Beware of monocausal explanations. With that proviso, a new essay in The Atlantic by Jonathan Haidt is an excellent attempt to lay almost all the blame for our current madness at the feet of social media and Facebook in particular. (Although I have to admit that I wouldn’t have come across this without following the always-interesting @georgetrefgarne on Twitter).

“This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and local), and it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight. The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution. Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.“

Haidt rightly references Martin Gurri. It’s also delightful to see a shoutout for the late, great Steve Horwitz.

“A brilliant 2015 essay by the economist Steven Horwitz argued that free play prepares children for the ‘art of association’ that Alexis de Tocqueville said was the key to the vibrancy of American democracy; he also argued that its loss posed ‘a serious threat to liberal societies.’ A generation prevented from learning these social skills, Horwitz warned, would habitually appeal to authorities to resolve disputes and would suffer from a ‘coarsening of social interaction’ that would ‘create a world of more conflict and violence.’“

Read the whole thing. It’s unsparing to all sides, as it should be, and even softens its monocausal frame toward the end with Haidt’s concerns about parenting styles.