Tag: language

The Trouble with Meme Activism: Sometimes to Speak is Not to Speak

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ 2 Comments

In the past couple of years, I have noticed that periods of social unrest are often accompanied by a corresponding outbreak of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I am referring, of course, to the accompanying blizzard of memes on Facebook and Twitter that display a quote famously (and probably incorrectly) attributed to Bonhoeffer: “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

In most cases where it appears, the quote stands as a comprehensive indictment of anyone who has not yet expressed public outrage over some event that has captured the attention of the current news cycle. The meme is a cultural syllogism: A terrible thing has occurred. You have not said that it was terrible on Facebook or Twitter. You are a terrible person. The reasoning seems to be that if you have not publicly condemned it on social media, you are complicit in its terribleness.

I suppose we should not be surprised by such reasoning. In the age of social media, it is not enough to possess moral convictions. There are no longer any unpublished thoughts. We are now expected to leave a public record, especially of those things about which we disapprove. Public statements, especially in social media, are now considered to be a form of social action.

But in most cases where quotes like this appear, they are usually something less than meaningful action. They are merely a form of virtue signaling intended to place social pressure on those who do not hold the “right view” of whatever incident prompted the post. Of course, social pressure like this is nothing new. Nor is it necessarily bad. Public expressions of disapproval have always established the boundaries of right and wrong. The lessons begin in infancy and continue throughout our entire lifetime. In social systems, both large and small, the rules of acceptable behavior are taught by suffering the frowns and slights of others. Shame works hand in hand with acceptance to bind people together. And to get them to do the right thing.

The real problem with meme morality is its tendency toward reductionism. What is intended as a manifesto proves only to be a cliché. It is a statement of the obvious. We think we are thundering like God on Sinai when in reality we are only expressing a mundane truism. War is bad. Racism is evil. Be nice to others. Treating such assertions as a form of social activism reduces moral behavior to mere sentimentalism. It is the kind of speech that James 2:16 condemns–the digital equivalent to “be ye warmed and filled.” It makes a demand without offering any corresponding action that will address the problem.

Sentimentalized language is trite. It states the obvious but so broadly that it offers no real help to the reader or the listener. Sentimentalized speech is characterized by what Wendell Berry calls “the sickly beauty of generalized emotionalism.”[1] This sort of vagueness is a common feature, not only of social media but of bad preaching. Such preaching paints with a broad brush. Its target is so large that it aims at nothing at all. It may make us feel, but it will not help us to act.

There are, of course, contexts where the mere assertion of an idea is an act of bravery. To speak the truth aloud lies at the heart of the Christian act of preaching. Speaking can be a form of activism, but for that to be the case, it must be speech that goes against the grain. There must be a potential cost to the speaker, as well as a genuine interest in the welfare of those who disagree. Without these, it is cheerleading at best and the voice of the mob at worst.

We should not be surprised to find that many confuse sentimentalism with activism. Croatian sociologist Stjepan Mestrovic has observed that emotions are the primary object of manipulation in postmodern culture. “Today, everyone knows that emotions carry no burden, no responsibility to act, and above all, that emotions are accessible to everyone,” Mestrovic writes.[2] One result of this is something Jeremy Begbie has called “conspicuous compassion,” an emotional expression that becomes an end in itself and produces “very little in the way of positive, practical action.”[3]

Emotion can be a wellspring of action, but it is not always necessary. It is possible to act apart from feeling or even contrary to feeling, a condition that is sometimes called duty. Like Jesus, we are at times called upon to do that which we would prefer not to do (cf. Luke 22:42). Or we may refuse to do what we would like to do (Col. 3:5). Sentimentalism believes that feeling by itself is action. More than this, for the sentimentalist, emotion is an end in itself. The aim is to feel, and feeling is enough. “Sentimentalists typically resist any challenge to their way of life,” Begbie observes. “They are much more often moved by strangers than by those close to them, since the former require no personal sacrifice.”[4]

True activism not only seeks to change the situation but also aims to change thinking.

Meme activism often fails on another critical level. It tends to be coercive. The aim of such statements is not to engage, debate, or persuade but to silence. True activism is persuasive rather than coercive. It not only seeks to change the situation but also aims to change thinking. To do this, the language that accompanies activism must seek to elicit rather than impose the desired response. Speaking that is coercive throws off the persuasive responsibility of speech and employs language as an instrument of brute force. Theologian Joseph Pieper rightly calls this form of communication propaganda and notes that its use is not limited to the official power structure of a dictatorship. In his essay “Abuse of Language–Abuse of Power,” Pieper explains, “It can be found wherever a powerful organization, an ideological clique, a special interest, or a pressure group uses the word as their ‘weapon’.”[5]

An essential component of propagandistic speech is the element of implied threat. But Pieper notes that the threat can take many forms. In this category of threat, he includes “all the forms and levels of defamation, or public ridicule, or reducing someone to a nonperson–all of which are accomplished by means of the word, even the word not spoken.”[6] It is not its strength of statement, the fact that it may disagree with the viewpoint of others, or even its emotional tone that renders such speech abusive. It is the desire to squash all opposing viewpoints merely by force of statement alone and to demean those who disagree. “The common element in all of this is the degeneration of language into an instrument of rape,” Pieper explains. “It does contain violence, albeit in latent form.”[7]

Today’s public discourse is not only inclined toward coercion; it is addicted to flattery. By flattery, I mean more than the practice of empty praise. That is indeed a form of flattery. But more broadly, flattery is the habit of telling others what they want to hear in return for gain. It is speech, as Joseph Pieper, explains, whose main objective is one of “courting favor to win success.”[8] Pieper wrote his essay a decade before the birth of the internet and nearly two decades before the founding of Facebook. Yet he anticipates the era of social media, observing that this craving for approval may reduce theology to mere entertainment whose primary purpose is to gain a following. Flattery in this broad sense is the language of choice for all whose primary objective is to gain a large audience. It is especially the lingua franca of social media, where being heard is often a function of likes and shares.

The pandering that is a mark of flattery may seem far removed from the bullying of coercive speech, yet they are actually two sides of the same coin. Both are the stock and trade false prophets and false teachers. The apostle Paul criticized the Corinthians for being smitten by false apostles who sought to use them to build their platform. He observed, “. . . you even put up with anyone who enslaves you or exploits you or takes advantage of you or puts on airs or slaps you in the face” (2 Cor. 11:20). The pandering of these false teachers catered to the audience’s expectation not only in the content of their teaching, which avoided those aspects the Corinthians found offensive but in their manner and mode of delivery. In this case, the audience wanted to be treated in a demanding and arrogant way. A manner which they mistook for authority.

Whether or not Bonhoeffer said the quote attributed to him makes little difference. It is often true. To speak is to act. But it is equally true that our speaking may also be acting in the theatrical sense. We are not trying to change anything. We are trying to build a platform. We are curating an image. We are seeking an audience. We are collecting likes and shares the way we hope to collect crowns in heaven.

[1] Wendell Berry, Standing By Words, (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1983), 33.

[2] Jeremy S. Begbie, “Beauty, Sentimentalityand the Arts,” in The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts, (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2007), 53.

[3] Ibid., 54.

[4] Ibid., 52–53.

[5] Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), 32.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid. 28.

Uncivil Discourse: Why Our Speech Matters

~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

Ken Myers has observed, “The Christian tradition has long placed great value on care about speech.” He notes that the sacred importance of language is signaled by the fact that two of the Ten Commandments are concerned with speech. One of them has to do with the way we speak about God. The other, not surprisingly, deals with the way we speak about others. It seems that the tongue is the primary instrument we use to fulfill the two Great Commandments, to love God with heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself (Matt. 22:36-38).

We don’t usually think about our words. We open our mouths, and they just seem to come out. When we do give thought to the language we use, it is out of a detached, almost scientific concern. We think of the connection our words have to the concepts we want to express. But the Scriptures (God’s words) warn that the relationship between our speech and ourselves is far more organic. It is also dangerous. The tongue, James warns, is “a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell” (James 3:6). One of the surest ways to discern corruption of the soul is through speech. James echoes the words of Jesus, who warned the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart and defile us (Matt. 15:18). The tongue is both a muscle and an organ. It is not only something we use to express our thoughts. In some measure, the tongue is us, or at least a part of us.

In the same way, Jesus makes it clear that our words are just as intimately connected to our hearts: “For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander” (Matt. 15:19). Our words serve both as a sign and a diagnosis. The character of our speech is evidence of the state of our hearts. But this connection means that the problem with our discourse is more than a matter of poor word choice. According to Jesus, corrupt speech proceeds from an evil heart. The examples Jesus gives of the nature of evil thoughts that spring from the heart greatly expand the definition of corrupt speech. The Christian tradition has tended to define such language rather narrowly, limiting it to what we used to call swearing. Taking the Lord’s name “in vain,” coarse language, and vulgarity are a form of corrupt speech but the lowest form. Just as lust is the only the first and lowest of the deadly sins, common vulgarity hardly exhausts the full scope of sinful speech. All the categories of evil thought that Jesus mentions and the multitude of sins that he does not ultimately find their expression in the way we speak to one another.

Our most corrupt speech is often the most commonplace, expressing those sins that we have learned to tolerate in ourselves. This is because our thinking about sin tends to be backward. We believe that small infractions are less concerning than large. We think the problem with these “little” sins is that if we let them go unchecked, they will develop into something larger. Anger will accelerate into murder. Lust will take control and lead to adultery. According to Jesus’ teaching in the sermon on the mount, sin moves in the opposite direction. It does not start small and increase. We usually treat those sins as minor infractions, when in reality they bloom from the same root as those we think of as large. They are not the cause but the symptom. Sinful anger springs from a murderous heart, not the other way around (Matt. 5:22). A lustful gaze is the offspring of an adulterous desire (Matt. 5:27–28).

The same principle is at work in our speech. Corrupted speech includes coarse language, but it also gives evidence of a deeper evil that springs from unchecked desire, selfish-ambition, rage, envy,  and pride. The result is a deadly and self-reinforcing ecosystem of corruption as sinful motives infuse our thoughts, which shape our words, which justify and further reinforce our motives. George Orwell described this deadly cycle in his famous essay on politics and the English language when he observes that effects become reinforcing causes that produce the same result and intensify it. “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks,” Orwell observes. “It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

We don’t usually think about our words.

The fact that Orwell identifies this as a trait of political speech is especially significant because it indicates that what is true of the individual is also true of society. How could it be otherwise? Civilization and its institutions are made of and made by its people. If the cells are diseased, so is the body. It cannot be any other way. Speech, by its very nature, is a communal act. It presumes the existence of another. In his book entitled Abuse of Language–Abuse of Power, theologian Josef Pieper notes that human language and human words accomplish a two-fold purpose. “First, words convey reality,” Pieper explains: “We speak in order to name and identify something that is real, to identify it for someone, of course–and this points to the second aspect in question, the interpersonal character of human speech.”

Pieper observes that public discourse, when it is separated from the standard of truth, creates an atmosphere where tyranny thrives. The primary abuse of language in such an environment is propaganda. Peiper notes that propaganda does not necessarily come through the official power structure of a dictatorship: “It can be found wherever a powerful organization, an ideological clique, a special interest, or a pressure group uses the word as their ‘weapon.’” Of particular interest is Pieper’s further observation that the threat from such words “can mean many things besides political persecution, especially all forms and levels of defamation, or public ridicule, or reducing someone to a nonperson–all which are accomplished by means of the word, even the word not spoken.” Especially poignant for this particular political moment, is Pieper’s citation of the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, who: “counted among the forms of ‘modern sophistry’, as he calls it, also the ‘lingo of the revolution’, which, ‘intent on fomenting rebellion through agitation, singles out one isolated instance, and focusing its spotlight on this, makes everyone blind to all the rest’.”

The worry that corruption of speech will lead to cultural corruption is more than the concern of a frustrated grammarian. It is the conviction of philosophers, theologians, and God’s word itself. The problem is not a matter of style but truth. The need for our words to correspond with reality is what lies behind the command not to bear false witness. Regard for truth is the root concern of the command not to take the Lord’s name in vain, a prohibition that cautions us not to use God to make cheap promises that we do not intend to fulfill. Truth is also in view in all the Bible’s cautions about the dangers of flattery and slander.

Such concerns are understandable when we consider that speaking is also a divine act, since language originated with God. God spoke the first words ever uttered (Gen. 1:3). By that word, all things are made. This original word shows the power of language not only to describe but to shape reality. The fact that sin also entered the world through speech is proof that words can destroy as well as create. The temptation that drew our first parents down into sin was a distortion of something God has said (Gen. 3:1-5). When they fell, they carried all of creation with them. We have not lost our ability to speak. But that capacity has been sorely damaged by the entrance of sin into human experience. This harsh reality prompts James to lament that “no human being can tame the tongue” and to call it “a restless evil, full of deadly poison” (James 3:8).

Orwell believed that the degradation of speech could be reversed. “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble,” he explains. “If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” But Orwell is only partly right.

The rudeness and violence we see in contemporary political discourse are, unfortunately, not an anomaly. Uncivil discourse is the norm in both popular and social media. It is as characteristic of the church as it is of the secular culture. Orwell may be right in saying that the way we speak to one another could improve if we gave it more thought and applied ourselves to discipline. The resulting change would be no small improvement and a desperately needed relief. But if what Scripture says about us is true, the difference would only be cosmetic. Our problem is deeper than our choice of words or even our tone. According to Jesus, our inability to engage in civil conversation is evidence of a poisoned heart.