: forest and ocean are not merely backdrop but a way of decentring the human, of insisting that if fiction limits itself to an anthropocentric universe, it severely limits its potential.

Quelle: ‘I no longer have to save the world’: Novelist Richard Powers on fiction and the climate crisis

Enlightenment liberalism neglected the socially embedded nature of the self, Taylor contends, but the Romantics can tell us how to restore a shared sense of meaning and purpose.

Lyric poets and mathematicians, by general agreement, do their best work young, while composers and conductors are evergreen, doing their best work, or more work of the same kind, as they age. Philosophers seem to be a more mixed bag: some shine early and some, like Wittgenstein, have distinct chapters of youth and middle age; Bertrand Russell went on tirelessly until he was almost a hundred. Yet surely few will surpass the record of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who is back, at ninety-two, with what may be the most ambitious work ever written by a major thinker at such an advanced age. The new book, “Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment” (Belknap), though ostensibly a study of Romantic poetry and music, is about nothing less than modern life and its discontents, and how we might transcend them.

(…)

Taylor’s new book is formidably chewy, with page after page featuring passages of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Rilke, offered both in the original German and in translation. Long analyses of T. S. Eliot and Milosz arrive, too. But, though Taylor’s subjects are often severely abstract, his sentences are lucid, even charmingly direct, and his purpose is plain. We once lived in an “enchanted” universe of agreed-upon meaning and common purpose, where we looked at the night sky and felt that each object was shaped with significance by a God-given order. Now we live in the modern world the Enlightenment produced—one of fragmented belief and broken purposes, where no God superintends the cosmos, common agreement on meaning is no longer possible, and all you can do with the moon is measure it. “I admire the moon as a moon, just a moon,” Lorenz Hart sighed, with memorable modernity, adding, significantly, “Nobody’s heart belongs to me today.” Enlightened, we are alone.

Romantic poetry—the poetry of Shelley and Keats, in English, of Novalis and Hölderlin, in German—first diagnosed this fracture (the argument goes) and offered a way to heal it. Where neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope appealed to an ordered world, with clear meanings and a hierarchy of kinds, the Romantics recognized that this was no longer credible. The enchanted world had been replaced by the modern world. We could hardly go back toward ignorance—Goethe, one of Taylor’s heroes, participated in the modern world as a scientist—but we had to find a way to reënchant it. The best way to heal the wound is through poetry and music, of the sort that doesn’t offer propositions but casts spells and enacts rituals. The arts are not subsidiary places of secondary sensations but the primary place where we go to recall feelings of wholeness, of harmony not just with “Nature”—the craggy peaks the Romantics loved and the Italian lakes they lingered by—but with existence itself. Poetry and music do this by escaping the constraints of intellect, by going at things atmospherically rather than argumentatively. They convey a sublime atmosphere of sound, ineffable intimations of immortality, and so the apprehension of a “cosmic connection.”

 

Taylor reproduces lines from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (“And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; / A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of thought”) and tells us, “To let oneself be carried by this passage is to experience a strong sense of connection, far from clearly defined . . . but deeply felt; a connection not static, but which flows through us and our world.” Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” is similarly effervescent in diction, similarly ethereal in effect. The lines “O for a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, / With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purple-stained mouth” cast a spell as much as they describe a feeling. Taylor writes, “The rhythmic flow between the features as recounted in the poem somehow encounters, meets, connects up with the flow between the features as we live it.” Classical art, he argues, moves us by convincing us; Romantic art convinces us by moving us. (…)

Quelle: How the Philosopher Charles Taylor Would Heal the Ills of Modernity

Here a link for another interview with Charles Taylor in June 2024: https://christianscholars.com/where-language-can-lead-ft-mcgill-universitys-charles-taylor-i-saturdays-at-seven-ep-36/

Todd Ream: Well, those efforts have certainly been well-received. And as one who was a grateful graduate student when you were working on your sources of self, and it already put your works on Hegel into circulation, I appreciated them I will say and many others are too. 

Want to transition now, if I may, to talking about some of your most recent works. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of Human Linguistic Capacity was published in *2016. And then just recently, your Cosmic Connections, which you referenced earlier, Poetry in an Age of Disenchantment was published. In the first of these two interrelated works, you proposed linguistic holism. Would you begin by offering an overview of that proposal and what you mean by it?

Charles Taylor: Yeah, well, there’s really, as I look back on that book, language book, there really are two senses in which you can talk about holism. Number one is that, in developed language, there is a sense when I use a word to describe something seriously, I’m not joking, I’m not caricaturing, that this is the right description, this is the right word. But you can only articulate, even raise the question, is that the right word, if you have all the resources of language at your disposal, right?

So, think of an argument that used to be yours, you’re characterizing that as foolishness or characterizing that as stupidity or in characterizing that as a bad faith description. You have an alternative in mind, and you are, what captures better that behavior, that situation, and so on. And you have to defend yourself against it, right? Because you’re making an implicit claim. So the whole of language, in a certain sense, is kind of prior to any particular argument about a particular description. That’s one sense of holism. 

The other sense of holism, and maybe I didn’t make this clear enough in the book, is that language has this important place in human life that it, it’s a mode of being together with others in which we bring up things for discussion or perception, which are recognized as not for me and for you only, but for us, right? A kind of sharing of that consciousness. 

And if I had to rewrite that book, I’m not going to try this in my life, but if I had to rewrite that book, I would make more of this, that the extraordinary thing is that I drew on people like Bruner. And I’m recently reading a book that I should have been, published before mine and that I should have been using but I didn’t know existed, which is by Greenspan and Shanker, about children and how they’re inducted into language. And you realize that their only way to induct children into language is by intense communication, intense sense of what children love and always looking for. 

They want their parents to talk to them, to play with them, to pay attention to them, and that gives them a sense of who they are and so on. So that it’s this being, I call it, for us, and not for you and for me, but for us. Language is always that kind of place in human life. 

I mean you can see this in certain very sophisticated situations where, let’s say some, some politician has actually been caught with his hand in the till, but it isn’t yet public knowledge, but the inside dopesters in Ottawa or Washington all know about it, so they’re all talking about it at a cocktail party in which there are other people that are not privy to this. And so they’re not raising it themselves. (…)

Todd Ream: In your recently released book, Cosmic Connections, you turn to poetry as an expression of language that could address at least some of these insufficiencies. Would you please offer an example or two of how poetry serves us in such ways? 

Charles Taylor: Yeah. Well, I think, yes. A lot of us have some sense that they, that nature or the, let’s say, the planet and all its differences and so on, that cosmos, as people might call it, right, that we live in, is something deeply meaningful for us. Or sometimes we think, when we look at the devastation of the planet by ourselves, we think it should be more meaningful for us, right, than it has been. 

Okay, but now we get the really crucial point in light of a point we made immediately before. What’s the language that you can find which will tell you what the meaning of the cosmos is? And here, I think that we’re in a very strange situation that looks as though it bars any progress, but I don’t think it does, but it looks as though. Why? Well, because there are various kinds of artistic expression, which help to articulate how we can feel about the larger universe that surrounds us.

But it’s very hard if somebody doesn’t get it. To say, okay, I’ll give you an alternative description, right? And what I wanted to do was to show that in the case of poetry of the Romantic time and what succeeds that, which everybody is deeply influenced by that Romantic term. So, how about, I thought to myself, how about if, I try to take some examples like Wordsworth, like Hölderlin, and so on, and do a reading of them, where you can see that what’s happening here, is you have a very powerful sense of cosmic order, but it isn’t one that you could defend in philosophical terms, but it’s very, very powerful sense that arises from that. 

I want the reader, in the end, to put all that into a context, even bigger context than the book, with the underlying idea that there’s always been some sense of the cosmos, which has moved people, and that in the 18th century and before, in the Renaissance period, it was these notions of cosmic order that people believed in philosophically, right, and then the philosophical belief was undermined by modern natural science, and the order of Newton was not like the order that Aristotle offered us. 

But the sense of wanting some kind of contact of that sort remained very strong. So artists, poets, composers, because I have side references to these, but particularly poets, stepped in a certain sense. But they stepped in with a different, different contribution because they aren’t telling you anything which will permit you to prove that’s the real nature of things. They just give you a very powerful sense that that’s the world we live in. Right? 

And so there’s a kind of, I call it epistemic retreat. They’re not trying to say this is the final correct description of things. So we can follow that through. And then other changes occur. You know, the whole sense of a continuing cosmic order really is swept aside by modern sense of the universe since the big bang and evolution and so on.

And then we get another kind of connection that people are finding in the dimension of time, in the dimension of what I call higher times. And there’s 20th century figures like Eliot and Milosz, yeah. 

Überall Ernüchterung. Und doch sehnen wir uns danach, mit dem Kosmos verbunden zu sein. Der große Philosoph Charles Taylor erzählt in seinem neuen Buch ‚Cosmic Connections‘ von der Macht der Spiritualität. (Interview in ‚Die Zeit‘ vom 15. Juli 2024)

DIE ZEIT: Wir sehnen uns danach, mit dem Kosmos in Verbindung zu sein. So sagt es Ihr neues Buch Cosmic Connections. Ist das Wort Kosmos nicht veraltet? Was soll es noch heißen?
Charles Taylor: Kosmos ist ein altes Wort für die Ordnung des Universums, deren Teil wir als Menschen sind. Aber es ist nicht veraltet, die Art der Verbundenheit hat sich nur beständig gewandelt. Heute redet man eher von der natürlichen Umwelt, von der wir uns entfremdet haben, weil wir sie als pures Instrument für unsere Zwecke behandeln. Mir geht es in meiner Arbeit um die Beziehungen des Menschen zur umgebenden lebendigen Natur, die uns etwas bedeutet. Diese kosmische Verbundenheit ist eine Quelle von Kraft und Sinn, aus der sich das moderne Selbst nährt.
 
ZEIT: Gilt das nur für moderne Menschen, die in ihrem Verhältnis zur Natur und in ihrer Empfindsamkeit westlich geprägt sind?
Taylor: Nein, Menschen waren zu allen Zeiten und in allen Kulturen hungrig danach, als Mikrokosmos mit einer größeren Ordnung verbunden zu sein, um daraus geistige und spirituelle Nahrung zu ziehen. Diese Sehnsucht nimmt aber immer wieder radikal verschiedene Formen an. Mal tritt sie uns sprachlich in den Gedichten von Baudelaire, Rilke oder Miłosz entgegen, mal in einer indigenen Naturreligion, mal in der indischen Geistesgeschichte, mal in der gegenwärtigen Arbeit an einer ökologisch intakten Welt. Die Sehnsucht gilt nicht einfach einer bewussten Wahrnehmung der Umwelt, sondern einer besonderen Verbundenheit, in der Freude, Inspiration und Bedeutung spürbar werden.

Taylor: Mir geht es um einen epistemischen Rückzug, und das soll heißen: nicht immer bloß auf wissenschaftliche Erklärung orientiert und fixiert sein, sondern auch die Macht des Unerklärlichen und des Unverfügbaren spüren. Die Poesie lässt zwischen dem Subjektiven und der physischen Welt offene Spielräume der Erfahrung und der Deutung, und in diesem Dazwischen kann entstehen, was uns verzaubert. Romantisch ist die Idee von einer Sprache, die aufgrund ihrer Doppelnatur zweierlei vermag: Sie kann die Dinge einfach nur instrumentell benennen, sie kann aber auch Bedeutungen in Worten entdecken und neu hervorbringen. In der höheren, der poetischen Sprache erleben wir den Versuch, etwas auszudrücken, das sich uns entzieht und das uns unwillkürlich nach einem treffenderen Ausdruck suchen lässt, weil wir spüren: Dieses Wort trifft es oder trifft es noch nicht. Die Metaphern, die wir finden, sind in gewisser Weise lebendig, sie entfalten sich. Sie bringen etwas hervor, das sich genau zwischen einer rein subjektiven Projektion und einer völlig unabhängigen objektiven Realität bewegt. (…)

ZEIT: Kriege und Klimawandel stellen uns gegenwärtig aber unromantische Fragen: Haben wir seit 1800 historisch überhaupt Fortschritte zum Besseren gemacht?
Taylor: Zweifellos sind heute die ethischen Standards hoch, die wir historisch entwickelt haben, und ebenso zweifellos ist das reale Verhalten der Menschen oft nicht auf der Höhe dieser Standards. Aber es gibt in der Geschichte so etwas wie ein ethisches Wachstum, auch wenn es nicht linear ist: Heute zählt ideell jedes einzelne menschliche Leben, und selbst ein Diktator wie Xi Jinping würde aus diesem Grund öffentlich nicht vom Unwert des Lebens der unterdrückten Uiguren sprechen, sondern eher von amerikanischen Lügen. Es hat historische Zäsuren wie die europäische Aufklärung und die Französische Revolution gegeben, in deren Folge die Sklaverei abgeschafft wurde und die Menschenrechte formuliert wurden. Der Gedanke der Unantastbarkeit der Würde ist seither in der Welt. Und seit der Amerikanischen und der Französischen Revolution ist auch die Idee der unveräußerlichen Rechte so präsent wie der Gedanke des Rechts auf Selbstbestimmung. Politische Autorität muss legitimiert sein. All dies sind Neuerungen in der Geschichte, die wir als Fortschritt verstehen können, auch dort, wo gegen diese Standards massiv verstoßen wird.
ZEIT: Sie sind nun 92 Jahre alt und haben drei Jahrzehnte an diesem Buch Cosmic Connections geschrieben. Die letzten dreißig Jahre haben die Welt in ein Chaos aus Krieg, Autokratie und Ökokollaps verwandelt. Wie hat sich diese Realität auf Ihr Projekt ausgewirkt? Taylor: Ich bin ein und derselbe Mensch, der entsetzt ist über diese Entwicklungen und zugleich an den kosmischen Verbundenheiten gearbeitet hat. Über die Frage, ob Menschen in ihrer Geschichte moralisch gewachsen sind, hätte ich sonst nicht nachgedacht. Ich bin davon überzeugt, dass Wege nach vorn uns nicht zu einer universellen einzigen Form von Spiritualität führen können, sondern dass die Wege so irreversibel vielfältig sind wie die Spiritualitäten, aus denen wir Menschen uns nähren. Ethisches Wachstum kann es nur in deren wechselseitiger Anerkennung und Versöhnung geben, auch wenn wir gegenwärtig Rückschläge erleben. Ich möchte es wiederholen: Die Geschichte hat die Form einer Spirale. Menschen verfügen über eine Offenheit gegenüber der umgebenden Welt, die ihnen etwas zu sagen hat und mit der sie in vielfältiger Weise in Beziehung stehen. Von dieser Offenheit auszugehen, ist auch inmitten von Katastrophen nicht unvernünftig.

Quelle: Charles Taylor: Wie kommt der Zauber zurück in die Welt?

Kev Quirk answered the question in his blog( https://kevquirk.com/blog/why-have-a-personal-site-instead-of-social-media ) and I wanted to add my two cents on top. It’s a topic close to my heart as a website owner and personal web advocate. For Kev, the main reason to have a personal site is ownership. When you are only using social sites, you are completely relying on their decisions and whims. A site might go down, change direction, drop features or let people you don’t want to associate with run amok in the platform. All of these are potential reasons for you to lose what makes being on that platform worth while.

Having my own site and publishing my thoughts here, I can decide what gets shown, what is prioritized and what gets a spotlight. Not someone else and their recommendation algorithms. My website is the place where I can point anyone interested to. It’s like my home address, in the web.

Quelle: Why a personal site rather than social media presence? Jun 30th, 2024 by Juha-Matti Santala (@hamatti@hamatti.org)

Here an additional link for a post by Matthias Ott about webmentions in his highly recommended serial about own your web: https://buttondown.email/ownyourweb/archive/issue-14

Here some more infos and thoughts from Matthias Ott about ‚own your web‘: It looks like I’m not the only one who is unsatisfied with the current state of social media and the Open Web. Many of us share that vision of a Web that lets everyone participate, a Web that is empowering and full of creative ideas, a Web that is home to respectful and welcoming communities, and a Web where people can truly own their work and the content they create and publish. And you know what? Drowned out by the noise on the large, attention-grabbing, enshittificated social networks, that version of the Web still exists. On our personal websites.

Having a personal website in 2023 is a superpower. It’s a place to write, create, explore, and share whatever you like, without limitations. It’s a playground to try out new things, tinker with new technologies, and build something beyond the ordinary. It’s a tool to make yourself heard, to participate in online discourse, create community, and make new friends. And, it’s a place to truly own your content and tell your story. It’s your personal home on the Web.

Now imagine a place where you actually own your content, your connections, and your online identity.

And now, imagine that this place is your personal website, under your own domain name, under your control.

This is the basic idea behind the IndieWeb. The IndieWeb is a community of independent and personal websites and the people behind those sites creating tools that enable a decentralized, people-focused alternative to the corporate web and its social media silos.

The IndieWeb has already been playing a key role in developing many of the tools that make an independent, decentralized network of personal websites possible. This in itself is invaluable. Now it is on all of us to implement more and more of those features into our sites, build even more tools and solutions for the independent web, and help to lower the barrier of entry so that the IndieWeb’s vision of owning your content and online identity will be more accessible to evermore people. Every step we take will change the Web for the better. Because ultimately, the IndieWeb is for everyone.

The next chapter of the IndieWeb awaits and the fight for an independent, open web seems more worthwhile and promising than ever. Tim Berners-Lee once said: “You can make the walled garden very very sweet. But the jungle outside is always more appealing in the long term.”

Let’s make this jungle wild, exciting, and beautiful again.

Imagine, just for a second, a future in which we all have our own websites and that those sites are at the center of everything we do and create online. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to collect reactions from other personal websites or large platforms when we publish something on our own sites? And wouldn’t it be exciting if we could actually enable decentralized conversations across our websites, by letting our sites talk to each other?

Well, there is a way to that today: Webmentions. Webmentions are one of the fundamental IndieWeb building blocks and a powerful way to establish rich interactions between websites. As I wrote earlier this year, comments used to be at the heart of the interactions that happened around blogs and personal sites. It’s time to bring them – and the people – back to our sites. Webmentions are a part of that.

Here some own thoughts on this topic: I totally agree to all former thoughts on this complex topic (ownership, self-determination, freedom, interaction, community, identity…) and hope for your additional thoughts and comments. What are your main reasons for having a personal website instead of or additionally to social media?

Schneebedeckte Berge, Palmenstrände, verwunschene Dörfer, Kräuter und Kulinarik: Griechenlands malerische Mittelmeer-Insel verzaubert Künstler seit jeher – und nicht nur die.

Mountains, palm-lined beaches, enchanted villages, herbs and culinary delights: Greece’s Mediterranean island enchants artists – and not just them. Crete is the largest of Greece’s islands. The picturesque landscape of the island in the eastern Mediterranean is the muse of many of its inhabitants. Crete was the birthplace and home of world-famous artists such as the painter El Greco, composer Mikis Theodorakis and writer and Nobel Prize winner Nikos Katzantzakis. Cultures intersect here and the senses are sharpened – by nature, art and people. A researcher of Greek food culture cooks ancient recipes under olive trees on an open fire. In the mountains of Crete, herbs for Malotira tea are discovered that only grow at an altitude of 1800 meters. The painter Angelos Spartalis not only creates oil paintings, but also works with film and ceramics. In the traditional pottery village of Margarites, Crete’s clay is potted and fired, just as the Cretans have been doing since Minoan times. Georgia Dagaki plays rock music with a lyre, an ancient instrument that was previously reserved for men on Crete. The documentary by Lourdes Picareta has the original title „Crete with all senses“.

Quelle: Traumziele: Kreta mit allen Sinnen

The spell of words … a wonderful book in which a Booker prizewinner explains what makes classic short stories work so well.

This book is a delight, and it’s about delight too. How necessary, at our particular moment. Novelist and short story writer George Saunders has been teaching creative writing at Syracuse University in the US for the last 20 years, including a course in the 19th-century Russian short story in translation. “A few years back, after the end of one class (chalk dust hovering in the autumnal air, old-fashioned radiator clanking in the corner, marching band processing somewhere in the distance, let’s say),” he had the realisation that “some of the best moments of my life, the moments during which I’ve really felt myself offering something of value to the world, have been spent teaching that Russian class.”

Now Saunders has developed as essays some of the thoughts arising from those classes, and put them together into a book alongside the stories he’s discussing – by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Gogol. These essays aren’t anything like academic analysis. The questions that get asked in a reading-for-writers class are inflected differently from literary criticism – “Why did the writer do this?” rather than “How must we read this?” – even if they converge finally on the same points of appreciation, and the same questions of meaning.

Quelle: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders review – rules for good writing, and more

For further reading here the link for a very nice interview with George Saunders about his new short stories collection „Liberation Day“ in the „Time“: https://time.com/6221432/george-saunders-liberation-day-interview/

What was it like to write stories after your intensive study of Chekhov, Turgenev, and other Russian greats?

There was a little bit of feeling inspired, because getting inside those stories really got me energized about the form—and also made me realize there were things within the form that I hadn’t tried yet. Those Russian stories are so good at creating feelings of confusion and ambiguity on the part of the reader, and at the end, they say, “All these things are true.” They just leave you in that space, going, “What am I supposed to believe?” And the story’s going to say, “Well, all of it.” So that’s something I’m trying to do.

In Liberation Day, it feels like you’re leaning even more into ambiguity, leaving space for the reader’s interpretation.

It might have to do with the times in which it was written, because the highest form of wisdom I could find to get through the last three or four years is to say something like, “Admit everything. Admit all sides of the issue. Admit my own confusion about what’s going on politically and with COVID.” And don’t try to do what I might normally do, which is to tilt toward optimism or a sort of facile accommodation. Life is complicated. Let’s leave everything in.

https://scribe.rip/@kiyoshimatsumoto/wabi-sabi-japans-simplistic-way-of-life-40fbb0ec3492

Wabi-Sabi is Japanese acceptance of imperfections as both meaningful and in their own way, beautiful — a refuge from the modern world’s obsession with perfection. Wabi-sabi is a concept of aesthetics, which helps us see the world in a whole new way. With roots in Zen as well as the tea ceremony wabi-sabi serves to remind us that everything in nature is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete. It promotes imperfection as the natural state of all things, including ourselves. A belief in wabi-sabi takes the pressure off the need to pursue perfection, allowing us to relax more in everyday living.

Here is a beautiful quote by Richard Powell, author of Wabi-Sabi Simple. “Wabi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect”.

This quote captures the essence of wabi-sabi and is a lesson for life. Life moves on whether we are ready for it or not. The fact we are here is a wonderful miracle. Let’s harness our strengths, our true nature — faults and all. And get moving. Love who we are. Your face will change. Your body will change. So too will your knowledge and abilities. Regardless of how we each look, think, or feel, we will always be us. You will always be you. I will always be me. And time will always move on.

Below a link for the traditional tea ceremony in Japan:

https://mai-ko.com/travel/culture-in-japan/tea-ceremony/japanese-tea-ceremony/

The founder of the tea ceremony Sen no Rikyu stated that the meaning of tea ceremony means being present at the moment and realizing that every moment only occurs once. His philosophy is known as ichi go ichi e : one time – one meeting. This phrase roughly translates as “every moment occurs only once” or “cherish every moment” or “once in a lifetime chance.” 

The tea ceremony is not about the taste. It is all about enjoying the moment and remembering that this moment will never repeat. We have to forget about everything and just focus on drinking tea in harmony. Even when two people meet in the same room and drink from the same cup, it is not the same moment. The tea meeting, which may seem like a simple routine, should be deeply enjoyed as that tea moment will never come back.

The director’s audacious new film about Auschwitz’s commandant was 10 years in the making. He explains how it was made – and the importance of finding light in the darkness

Quelle: Jonathan Glazer on his Holocaust film The Zone of Interest: ‘This is not about the past, it’s about now’

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

Quelle: End the Phone-Based Childhood Now