Video Games and Vaccines

A Tale of Two Views of the State

China announced this week that school aged kids can no longer play video games on weeknights. Yes, you heard that right, the government of a country has made a law telling kids when they can and can’t play video games. Previously in China, kids under 18 years old were only allowed to play 90 minutes a day on weekdays, and 3 hours per day on weekends and holidays. But the new rule has clamped down further, declaring that they can only play between 8 and 9 pm on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

According to the government, there is a growing scourge of video game addiction, and this poses a cultural threat to the country. Also (according to the government) it was the parents who requested this change because video game addiction is harming their kids’ study habits and even personalities. One mom said, “Some teenage kids just won’t listen to their parents’ discipline, and this policy can control them.” She went on, “I think this is the right policy. It amounts to the state taking care of our kids for us.”

The easy response to this situation is: the parents just need to step up and control their children. But of course, in China as well as in America, some parents will control their children and some won’t. The government of China has effectively said, “We gave you a chance to control your kids, but you didn’t do it; so we will. The good of the nation depends on it.”

I’m not disputing the claim that video game addiction is bad for kids. Just curious about the role of the state in determining and enforcing what is good for people. Over here in our hemisphere, the government can’t even compel people to get vaccinated, despite the fact there is almost zero doubt that good of the nation depends on it. And some states have gone so far as to legally squelch the attempts of some communities to enforce the public good, by making it a law that you can’t require vaccines or even mask wearing for their events.

2

What accounts for this difference between countries and our views of the role of the state? I’ve sometimes wondered if there is any genetic disposition involved in this. Aside from those who were forcibly brought to this country, the people who made it here were often escaping circumstances they didn’t want to put up with any more. Certainly there is no single gene (let alone a single mutation) that accounts for that kind of action, but maybe there are some personality traits that lend themselves to freedom seeking which are over-represented here. I suspect, though, that it is more complicated than that.

Even here in America there are marked differences in intuitions about the role of the state. We’re often portrayed as falling neatly into one of two camps: either you’re a liberal who thinks the government should make everything fair for everyone, or you’re a conservative who thinks the only legitimate function of government is to protect our individual freedoms. In reality, though, all of us have a mix of these impulses. All of us think there should be some limits to individual freedoms (I shouldn’t be free to torture kids for fun, or drive as fast as I want through a school zone). And all of us think there are some things that should be left to individual choice (does anyone in this country think the government should decide what your career will be?).

What has happened is that the two camps have increasingly coalesced around clusters of freedoms and limitations, often in ways that strain logical consistency. For example on the left, tolerance and cancel culture have become odd bedfellows; and on the right, the pro-life impulse which is so strong against abortion is almost non-existent for other areas directly related to life. Social media has amplified the cluster approach so that if you know where a person stands on one issue, you can be pretty sure where they stand on another.

The result is that these two camps have become two different cultures, with their own values and language. It becomes difficult to communicate and to empathize across these lines, so that the people on one side say, “I genuinely don’t understand how those other people can think X or vote for Y.” And those of us who have sympathies for some elements of the clusters of both groups feel stuck in the middle — people without an ideological home.

3

Maybe that’s the same dynamic going that’s going on with how we can’t understand how China would make laws about when you can play video games. Even they agree there are some things that should be left to individual choice, and some things that the state should regulate. They just draw the line between these differently; they have a different cultural cluster of ideas their team has identified and rallied around.

That doesn’t mean I think any cluster is just as good as any other. I think my cluster of freedoms and regulations is the right one! Maybe, though, I don’t need to vilify those who disagree as obviously insane. Perhaps we’d get further in finding a public good, a society where we have the appropriate freedoms for all of us to flourish, if we recognized that’s what other people are looking for too.