So I’ve read the Jonathan Haidt graduation speech, and it strikes me as perfectly anodyne, occasionally inspirational, and in no way offensive. Of course the people who objected to his giving a speech hadn’t read the speech; they only objected to his presence, because of other things he’d said elsewhere. But those protests illustrate some of those other things he’d been saying.
I’ll quote some bits, including what I quoted yesterday.
The Atlantic, Jonathan Haidt, today: Pay Attention, subtitled “Essential advice for the class of 2026”
It’s mostly about living your potential, thinking for yourself, taking advantage of opportunities. “Treasure your attention.” I quoted this yesterday:
In 2014, when she was nearly 80 years old, the poet Mary Oliver wrote a short poem titled “Instructions for Living a Life.” It goes like this:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.It sounds simple. But paying attention is in fact one of the most challenging and meaningful things you can do. Because what you pay attention to shapes what you care about. And what you care about shapes who you become.
He then quotes something David Foster Wallace said in his commencement address in 2005 at Kenyon College.
He said, “the really significant education-in-thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” He was right, and he seemed to anticipate that, two decades later, there would be so many powerful people and big companies trying to take that choice away from you.
They compete with each other to capture your attention. Think about that phrase. It acknowledges that your attention is valuable. But it also reveals that some of the biggest corporations in human history aren’t trying to earn your attention, or deserve your attention. They’re trying to take it from you.
This evokes his warnings of the dangers of social media, in his books. He goes on with examples of asking his students to turn off their phones, to disconnect from their social apps.
Once you’re in control of your attention, you can start to ask yourself one of life’s most exciting questions: “What do I want to do?”
Of course, the answer to this question is going to be different for each of you. But looked at in another way, I think the answer may be the same for all of you. What should you do? You should do hard things.
With his repeated message: “humans, and especially young people, are not fragile.”
And then:
Which brings me to my final point. Because along with the question “What should I turn my attention towards?” comes a related question: “Whom should I spend my attention on?”
Once again, the answer is going to be different for each of you. And once again, the answer may also be the same for all of you: You should spend a lot of your attention on real people in the real world.
He worries about people getting lost on their phones. Make personal connections, he says. And he ends:
Here’s something else I can tell you: The world needs you to seize that opportunity with everything you’ve got. It won’t be easy. You’ll face the universal challenges encountered by all the generations who came before you, and you’ll face the unique ones that have arisen for your generation.
But if you treasure your attention, and then use it to do hard things, with other people, in real life, then––and trust me on this, as a social psychologist––your life is going to be amazing. And the world is going to be a far better place because you’re in it.
My thoughts: most people won’t do this, because they don’t need to. Most people go through life following prescribed social roles. They don’t think, because thinking might undermine the presumptions of their social and religious tribes. Easier to conform.
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Aside, since I saw this online just now.
- JMG, today, via press release: GOP Bill Would Mandate Inscribing “In God We Trust” In “Prominent Locations” On Every Federal Building In US
- These are the people who don’t think, and don’t want anyone else to think either.
- And, this thought just occurred to me: they are like billionaires, for whom what they have is never enough. I’ll expand on this later.
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Or maybe not an aside. I should catch up on some related items.
- Salon, Amanda Marcotte, today: The Christian right hijacks America’s 250th, subtitled “Trump’s Rededicate 250 event erases the U.S.’s secular history”
“On Sunday, May 17, the White House will kick off the celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary with an alarming event: Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, an all-day prayer festival featuring administration officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The founders would no doubt be appalled, as there is nothing to rededicate; they explicitly wrote the Constitution to reflect their belief that the U.S. is a secular nation. But Trump’s second term has been dominated by a single-minded determination to erase real history and replace it with self-flattering fantasies of the MAGA movement.”
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This is just weird. Are we not civilized? Or are we religiously-befuddled tribalists?
Vox, Christian Paz, yesterday: A year of Trump is backfiring on the religious right, subtitled “Americans don’t really want “Christian nationalism.”
This weekend, an array of Christian religious leaders and government officials are scheduled to gather at the National Mall in Washington, DC. They’ll convene to pray, yes, but this rally — organized as part of the White House-backed Freedom 250 celebrations tied to this coming July 4 — will also serve as a “rededication of our country as One Nation under God.”
If you’ve been following the cultural resurgence of religiosity in the United States, this ceremony shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The religious right has been ascendant during the second presidency of Donald Trump, and they’ve harnessed his disdain for rules and norms to blur the lines between church and state.
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I don’t know why I haven’t being seeing notices from the Veritasium channel on Facebook lately, but today I did get one.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/4032484263632626
(I still haven’t figured out how to link some videos to Fb posts. I’ll try to fix this tomorrow.
*This* is about deep reality, not the childish fantasies the religious project onto the entire universe. The idea here, not new but explained well, is that, in mathematics, there are things that are true that cannot be proved; and about how very simple rules, in Conway’s “Game of Life,” can generate patterns that we perceive as living, even intelligent. Which is to say: human intuitions are not reliable. Reality is deeper and more complex than what humans think.
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About one of those childish fantasies.
I’m reading the new Neil deGrasse Tyson book, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter, which has this passage, on page 38:
Imagine a pair of Aliens, perched halfway across the Milky Way, staring at a dense star field, and one says to the other, “See that distant star? The one that’s indistinguishable from a billion other stars just like it? On its third rock in orbit, there’s a species that’s certain the whole universe was made just for them.”
