Category Archives: Social Issues

We Seem to Disagree on Everything

September 10, 2026Extremism, Gender Warfare, Moral Humility, Pluralism, Social Issues, Wokemeanderer007

The divisions in America keep growing in number and in the depth of those divides. As usual, Canada is the same just a little more gently. Polls have shown that many Americans think those divisions are so deep that the country will not be able to survive its problems. In other words, because of polarization we are doomed. But are things that bad?

Mark Edmundson writing for the New York Times pointed out that evolutionary biologists have determined that,

“binary behavior is an evolutionary adaptation. It inheres in the reptile brain. There was a time when it was incumbent on us to decide and decide quickly who was friend and who was foe. Will it eat me? Am I safe around it? Err, if you must, on the side of enmity. You don’t want to equivocate about a sabre-toothed tiger.”

But, he also said, he did not agree things were that bad. Edmundson suggested the famous philosopher Jacques Derrida had some important things to say on the topic. Derrida hated the compulsion so many of us have to divide the world into binaries or polarities. Life just was not that simple he said. That is why according to Edmundson, Derrida was an “an enemy of simple, dualistic thinking.” That is not a bad thing. Such thinking deserves critics. Added to that, he said “Derrida worried that compulsive binary thinking, in which one seeks opposition everywhere, could readily lead to violence…” Edmundson agreed with Derrida. So do I.

Edmundson preferred the position of that modern philosopher Ted Lasso, who said instead, we should “Be curious, not judgmental.” That is often good advice. As a result Derrida called for thinking that did not require polar opposites but instead “resembled a form of thinking that was not based on the tension of opposites but resembled an ever-expanding web of rich associations.” Derrida’s curiosity led him to affirm the free play of the interpreting mind.

I agree with both of them but put it just a little differently. My take is that we should not think and see in black and white, nor even gray. We should think and see in colour. Glorious colour. But that is not what we do.

Instead of that we think in black and white. We think the world is either A or B. 2 choices no more. Pick a side and stick with it. As Edmundson said,

“Our culture is amok with binaries. We have two major parties, just two, and they are forever opposed. When a group tries to start a third party, it can be summarily disabled by the existing powers. We love sports, generally the most binary of activities. One side wins; one side loses. Root hard for your squad and the devil take the opposition. We savor debates where one side wins and one side loses.”

In the larger world, we find allies and we find enemies. We are, as I say, Democrats or Republicans, realists or idealists, people of much faith or people of none. We wear our team jerseys with pride and scoff at the opposition’s colors.

Such binary thinking is just plain impoverished and so are we if confine ourselves to black and white. Yet it is everywhere.

There is one clear modern example of this deficiency which is pretty plain if you look. That is thinking about sex and gender. More and more people are saying there are only 2 sexes and 2 genders. A person is a male or female. Oner or the other. The pendulum is swinging. There are no other choices. In fact this is an issue in the municipal elections in Steinbach this year, as odd as that seems.

But life is not that simple, even if we would like it to be. It is an uncomfortable fact that some people are born with ambiguous sexual organs. It is just not clear whether the person is male or female. Such a person could be one or the other or some combination of both. Such people are called intersex.

The differences between the genders is even less clear. There seem to be a lot of choices when you look. As Edmundson said, “Insisting on purity — you must be one thing or another — will inevitably create confusion and resentment.” That really is the point. Insisting on simple answers will just bring about a lot of unnecessary unhappiness and pain. There is no need to insist upon a clear distinction. There is nothing to be gained by such simplified thinking. Its none of our business. Let others live and let live.

Edmundson had a better approach, which he found in eastern religions. This is what he said,

“A person influenced by the great Eastern texts, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, would be likely to see it differently. The best state of mind is one in which you can look out on all creation, other people in particular, and say to yourself: That, too, I am.

We are all part of one being; we all possess the same soul. This way of seeing does not cultivate opposition or conflict. It accepts what comes its way without picking sides and initiating strife.”

This does not just apply to issues of sex or gender. We should look at the other and keep our opinions to ourself. If the other person is suffering from confusion let him or her or they choose. Be happy.

I am not sure the Bible actually says, as some suggest, “we are all God’s children,” but it could still be true. If you believe in God surely you would say we are all God’s creation. Is that not enough to give us all dignity? Sometimes, we should give up judging in favour of accepting. As the Beatles said, “Whispser words of wisdom. Let it be.”

Is that not enough?

Adding Life to the Death Penalty

January 30, 2026Death Penalty, Social Issues, violencemeanderer007

It hasn’t been making a lot of news lately, amid all of the disarray in the United States, but Donald Trump has had, what The Guardian magazine called “a campaign to reinvigorate judicial killings” in that country. In 2025 in the United States 47 men and no women were executed for crimes. That was almost double the previous year. That is also the highest number since 2009. Ed Pilkington in The Guardian used rather colourful language to describe it as “the greatest frenzy of capital punishment bloodletting in America since 2009.” The word “frenzy” seems a bit excessive to me.

Of course, we must remember, Obama was president in 2009. It was his first year in the presidency. So if I want to blame Trump for 2025, and I do, I must to be fair blame Obama for the executions in 2009. Obama, my favourite president, was also called “the deporter-in-chief.”. He also launched targeted assassinations by drones. He was no pansy when it came to killing. But he was no Trump either.

I am picking on Trump because he seems so keen on the official killings. On his first day of office in the second of his 2 terms as president he issued an executive order “restoring the death penalty.” I think he was referring to Biden who commuted the sentences of all but 3 convicted killers on death row in his last year as president.

Trump bragged about the change. He seemed to take glee in it. Just as he took glee in having his armed forces blast supposedly drug laden boats off the coast of Venezuela, invariably killing everyone on board. Trump likes to show himself off as the tough guy, the strongman. What better way to do it than kill people?

Sister Helen Prejean, who is a well-known advocate for abolishing the death penalty and the author of Dead Man Walking on which the film by that name was based, described things in the US this way: “It’s in the air, it’s in the national rhetoric sent down from Trump—you use violence and cruelty to solve social problems.” That’s the point I want to make. America is a violent society. That does not mean everyone in that country is violent. Apparently 55% of Americans no longer support the death penalty. But violence this pervades America. Killing people is still very popular—too popular in my view—in that country.

And of course, in America the killing cause is ably assisted by the very conservative US Supreme Court. Last year that court denied every request it received to stay an execution. Not one was granted. None, they thought, deserved mercy.

As if life in an American jail is mercy.

Epidemic of Despair

November 10, 2023Alienation, Health, Loneliness, Social Issues, Substance Abusemeanderer007

When Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who besides being a physician is also a periodic commentator on CNN first started looking at the deaths in the white middle class that included deaths by opioid overdose, suicide, cirrhosis of the liver, it felt a bit mysterious. He was struck by the numbers but did not really understand the causes. It took some time for him to piece things together.

He found an interesting article with an interesting title. This was “The Epidemic of Despair Among White Americans: Trends in the Leading Causes of Premature Death, 1999-2015” published by Elizabeth Stein, MD. MS, Keith P Gennuso, PhD, […] and Patrick Remington, MD MPH in the medical journal American Journal of Public Health. An epidemic of despair? That is very strong language? Is it justified? Gupta wanted to know. So did I.

Dr. Gupta wanted to know, ‘what causes those deaths of despair?’ That is an important question. He was not satisfied with the medical causes of death. He wanted to know ‘the cause of the cause.’ He, like me, thought that was a much more significant question. But this one is harder to tackle.

Why are people taking so many opioids? Why are they becoming addicted? Part of it is overprescribing for which physicians are responsible. Why are so many people drinking to excess? Why are so many people dying of suicide. Is there a common cause of the cause?

As Neurosurgery Resident Kumar Vasudevan put it, “We are living in a time in which we are very, very good at treating diseases, we are less good and less proficient at understanding health.” I would add, that many of us are reluctant to look at social causes, and, believe it or not, political causes. Is that possible?

As Dr. Gupta said, “deaths of despair seem to be a symptom of an underlying problem, rather than the problem itself.” Cyril Wecht believes that the underlying problem is that American society is increasingly stressed. Pressures make lives more and more difficult. Pressures of making a living, depersonalization, families breaking up, and what he calls the “robotization of society.”

But there were also things that happened on the side of medicine. The idea began to flourish that people should not have to suffer. If they suffer that was seen as a failure of medicine. There always seem to be simple solutions–write a prescription. Drugs can take care of any problem. But simple solutions are often the most dangerous. And prescriptions were one of them.

Of course there is more to it than this. Let’s look farther.

Social Cancer

August 22, 2023Decline of the west, Drugs, Health, Social Issuesmeanderer007

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn writing in the New York Times in 2020 said there was “a cancer growing at the heart of the nation.” They meant the USA of course, but really as Jonathan Haidt showed it goes much wider than that. I clearly includes Canada and other countries such as the UK and Australia.

It is that social “cancer” that I want to look at. To do that, I must find it. That may not be easy.

Kristof and WuDunn have a suggestion of where to look:

We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.” [They wrote this in 2020]

I had heard that expression before. I think it was another physician, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Dr. Gupta is both a physician and a television medical analyst. He had some very interesting things to say on a fascinating television documentary.

The trigger for Dr. Gupta’s documentary was another startling fact that as far as I was concerned had gone under the radar. As he said, “In the 1960s Americans had among the highest life expectancy in the world. Today [2019] the U.S. ranks at the bottom of major developed nations.”

In that documentary, Dr. Gupta interviewed another physician a forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht, in Greenburg Pennsylvania, who said “the previous year I did 356 autopsies. Of those more than 300 were drug deaths. And this is what is being experienced throughout the country.” He also said, “this is far greater than what we experienced with AIDs. It is a very significant epidemic of monstrous proportions.” As Dr. Sanjay Gupta said, “what we are dealing with in fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin.” Drugs are part of the problem, but I actually think they are more a symptom than the cause. I will post more about this in the future. It is a fascinating issue.

As Dr. Gupta said, “In the United States life expectancy is dropping faster than any other demographic in the world.” According to the Center for Disease Control, “Middle-aged whites are the highest increase in the deaths of despair.” This group also has very high rates of drug overdose. Whites? Who would have thought that?

What is going on here? That is what we must figure out. What is the cancer at the heart of the United States and Canada?

Eye Witness Testimony

August 18, 2023Decline of the west, Health, Social Issues, Social Mediameanderer007

Jonathan Haidt also told the Senate that “eyewitness testimony” confirms the academic findings: social media is a culprit. Not necessarily the only culprit.

Their research and others directly asked teens what they think is causing the problem. As we all know, many of them like social media, like heroin users like heroin, but when teens were asked whether they think social media overall is good or bad for them, according to Haidt, “The answer is consistently “no.”

Added to that, Haidt pointed out to the Senate that

“Facebook’s own internal research, brought out by Frances Haugen in the Wall Street Journal, concluded that “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression … This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

Haidt advised the Senate that in Australia a study showed that “teens believe that social media is the main reason that youth mental health is getting worse.”

This is what Haidt told the Senate committee investing the problem:

“This crisis did not emerge gradually. There was no sign of it before 2010, but by 2015 it was everywhere, overwhelming mental health centers that catered to teens and college students. The crisis emerged in the exact years when American teens were getting smart phones and becoming daily users of social media platforms such as Instagram. Correlational, experimental, and eye-witness testimony points to social media as a major cause of the crisis. I do not believe that social media is the only cause of the crisis, but there is no alternative hypothesis that can explain the suddenness, enormity, and international similarity that I laid out in part 1 of this document. Researchers and spokespeople for the major platforms who tell you that the evidence is “inconclusive” or that the effect sizes are “too small” should be asked directly: “OK, then what do YOU think caused this?”

Haidt and his team believe, based on significant evidence, not just grump adults, that social media is part of the reason that in the United States, Canada and elsewhere are suffering from these serious health problems.

It is clear that in the United States and Canada the countries are experiencing what Haidt called “a catastrophic wave of mood disorders (anxiety and depression) and related behaviors (self harm and suicide).”

The crisis is so severe that the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, recently issued an Advisory on Youth Mental Health warning Americans to take this problem seriously.

I think we should all do that. If we don’t the west will continue to decline and many more American and Canadian young people will suffer immeasurably.

A World-Wide Problem

August 17, 2023Decline of the west, Health, Social democracy, Social Issues, Social Mediameanderer007

Jonathan Haidt made another important point to the Senators that he has often made in print, namely, that this is not just an American problem. The same crisis has hit “many countries” not only the United States. That means that it cannot be blamed solely on problems unique to the US such as gun violence, particularly in schools. The cause must be broader than that. He then made a statement that should concern Canadians, namely that

“The patterns are nearly identical in the UK and Canada, and the trends are similar though not identical in Australia and New Zealand. We do not yet see signs of similar epidemics in continental Europe or in East Asia, although I have not yet found good data from those regions.”

Together with His associate researcher Jean Twenge, they had discovered

“a sudden increase between 2012 and 2015 in all regions of the world. These patterns indicate that whatever happened to American teens was not uniquely caused by trends and events in the USA (e.g., a sudden fear of school shootings after the Newtown massacre of 2012). The cause is likely to be something that affected teens in many or all regions of the world at the same time.”

This is a world wide problem, partly because social media is a world wide phenomenon.

Note in particular the sharp rise for Girls after 2020. In particular, between 2012 and 2020 The rates of major depression for girls more than doubled during this time. The increase for boys was not as high.

Most of the research is confined to the west, but by no means exclusively.

One must always bear in mind the scientific point often made, that correlation does not prove causation. For example, just because 80% of sex assaults are perpetrated by men who ate potatoes that day does not prove potatoes are a cause of sexual assaults.

First, Jonathan Haidt explained to the Senate Select Committee that “Correlational studies consistently show a link between heavy social media use and mood disorders, but the size of the relationship is disputed.”

Haidt then drilled down:

“Nearly all studies find a correlation, and it is usually curvilinear. That is, moving from no social media use to one or two hours a day is often not associated with an increase in poor mental health, but as usage rises to 3 or 4 hours a day, the increases in mental illness often become quite sharp.”

The graphs are quite explicit. To see them go to the reports. The message is loud and clear. The more young people use social media the more they suffer from serious depression and anxiety and the more likely they are to attempt to commit suicide. Haidt puts it this, contrary to what some of his critics have said, “The correlation is much larger than for “eating potatoes” or “wearing glasses.”

This is a big deal. We should all take note but particularly our political leaders who have the capacity to respond. This is not something that should be swept under the rug.

The Stupid Decade Continued

August 8, 2023Decline of the west, Health, Social Issues, Social Media, Truth Seekingmeanderer007

Jonathan Haidt makes the astounding claim that starting in the mid 2010s people, particularly young people, but really a lot more than that, starting getting stupid! It’s not just the kids.

Haidt, like me, is a fan of John Stuart Mill who pointed out that if a person only knows his or her own side of a dispute, he knows little of that. I have blogged earlier about Mill’s arguments on this point.

[If you look under tags under John Stuart Mill you can find links to these posts] ]

In other words, to really understand a position one must look at it from different perspectives. We need to have opposite cases pushing against each other. That is what used to be done in universities, at least, according to Haidt, until around 2013 or 2014 when universities became places where ideologies were homogenized, and questions about sacred positions became hazardous to professors’ career paths. It became difficult for professors and their students to challenge conventional wisdom. This was particularly true for a few sacred issues like race, gender, transgender and others. If a professor or even students, suggested there might be a case to be made for views that challenged the conventional wisdom, the challenger would feel the full wrath of social media warriors. And as Haidt said, “when critics go silent, the group gets stupid.”

Haidt admits that we have had polarized views in the past, but the new element is that social media supercharges the tendency to require ideological conformity. That of course amplifies polarization and intellectual tribalism. The “other side” gets ignored. We need critics to make us smarter. If we don’t have them, we get stupider. We need opposing views or we get stupid. As Haidt said,

“What’s new is these new dynamics brought to us by social media and especially Twitter, that we’re not shooting the other side so much anymore, we’re shooting the moderates on our own side. And so, what happened in the early to mid-2010s is the moderates on the left and right begin to go silent and the extremes get super empowered.

Haidt points out that as result on the right the Republican Party went off the rails and on the left, it was not so much the Democratic Party that went off the rails, but the supporters of the left who dominate major cultural and educational institutions, universities, media, museums etc. According to Haidt, “Both sides started shooting their moderates…Moderates on the left and right begin go silent and the extremes get super empowered.” Metaphorically of course, I must add.

We must remember that polarization has many causes, but social media sure seems to be one of them. Anything that helps to silence our critics helps to make us stupid. And that according to Haidt is how the west declined—by getting stupid.