Culture Friday - Olympic-sized criticism

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday, August 6th, 2021.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler.

MEDIA MONTAGE: Well this just in from Tokyo … U.S. / gymnastics superstar Simone Biles / the four time Olympic gold medalist / has withdrawn from the final individual all-around competition / she said to focus on her mental health / mental health / mental well-being / the US gymnastics team applauding her, writing in a statement, / “after further medical evaluations, Simone Biles has withdrawn … to focus on her mental health / people are using Simone Biles as their own soapbox / what's your reaction to the news? / is she a pathetic quitter or a heroic, trailblazing mental-health warrior, or are both of these narratives wrong? / It's a combination of social media...

The question of emotional pressure that young, high-level athletes are feeling on the world stage these days has prompted many a think piece in the news media.

EICHER: The Wall Street Journal carried an editorial by psychoanalyst Erica Komisar who took aim at social media.

Quoting now: It “leaves teens highly vulnerable to external influence and especially sensitive to harsh criticism and bullying. … Twitter and Instagram are breeding grounds,” she says, “for brutal, constant, and omnipresent bullying and judgment. Social media also encourages unrealistic standards of what it means to be ‘beautiful’ or ‘cool’ and to have a ‘good life,’ all of which contributes to anxiety, self-consciousness, and harsh self-criticism.”

It’s Culture Friday. John Stonestreet is here. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Good morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: I want to read one more quotation from that editorial: “shallow pursuits [of the sort we see on social media] have always been a part of adolescence, but they were a brief developmental phase on the way to self-acceptance and emotional security.

Now social media prolongs this period of self-involvement, self-consciousness, and insecurity, and teens and young adults often get stuck in a negative feedback loop.”

What do you think, John? Is there something to this?

STONESTREET: I think there's absolutely something to this. And we need to be really clear on what it is. The mental health issue across the west, particularly America, is ubiquitous. It is at an all time high. I mean, and it's far worse by the way than COVID. Three times as many people killed themselves in that young adult age bracket than died of COVID last year.

So we took a group that was already struggling with mental health issues. And then we put them all by themselves in front of these very dangerous social media platforms that you've just described, and Erica Komisar described.

But I think it's even more than that. I don't think it's just the bullying: I think this is kind of like if you go back to the Columbine shooters in 1999 people were like, “well, they were bullied.” And what we found out is that that may have been partially true, it really wasn't very true. The most true thing was their philosophy of life that they had embraced.

Now, the problem with the ever fast-moving world of social media and influence is that it doesn't give students a time to really sit down and think about what is true and what is meaningful. And what's worth my attention and loyalties and my allegiances. It moves them from one thing to another. But what it doesn't give them is a philosophy of life. It doesn't give them something bigger than themselves to live for at anything that's beyond the here and now.

In fact, it's not even here. It's just the now, because the here continues to move and social media. You can be here and then somewhere else. And you care about what's happening when you shouldn't care. So there's this perpetual fear of missing out. There's this perpetual sense that something's going on without me—[of] being disconnected.

And there isn't this deeply framed responsibility for loving God and loving neighbor. This deep sense of purpose and meaning, why I am here. How I can actually give my life to someone else. And Jesus was clear, if you don't lose your life, you can't keep it and our life is to be lost for others.

But this is a completely insular and self-oriented and self-referential way of living on social media. You know, you can live with hard challenges if you have meaning. You can't live with the most, you know, incredible amount of leisure and wealth if you don't have meaning.

BUTLER: John, in that same article, Erica Komisar writes this:

A 2019 survey for the Lego Group found that “YouTuber” is the most common career aspiration for 8- to 12-year-olds, nearly three times as popular as “astronaut.”

Hoping to go viral, or earning your 15-minutes of fame is a strong siren call—and not just for youth, but adults as well.

STONESTREET: Yeah, well we've been on a journey. I mean, the journey started, you know, in this modern age of entertainment. There were news stories and entertainment stories. So we went from having news and celebrities to having news about celebrities to having somehow offering celebrities a platform to tell us the news.

You know, I remember, you know, 20 years ago, picking up a newspaper and seeing Johnny Depp on the front page, you know, criticizing the war in Iraq. And I thought to myself, well, I mean, I'm sure he has an opinion and a right to have an opinion, but I'm pretty sure he's not getting security briefings from the Pentagon. So why do I care what this guy, you know, the pirate, has to say about Iraq, because he doesn't know what he's talking about? Now, you fast forward to today. And you have a democratization of celebrity, where some of the most well known people in the world are people with social media channels. And this is the thing that everyone's trying to get.

And, you know, I remember, you know, again, 20 years ago, I'm dating myself, but I'm, I'm working at on the campus of a small Christian college and I have these freshmen over to my house and, and I asked them what they're majoring in, and this you know, he kind of young punk guy says, “I'm majoring in basketball.” And I thought to myself, do you realize where you're at like, you're in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee, and you're playing NAIA Division 2, but like, if this is your life, this is pretty sad.

In other words, it was the emulation of this basketball as life sort of thing with NBA players. And he had completely lost perspective. Multiply that across the whole scope of adolescence, where the democratization of celebrity has given everyone the illusion of this is what it means to be an adolescent is to try to be a celebrity and therefore to try to be an authority and that somehow this gives you some sort of moral standing in which to make proclamation and quote unquote use your platform. I think you lose any sort of external reference point for truth, for meaning, for value, for perspective.

EICHER: Switching gears now. Did you see the story about a short-lived Planned Parenthood president, Dr. Leana Wen, talking about why her tenure was so short-lived? According to our story in WORLD, she came under fire from colleagues for not being sufficiently enthusiastic about abortion.

Leah Savas reported: “Wen says she used to think pro-life groups hyped the connection between Planned Parenthood and abortion to bring down the organization’s reputation among legislators. But she discovered … that Planned Parenthood wanted to own the abortion label. Some of her coworkers said they were proud to provide the procedure and would call themselves ‘pro-abortion’ rather than ‘pro-choice.’”

Does this tell you the pro-life argument is a winner or maybe just that the pro-choice argument is a loser, or is it something else?

STONESTREET: That's a that's an interesting way to put the question. I think the pro life argument is a winner because it matches reality and not because of this but I've been looking at the story too and wondering, man, what is actually happening here? Is this the story of the loss of social capital around abortion, leading those that believe that the you know the quality of life itself rests on preserving it now have to go kind of full on on offense, you know, when you when you kind of are in the cultural majority and people are with you, and you know, you're able to sneak it in under the radar of you know, verbal gymnastics like women's health care or whatever else. Then at that point, you don't really have to defend it. And now that all of that I think has been exposed, that you just have to come out and own it. Is that what it is? I mean, is this kind of like, you know, the the communist revolutionaries finally admitting that their plan was to kill everybody? I don't know. I mean, this is this seems to be like, what this is.

But you know, some of us have been saying this for a really long time, right? We've been saying that this is planned parenthood's bread and butter. This is where they make their money. This is what they're most committed to. This is not really something about women's health. This is something about abortion. And you see this come out when you have these people that are like, well, I really want to help women, in other words, their true believers in the helping women narrative, and then they get there. And it wasn't this the story of Abby Johnson, how crazy would it be if Leanna when would you know, follow the path of Abby Johnson gets so disoriented and turn around and go, yeah, maybe this wasn't such a great plan and maybe the unborn are human and become an activist against Planned Parenthood. That would be great. Because it's just this is, you know, evil that's hidden is evil that flourishes, and now we have yet another story of somebody kind of pulling back the cover and saying, here's what's really happening behind the scenes.

BUTLER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

EICHER: John, thanks so much.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.