What if We Stopped Cursing the Emotional Darkness and Instead Lit a Candle?

 

“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.”                                 Anne Frank               

I don’t use Twitter because I find it hard enough to express myself clearly in unlimited words.  Also, I find non-stop emotional outbursts tiring.  And I agree with what Alan Jacobs has to say about social media being a poor tool for reasoning and rational reflection, in large part because it encourages “instantaneous response and crude measures of approval or disapproval.”

Jacobs:

I don’t think there’s any question that social media prompt us to respond to the world in childlike/childish ways, leading always with our strongest emotions and then coming up with comically inadequate post factojustifications of them, or assuming that the only just world is one which conforms itself to my felt needs and within which the only real violations are of my feelings.

 ….In the current moment, most adults are emotionally six years old, most college students four, and the Republican Presidential nominee two. (Seriously: look at any professional description of the “terrible twos” and try to tell me that it doesn’t precisely describe Donald Trump, whose supporters act as indulgent parents and elder siblings.)

I can’t say that this is a good thing, but it’s the situation we’re in and it’s not going to change any time soon. So when we’re thinking about social media and political discourse, what if we stopped cursing the emotional darkness and instead lit a candle? And the first step in doing that is by accepting that most of the people we interact with on social media really are children.

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis wrote,

St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’

This, I think, should be the task of those who want to use social media wisely and well: not to try to reason with people — the code architecture of all social media, and especially Twitter, with its encouragement of instantaneous response and crude measures of approval or disapproval, militates against rational reflection — but to promote ordinate affection, and especially the love of the good wherever it may be found, even in people you have been taught to think of as your political opponents.

…If we are going to begin to heal the wounds of our political culture that have been either created or exacerbated by social media, then we will need to train ourselves — and only then, we hope, others — in the practices of loving what is truly desirable. Rather than trying to wrench Twitter into a vehicle for rational debate, which it can never be, we need to turn its promotion of emotional intensity to good account. (We need jujitsu, not Mortal Kombat.) And then, perhaps, when at least some people have become habituated to more ordinate affections, and Reason at length comes to them, then, bred as they have been, they will hold out their hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity they bear to her.

 

 

You can read it all here.