Moral Dissolution through Moral Indignation

The cycle of violence in American politics 

Let me take you on a journey – a journey that most people are already on.  In this post we will descend into the depths of American political discourse.  Without realizing it, most people are somewhere on this road, even the disinterested who’s political engagement is purely incidental through their Facebook newsfeed.  We all have feelings about what is right and what is wrong with this country.  Unfortunately, those feelings are only the beginning of this journey, which may not end well.

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Have you ever been had a conversation with someone who seemed like a compassionate and intelligent person one minute and a crazy political extremist the next? Perhaps he favors taking health care away from people for the sake of smaller government, or redistributing wealth from hardworking Americans so that poor people are given more material resources, or loosening climate regulations to boost fossil fuel production – Earth be damned, or making abortion services available to mothers in the 3^rd trimester. How could a person who seems so nice and reasonable think that way?

It’s possible after reading that list that you had an immediate emotional reaction to the statements – I’ll admit I could feel emotional content stirring in me as I typed it.  Perhaps, if you’ve spent enough time thinking about the topics, a list of talking points spewed into your consciousness like a geyser exploding from its pressurized reservoir.  The reason these topics are so emotionally volatile is because at their core, they are moral issues.  These are fundamentally questions about right and wrong, about how humans should act toward each other and toward the world they inhabit. 

Your emotional and moral reactions to the topics are the reasons why your hypothetical conversation partner looks ghastly to you as they fall on the wrong side of the moral divide (and the wrong side of history, as we’re quick to point out).  It seems our culture (and the internet) believes that people who hold morally wrong beliefs are by extension immoral people who must be corrected, coerced, or contained – a process that daily plays on repeat in our news cycle (source: CNN.com).  This moral condemnation cycle drives the tribalism into which our country has descended. The two sides can’t talk because the other side is so abhorrent.  The natural outcome of this process is emotional and physical violence as interpersonal relations break down.  2016 was filled with such examples, from violence at political rallies, to protests dissolving into riots, to ambush-style cop killings, to the spike in hate crimes after the election. 

Another casualty of this moral condemnation cycle is truth.  Much of what we know as “truth” is based on trusting authorities that report events to us.  Moral revulsion and tribalism erode trust in those outside the group. As trust shrivels, unbelief blossoms.  You won’t believe the New York Times to tell you about shadowy Russian hackers - a topic you have no empirical access to - if you believe there is moral rot in the hearts of the writers.  Although skepticism can be a virtue when coupled with impartial intellectual analysis, moral tribalism tends to drive motivated reasoning where our “truth barometer” is not what accords with the fundamental principals of logic and reason, but rather what resonates with our pre-existing beliefs about the world.  As a result, fake news goes viral and truth recedes into relativistic obscurity. 

Though interpersonal violence and motivated reasoning are natural outcomes of moral tribalism, we have not yet spiraled to the bottom of this destructive cycle.  The current situation in the country, two sides that find the other morally abhorrent, is an inherently unstable arrangement.  Moral revulsion repels and with each instance of violence or faulty reasoning, the two sides are pushed further apart. As the distance grows, our ability to understand the other side dissolves and productive conversations fizzle.  Unfortunately, since we share a country together, each side still needs to influence the other to obtain their own political goals; however, since the ability to influence through reason and compromise has collapsed, the only available route is through force.  So each side finds forceful displays of power to be the most expedient political activity.  We can see this process play out, for example, through the Left’s use of identity politics or the Right’s obstructionist behavior in congress over the last 8 years. 

While these types of power plays have existed in American politics since the birth of the nation, as the country’s shared values erode, the range of acceptable political behavior widens to include previously unthinkable acts.  Donald Trump not only normalized but also benefited from violating political norms, such as insulting the spouses of his political opponents, lying about releasing his taxes, and breezily threatening war on Twitter.  Trump is neither special nor clever; he is merely filling the space opened by our country’s moral dissolution. 

He is also not the worst that could come. 

If Trump continues to wield his newfound political power like a bludgeon, the rift will widen and moral norms will continue to erode.  As each side suffers violence, frustration will turn into hatred.  This hatred will be disguised as moral indignation, a self-righteous deception that justifies the violence it produces.   Moral indignation will act as an engine for this cycle of violence as we roll into the abyss of hyperpolarized tribalism.  Downward we will spiral until the situation is right for the next Trump-like figure to appear, the Trump of nightmares, the Trump empowered by an electorate who is ready to send the opposition to Hell. 

This devil-Trump may not arrive in the near future.  Such an evil may yet be decades in the making, but if our country continues on its current course, we will run directly into his seductive embrace.  One may think I’m being dramatic, prophesying doom based on fantastic guesswork.  To this I would reply that 2016 happened…and they said, “it can’t happen here”.  

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It is highly likely that you do not identify with the moral tribalism identified here.  You probably have some political thoughts and you likely identified with a candidate in the election, or were just frustrated by all the candidates.  But I would invite you to remember the feeling of powerlessness you felt from this election.  You may have felt powerless when Trump, who you thought had no chance in the world of winning, dominated the Electoral College vote.  Or you may have felt powerless when neither candidate even approached representing your unique views, and the political discussion moved on without so much as noticing you were there.  This is the danger of a binary choice in a world of infinite possibilities: the choices do not reflect the choosers, and yet the choosers choose nonetheless.  This same binary choice of Left and Right continues today, and the locus of power is migrating towards the extreme ends of the spectrum.    Although you may not be far along with the process I just described, it is undeniable there are many people (who you probably do not interact with and who are not in your social media networks) who are quite far along this path.  If you do not counteract the process now, you’ll be powerless to do it later.  You’ll be trapped in a more extreme version of the same false dichotomy in which you were just crushed. 

Sunday Prayer, after the election

  

          “Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of
humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one
can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without
overcoming this double exclusion — without transposing the enemy from the
sphere of the monstrous… into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from
the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. When
one knows [as the cross demonstrates] that the torturer will not eternally
triumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person’s humanity and
imitate God’s love for him. And when one knows [as the cross demonstrates]
that God’s love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light of
God’s justice and so rediscover one’s own sinfulness.”

-       Miroslav Volf

Both sides of American politics will have much to forgive of the other in the coming years.  Grievance can lead either to hatred and then bitterness or to forgiveness and then peace.  No matter how wide the political divide, we all live in the community of sinners, each of us usurping God as king of our lives, called to kneel before the throne to find true redemption and peace. 

Lord, may my soul lay prostrate before Your divine love.  

Amen

A Prayer on the Eve of the Election

The Perspective of Infinity

Peace,

Wholeness,

Ultimate good

Perfect fulfillment,

The way things were supposed to be. 

In Hebrew You called it shalom.  It was Your original plan for Your creation, a beatific vision for Your beloved creatures.  Man was designed for a sublime equilibrium of harmonious relationships between himself, other men, the creation, and You.  Peace was to resonate throughout these connections, proceeding to the rhythm of Your own heartbeat. Psychological wholeness, sociological perfection, ecological equipoise, theological consummation – these were the seeds of the Garden of Eden and their symphonic interactions, the branches of the Tree of Life.    

Yet the brilliant light of perfection cast a shadow.  Man made a choice to remove You from Your throne of Glory and exalt himself as god.  As he ascended the steps of the throne, shalom crumbled around him and dissolved into obscurity.  As he sat and placed the crown on his head,

The music stopped,

The garden died,

Corruption

Reigned. 

When the divine reality is juxtaposed against the worldly, I feel as though I’m overlooking the edge of a chasm, transfixed by what I do not see, crushed by the weight of the void.  We’ve fallen so far from Your Beatific Vision for us.  Since the time we usurped Your throne, history has unfolded as a perversion of Your original story, a debased specter of what could have been. 

And here we are now in 2016, our country on the eve of a presidential election that has reminded us how profoundly wide is the gap between the good life that You want for us and the corrupt reality that we inevitably produce.  I cannot help but feel a profound sense of loss of Your shalom.

Lord of Peace, Jehovah Shalom, my prayer is that we see the world, and this election, from your infinite perspective.

I pray for the United States. 

From the time our country was founded we have claimed to be exceptional, a city on a hill, a light that cannot be hidden. Yet we continue to fall short of that ideal.  We claim to be pro-life, pro-choice, pro-marriage, pro-equality, pro-American, pro-immigrant, pro-business, pro-worker.  Yet all these things we are for set us against our fellow countryman.  Racial tension, religious animosity, tribal culturalism, corporate greed, and public corruption dominate our news cycle. Our societal dialectic has thrust us into discord, and from the very existence of the “other” we’ve fled toward “us” to rid ourselves of “them”.  The gap between our reality and Your shalom is widening.  Lord let us feel the weight of its absence. 

I pray for the candidates, Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton.

Through the rancor of election rhetoric, it easy to forget that behind the political façade are real people created in your image in the same existential state as the rest of us.  I do not know either of them personally, nor can I speak to their motivations or the state of their hearts.  All I can do is humbly compare their public image to the harmonious state which you have intended for man, and, acknowledging my own epistemic limitations, evaluate their policy proposals against the resonant perfection of the created order which You intended.   By this comparison, their political personas measure so small against your Beatific Vision, it is as if they disappear.  All that remains of them is the enduring part common to all of us, the divine image-bearers which you created and humanity itself corrupted.  So we are left with Donald Trump, the man, and Hilary Clinton, the woman, desperately clambering for something that does not seem to be Your shalom, and therefore tragically missing the only thing of true value in this life.  Lord let them see Your glory. 

I pray for the state of my own soul as I relate to my fellow man

Am I in so different a state than the candidates? How often do I aim at futility or run after destruction?  Looking the candidates in the face shows me that I’m not so different from them.  There are no stones to throw here. I too have ascended the throne and displaced You as king of my life.  I have participated in the disunity of national tribalism.  I measure to the same infinitesimal height as Trump or Clinton when compared to Your shalom.  Lord let me not look past my own illness, as I too readily diagnose it in others. 

Hope

So it is that the nation, the candidates, and I are all in the same situation.  Side by side, we occupy the same strident reality, perched on the edge of the chasm, peering into the darkness for something more.

Yet, thankfully, incredibly, You offer us hope for redemption.  Your Son has provided the possibility of restoration.  An infinite God paid an infinite sacrifice displaying infinite love toward us, the idolatrous usurpers.  And so You have closed the infinite gap between our corruption and Your perfection. 

Election 2016 will come and go.  People will yell, emotions will flair, politicians will scream.  The discordant parade of history will march onward.

Yet from the perspective of infinity,

the noise will echo

into the void

until shalom

returns. 

Taming your inner troll: The 4 rules of sharing political opinions responsibly on social media

This is the second in a 2-part series.  Read the first part here.

 Source: https://xkcd.com/386/

Remember that time the Internet lost its mind? It might have been about holiday cups at Starbucks, a satirical racial joke by Stephen Colbert, a lion or monkey being killed, some actor saying something offensive or a journalist asking a politically incorrect question.  While each issue has its own degree of legitimacy (large or small), the tidal wave of outrage it triggers represents the destructive potential of social media.  The smallest perceived offense can ignite the Internet’s fury.  

On the flipside, remember when we had a presidential race that featured candidates with such loose relationships to reality that people simply stopped being outraged.  Like the proverbial frog that let the water heat to boiling around him, so too have many people come to expect, or worst accept, this toxic political environment.  The deluge of unreality has blunted our ability to react appropriately. 

Both of these examples of outrage and apathy demonstrate the importance of social media as a tool for social conversation.  In my last post, I discussed how social media can help us as a society decide what is right and what is true.  Knowing this will help us deal with outrage and apathy appropriately.  Yet these examples also demonstrate that social media can be destructive and actually push us further apart. 

To turn social media into a constructive force, we need guidelines to harness its power.  Here I will discuss the 4 rules of using #SocialMediaForSocialGood.

The 4 Rules

These rules are taken from Daniel Dennett’s book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking in which he relays debate rules that he received in conversation with the accomplished mathematician and game theorist, Anatol Rapoport.

1.     You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”

2.     You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

3.     You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

4.     Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

Let me take each of these one at a time. 

You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.

This one is key on social media.  The vast majority of Facebook arguments I have either seen or participated in became contentious because people were arguing against things their opponent was not saying.  The format of social media lends itself to miscommunication because it is so constrained.  You have 144 characters on Twitter or clunky comment boxes on Facebook to express yourself.  You need to focus on the specific point the person is making and not argue against a conclusion you think they will make three logical steps down the line. 

Suppose I post something negative about Trump like “whenever Trump talks, he lies a lot”.  My conservative friends will immediately respond with how terrible Hilary is.  The conversation is already off to a bad start because I didn’t say anything about Hilary, they just assumed a conclusion that wasn’t made. Re-expressing the argument helps to narrow the scope of the conversation to a manageable topic over social media: “I think your point is that Trump says things that are untrue, for example during his political speeches, well if you look at the context…” and so on. Now we are on the same page and won’t be talking past each other. 

One last note, this rule also implies that the original poster is the person setting the scope of the debate.  If Trump’s lying makes you want to say something about Hilary’s emails, then either take the time to logically connect the original point to the emails, which will probably take multiple back-and-forth posts, or post a new topic yourself. The conversation will be pointless if we continually talk past each other or bury each other in an avalanche of disconnected opinions. 

You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

This is an important point for both participants in the conversation.  It serves to close the ideological gap by allowing all parties to realize what they have in common.  This also helps to further narrow the scope of the debate so you both know what is already considered true in this particular conversation.  It also has a nice psychological benefit of lowering the oppositional barriers the participants might be feeling that are inherent in disagreements.  Keeping with our Trump lying example, you as a Trump supporter may say something like “I agree that many of his comments are untrue at face value, for instance there is no way Mexico will pay for the wall.  But he says these things to make a larger point about immigration policy….” and so on.  Now we both know our common ground and where the disagreement begins.

You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

The point of the discussion is to get closer to what is right or what is true, so hopefully you are learning something along the way.  You have not somehow “lost” the discussion by learning from your opponent.  This is actually evidence of the back-and-forth process at work and should be encouragement for further discussion! Like the second point, this also has psychological benefit because it breaks down the divide between participants and reframes the experience more as two humans trying to decide what is right or what is true together rather than as a competition between two opponents.  

Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

Now we both understand what the argument is about, where we are beginning from, and what the benefit of the conversation has been.  So now, its time to tussle!

Let me make a few concluding observations:

·      These steps do not necessarily have to happen in order or with every reply or post that is made.  Some of them can happen a few times throughout a conversation or sometimes you can just check them yourself mentally.  The point is that these guidelines should provide structure for how you approach discussing sensitive topics with another human; how you actually employ them is up to you.

·      During political discussions, we are ultimately arguing about what is right and what is true (see the last post).  We shouldn’t be trying to “win” or “defeat” an opponent. It also helps to assume good motives in others, for instance that they too want to better understand what is right and what is true

·      However at times it becomes clear that some people have bad motivations, such as trying to belittle your point.  I would argue that it’s not worth engaging these people because it will quickly degenerate into a rhetorical competition.  The only level in which you could engage them is to argue that what is right and what is true should be the purposes of their arguments.

·      Emotions play a big role and need to be observed mindfully throughout a discussion.  Sometimes its just better to sit on that message overnight before pressing send.

·      Be responsible, don’t drink and tweet. 

So there you have it, my (actually Daniel Dennett’s) proposed rules for debating politics and other sensitive topics on social media.  With these rules, we can overcome the cycles of clickbait outrage and sensational apathy and instead learn to thoughtfully use #SocialMediaForSocialGood.