Do our students have a "divinity axis"?
What I learned from Jonathan Haidt about embodiment.
Since writing Thoroughness & Charm, I have spent a lot of time thinking about embodiment and how we should occupy the space and time of our lives. In his groundbreaking book Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt discusses the spiritual effect of smartphones upon children, teenagers, and society broadly. Although he clarifies that he is an atheist who “sometimes needs words and concepts from religion to understand the experience of life as a human being,” (201) he points out that human beings have certain “spiritual” responses that are akin to being “lifted up” or “pulled down.” He attributes these feelings to our “elevated nature” as humans. This elevated nature, or our spirituality, Haidt says, desires to live more of life around things that lift him up and less and less of life around things that pull him down. He calls it a divinity axis “because so many cultures wrote explicitly that virtuous actions bring one upward, closer to God, while base, selfish, or disgusting actions bring one downward” (300). And he concludes (from research) that humans desire to live as much of their life as possible “above zero on the z axis” (301).
Haidt’s premise throughout the book is that the smartphone has had a disastrous effect on those populations who are particularly susceptible to its addictive design. But he shifts about 200 pages in to ask his readers whether or not something that pulls down everyone who uses it “would be a harm to society.” Hmmm.
Would this pulling down harm even those past the vulnerability of childhood and past the brain-remapping and identity-forming stage of puberty? Does the overuse of smartphones pull down and harm those without mental health issues like anxiety or depression? He answers in the affirmative. The more people spend in spiritual degradation, or being pulled down by something as ubiquitous as the smartphone, he claims that we would logically see “a general society-wide degradation that would be hard to put into words” (201).
When an atheist can use science to diagnose a spiritual problem, we clearly do have something on our hands, the magnitude of which is “hard to put into words.”
Even Haidt, who declares himself to be an atheist, can see the importance of embodied experiences that point to the transcendent. He says, “The strongest and most satisfying communities come into being when something lifts people out of the lower level so that they have powerful collective experiences. They all enter the realm of the sacred together, at the same time. When they return to the profane level, where they need to be most of the time to address the necessities of life, they have greater trust and affection for each other as a result of their time together in the sacred realm” (203). Powerful collective experiences occur when we “enter the realm of the sacred together” and those “powerful collective experiences” create communities.
“But what happens when social life becomes virtual and everyone interacts through screens? Everything collapses into an undifferentiated blur. There is no consensual space…In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things. Nothing ever closes, so everyone acts on their own schedule…everything is available to every individual, all the time, with little or no effort. There is no Sabbath, and there are no holy days. Everything is profane” (204).
Even though he wouldn’t say it this way, Haidt is basically begging teachers and families to create embodied rituals in order to save the souls of our children. Things have to have a beginning and an end. Things have to open and close—be turned off. Certain days have to be more special than others. And we need to let people into our lives again. We need to make an effort and struggle through challenges to achieve goals.
Haidt says “we could create healthier environments for ourselves and for our children if we could reconnect with the rhythms of the calendar and of our communities” if we could “endow time and space with some of the social meaning they have lost” (204). But time and space have more than social meaning. Time and space have sacred meaning because the things we see and the rituals we participate in all use the temporal to point to the eternal, thereby calling us out of ourselves and into the presence of the divine.
The rituals or practices that we participate in as a community form social cohesion by binding us to one another in a shared desire to transcend ourselves—to be pulled up on Haidt’s divinity axis. The tension between one’s own finiteness and the infinite desire in the human heart will find an outlet. Our hearts are indeed restless. The digital matrix has distorted our desires and fulfilled them by substance. Making even our relationships a consumable product and our communication a commodity for sale.
Embodied ritual practices are necessary for us as humans to feel connected to one another. “When communities engage in these practices together, and especially when they move together in synchrony, they increase cohesion and trust, which means that they also reduce anomie and loneliness” (202), Haidt says. These collective experiences or spiritual rituals give us a physical way to be reminded that something greater than us exists. They move us out of the self, preparing us to receive revelation, informing our beliefs, increasing our faith—but also they remind us of the story we are in: who we are and why we are here.
We can observe rituals in our classrooms. We can observe rituals in our homeschool. We can learn how to order the space and time of our daily lives in such a way that we refuse to succumb to the digital matrix. We do not have to let everything collapse into an undifferentiated blur. We do not have to let everything become profane.
Where Mrs. Gerth is speaking:
The Classical Teaching Institute Fall Retreat, Boise, ID, November 14-15, 2025
Labore, Brasilia, Brazil, January 12-16, 2026
Chesterton Academy of Our Lady of Victory, Centennial, CO, January 5, 2026
Great Hearts National Symposium, Tempe Mission Palms Hotel, AZ, February 25-27, 2026
Northwest Classical Academy, Kennesaw, GA, March 3, 2026
What Mrs. Gerth is teaching:
The Thales College Certificate in Classical Education Philosophy Program (CCEP) consists of eight courses taken in any order, culminating in a certificate. Courses cost just $300 each and are held through Google Meet once every other week. Register by September 26. Classes begin October 14.
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