At the height of China’s Cultural Revolution, the future novelist Han Shaogong found himself exiled to a small village in a mountainous corner of northern Hunan province, in accordance with Chairman Mao’s Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement. Han’s “re-education through labor” may fairly be said to have backfired, given that he would later become a prominent critic of the Cultural Revolution, leading the laudable Xungen (“Back to Roots”) literary movement, which advocated on behalf of a return to pluralism and localism in Chinese culture.

A lightly-fictionalized account of his time as a sent-down youth, *A Dictionary of Maqiao* (1996), was comprised of some 115 articles on various aspects of Maqiao village life. It is the entry on the term “scattered,” *sànfà* or 散發, that concerns us here.

“Scattered” represented “one of my favorite words in this dictionary of Maqiao,” wrote Han. The term was primarily used as a euphemism for death. “Once life has finished, then all the different elements that hold life together disintegrate and disperse,” he explained. At the moment one’s heartbeat stops, one’s “names and stories also disperse in fragments of human memories and legend, and after the passing of just a few years will end up utterly lost in the sea of humanity, never to return to their beginnings.”

The villagers of Hunan province evidently possessed an instinctive understanding of the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, and the tendency for isolated systems to evolve towards equilibrium—even if they did not put it in such drily scientific terms.

**(RELATED: ‘All Under Heaven’: The CCP’s Distortion of Chinese Philosophy)**

The Maqiao concept of “scattered” was not necessarily limited to the irreversible cessation of biological functions. As Han Shaogong related:

> Many years later, listening to the old people considering the merits of television, I heard them remark in fearful tones: “If you watch television every day, till your head’s full of it, won’t you end up scattered?”

They were simply expressing the anxiety that all the extra knowledge people picked up from watching television would stimulate more and more desires—and how would they manage to cohere? And if they couldn’t cohere, surely they were done for.

Han realized that the “Maqiao people retained their own sense of stubborn vigilance toward any form of scattering, toward the wild flights of fancy, the merging with the wider world one could experience while watching, for example, a color television.”

Once again, the villagers had proven remarkably perceptive.

“Scatterbrain” is not just an insult or an idiomatic, figurative nominal compound; it is, in fact, a genuine physiological phenomenon. Compare brain scans of children who regularly read with those of children who primarily consume content on televisions or tablets, and you will find that the former set demonstrates increased growth of white matter, while the latter set displays underdevelopment and disorganization of white matter—particularly in the language and literacy areas of the brain.

**(RELATED: Brain Rot and the Crisis of Digital Late Modernity)**

The cognitive demands involved in reading tend to enhance brain volume in the prefrontal, temporal, and insula regions, whereas higher screen use reduces cortical thickness and surface area in critical brain areas linked not just with language development, but with social skills like empathy and emotional expression. Excessive consumption of televisual media and immoderate exposure to screen time have resulted in multiple generations ending up “scattered” on an emotional and even a neurological basis, which was precisely the concern of Han Shaogong’s humble villagers of Maqiao.

The pernicious effects of modern technology have led some, like NYU’s Arpit Gupta, to propose a “smartphone theory of everything,” which purports to explain how “worsening mental health, especially among women,” the “rise of addictive gambling behavior, especially among men,” “cognitive decline,” “lower coupling rates, so lower fertility,” and “new information bubbles and a global rise in populism” are all the result of universal access to mobile phones with advanced computing capabilities.

The liberal economics blogger Noah Smith has gone so far as to declare, in response to data on China’s (and pretty much everywhere else’s) ongoing fertility collapse, that “Phones ended the human species.”

No less a figure than Francis “End of History” Fukuyama, in a recent *Persuasion* piece titled, “It’s the Internet, Stupid,” has assigned the blame for basically every modern problem on, in a word, “screens.” According to Fukuyama, “the rise of the internet and social media story before all the facts are in?”

The Critic’s Henry George, in his insightful review of Robert Kaplan’s *Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis*, proposed that:

> “A culture defined by print media is one where rational reflection and cool-headed analysis is much easier to achieve than one defined by the panicked immediacy and lizard-brained impulsivity of the digital realm.”

Slow media has its advantages, but the digital realm is ascendant, the reptilian complex of the basal ganglia has taken over, and we are left with a major problem on our hands—that much can readily be stipulated.

That being the case, there is an unfortunate tendency these days to conflate symptoms with the underlying disease, as well as a marked predisposition to advance simplistic theories to explain complex phenomena.

It is easier to blame localized flooding after heavy rainfall on atmospheric carbon dioxide alone, rather than considering deforestation, destruction of wetlands, overdevelopment, vast artificial expanses of concrete and turf grass, poor urban planning, inadequate storm drain maintenance, and other aspects of human activity.

Similarly, it is easier to blame the present collapse in fertility rates on “phones” instead of the far-reaching effects of the industrial revolution, urbanization, materialism, a decline in religiosity, the increasing representation of women in higher education and the labor force, combined hormonal contraception, expanded abortion access, anti-natalist and apocalyptic environmentalist rhetoric, synthetic xenoestrogens and microplastics (probably), and any number of other environmental and lifestyle factors.

System collapses are never straightforward affairs.

I will be the first to admit that the digital revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, to borrow a notorious phrase, but we can hardly just declare that “phones ended the human species” and knock off for the day.

Fukuyama’s proposition that the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, and also the January 6 riots, can be explained away by “screens” is really quite facile.

Were there no political assassinations before the Internet? Did no one ever take to the streets before social media and instant messaging apps? Did the radical leftist Jacobins and other French revolutionaries need Signal and WhatsApp to organize the September Massacres and the genocide in the Vendée?

When late nineteenth-century anarchists embraced the “propaganda of the deed” and started gunning down monarchs and politicians and blowing up cafés, was it because they had been spending too much time playing third-person squad-based shooters?

When Italy underwent the *Anni di piombo*, the “Years of Lead,” from the sixties to the eighties, with the Red Brigades and the neofascisti kneecapping industrialists, sabotaging factories, and setting off time bombs in piazzas and train stations, was it because of dank memes?

Maybe one symptom of scatterbrain syndrome is a total lack of historical context or sense of proportion.

Screens are a problem. But so too is hyper-modernity, and human nature itself, while we’re about it.

Declining metrics in terms of fertility, cognition, readership, social solidarity/cohesion/assabiya, and faith in institutions cannot all be attributed to “screens,” “phones,” and “video gaming.” Screen addiction might be a symptom or a coping strategy, but it is not the origin of the systems collapse now in progress.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila, the great Colombian philosopher and aphorist, counseled that:

> “El que quiera evitarse colapsos grotescos no debe buscar nada que lo colme en el espacio y en el tiempo.”
> *(The man who wants to avoid grotesque collapses should not look for anything to fulfill him in space and time).*

Well, we’ve got our grotesque collapse, and it is indeed because our attempts at fulfillment are so often limited to space and time.

Screens cannot provide that sense of satisfaction, but neither, as presently constituted, can many of our public and religious institutions, our schools, our arts communities, our content creators, or our food suppliers.

It is the spiritual dimension that is missing, but nobody wants to say that our cultural degeneration, *déracinement*, and moral decline have played no small part in “ending the human race.” Better to blame the six-ounce smartphone buzzing and chirping in your pocket.

Consider the Hogarthian scene playing out before our very eyes: the toddler who cannot appear in public without playing *Run Sackboy! Run* or *Spongebob: Patty Pursuit* as loudly as possible on his iPad; the mind-fried adolescent or post-adolescent endlessly doomscrolling and swiping left or right; the father who spends all of his daughter’s ballet academy observation night texting and staring at Instagram posts, or placing wagers on football games, or what have you; the boomer wallowing in a morass of AI-generated slop; the members of a vacationing family, each one slumped over, slack-jawed, looking vacantly at their respective phones, the only evidence of their vital status the constant movement of their thumbs.

Of course, it is tempting to blame the phones and their nefarious six-inch screens, but those are proximate, not ultimate, causes.

We do not blame the morphine water for the degraded state of the rodents in Bruce K. Alexander’s famous Rat Park experiment; instead, we blame the conditions in which the rats lived—at first deplorable, but upon amelioration rendering the complimentary narcotics so much less appealing.

When life “is reduced to survival or to the immanence of consumption,” Byung-Chul Han has lamented, people will be reduced to the state of pure consumers with “no hopes, only desires and needs.” The result is the “colapsos grotescos” evident in our public life, our built environment, our literature, our art, our values (such as they are).

In order to combat this endemic brain rot and all these scattered brains, we will need faith, beauty, nature, slowness, silence, tranquility, deliberation, shared in-person experiences, and, above all, hope for the future.

These are not things you will find in the yawning abyss beneath the liquid glass of a smartphone.

Still, we must bear in mind that it was not our Apple iPhones, Google Pixels, or Samsung Galaxies that declared war on faith, beauty, nature, slowness, silence, tranquility, deliberation, shared in-person experiences, and hope.

We should remain suspicious of screens, certainly, and endeavor to resist the sirens’ call of their push notifications. We should not, however, be directing our ire towards agglomerations of plastic, tempered glass, chipsets, RAM, ROM, speakers, and batteries, but towards those very real creatures of flesh and blood who have reduced our civilization to its present scattered and etiolated state.

Beware those who would divert our disgust and righteous indignation away from the true culprits and in the direction of mere inanimate objects.

—

**Related Reads:**

– [Brain Rot and the Crisis of Digital Late Modernity](#)
– [A Mighty Fortissimo: Antonín Dvořák’s Rusalka](#)
https://spectator.org/scatterbrains-screens-and-our-moral-collapse/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=scatterbrains-screens-and-our-moral-collapse