In the Flesh

Every year, the group is different.

They stand just up the street, a cluster of teens, all of them awaiting the arrival of the big yellow bus that will take them to the nearby high school. I pass them on the other side of the street on my morning walk with the dog, every once in a while making sure to be out of the way when a teen comes hurtling down the street, having gotten out of the house at precisely the moment the bus passed it.

This year, it’s a group of four teenage girls that seems to have been selected by a casting director’s diversity and representation consultant. A Latina, an African immigrant, an Asian American, and a White girl, and they’re all lined up in a row, in precisely that order, morning after morning.

This would, were one to be making some slightly unsubtle teen film about the joys and blessings of our multiethnic melting-pot republic, be a perfect setup. Each of their lives and backgrounds, different, coming together and finding friendship and common humanity as they got to know one another. That’d be great, but that’s not the reality.

All year long when I’ve passed them, they’re always standing in what apparently is their assigned spot, each a perfect COVID era six feet away from the other, Latina first, two meters, then the African girl, then two meters, then the Asian girl, and two meters beyond that, the white girl sitting separate in the passenger seat of her dad’s idling car.

And never, not once all year long, have I seen any of them interacting with one another. Not once. 

 Every day I pass them, they’re all in The Position. Hands together, head down, thumbs typing or swiping.

The pastor in me wishes that some morning, the Apostle Paul could join me on my walk, and I could point to that foursome hermetically sealed away from one another, and ask: 

Paul? When you talk about the importance of not being in the flesh, how does that relate to what we’re seeing happen all around us? Could you break that down for me? This culture-wide discomfort around face to face connection, our seemingly inexorable separation from one another? How does that play out against what you taught about Spirit and flesh?

What does that have to say to us, in a time when we struggle with the realization that the society-wide experiment with inescapably present media is depriving us of an essential component of our humanity? How, I want to ask Paul, does that speak to the peculiar character of our distracted lives and disembodied attentions? When passing a group of teen girls doesn’t sound like the delightful chattering spring vibrance of a murmuration of starlings, but is day by day as silent as a sarcophagus?

Like the clinical psychologists who designed the software that drives the dark glass shards that consume our attention, we know that the reason we aren’t present is because of a weakness of the flesh, a vulnerability that can be hacked. When we can be shown exactly what our brains desire, all the time, without ceasing, why would we get to know or care about the person standing right next to us? Or, equally and to be fair to the teens, the person sitting right next to us on the couch every evening, as we both scroll mindlessly through nothing.

We cannot be compassionate or love our neighbor if we don’t even notice the human beings around us, if we’re oblivious to the place in which we are standing.

Resisting this, I think, is a necessary thing, if our every action and every deed of our body is to be a part of what Christ is working in the world.

Polite Society

I recently remedied an absence in my reading repertoire. There’s a terrifyingly large number of books out there, so even though there are stories and writers you know you should have engaged with, it’s nearly impossible to keep up.

So when I last journeyed to the library, and saw upon a shelf a copy of Jane Austen’s PERSUASION, I thought, I’ve never actually read an entire Jane Austen novel. Excerpts, sure. Adaptations? They’re inescapable. But I’ve never read one, cover to cover.

And so I did. It took a little while. When reading early 19th century literature, you have to adjust your brain a little bit. The patterns of thought and writing aren’t ours, with compound sentences that spin endlessly outwards like fractals generated from a Mandelbrot set. PERSUASION was Austen’s very last novel, written in her late thirties and published at the very end of 1817, six months after Austin’s death. I’d say “untimely death,” but before antibiotics and vaccines, dying before forty wasn’t even faintly unusual.

It’s a romance, unsurprisingly, one between the thoughtful but suppressed Anne Elliot and the dashing but frustrated Captain Wentworth, who she’d loved passionately but whose offer of marriage she’d spurned years before after being persuaded by her family that it wasn’t a socially advantageous match.

Two hundred years ago, things were really, really different if you were of the genteel class in Britain, because all that mattered was society. Meaning, ninety-seven percent of the life of the Elliot family seemed to be going to visit people, and having people visit them.  

I found myself thinking, Dear Lord, do none of these people have jobs? Which, being aristocratic, they mostly didn’t.

Polite society meant everything was about carefully managed appearances and relationships, about everyone knowing who you were and…equally importantly…who was connected to you. 

If someone had more social influence, you’d do anything you could to establish a connection with them. In practice, it meant that you were constantly spending every last second of your life worrying about how you were perceived. Even though every moment was compulsively socializing, you were also strangely, paradoxically alone. Your real thoughts, your deepest feelings and fears? None of that could be expressed. All of it was posturing and falseness and striving for advantage.

So, you know, nothing at all like the way we “socialize” now in the social media era. 

 As false as it was, at least in British polite society you actually got to spend time with people, face to face. The smothering heights of Austen/Bronte-era society ain’t got nuthin’ on our commodified, algorithmic, Skinner-box social hellscape, which is antithetical to genuine intimacy, meaning relationships where you can be completely, deeply, utterly yourself.

If the net result of a new social paradigm is relentless interaction coupled with deep and paralyzing levels of human loneliness, you know something is very, very wrong. 

Without real intimacy, all we will ever feel is utterly alone.

Tik Toxic

It's coming up on nearly two months since I've posted anything on social media.  My Instagram and Facebook feeds are cold and stale.  There's nothing much on my BlueSky.  I'm not sure what's going on over at Mastodon, because I can't be bothered to check.  I'm not on Tik Tok, because it makes my brain bleed, but with the tiktokification of so many other platforms, I may as well be.

In this, I'm not doing my due diligence as a servant of the corporate ecosystems that have shouldered their way in between us.  Nor am I engaging in Building My Brand, which is now mandatory if you're going to be a successful creative of any ilk.   This has happened before.  

It's because I go through patches where I find the entire social media experience a little loathsome.  What do I get out of Meta's ecosystem, for example?

Threads is just X, just hot takes and outrage, a howling, grasping storm of fermented egotism.  I get Tiktokified compulsive distractions on Insta, burps of short form comedy or action or musical recipes, tuned specifically to my interests, designed to mete out the dopamine.  Facebook, which once was old friends and a few ads?  It's now almost entirely ads, plus short form videos, plus posts from random hungry influencers who've paid Facebook to promote them.  

A small fraction of it is anything that matters to me.  A picture of friends gathered with family, or some delightful news, or someone in need of prayer and encouragement.

While I love encountering these things on social media, they're like recovering a gold ring swallowed by one's dog.  You're glad to see it, but the process of getting there leaves something to be desired.

There are many people I know on those platforms, but the algorithms warp my perception of them.  I'll see the same meme, posted and reposted within subnetworks of souls.  The same jokes.  The same rageposts.  The sharers frequently cease to be the fully unique people I know, and become more reflexively neural, passing along whatever signal that's resonating across their fully-commodified web of interrelation.

It warps our nature.  It warps my own.  On social media, I am shallower and more reactive.  On social media, I am more avaricious and trivial, as the perfectly targeted baubles dangled before me cry for clicks.  

That's overstating it, you might say.  The medium is just a medium, you might say.  It's just a tool, and you can use it without moral hazard.  

Oh, honey.  Bless your little Saruman heart.  It's not that at all.  It is an implement made with hidden intent, a sword whose handle is saturated with opiates, a blanket impregnated with smallpox.  It's a Skinner Box designed to ensnare us, because we are the product, not the purchaser.  Our intent may be old acquaintance not being forgot, but their intent is compulsive engagement.

But without it, we vanish.  We have no platform.  We are not relevant.  We are friendless.  Surely, surely, those things are worth the sacrifice.  What's the point of this bit of online journaling, for example, if it's not widely read?

Again, I am meant to desire platform and relevance.  I'm supposed to crave the approvals, the likes, the comments, the reposts.  It's The Work, one might cluck. Sure, you don't like it, but if you want to succeed, you've got to do it. 

Do I?

Want to succeed, that is?  Or, rather, do I want to succeed on the terms established by our blighted culture?  Do I want fame and lucre, influence and social power?  Are these my priorities?

Do I want to announce everything I do with trumpets, to act that I might be seen by others, to declare my righteousness on the street corners of our mammonized sociality?  Do I want influence, and power, and to be celebrated by all?

If I said I do not desire that success, I would be lying.  I do desire it.  Part of me certainly does.  Lord have mercy, do I want that.  Having tasted it, I hunger for it.  I lust after it.

And there, as a Christian, lies the heart of social media's moral hazard.   

Public Shaming and Social Media

It's surfaced a few times on my social media feeds in the last week.  Public Shaming, it's called, a progressive/lefty social media site (on tumblr, in this instance) that serves one purpose.

That purpose: to highlight racist/ignorant comments on social media, and then turn the ire of those who are outraged at such comments against the individual in question.  You're invited to google it...but it's a wee bit profane.  Well, actually, it swears like a sailor with Turettes.  Just so's ya know.

It was active around the Asiana airlines crash, publicly humiliating those insensitive enough to make that an opportunity for jokes about race.  And then I saw it again today, as it called out a half-dozen or so twitter users who made racist and ignorant assumptions about singer Marc Anthony as he sang at a baseball game.

The folks tweeting were...well...not bright, and not pleasant.  Being of Latino heritage and fluent in Spanish doth not make a person 1) Mexican or 2) Not American.   And what they posted, without exception, was shameful.  But as this site and others like it get more purchase, I found myself wondering what reaction it was stirring out there.

What does public humiliation look like in the social media era?   I went to the twitter feed of one @G_Lewis19 to find out.  He'd tweeted the following bit of nastiness to our collective consciousness:

"Why is some Spanish [fornicate] singing God Bless America at the All Star Game? That's just wrong"

Contemptible, without question.  And...well...stupid.  And racist.  All of those things.  So I searched for his account.

There, I observed the reaction, fueled by the shaming site.

Hundreds of responses, pages and pages of them.  I scrolled down for a while.

Some were measured.  Most were rather less so.  A sample, redacted as needed:

"Get educated dumb [fornicate]!" 
"You dumb white trash [fornicate]!!!!"  
"I hate dumb[fornicates] that talk [excrement] about r culture...Glewis beware!"  
"you ugly [fornicating] short white trash. He's American you dumb [fornicate.]" 
"[Fornicate] your apologies you said there is no coming back from being scum you hateful [genitalia]..." 
"so ur the moron who think latins can sing an american song guess what fagot puertorricans are as americans as anyone else."

And so on, and so forth. Hundreds of these.  From the comments, it was clear that the offender had attempted an apology, and then stopped as the tide of hatred continued, and then fled.  The account itself is no longer accessible, at least as of this writing.

Other accounts targeted for racist comments were still up, with various reactions.  One appeared to be an attention troll, the sort of web denizen who thrives on that sort of thing, and was continuing to blissfully spew out nastiness in a sea of vitriolic response.  But most shut down.

And I wonder...just what does this help, precisely?  What does using media as a lens to bring the outrage of hundreds or thousands onto an individual actually do?  Sure, there are ignorant people out there.  But connecting them with people who are filled with hatred for their stupidity seems unlikely to create ground for reconciliation or understanding.

Hatred has, in the long and blighted history of our species, never managed to do much of anything but engender more hatred.  And shaming, humiliation, and verbal abuse of a complete stranger...no matter how much of an idiot/moron/knuckledragger they may in actuality be...also doesn't tend to improve things.

It's not particularly good for changing the blighted spirit of a racist, any more than beating a bad dog makes them a better dog.

But it's also not good for those who feel that surge of insta-media outrage and umbrage, vent at a stranger, and then move on through their day.   It stirs a sense of agitation that more likely than not does not actually mirror their reality.  It shifts and shapes us into holding an adversarial understanding of being.

And that seems like the last thing we need in our culture.  That, we already have aplenty.

Gaming, Creativity, and Society

I read a great deal of random stuff, and as part of that randomness, I'll occasionally peruse one of my wife's copies of Fast Company. It's a magazine dedicated to the amazing creative glory of capitalism, and tends to feature cool young people who've got the latest bleeding edge idea or product.

The June issue...now, of course, stale...highlighted the 50 most creative people in the business world. Among them were several gamer types, and the one with the most prominent picture was a Ms. Jane McGonigal, who does appear to actually be the free-spirited daughter of the Hogwarts instructor.

She's not so much a game designer in the classical sense, but rather, a games theorist and practitioner. Games include a whole variety of forms of play, not just those in the virtual world. In the words of her Fast Company interviewer:

She believes if people could experience the same emotional and physiological benefits in real life that they receive from gaming -- elation, adventurous thinking, focus -- people would be as engaged in their work and global issues as they are in World of Warcraft. However, for all the creativity that games can trigger, McGonigal concedes that they are only the first step. "Games are getting people to agree on a common goal and engage with that goal collectively for large amounts of time," says the self-styled happiness hacker. "But it's not like it's a magic button. They still have to do the problem solving when they get there."

She seems an endearing enough sort, but I'm not sure that gaming is quite so entirely positive. Yes, we learn through play. Yes, play trains us for the world. But gaming and organizing our lives around alternative or virtual realities may be, as Marx would put it, mainlining heroin for the masses.

Human beings are natural and collective problem solvers. It's what we do. More often than not, we mess up, but once we've cleared away the debris of our failed efforts, we organize again. It's that yearning for meaning thing. We find purpose in overcoming challenges, and in doing so together. That's what deTocqueville noted about us Amurricans at the very beginning of this fragile little experiment of a republic.

But gaming can be..well..a bit onanistic. We all know of the horror stories of young Koreans who forget to eat and die after a four day gaming binge. Or of pale pasty folk whose entire lives revolve around complex tables and throws of the dice. There are more subtle versions of this threat. Gaming can consume and redirect that desire to work towards a goal. Instead of providing the conceptual tools we need for the hunt or the harvest or the 2010 iPhone 3-GSXR or global hunger, we can become hermetically sealed away from reality in our gaming communities. Our creative energy and efforts can be consumed in a gaming phantasmagoria, leaving us nice and drained and ready for our life as a complacent cubicle drone.

I think the points she makes aren't inherently wrong. Gaming is...fun. Gaming can help us organize our thoughts and think strategically. It can certainly be used for training and indoctrination, or the U.S. Military wouldn't be putting so much effort into getting kids and soldiers alike to play America's Army.

But it ain't all virtual butterflies and flowers.

The Only Real Christians Live In Denmark

I've just done a fascinating bit of reading over at Public Discourse, a conservative web journal. The article I'd commend to your attention is written by W. Bradford Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociologist. He opines at totally manageable length about the impact of social democracy on faith, drawing from a recent 33 nation study by two University of Washington sociologists. That study confirmed something many folks have noticed anecdotally: that nations that provide cradle-to-grave care for their citizens tend to be less religious.

For Dr. Wilcox, this reality poses grave concerns for the landscape of American faith during an Obama administration. Given this administration's focus on providing health care, a functioning infrastructure, and an educational system, things could get particularly ugly for the church if all of those things are successfully provided. Why? The answer is simple, says the good doctor:

"The bottom line: as government grows, people’s reliance on God seems to diminish."

Why is this? It isn't that folks aren't religious in countries like Norway and Denmark. There are Christians...just not as many of them. Why? In his review of the 33 nation study, Dr. Wilcox pulls out the core finding:

How do we account for the inverse relationship between government size and religious vitality? As Gill and Lundsgaarde point out, some individuals have strong spiritual needs that can only be met by religion. This portion of the population remains faithful, come what may. But other individuals only turn to churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques when their needs for social or material security are not being met by the market or state. In an environment characterized by ordinary levels of social or economic insecurity, many of these individuals will turn to local congregations for..support.

So let's make the shift from sociology to theology. What does this mean theologically?

It means, if we're attending to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, that the "success" of American Christianity only comes because most American Christians don't have a clue what Jesus actually taught. The findings tell us that we turn to God when we are seeking material well-being. We turn to Christ seeking physical security.

What we do not appear to be seeking is the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. We're as confused as the Samaritan woman at the well, who had trouble grasping the difference between water and Living Water. We come to Jesus not because we feel the yearning to be conformed to the will of God and transformed by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. Instead, it's because we got us a jones for some a dat schweet, schweet Mammon, and we expect that Jesus in his infinitely beneficent blingitude will supernaturally serve it up if we ask real nice.

Perhaps, to flip Dr. Wilcox and his conclusions on their head, what a welfare state actually does is help separate the wheat from the chaff, the True Kirk from the Church of the World, the Heavenly City from the Earthly City. Those who would otherwise go to church seeking first their own interests and their own comfort find what they seek in the state, and fall away.

Those who recognize that there is more to our purpose life than material possessions and security...well, they keep seeking the Holy until they find it.