The shift began 20 years ago or so, when networked computers became sufficiently ubiquitous that people began using them to build and manage relationships. Social networking had its problems—collecting friends instead of, well, being friendly with them, for example—but they were modest compared with what followed. Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.
A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.
But now, perhaps, it can also end. The possible downfall of Facebook and Twitter (and others) is an opportunity—not to shift to some equivalent platform, but to embrace their ruination, something previously unthinkable. […]
[It could be] tragic for those who have come to rely on these platforms, for news or community or conversation or mere compulsion. Such is the hypocrisy of this moment. The rush of likes and shares felt so good because the age of zero comments felt so lonely—and upscaling killed the alternatives a long time ago, besides.
If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.
Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation (although the risk of instrumentalizing one another was present from the outset). The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain. Someday, eventually, perhaps its web will unwind. But not soon, and not easily.
… To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often—and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well. We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.
love alone is credible
As I imagined a call to pastoral ministry, all I really imagined was preaching. And the only thing I could envision as preaching was teaching: didactic induction into the truth. The pulpit was where one dispensed instruction. I look at my sermon notes from this period and cringe. I want to go back to these congregations and apologize—for boring them to death, sure, but also for a youthful selfishness, imagining my abstractions and speculations had anything to do with living the Christian life. Here were people quietly burying their elders, terrified for children bent on destroying themselves, facing death and loneliness and loss, never given permission to doubt, carrying any number of secret burdens and sins they longed to confess; and here’s a 22-year-old kid who’s read a lot of books trying to parse trinitarian personhood through 19th-century scholasticism as if it matters. […]
As a young Christian philosopher, I wanted to be the confident, heresy-hunting Augustine, vanquishing the pagans with brilliance, fending off the Manichaeans and Pelagians with ironclad arguments. As a middle-aged man, I dream of being Mr. Rogers. When you’re young, it’s easy to confuse strength with dominance; when you’re older, you realize the feat of character it takes to be meek. I used to imagine my calling was to defend the Truth. Now I’m just trying to figure out how to love.
It’s not that I’ve given up on truth. It’s just that I’m less confident we’ll think our way out of the morass and malaise in which we find ourselves. Analysis won’t save us. And the truth of the gospel is less a message to be taught than a mystery enacted. Love won’t save us either, of course. But I’ve come to believe that the grace of God that will save us is more powerfully manifest in beloved community than in rational enlightenment. Or, as Hans Urs von Balthasar has put it, “Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed.”
useful links floating in the air
The distinction between instrumental and intrinsic goods is crucial, because friendship (real friendship, not the ersatz friendship we practice today) is an intrinsic good, while politics is an instrumental good. Thus, to lose a friendship over politics suggests that something is deeply disordered in our souls. […]
When politics is understood as war, genuine friendship becomes difficult because friendship contributes nothing to the cause. What it is replaced with is “allyship” or “comradeship.” And comrades are not, strictly speaking, friends. They are rather partners in a cause. …
[A] culture that views politics as war will inevitably struggle with meaninglessness. Of course, there is some sense of meaning in fighting for a cause. But in pluralist societies like ours, political causes will never be fully achieved, not only because there is no place to dispose permanently of our enemies—every victory is thus subject to reversal over time—but also because what the “warmakers” are ultimately seeking in politics is a resolution possible only on the far side of the eschaton. We are seeking perfect justice, perfect agreement, and perfect stability over time. Because perfection in this world constantly eludes us, politics is like that chain suspended in midair. Each link seems meaningful, but the chain is anchored in nothing. The war to end all wars has no end. What ends is only our healthy relationship to intrinsic goods that bring happiness and meaning to life. […]
Some people I know worry that genuine friendship is less possible in a pluralist age than in contexts where citizens share a robust conception of the good, or of God. But this is not my view. From experience I have learned that friendship does not require that friends love all the same things, much less that they love the same ultimate things. Friendships based on such common loves of course do exist, and perhaps they are of a higher order than those in which ultimate truths are not shared. But friendship is possible where what is loved is simply the person, not the person’s metaphysics or theology. Pluralism thus need not be the death of friendships that are genuine and deep.
But if pluralism does not render meaningful friendships impossible, the tendency to understand politics as a form of war certainly makes them less likely. That was the claim I supported above by distinguishing between friendship and allyship. The second claim I made was that how one understands friendship can affect how one practices politics. Why would this be so? It is because the experience of genuine friendship, which is not merely an intrinsic good but a peak intrinsic good, cannot help but put politics in its place. Politics today makes great claims about its own importance. Yet politics cannot bring meaning to our lives—not deep meaning at any rate—because it is never more than an instrumental good.
Politics is also always incomplete, while friendship is complete in itself, in that it needs nothing else to deliver such satisfaction as is possible here on earth. Of course, friendship is incomplete in its own way, in that it cannot make us perfectly whole. But this incompleteness differs in kind from the incompleteness of politics. Politics is incomplete because its work is never done. Friendship is incomplete only insofar as its complete success intimates something even higher, a kind of friendship with God that awaits us at the end of time. Those who understand what real friendship is, and what it ultimately foreshadows, will place less value in politics because they will have better things to do. They will know through experience where their deepest longings are most fully satisfied.
“aggressive performativity”
There is, it seems, a pervasive loss of nerve about what we might want to convey about value or purpose to a new generation. And there is our tolerance of public rhetoric – not only online – in which aggressive performativity substitutes for truthfulness, analysis and negotiation. It’s as if we have lost not only a sense of positive continuity with the past but any kind of thoughtful capacity to imagine the future, and everything collapses into the hectic theatre of the present moment and the hunger to be made to feel better instantly.
“a unifying thread”
We answer for everything—for every deed and every word—and memory invites us to consider why we have lived, what we have done with our lives, whether we had a preordained purpose, and if so, whether we have fulfilled it; whether our life had a unifying thread of meaning, or whether it consisted only of random and absurd happenings.
If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line—starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King’s Highway past appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.
“burn it down”
Re-upping from here:
I get that both sides of the political isle—as a whole!—do a wonderful job of maintaining a mutually despising feedback loop. And I’m not saying that the Left—religious or not, non-white or otherwise—hasn’t earned a great deal of scorn. But as far as I can see, the Right, especially in its religious elements, has earned every last drop of its closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, unintelligent, and lazy reputation. Its house is entirely corrupt, and that is no one’s fault but that of its own members.
And also here:
There has probably never been a time when parties were not cult-afflicted. The current Democratic Party is no exception. But the Republican Party at this point is pure cult-of-personality, cult-of-grievance. Its insanity and stupidity can not possibly be overstated.
To agree with Andrew Sullivan here:
I am not saying that the Democrats are not also corrupted by rank tribalism. At their worst, they are, as I often point out. I am saying that they do not compare with the current GOP in its hollowness and depravity and madness.
[Herschel] Walker shows that there is no principle they will not jettison, no evil they will not excuse, no crime they won’t “whatabout,” and no moron they won’t elect, if it means they gain power. There is degeneracy among many Democrats, sure. But the Republican party is defined by this putrescence. Burn it down.
sweet sweet diversions
It turns out that reality has limited power over an infinitely distractible and distracted society.
– 171. Misery. The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves… Without diversions, we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.
a cynic’s take on orthodoxy
I highlighted this from David French’s The Third Rail newsletter last week:
I can name many people who know who Jesus is and embody those virtues as well as imperfect people can.
But when the Church leads with its moral code—and elevates that moral code over even the most basic understandings of Jesus Christ himself—the effect isn’t humility and hope; it’s pride and division. When the Church chooses a particular sin as its defining apostasy (why sex more than racism, or greed, or gluttony, or cruelty?), it perversely lowers the standards of holy living by narrowing the Christian moral vision.
The result is a weaker religion, one that is less demanding for the believer while granting those who uphold the narrow moral code a sense of unjustified pride. Yet pride separates Christians from each other, and separates Christians from their neighbors.
Millions of Christians are humble and hopeful. Millions are also prideful and divisive. Why? One answer is found in the LifeWay-Ligonier survey. In the quest for morality, they’ve lost sight of Jesus—but it is Jesus who truly defines the Christian faith.
Along with Alan Jacobs and I’m sure many others, I say a hearty “yes and amen!”
Buuut…
It’s fitting that Jacobs decided to quote French and the survey on his blog, since Jacobs is the first person I thought of when I read it.
Maybe this is a stretch, but I would be very curious to see Jacobs do something similar with the data from the Lifeway-Ligonier survey as he has done with the romanticized ideas of lost literacy and readership. He says, in nuce, that we don’t know enough about the history of literacy at any given point in any given society to make any meaningful comparisons, and therefore there is no point in making comparative judgments between us and our ancestors. And, perhaps even more relevantly, he adds another point:
I will just say this: I think the hidden assumption in essays like Harrington’s and Garfinkle’s [on the subject of Literacy Lost] is that if people weren’t on social media and staring at their iPhones they’d be reading books instead. And I don’t believe for one second that that’s a safe assumption.
Again, it might be a stretch, but I think that very similar questions can be asked, and criticisms made, of this new survey on “orthodoxy.” Maybe there are other studies to compare here, but I would very much like to know: When exactly in the past did we, as Christians (self-identified or otherwise), have a clear grasp on orthodoxy?
That seems like a question worth asking. But the main point I would like to make is this: I would not be the least bit surprised if there is absolutely no significant correlation between “orthodoxy” and genuine Christlike conduct.
A few years ago, while I was finishing my bachelor’s degree, I took a history class called “Genocide in Our Time.” One of the assignments each week was to respond to a given question in our own journal-essays. One week’s question was on the topic of “raising awareness” and its effectiveness.
I don’t remember the exact question that was asked, but here is my response, titled “A Cynic’s Take on Awarenesss”:
I’m no scholar of the Protestant Reformation, but I grew up being taught that the reformers believed in three distinct but related elements of conversion: notitia, assensus, and fiducia. A person could hear all the details (notitia) and agree that they are true (assensus), but it was not until people actually placed their confidence in that truth—had “cast themselves upon it”—that they could be said to have faith (fiducia). I’ve never heard them used outside of the Reformation, but those three little Latin words seem to me to have significance far beyond the ecclesia.
I mentioned in the discussion this week that I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to the topic of “raising awareness.” If I was being truly honest (and more willing to risk offense) I would have said that “raising awareness” is almost an entirely meaningless phrase to me. Even now I’m a little hesitant to admit this, partly because I’m afraid that what someone will hear is that I am somehow against truth or justice, or that anyone who operates under the task of raising awareness is doing meaningless work. This is certainly not what I mean. I think one way to say what I mean is this: in the same way that the reformers believed that notitia and assensus were nothing if they did not include the commitment of fiducia, hearing the details about genocide and believing them to be true are (almost) meaningless acts if they do not include the “faithfulness” required to prevent or respond to them. That in no way means that awareness doesn’t matter. Sticking with the analogy: if raising awareness amounts more or less to the notitia and assensus of the truth of genocide, someone need not fear that I’m in any way calling that task meaningless, since the reformers also believed that one couldn’t have fiducia without first having the awareness.
Here, however, just when I think I’m starting to clarify myself, is where I make a slight turn.
In some ways I’m not entirely faithful to my reformed roots. Without getting into too many of the details, I am (these days) inclined to reverse the above formulation—much to the chagrin of my own father, Reformation man that he is. Though it seems at times very counterintuitive, I think that fiducia almost always comes first, and that you can have it without—strictly speaking—having the other two. Put simply: if one doesn’t have the character of commitment (fiducia), then notitia and assensus won’t really matter. Character is infinitely more important than any amount of knowledge or awareness. T.S. Eliot asked, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Somehow we have learned—though this is not a new problem—to speak about the truth without becoming wise. Or, more to the point, we often act as though getting all the facts straight will somehow make us wise, but ages upon ages of humanity tell us that this is simply not true.
I believe as much as anyone in the importance of calling a thing by its true name, especially when it comes to genocide, but the question is not so much about how we can get more people to admit of atrocities or to acknowledge the word “genocide.” Instead we would do better to ask how we might, each and all, be and become a people who are, in the words of Albert Camus, “resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally.” Forget those who consider themselves “aware.” Give me ten men and women who know nothing about the history of genocide but who live truthfully and sacrificially today, and I think it will be those faithful (fiducia-filled) people who prevent the next genocide long before anyone else. A people who live in this way will know what to do with the truth when they find it. For those who do not, the truth may not matter at all. As Norton Juster’s character Canby laments in Phantom Tollbooth, “You can swim all day in the sea of knowledge and still come out completely dry. Most people do.”
As mentioned before, I am not saying that spreading the truth about genocide awareness is unimportant; indeed, I think it is massively important. But no matter how important it is, I do think that the truth about genocide at least can be meaningless. We must speak the truth, but if we don’t do more than that, all the awareness in the world will not help the Rohingyas of today or the Yazidis of tomorrow. And in that way, unless some sense of fiducia is central, no awareness project will be, in any meaningful sense, successful.
While in this case I was borrowing an idea to answer a question about genocide prevention, I think, for obvious reasons, that every single word I wrote in that short essay could be said about “orthodoxy” among the “faithful.” In fact, it seems to me that this is one of the core elements that make up the stories and teachings of the Bible, and particularly every encounter with Jesus: Your ability to pass the test—on sexual morality or on theology—is irrelevant.
Again, there could be some more informative data out there that I’m not aware of, so I say this as humbly as possible. Maybe there was a time, in the near or distant past, when a majority of proclaiming Christians had there theological i’s and t’s dotted and crossed and italicized. And maybe these orthodox practitioners were the ones most likely to be sacrificing life and limb for the glory of God and the love of neighbor. But I don’t believe for one second that that’s a safe assumption.
a modern David
David Bentley Hart (2011):
How then, I asked Ambrose, should one portray the prince of darkness?
After a pensive moment, Ambrose replied, “A merciless real estate developer whose largest projects are all casinos.”
And recalling this exchange brought Donald Trump to mind. You know the fellow: developer, speculator, television personality, hotelier, political dilettante, conspiracy theorist, and grand croupier—the one with that canopy of hennaed hair jutting out over his eyes like a shelf of limestone.
In particular, I recalled how, back in 1993, when Trump decided he wanted to build special limousine parking lots around his Atlantic City casino and hotel, he had used all his influence to get the state of New Jersey to steal the home of an elderly widow named Vera Coking by declaring “eminent domain” over her property, as well as over a nearby pawn shop and a small family-run Italian restaurant.
She had declined to sell, having lived there for thirty-five years. Moreover, the state offered her only one-fourth what she had been offered for the same house some years before, and Trump could then buy it at a bargain rate. The affair involved the poor woman in an exhausting legal battle, which, happily, she won, with the assistance of the Institute for Justice.
How obvious it seems to me now. Cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers, the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump—though perhaps just a little nicer.
hand grenade politics
Strongmen whose power depends on perceptions of invincibility would rather destroy a system that threatens their power than yield for the common good. We saw an example of that in our own country on January 6. We’re seeing a higher-stakes example of it now in Ukraine. No one bets on a monkey with a hand grenade to behave responsibly. But just how irresponsibly it might behave when it’s threatened and desperate to save face, which is all this war is about anymore, is an imponderable we should all start pondering.