July 2, 2024:
I’m not a big fan of social media. Very few podcasts keep my interest; too often they feel like you’re listening in on a conversation between friends who share assumptions and inside jokes and agendas that leave you stranded on the outside. Too, bloggers knows that controversies are clicks, so disagreements and misunderstandings must always be a battle between good and evil, right and wrong, orthodoxy and heresy. Offering nuanced critique online just doesn’t sell.
My take is that, by definition, the online world is an abstraction and, therefore, will never contribute solutions in any meaningful way.
So, what might constitute productive conversation? I find myself going back, time and again, to CS Lewis’s answer to that question. Writing in Prose Literature of the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama (p37) on “this tragic farce we call the history of the Reformation” (note the tragic farce is the history of the Reformation, not the Reformation itself) Lewis offers this…
“The theological questions really at issue… could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure. Under those conditions formulae might possibly have been found which did justice to the Protestant – I had almost said the Pauline – assertions without compromising other elements of the Christian faith. In fact, however, these questions were raised at a moment when they immediately became embittered and entangled with a whole complex of matters theologically irrelevant…”
Two things to note here: first, the three conditions necessary for productive conversation: 1) mature and saintly disputants, 2) in close proximity, and 3) at boundless leisure. It’s obvious that the internet fails on at least two, and more often than not all three of these conditions. And second, the entanglement of important matters with “theologically irrelevant” ones. Too often, we think we are talking theology when in fact we are talking cultural politics.
When we fail to meet those conditions, Lewis points to the results:
“When once this had happened (embitterment and entanglement), Europe’s chance to come through unscathed was lost. It was as if men were set to conduct a metaphysical argument at a fair, in competition or (worse still) forced collaboration with the cheapjacks and the round-abouts, under the eyes of an armed and vigilant police force who frequently changed sides. Each party increasingly misunderstood the other and triumphed in refuting positions which their opponents did not hold…”
Need I say more?
