Human beings are flawed, finite creatures. But they are not problems to be solved, argues AEI senior fellow Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience. In the technological age, we too often see basic human activities, from reading and writing, to shopping and conversing, as obstacles to efficiency that must be overcome, simplified, or replaced. And while digital technology has provided many benefits, it has also come with unintended consequences for our habits of mind and social interactions. Rosen argues that we need a “new humanism” that puts the human person front-and-center and encourages people to regularly “touch grass.” 

Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.

Related Links:

The Extinction of Experience (Christine Rosen)
The Outrage Industry ( Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj
Irony and Outrage (Dannagal Goldthwaite Young)
“A Long View on Artificial Intelligence” (A Law & Liberty forum on artificial intellegence led by Rachel Lomasky)
“What the Smartphone Hath Wrought,” (A Law & Liberty review by Joseph Holmes of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation)

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. The date is September 6th, 2024. Our guest today is Christine Rosen. She is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, society and culture, technology and culture, and feminism. Concurrently, she’s a columnist for the Commentary Magazine and is one of its co-hosts for their podcast. She is also a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies and Culture and a senior editor in an advisory position at the New Atlantis. 

Her previous positions include editor of In Character, managing editor of the Weekly Standard, and distinguishing visiting scholar at the Library of Congress. She is also the author of several books, including My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of Divine Girlhood, and Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, which is a dynamite book, although it sounds like it would be very unpleasant to read. It’s actually dynamite. A prolific writer, Dr. Rosen is often published in the popular press.

She has a PhD in history with a major in American intellectual history from Emory University and a BA in history from the University of South Florida. Today, we’ll be talking about her new book, The Extinction of Experience, which comes out next Tuesday, September 10th, 2024. By the time this podcast comes out, however, it will already be for sale, and you will be buying it because we’ll persuade you to be interested in this if you’re not already by this podcast. So, Dr. Rosen, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Christine Rosen:

Thanks so much for having me, James. And please, no doctor, I cannot prescribe medication.

James Patterson:

That’s right, that’s right. Well, we’re going to prescribe something today.

Christine Rosen:

Sound advice.

James Patterson:

That’s right, that’s right. So obviously, the term “the extinction of experience” invites the question: What do you mean by experience, and how do things like digital media and social media threaten it with extinction?

Christine Rosen:

That’s a great, great question. The title of the book is actually a phrase that was originally used by a naturalist named Robert Michael Pyle. He was concerned that each new generation wasn’t actually having hands-on experiences in the natural world. And so if a species went extinct, they wouldn’t even register that because they had no real-world experience with it. And I had been reading something that talked through this idea and I thought, that’s actually a problem not just about the natural world, but about the way we talk to each other face-to-face. The fact that a lot of us can’t write by hand any longer and that we don’t teach children to write by hand, and the way we interact in public space. It just got me thinking about all of the human experiences that we now take for granted because we either outsource them to technology, assuming that’s a better and more convenient way to do it, or they’ve simply disappeared and been replaced by technology.

And so what I wanted to grapple with is, how many of those replacements were improvements? How many were not? And are some of the things that we’re unthinkingly embracing as good, in fact, undermining some deep and important truths about what it means to be human?

James Patterson:

Younger millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, these are the people that I’m teaching now. They’re growing up as what used to be called digital natives. These are kids who had digital devices thrust into their hands and grew up with them as kind of natural extensions of the world. How do they differ in their understanding of technology – their use of technology – from the very analog Gen X and baby boomers?

Christine Rosen:

Well, it’s interesting. So I’m Gen X—my kids are Gen Z. They’re 18 years old. They grew up with this stuff. I watched how much more saturated they were in a technological world, just simply by being the age and born at the time they were.

I think what has happened is that we’ve seen, particularly with millennials, that they were the first generation to really spend a good portion of their childhood/young adulthood with these tools. And we all wanted to believe it would be an improvement. Right? The digital natives would know how to search the internet. They would have access to so much information, they would be more knowledgeable. We all wanted to believe this. None of it was true. And we now are starting to see the fallout. In fact, information is not the same thing as knowledge. Those are two separate things. All of this mass of information, if it’s just thrown at you like a fire hose and you cannot curate the true from the false, the good from the bad, the reputable from the disreputable, you actually end up more confused and often more skeptical about everything than you do actually gaining knowledge and wisdom.

That said, the skills that I saw, the de-skilling, I should say, that I saw in younger generations that concerned me most were the human things. Can you look someone in the eye and carry on a conversation? Can you be bored without going slightly crazy? Can you daydream? Can you find ways to entertain yourselves and interact with others in your peer group that don’t have to mediate yourself or others through a screen, or doesn’t involve having to express emotion through emoticons or emojis or memes? And if we’re choosing more and more often to mediate our relationships, what happens when we’re stuck in a situation where you can’t mediate? Are we more impatient? Are we twitchy and can’t handle boredom?

These are all questions that I think, these are qualitative questions. And I think a lot of our discussion in the last 10 to 20 years about technology is about the quantitative benefits and some of the quantitative harms. How many hours do you spend staring at a screen? How many minutes do you save efficiently searching something up on Google versus an encyclopedia? Those are important questions, but we’ve missed the qualitative questions, and I think those are the ones that really are impacting us now, in terms of how people understand themselves, how they talk to other people. Why are our political culture, for example, is so wildly polarized. I mean, there are a lot of strands here and they’re not all causal, but I think those qualitative human interactions are what I was most curious about exploring in the book.

James Patterson:

So in response to the problems that we see with digital media, especially social media, you affirm sort of towards the beginning of the book, we need a new humanism, one that can challenge the engineering driven scientism that has come to dominate culture. Humanism puts human beings and human experiences at its center, not engineering or machines or algorithms. This is a pretty forthright statement. I was actually pretty taken aback when looking at it, that this is the nature of the problem. What does this humanism look? What would it be? What did it look like, and how might it apply constraints to the way we interact with digital media?

Christine Rosen:

That’s a great question. So I think we are in an era, we’re entering an era and the artificial intelligence stuff coming quickly down the pipeline will only accelerate this. We’re in an era where we have to d