Like every other reasonable person in our society, I’m worried sick about the phenomenon of gun violence, and I’m especially concerned about what it reveals regarding the status of young people, particularly young men.
Time and again, disgruntled, angry, depressed, self-hating men – boys really – are the perpetrators of these awful crimes. As I write these words, images of Robert E. Crimo, the 21-year-old who has confessed to killing seven and wounding dozens more in Highland Park, Ill., are circulating on social media, and his face has burned itself into my mind. He just looks so lost – physically, psychologically and spiritually.
Now, I fully realize that Crimo is exceptional and so I don’t intend to extrapolate from him to all young people, but evidence has been piling up for some time that youths, especially boys and young men, are suffering badly in our society.
To give just one example, Derek Thompson’s article “Youth mental health crisis,” in the April issue of the Atlantic, reveals that from 2009 to 2021, “feelings of sadness and hopelessness” among American teenagers rose, astonishingly, from 26 percent to 44 percent. And the increase in depression was consistent across all major categories among teens in all 50 states: male, female, black, white, LGBT, etc.
What is causing this drastic rise in unhappiness? There is, obviously, no one answer, for the issue is multivalent and complex, but Thompson hazards four suggestions: social media use, a related decrease in real social contact, the stressfulness of the world to which contemporary media are giving young people far greater access, and modern parenting strategies. All are interesting and worth exploring, but I would like to focus on just one of his explanations and then offer a rationale of my own.
Social media are making a lot of people – but especially young men and women – crazy and sad. Period. This is the case, first, because social media produce an obsession with body image, looks and popularity, and on the flip side, they give rise to a uniquely toxic atmosphere of judgmentalism, accusation and criticism.
And what makes all of this worse is that the devices that communicate social media were designed to be addictive. As a result, even those who admit that Instagram and Facebook are making them sad cannot stop themselves from logging on.
A closely related problem is that social media are so dominant in kids’ lives that they effectively supplant activities that naturally bring joy. The average young person spends five or six hours a day on social media, and as a consequence, Thompson says, “compared with their counterparts in the 2000s, today’s teens are less likely to go out with their friends, get their driver’s license, or play youth sports.”
As for my own explanation of the phenomenon of teen depression, I would emphasize a theme I have been talking about for years: the culture of self-invention. It is now a fundamental orthodoxy of the culture: Values – epistemic, moral and aesthetic – are generated from within one’s own subjectivity. In a word, each individual determines what is right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful or ugly. There is no “truth,” only my truth and your truth.
This attitude is disastrous both psychologically and spiritually, for it essentially locks a person into the narrow confines of his own range of experience. It prevents her from moving outside of the tiny ambit of what she can imagine or hope for. The best moments in life, in point of fact, are those in which objective values – real truths, real moral absolutes, real beauty – break through the defensive shell of one’s own subjectivity and lift one up to the contemplation of something new, something that stands wonderfully beyond what one even thought possible.
More to it, objective goods connect us to one another. As long as we are under the tyranny of subjectivist relativism, we are each locked in the prison of our own psyches, perhaps tolerating one another from a distance, but experiencing no real bond. However, precisely because they stand outside of anyone’s private experience, objective values can bring a plethora of people together in a common love and devotion.
Contrast two images: the first of an angry, isolated teen insisting that the world respect his private conception of truth, and the second of a group of teens, joyfully giving themselves together to a common purpose, a common good.
In addressing the plague of gun violence in our country, I do indeed think that sensible legislation is called for. But there are far deeper moral and cultural issues that have to be addressed, most notably that of depression among our young people. Two simple suggestions: we should set limits to the amount of time teens are spending on social media, and we should introduce them, any way we can, to the world of objective values.
Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, online at www.wordonfire.org, where this commentary first appeared.