I’ve recently decided to leave Facebook as I’m plenty tired of Zuckerberg’s corruption and cannot support it in good conscience, and as participation in the social network is simply not the best use of my time.
And like so many millions of others, I’m met on the first day of my retreat with the immediate regret that arises from no longer having the ready access to a ranting platform during the next day of corruption and foolishness in this world. It’s just so easy to pop off a post on Facebook about whatever I’m seeing in the world—and how it ought to be fixed—about how people really should know better. But if I’m not doing that anymore, then what shall I do instead?
While that’s a fine question, there’s an earlier one that’s still compelling, and that’s the question about what good it did to have been venting on Facebook in the first place. The respondents are almost always the same handful of Facebook friends, with an occasional stray like or share here and there. And that’s about it. Indeed, I don’t recall the last time I saw someone change his mind as the result of a Facebook discussion. It seems quite the rare occurrence.
And to me, this is quite an important statement since the question “What kind of people are we?” is an important one to me—as is the question of whether we humans can change—of whether we can improve ourselves. My view is that we can change. Why, then, do we tend to do so little of it? Even in the face of overwhelming and solid evidence, far too many seem to view fact, logic, and sourcing as of advisory-only value, and don’t seem to think it has any particular belief-changing authority.
And why is that?
Has the human race forgotten in the last generation or two how to correct itself? Has it forgotten how to give an account for itself, and to make sure its convictions jibe with reality?
Maybe it has. And I was there to watch it happen.
Well, I’d like to see about turning that around—about providing an alternative philosophy to the world, wherein truth and reality and honesty and rationality and responsibility are supreme axioms, and wherein people adjust themselves to fit reality, and not the other way around. But this is no new philosophical idea. No, these ideas have been cooking in the Bible for eons. Indeed, they were also cooking in the classic cultures of Rome and Greece (to name just a couple), before there was any modern Bible collection to be bought in stores. These are old ideas; not new ones. And there’s not much room for improvement upon them, either—as simple and practical as they are.
Why, then, should Jack see a need to start a new philosophical movement in promotion of such things?
It’s because the original has been twisted out of shape—misappropriated for twisted use in the name of any of a number of compromised versions of Christianity, where so many make fast and loose with fact, logic, and sourcing in order to suit themselves—as if there were not ultimately any God to be answered to after all. I would like to promote the actual words of the Bible as some sort of Exhibit A in a grand case against the popular corruptions of Christianity—except that no one seems interested in trying that case. It doesn’t seem to be a question of natural interest for hardly anyone–whether their religion has got its facts straight or not. And how curious is that? How curious is it that we should be involved at all in something that seems to keenly-focused on whether a certain set of facts is true—and then to have no real concern about dealing with the particulars of those facts after all?
Indeed, I have ranted about it weekly on Facebook for years, and can hardly find a taker. It’s the same with politics; almost nobody cares to wrestle the details with a view toward actually settling anything. Instead, there seems almost a universal sense of entitlement to sit back quietly, and to disagree to some extent or other with whatever Jack thinks, with not the slightest compulsion to let on as much. There’s no palpable sense of honor in all this—as if it would be the right thing to state one’s disagreement, even if only for the record. No, almost no one does that. Occasionally, one might say he disagrees generally, and he might even promise to come back and say why—the if the former happens at all, the latter is almost unheard of. They never seem to make it back to the details they swore to provide.
Jack has pounded away, year after year, but almost nobody has ever dared to disagree in writing to any substantial extent beyond the mere promises I mentioned just above—and fewer yet to mount a case in reply—and far fewer yet to hash out a case until it’s all been heard and settled, which is the way Jack would prefer to do things. Indeed, I know very few people who seem to be in such cognitive practice that they could handle an expansive debate or examination of anything. That’s what I do still, but I don’t find anybody in our society looking for fellow examiners to hash things out.
It’s as if we just don’t do that here anymore–if we ever did.
But mine is no new complaint. Twain was fussing about this 115 years ago:
“In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”
Mark twain, autobiography, 1907
And Twain was himself not onto anything new. Indeed, Aristotle was differentiating between the examiner and non-examiner types some 2,400 years before Twain did it.
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
aristotle
And it was a couple of centuries before Aristotle that Socrates was making a target of the unexamining type of person:
“The unexamining life is not worth living.”
socrates
And then there was Jesus, of course–my favorite philosopher–who came along examining a great many things, getting himself most famously killed over it in that greatest show of irony: The one who cared the most about the quality of people being murdered on account of it by those who cared the least about the quality of themselves.
And this seems to have been the main theme of my ranting on Facebook all these years: That people ought to cut it out and do what’s right. Meanwhile, however, what people really seem to want is for other people to cut it out and do what’s right, while leaving them alone to do as they please. Most of them don’t have any grand schemes of evil in mind; they want something much more mundane: to be left alone to be sloppy in their thoughts, decisions, and beliefs if they want to be sloppy. They just don’t want to be challenged.
And that seems to be where Facebook culture thrives: laissez faire. That seems to be the sweet spot. That seems to be the target behavior upon which the whole platform has been engineered–and the primary activity upon which the ad impressions are designed. It is a colossal exercise in my-side bias, where self is excused in various ways, even while pointing a finger at others for their misdeeds. It is a straining against the reality of cause-and-effect, under the chimerical notion that the things thought and said and believed and done by one’s own self don’t really count nearly as much as those thought, said, believed, and done by others.
It is a lie.
It is a colossally-popular lie—that we are somehow getting something useful done while protecting our own personal statuses quo.
And that’s my beef with it.
Indeed, what have we achieved with all our vying all these years? Has one of us changed himself? Are we now better humans than we were in 2008 or 2009–whenever Facebook was getting cranked up?
Yes, perhaps some very small number of us are better than we were then, but is this a substantial trend? No, I think most of us can readily recognize that self-correction is not the primary activity of Facebook—even when so much fault-finding is going on.
If not on Facebook, then where?
Is there some other locus on which people are more apt to practice self-correction?
Is it at some church I have never heard of? Or in some university?
If not there, where?
Or, is it rather that such habits are so seldom practiced as to have no commonly-known home?—that they are so rare as not to be readily associated with any group or place? What a pity that even in the religion called by his title, the Christ can’t have his own cognitive example enthroned safely in the lore of the people.
Indeed, where are the Christians who’ve had enough of the spin, and who are ready for the real deal?
Well, again, they’re obsessed with what’s wrong with everybody else. They’re ignoring dealing with their own errors, because it’s just to fascinating focusing on the errors of others. And whether they ever would have told you that they’d have thought this would be a good use of their time on Facebook all these years, this is what it has turned out to be for them. It’s a place to rant–or to read the rants of others–while neglecting the due diligence of self-correction. It’s a place in which to distract oneself from doing one’s own rightful business. And more than that, it’s a place to pretend one is doing something other than the very thing I’m talking about.
I’m sure that if some society of highly honest, rational, and responsible people were to chance upon Facebook for some reason, they’d use it for honest, rational, and responsible ends–because that’s what kind of people they are. But what would be the effect of a sudden onslaught of honest, rational, and responsible posts from this new society?
I’m afraid that Facebook would absorb that spike in high morals rather quickly—perhaps with some lip service here and there, followed with the standard excuses and distractions, and then back to business as usual. That’s how it would behave on the whole—in the aggregate. This is how things work.
And that brings me to my current season of recession, where I’m reconsidering what I do and how I do it–and how well it’s working. Just what is the point of ranting and venting on Facebook, and pleading my case for a better world? There’s certainly no career in it, nor any fame or fortune. There’s rarely even good discussion in it; this culture can’t seem to bring itself to have a good discussion—even if it might have found pause enough in some idea to say to itself, “Hmmm, interesting point.” But that would be about it; just a brief blip on someone’s mental radar—a vestige that something happened once upon a time—that some new thought registered for a second before fading away into irretrievability.
When I stand back and observe, I can see that for many at Facebook, things like fact and evidence and logic and sourcing seem to be important. And how do I know this? It’s because so many of us still frame our statements in this sort of language. We still set things up this way—as if these things are still important things—as if it were still important in this world to get one’s facts right, to be be consistent in one’s logic. But we so often do a terrible job of following through on it. We’re just going through the motions in so many cases, not even clear enough of mind to realize that we have failed in upholding these sorts of axioms that we brought to the table in the first place.
Simply put, so many of us are terrible observers of self. And this comes as no surprise to me, as I weekly teach courses on a number of topics that involve the need for people to monitor their own performance. (Singing, public speaking, acting, reasoning, etc.) I can attest that, for whatever reason(s), most of us are terrible at this sort of self-monitoring. We have no real idea if we’re speaking louder or not, or if we’re truly hit the target vowel sound or not—or in this present case, whether we’ve really made the slam-dunk logical argument we set out to make when we sat down to post on Facebook.
This seems to be what time it is in our culture. And I’m trying to decide what to do about it. Suddenly, however, dumping more ranting and venting into the abyss of Facebook, no longer seems like a reasonable use of my time.
Perhaps I can discover some way to get people to pay attention to themselves at a higher standard of care, but I would have no idea where to start with that. It doesn’t seem to do much good to point out that the Bible has lots of standards and best practices in this regard that the churches haven’t adopted well. Nor does it seem to do much good to point out that Cognitive Science has, in recent years, made some good strides at understanding these same points from their own scientific observation and experimentation. The collective response to both seems to be, “So?” and “Why should I care about that?”
And this is where I think I have failed to get my point across. The Bible lore about Jesus seems practically unusable to promote such axioms because it’s too tied up in a massive tradition that’s concerned with other things. As soon as you’re talking Jesus, they already think they understand you, and they anticipate whatever points they’d expect you to make. They are not listening. They are not processing. They are not able to hear anything new this time around—even if you present some new fact in your study that they’ve never heard mentioned before. They’re just not any good at learning new things—considering new things—pondering new things—testing new things. Never mind that the Bible teaches they should be good at all this and more; the sad fact of the matter is that very few Christians are the sort to be concerned with these inner qualities of themselves. Their religion isn’t about that—even if Jesus’ religion was.
And I cannot seem to find the words to get anyone’s attention.
So, what’s the point?
I’ve certainly given it a good go. I think it’s been about about 13 years that I’ve been on Facebook. And you should see my daily memories. There are several years’ worth of thoughtful entries on most days. I’ve been thinking and venting and ranting and questioning for a long time now.
But what good has it done? Where’s the payoff? Where’s the return on whatever investment this has been?
Even in the course of writing this lengthy post in my spare time over the last couple of days, I’ve had the urge many times to post some brief statement on Facebook about the regrettable behaviors I’ve been seeing go on around me. And it still carries some promise—however false it probably is—that if only I’d post, there’d be some payoff to it. But what’s the most I can hope for? An attaboy or two, and maybe three or four shares in the case of some particularly hot topic? And then what have we done?
So I don’t get it. I don’t see how all that adds up into something that’s worth doing. And that’s very sad to me, because it could, I can reason. But it doesn’t.
And is this a problem with this world? Probably. But is it not also a problem with Jack? Probably—or maybe, at least. I do not think it’s wrong of me to want to live in a world where honesty, rationality, and responsibility hold a bigger place in the collective consciousness than they do. And I certainly don’t think it’s wrong of me to keep noticing when people and institutions give lip service to such things, while making serious errors in their practice of them. My question is whether I’m supposed to get used to all this—to become jaded by it—to settle—to give in—to lower my own personal barre to make life in this world easier for myself.
Many have done exactly that, to be sure. But I don’t think I’d be happy with myself if I were to do that. To me, it’s not about me. It’s not some internal question, but an external one. To me, it’s about what’s the right thing to do and to behave, and not about what’s the optimal way to feel about oneself or one’s circumstances. It’s not about reworking one’s worldview in order to find the most palatable disposition, but about reworking one’s disposition as needed to accommodate the things one knows, or should know, to be real in this world.
And I think that typifies the strife of my 13-year relationship with Facebook. It’s Jack trying to analyze his way through this real world on a platform on which the vast majority are probably more interested in trying to make the world seem more palatable to them, by any of a number of means, not all of which are honest, rational, and responsible. And it’s not hard to see why Jack doesn’t feel like he’s getting anywhere on Facebook. It is not there to help me, but to sell ad impressions and to influence my worldview by dishonest means.
And I wonder what is the cost to me of living daily in that cognitive environment, where nothing is ever settled, and everything is constantly being churned anew. And I don’t see how it could be worth it to live that way for so little in return.
