Friday, September 3, 2010
Where's the love?
Wheaton College prof Alan Jacobs has a thoughtful reflection on the righteous indignation that pervades the Internet:
A now-famous cartoon on the xkcd “webcomics” site shows a stick figure typing away at his computer keyboard as a voice from outside the frame says, “Are you coming to bed?” The figure replies: “I can’t. This is important. . . . Someone is wrong on the Internet.” I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues. . . .
[A]s we have come to focus our attention ever more on politics and the arts of public justice, we have increasingly defined our private, familial, and communal lives in similar terms. The pursuit of justice has come to define acts and experiences that once were governed largely by other virtues. It is this particular transformation that Wendell Berry was lamenting when he wrote, “Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.” That is, it has become a matter of justice rather than of love, an assertion of rights rather than a self-giving.
This same logic governs our responses to one another on the Internet. We clothe ourselves in the manifest justice of our favorite causes, and so clothed we cannot help being righteous (“Someone is wrong on the Internet”). In our online debates, we not only fail to cultivate charity and humility, we come to think of them as vices: forms of weakness that compromise our advocacy. And so we go forth to war with one another.
Comments are open. Let the love flow!
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/09/wheres-the-love.html
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Bob makes an interesting point. It reminds one of the story of Jonah. He had every reason to hate the Assyrians -- the whole Near East hated them for good reason -- and so when Jesus called him to work among the Assyrians, to try to get them to repent, he was not very enthusiastic. So Jesus introduced him to the great fish. That got his attention.
Jonah was sent on a mission to Save the Assyrians! But he was not sent in the guise of Mother Theresa -- no criticism of her; different conditions demand different approaches -- but as a fire-and-brimstone preacher, warnings of the destruction of their cruel empire. Against all odds, they actually listened to him!
At the end of his service to the Assyrians and to all their victims, Jonah asked Jesus why he had done that. What was it all about? This most upright and just of men still didn't really understand why. What he did understand is that it was what Jesus wanted, and so -- with some foot dragging -- he did it.
It would be really nice if we could always be polite and civil and politically correct in our dealings with each other. We always dream that we would all want to be Mother Theresas. We always suppose that we don't need to fool with the great fish. But life is not so simple. What we have to do is to do what Jesus wants. Recognizing that may even teach us a bit of the humility that Bob so wisely asks of us.