It’s all too easy for us to dehumanize the faceless person at the back of commentary online, and all too easy for them to dehumanize us, to default to the most visceral, most thoughtless reaction to any number of trigger words or opinions.
By Chris Sparks
These days, a vitally important sort of mercy is remembering that people in person are often wildly different than the same people online.
Yes, the digital world is just as much a part of “real life” as any other form of communication.
Yes, excuse-making of bad behavior online (saying “He’s not like that in real life”) is misplaced.
Yes, we shouldn’t pretend that gossip, detraction, or calumny online is somehow less hurtful than gossip, detraction, or calumny in other forms of communication.
Times have changed
And yet consider how different our communications often were when letters took months to reach us; our responses could take hours to write; and the whole affair came with built in cooling off periods. Consider the difference it makes to be able to instantly send and instantly read reactions produced in the heat of the first reaction to a post, a video, or some online creation.
Consider also how differently we relate to people when we can see their face, hear their voice, or even touch them as we speak. Consider the difference between someone getting mad at you over the phone versus in person, or how differently we may react to someone crying when we can’t easily remove ourselves from their immediate physical presence.
Consider, in other words, that we are naturally body and soul, both, together, not one or the other. Consider that in this fallen world, we have a hard enough time living in love of neighbor even when we are present to another in person, in full, and then let’s cease to be surprised by the lack of charity online.
And let’s be determined to bring more charity to our online interactions ourselves.
An online examen
Do you ever have a hard time thinking of the humanity or the individuality of the person behind an online comment on, say, politics, religion, or other hot topics?
Do you ever struggle to be charitable when someone says something obviously, shockingly wrong?
Do you ever find yourself being prompted in prayer to delete something you were going to send, or feel a tug from the Holy Spirit to regret how you said something online?
If so, then you are called to be merciful to the folks on the other end of the conversation.
I write as someone who at times forgets that just because I’ve heard a particular wrong, anti-Catholic argument or data point a thousand times, the person who’s presenting it isn’t just another manifestation of a problem, of anti-Catholicism, of an abstract worldview that I am somehow justified in mocking, belittling, or dismissing.
To whom am I speaking?
Sure, there are many obstacles to properly gauging how we should be responding to various internet comments. The prevalence of A-I today makes discernment harder than ever before, for one. Real person or bot? And of course, there are plenty of real psyops, for all that many people do jump at shadows. Foreign intelligence plant or honestly confused commentator?
A further point of discernment is demanded of us because folks in jail or in mental institutions may well have access to the internet and social media, so: Criminal or ill?
But no matter what, for the salvation of our own souls, we are called to abiding charity, defaulting to Christian courtesy in the face of ignorance, anger, or outright apparent malice. It’s all too easy for us to dehumanize the faceless person at the back of commentary online, and all too easy for them to dehumanize us, to default to the most visceral, most thoughtless reaction to any number of trigger words or opinions.
Saint Faustina’s wisdom on the value of silence, of discerning when to speak, is more relevant than ever. Consider, for instance:
I tremble to think that I have to give an account of my tongue. There is life, but there is also death in the tongue. Sometimes we kill with the tongue: we commit real murders. And we are still to regard that as a small thing? I truly do not understand such consciences. I have known a person who, when she learned from someone that a certain thing was being said about her, fell seriously ill. She lost a good deal of blood and shed many tears, and the outcome was very sad. It was not the sword that did all this, but the tongue. O my silent Jesus, have mercy on us! (Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, 119).
Now, in light of the evils of the 20th century, evils that often seemed to emerge because people held their tongues instead of speaking out against evil in a timely fashion, silence can seem to us as obviously wrong, hard to justify, and a coward’s way out. And yet to speak demands discernment; to remain silent demands discernment. Silence when we need to speak is an evil, but so too is speaking when we should be silent. They are each tools, each good when deployed well and bad when deployed when they should not be.
What to do
So let us ask St. Francis de Sales, great communicator, patron saint of writers, famous for his temperance, his love of God and neighbor, and his ability to win souls with honey rather than driving folks away with vinegar, to intercede for us. Let us seek to introduce greater charity to our own online communications, and so inspire others to do the same.
Pray for me that I might practice what I preach. I’ll pray for you.
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash.
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