What I have to say today isn’t for culture warriors, political partisans, or self-righteous ideologues. If you’re aware one of those titles describes you, I don’t have anything for you today. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to see you again through at some point. (Oh, who are we kidding? If you’re one of those people, you definitely don’t know it.)
What I do have for you today is the promised follow up to my previous piece about how we’ve arrived in the cultural moment we’re in and what I suggest that you do about it.
To sum up: in my last piece, I suggested that we’ve become a culture that doesn’t believe in objective truth, and that instead, through focusing on subjective truth, relativism, post-modernism, and hyper-individualism, we have become an emotive society that doesn’t care about reality so long as our particular brand of unreality doesn’t nominally “hurt” someone else. Deciding what is hurtful has become nearly impossible, as the moment that subjective feelings become the standard of measurement, there is no way to measure what is real and every person is left to fend for themselves. For most people, this means living quietly and trying to stay out of the way of the big cultural doings “out there”, at least publicly.
If you’re going to make a stand, make sure it’s a wise and necessary one.“The Yellow Steeple” by John Bear is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Which leads us to engagement in the actual worlds we inhabit. What the culture is offering is a fine way to live if you never leave your house, have no relationships, can telecommute and never have to spend real time with any people who disagree with you. In other words: it doesn’t work for how most people actually live. (That should be a clear sign that what the cultural forces are pushing is suboptimal and untenable, but they are busy trying to have it their way, and they’re beyond the audience of my little blog.)
A couple of years ago, after President Trump was elected, I was flummoxed by reactions from the political left which suggested that the right and moral thing to do, if one was a truly patriotic person, was to quickly disavow and disconnect from any friends or family who were of a different opinion. This view was disseminated on social media for most of the last four years by famous or notable people from seemingly every walk of life. As I watched more closely after my original shock wore off, I saw that this tactic was increasingly used by both sides of many different issues, and not consigned solely to the realm of politics.
Because of the collapse of our cultural relationship to truth, the same sorts of arguments were routinely used by both sides as justifications for the jettisoning of these friends, family members and coworkers. The informal set up of the argument, with it’s assumptions, is as follows:
- My position is the only correct, good, and righteous position.
- My position is self-evident. Therefore…
- Any person who who does not hold my position is therefore evil and wrong, because they are knowingly representing something that is wrong, unjust, hurtful, etc.
As is the case with any argument structured in this way, if the premises are true, the conclusion must follow. But the problem with this argument form is that both of the premises are false, and the conclusion is not only incorrect therefore, but dangerous. There are issues with added or missing words in the premises above which can help clarify the problems.
In premise one, the issue is with the word “only.” In a complex world, it is often the case that there are good motivations that can drive a wide variety of assertions. Principled engagement from anyone comes from them thinking there is merit to their position. Very few people engage publicly on anything with the intention of being evil, incorrect, and unrighteous. Of course, that has nothing to do with whether they are right, but deciding right and wrong used to be opportunities to appeal to objective reality, which we’ve just said is no longer usual practice. The reason this is such an important issue is because the work of being a responsible human thinker begins once a person realizes that important values are always difficult to secure in the particulars, no matter how self-evident the abstracts principles we value might seem to us. We become adults intellectually when we realize that we are frequently left deciding in a broken world how to negotiate when we have to choose between things that are important to us and one is at odds with another and we can’t have both. When we deny that there is any ambiguity in our world we annihilate the grace and good-faith that having a culture with meaningful values requires.
In premise two, the issue is with words that are missing: “to me,” following the statement. The assumption built into this premise is that anything that is clear to me should be equally clear to everyone else. Given what I have just said above, you can see what that is clearly not the case. We are all the product of our own experiences, and the value in all of us coming from different places and experiences and backgrounds is precisely that things which seem clear and self-evident to me are not to others. The value in cooperation for a group of any size is that it necessarily requires accounting for the views of a diverse number of people. The bigger the group of people in community, the more important it is that we simultaneously advocate in the right ways for what is evident to us, while simultaneously realizing that what is evident to us may not be to someone else because of where they come from. Again, hard decisions have to be made when the group has to decide how to accommodate important competing values.
The result of these two disastrous premises held in tandem is in what they create: complete annihilation of the good faith and benefit of the doubt which drives healthy interactions. That’s how you end up with people disavowing family because they can’t associate with “that evil.” What those utilizing this argument fail to realize is that severing the real substantive ties to family, friends, work and community is a worse evil than any supposedly good abstract moral, religious or political principle they claim to hold. The conclusion that one would be right to remove people their life who did not agree with them on serious matters which could come up is one which will eventually leave all people alone and divided. It isn’t a tenable or useful way to live. It is also incredibly selfish. If you were the only truly right person in the world, wouldn’t you want to help those who were most wrong? What good would there be in being right alone with a world that was organized wrongly?
So what do we do?
First, commit not to cutting anyone out of your life entirely for what they believe. They have a reason for what they believe, so as odious as it may be to you, forget entirely the idea that you can just be rid of them. You’re stuck with them, and that might not be a bad thing, for them or for you.
Second, understand your level of engagement with the people around you, and pay more attention and more careful attention to those who are closest to you. If you have a close family member who is diametrically opposed to you on some issue, you need to figure out how to live with them, and as quickly as possible. On the other side of the spectrum, that distant acquaintance from high school on Facebook who you haven’t seen in 20 years who lives in a totally different part of the country is probably someone you can safely unfollow. The closer they are to you, the more you should invest. I will say more about the concentric circles of relating I am suggesting at some future point, but for now, think of yourself as the center of a group of relationships. The first circle is your family. The second is your close friends. The third is your faith community if you have one. The fourth would be coworkers. Beyond that, there are circles for your community, your country, and your world. Your biggest responsibilities are the in the circles that are closest to you. If you are struggling for impact, start closer to you.
Third, prioritize in-person communication over random engagements, especially online. There is no good reason for you to be trying to correct a distant acquaintance’s friends on Facebook. There is no good reason to go looking for ideological fights with complete strangers in the comments on a news article online. A good rule of thumb for engagement online is that if you wouldn’t pick up the phone to say something to someone, don’t put it on their social media page (with the possible exception of public figures, which I would group in a separate category with its own rules). If you can have an in-person interaction with someone, especially about serious matters, you probably should have an in-person interaction with them, rather than on FB or through a text message.
Fourth, make living peaceably with all people a bigger priority than living self-righteously in front of a mirror or a small group of people who agree with you. Performative declarations of moral principles for a fauning audience is really just a way of gross ideological self-satisfaction. If that sounds gross, that’s because it is. Avoid it. Furthermore, you and your positions don’t get bonus points if you’re being a jerk–you’re really just more likely to turn off onlookers even if you do have a good point if that is how you are going to behave. Living peaceably doesn’t mean living without courage: it means that even when you do speak, you look not to say things that will rankle or start a fight because of how you said it. The goal in this is to speak in such a way that you bring care and truth to every engagement, even if the people don’t agree with you. Avoid taking offense, even if they try to cause it.
“…If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone…”
Romans 12:18
Fifth, don’t spend your time arguing about beliefs or ideologies anywhere that you aren’t making strides to live out and sacrifice for in your every day life. You probably have a great many positions that you believe deeply in. Great. But your life likely doesn’t have the time or space for you to engage in moving every cause you believe in forward. If you’re going to prioritize your interaction, choose to prioritize in places where you are already investing your life. It’s more honest, and you will have more to contribute. When the inevitable moment in an interaction comes when someone asks, “If this is so important, what have you done about it?” it’s nice to have more than some whitewashed version of “keyboard warriored online about it for three weeks.” Don’t spend your time opening your mouth for things you haven’t put your sweat into. Limiting your platform to the things that you care most about also has a way of increasing your impact in those areas.
Sixth, before you attack someone for what they have said they believe, take some time to engage and figure out why they hold the position they do. There are very few people in our world who hold a position for no reason. Sometimes, the reasons are bad. But many, many times if you do the hard work, you will see that most people believe as they do for a reason. If you take a few extra minutes before the flame war starts to figure out why the person you seemingly disagree with is so fired up, maybe you can put the pin back in the rhetorical grenade and have a more compassionate conversation instead. At the end of that kind of conversation, even if you disagree, everyone can walk away feeling as though they were heard–and that’s valuable, especially if you want to talk to that person/those people again.
Seventh, avoid ascribing bad intent to people who disagree with you. You don’t know what is driving all of the people who disagree with you. Don’t pretend you do. Claiming to know what someone else “is really after” or “what they really meant,” is the worst kind of hubris, as it indicates you think you know everything (including the inner thought life of people who you likely rarely engage with). If you regularly do that, don’t be surprised when no one wants to talk to you except people as intolerable and egotistical as you. If people who don’t agree with you have bad intent, they will make that clear enough without you trying to hang your psychoanalysis on them. Realistically though, most people don’t knowingly mean harm to others. The presence of ignorance or difference is not the same as the presence of bad intent.
Eighth, don’t swing at pitches in the dirt. Be smart. Know that someone who is posting a memeified photo that appears in your social media feed probably isn’t desiring to host a thoughtful and nuanced discussion on an issue, whether you agree with them or not. Yes, a part of the meme is probably nonsense, and twists a kernel of truth, and yes, it probably misses the point. It isn’t there to move dialogue forward. It is there to virtue signal and/or cause arguments. Just move on. It’s a baited hook, just waiting for someone with time to waste in having a fruitless argument with complete strangers. Again, just move along. If it is someone close to you, engage them in person or on the phone instead.
Finally, know when to limit your interaction. It may be the case that there are some things being communicated around you by people in your life that demand you say something. My suggestion here is that the further away from your core relationships that is, the sooner you should limit your interactions once you’ve said something. I’m not talking here about excluding someone from your life or disowning them–I’m talking about when you decide, based on your relationship with them, that you’ve done your duty to address something they’ve said or something they believe which is wrong, and it’s time to leave them to themselves as best you can. For those closest to us, there may be no point where we can stop engaging them, especially when we are deeply at odds with them. For those further away, I suggest you take one shot at addressing them, and then, if they don’t respond positively in a way that would make further investment a good use of your time, let them go. That letting go means that you still love them, value them, and honor their humanity, but that you are opting not to spend your time in ways where it is unlikely to improve something and will only damage the relationship. It’s okay for someone to be wrong on the internet! For the Jesus-following people in my readership–this is the point where you pray for God to change their heart (or yours) if it matters to you. When talking to someone becomes a bad use of your of time, talk to God ABOUT them–that’s a much better practice!
The central tenet running through all of my suggestions is to move your circles of communication closer to you, and away from social media. There is far too much going on in our world for you to handle it all, and especially when things are difficult, shrinking your life down to a more manageable list of responsibilities is a way to infuse meaning and purpose into your life and remove the sense of overwhelmedness you may feel at how wrong everything around you is. Focusing on the circles closest to you is a way to take responsibility for the places where you are most likely to have influence. In addition, you will learn important relational lessons about how to effectively communicate what you believe with an audience more likely to be patient with you. Then, if you do need to go to broader circles, you’ve already got good practice.
One of the ways we restore truth to our existence is to live from it personally. Logic, reason, and compassion are the values which can drive this process forward. If you can be connected to the truth yourself and live from it in your closest relationships, you can be the spark that creates healthy change in the world you inhabit, beginning with the places and people you interact with the most.
Blessings to you in the journey of representing truth, compassion, and engagement in our world in these difficult times.