Bent Within Ourselves – by Brad Littlejohn

Earlier this week I attended a summit at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation regarding the upcoming Supreme Court case, Free Speech Coalition vs. Paxtonthat could shape the future of any efforts to regulate children’s access to hardcore pornography. One of the presenters, Lisa Thompson, shared the results of a recent study that found that teens who regularly viewed pornography were more likely to (1) have much poorer relationships with their parents, (2) perform worse academically, and (3) exhibit a tendency toward sexual harassment or violence. Today, another of our collaborators in this fight, Michael Toscano of the Institute of Family Studies, published an article on the IFS blog documents a recent study showing that frequent porn viewing doubles the risk of feeling depressed or lonely.

When I heard Lisa’s numbers, I couldn’t help but hear the voice of a devil’s advocate (in this case, it really is). the devils lawyer!) in my head: “correlation does not imply causation.” Of course, the porn industry will tell us that teens who are lonely, depressed, and have bad relationships with their parents are more likely to turn to porn, and that those who are sexually predatory are also more likely to watch porn. They might even suggest that lazy, unfocused college students are the ones who have more time to watch porn anyway. Now, of course, none of these answers paint their industry in a very good, flattering light – “So what you’re saying is that your product is best suited for depressed, antisocial, predatory dropouts?” – but at least it gets them off the hook for cause the antisocial behavior.

In following Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, I’ve noticed a similar theme. For the past few years, he’s played whack-a-mole with more tech-friendly sociologists who insist that the links he’s documented between social media use and poor mental health tell us nothing about causation — maybe it’s just that otherwise unhappy, unstable people are just more likely to binge-watch X or Instagram? And that’s probably true!

Perhaps the premises of such arguments are misleading, however. For as the classic meme puts it, “Why not both?” Why can’t we say, for example: both that people who feel bad about themselves and the world are more likely to use pornography or Instagram as a drug to numb their depression, And that the more they do it, the greater their feelings of doubt, despair, and self-loathing become? In fact, any pornography addiction counselor will tell you that this is exactly how psychology works, like a feedback loop: no one likes me à I think I’ll look at porn à what a loser I am — why would anyone like me? à I think I’ll look at more porn. Note that the loop can start at either point: the emotion may trigger the action in the first place, or perhaps more commonly for young people, an inadvertent encounter with pornography can help start the cycle.

Indeed, such feedback loops may be the norm, rather than the exception, when it comes to psychology: negative emotions trigger negative behavior, which triggers more negative emotions, and so on. The attempt to neatly separate correlation from causation is a healthy impulse in the natural sciences, where much depends on whether the earthquake caused the avalanche or the avalanche caused the earthquake, but in the realm of the spirit, things are rarely so simple. Indeed, one of the classic texts of New Testament moral theology, Romans 1, makes this explicit:

“For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, nor were thankful to Him, but became vain in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made like mortal men, and birds, and beasts, and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up to impurity through the lusts of their own hearts, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves; because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! … And because they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things that ought not to be done. Although they know the righteous decree of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do them but also approve of those who practice them.”

Not honoring God leads to mental darkness, which leads to idolatry, which leads to a corrupt spirit, which leads to corrupt actions, which leads to a disorderly moral outlook, and so on. Do people act like beasts because they treat God as a creature, or do they treat God as a creature because they want to act like beasts? Yes.

Augustine’s famous description of fallen man, also adopted by Luther, captures this circular reasoning: man is warp in se“curled in on itself.” To sin is to be caught in a negative feedback loop, to be a snake chasing its own tail, unsure how to escape. The scientist’s attempt to distinguish correlation from causation, and to identify which way the causal arrow points in a given correlation, is based on a laudable belief in the reality of efficient causes (to use Aristotle’s term). Things don’t just happen, they happen because something sets them in motion. But for Aristotle, efficient causation makes sense only in light of ultimate causation—that is, it is only because we know that something is moving toward an end or goal, a goal appropriate to the kind of thing it is, that we can talk about the beginning and end of a process, and thus about causality, rather than mere motion.

In the realm of the spirit, then, clear causal explanations are possible only to the extent that a person is moving toward his true end, his ultimate goal: God. To the extent that we have turned away from Him and toward ourselves, we are acting as beings without a clear ultimate goal. A young child, caught in a misstep and asked why he did it, will probably answer, “I don’t know.” Often enough, they are not only evasive, they really don’t know. How could they? For sin is absurdity, unreason; to think we can explain it is to try to make it something other than it is. As we become alienated from our true end, we become trapped in feedback loops in which evil is both cause and effect.

This is not to absolve social scientists of the hard work of identifying causes and effects where they can be neatly separated. But it is to emphasize that when it comes to pathological behavior, they may not be—and indeed, the more pathological the behavior, the harder it is to separate.