STUDENTS REWIRING SPECIALS : PRECIS

TAKE the prominent review for Nature by a child/student development scholar, Candice L. Odgers, which cited American ''access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, and the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation'' as plausible causal alternatives to Haidt's social media diagnosis.

The tone of the review suggested that kids really ought to be a bit depressed. 

Wouldn't you be, growing up amid ''school shootings and increasing unrest, because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence''?

And for an answer to this unhappiness, with neither Providence nor scientific socialism available., Odgers turned to the therapeutic process, lamenting the dearth of school psychologists to help kids/students process '' their symptoms and mental health struggles.''

This seems like where a good portion of the American left finds itself today : comforted by neither God nor history, and hoping vaguely that therapy can take their place.

The World Students Society thanks Ross Douthat.