putting away "us vs. them"
on disconnecting from the social media hive mind
I’m not really in the habit of “giving something up” for Lent. I know this is a popular thing to do, and with Lent being the most meaningful time in the church calendar for me, you’d think I’d have a practice like that locked and loaded every year. But I never really have, and its because I hate the performative valence such action takes on. I know myself. I know I would be tempted, not just to give something up, but to talk about giving something up, here or on social media or to the people at my church. Better to not be like Pharisee, and open myself to the risk of loudly proclaiming my own righteousness. Remember, Lent teaches us we are dust, and in the end - matter what we give up - to dust we shall return.
So, its kind of funny how giving up social media in late January has kind of morphed into a Lenten practice for me this year, albeit one that will likely persist beyond Easter. It’s been good to have a deficit in life, caused by the withdrawal of Facebook and Instagram and mindless, endless scrolling. Paired with a paring back of podcasts and TV and other media consumption, I find my mind more and more free to think, and observe. One positive side benefit of this: I find myself able to think enough to write again. In fact, I’ve started a Lenten devotional practice over at Liturgical Threads, that you should check out if you aren’t already subscribed.
So what else am I noticing about what this fast has done for me? One thing in particular sticks out, and it was highlighted for me today by two sentences in a fantastic new essay on the Substack Walking with Wendell about practicing resistance in the manner of Wendell Berry:
Resist oversimplification and moral self-righteousness. There is no “us” and “them,” even though this reductionism is the fuel and fever that makes crowd action so satisfying for some.
When I was steeped in the daily scroll of social media, stewing in the minute-by-minute second-by-second churn of the news coming out of the White House, my brain completely submerged in the cesspit of shit that is Donald Trump’s MAGA moment, I found myself thinking much more in an “us vs. them” kind of way. I’ve always kind of resisted that kind of thinking on one level, but the inhumanity of so much of our politics had pushed me there, to the point where even walking through the grocery story after work, I was evaluating each person I passed, wondering if they were the kind of person who shrugs at children being kidnapped by ICE, who ignores the plight of immigrants, who could take or leave our civil freedoms. I found myself preemptively hating people I didn’t know.
And those I do know, who are either actively supporting MAGA, or passively doing so through inaction or inattention? I spent all my time thinking about this class of people, and just stewing in an almost constant rage at them. They are the problem with this country, I was thinking. They deserve the higher prices, the shrinking rights, the more violent world. They are getting what they voted for.
This is where my brain was all the time. And I know it was because I was imbibing news all damn day, every day. I was allowing my mood to be controlled by every drip of content coming out of MS Now and Fox and CNN and Facebook and Instagram and all the other narcoticized media forms shoved into our eyeballs by the richest and most powerful people on the planet.
Three weeks into a social media fast, I find I haven’t completely shaken off the us vs. them thinking. But it has modulated in a healthier direction, one that I think is more in line with my faith. No longer is the “them” bogeyman my fellow citizens, the other regular human beings I meet in the grocery, all those who, like me, are just trying to get by day after day. Certainly, many of them support things I hate, make choices I cannot condone, belief things that appall me. But they are just people, who by and large are trying to find their best way in the world. And, yeah, a lot of them have been convinced the best - or only - way to do that is by stepping on others, by throwing immigrants under the bus, by shunning the unclean and the impure. But someone is telling them these lies. And those someones, they are the “them” for me.
“Them” is the rich, the powerful, and the corrupt. All three of those descriptors go together in one package, necessarily. One cannot be rich without being powerful, and one cannot be powerful without it becoming a corrupting influence, an evil-making power in one’s life. One cannot be rich and also be living a Christ-like life, because to become rich means to take from others, to begin to view others as means, as dispensable in the pursuit of abstractions.
Perhaps I shouldn’t view the wealthy and the powerful this way. Certainly, they are all human beings. They all have lives, They eat and drink and have thoughts and favorite foods and indigestion and fears.
But, great wealth is a sickness, and a sin, and I cannot condone its corrupting presence in the life of my fellow human beings. More importantly, I cannot condone what it does to the least among us, how it creates a least that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Wealth turns human beings into consumptive monsters, into beings who only want more and more, at the expense of others. The great many challenges facing us right now, both in America and around the world, are caused almost exclusively by the extreme concentration wealth and those who would concentrate it even more. The lives of the vast majority of us are made harder each and every day by those who look at all they have, and want more, and so set up systems and programs and plans to suck us dry even more, to take from the vast public what little we have left.
Its still an us vs. them. But, I hope, its a healthier one, more in line with the teachings of Christ. And it isn’t one that causes me to seethe with hate towards those I meet on the street.
A blessed Lent to you all. Grace and peace,
Justin