How Merrily We Dehumanize
When I look back at shows and movies from eras before the advent of the Internet, its brainchild (and today’s whipping boy) social media, I see that people haven’t really changed. We’ve just gotten more efficient. Stereotypical New Yorkers yell and shake their hands at each other, screaming “Hey I’m walkin’ here” and “What’sa madda witchu?!”. During a hilarious sequence in The Love Bug, Dean Jones’ lower torso sticks out of Herbie’s window as he erratically swerves down the highway, another motorist yells “Are you from L.A. or something?!”. Gunslingers in a saloon have out their conflict utilizing six shooters. Would be tough guys approach Steven Segeal one at a time and find out they aren’t so tough as they thought. As a side note, there’s a scene in the obscure and underappreciated National Lampoons: Loaded Weapon 1 in which the anonymous thugs hilariously take a number as they menacingly approach the hero. We don’t find out the names and backstories of the people coming for the hero in these or any other onscreen conflict. In a way, they are only necessary as plot-moving objects and are less than human. It’s fine, if that view were only fanciful and fictional. It’s not. We homosapiens have a bad track record of seeing our fellow man as less than. Too many examples exist to recount here. I’m only going to talk in depth about the most recent incarnation of this habit.
Time was that in order to communicate immediately with someone you had to seek them out and have a face-to-face. When you’re talking with them, it did you well to recognize their humanity and give it the proper due lest you need to also account for their ability to do you violence with hands or words. We men still do this regularly. We size each other up and imagine ourselves locked in physical or verbal combat.
Then came the telephone. You could hear the emotion, intonation, and inflections in the voice of the person, but you didn’t have to see them in their body. Their voice is disembodied and removed one measure from reality. You had to force yourself to recognize their humanity, a task made more difficult when they were a telemarketer, debt collector, or your ex-wife. And you could sever the communication any time without a polite goodbye or mutual agreement to end the communication. Something about slamming the phone on the receiver is lost in translation with today’s smartphones.
And then came the interwebnettings. Now a person was just 1’s and 0’s on a digital screen, even one step further removed from reality and a physical embodiment. Not content with only using this wonderful tool (possibly the most useful ever built) for its endless possibilities of good, we men had to use it for the abuse of others. And it’s getting worse. I believe there is a spiritual lesson in almost everything, and therefore spiritual value in everything, so I only write about trivial and mundane things which have a bigger imprint on our lives. Social media disguises its bigger imprint with the trivial, mundane, and inconsequential. This is what makes it so dangerous.
An interaction of readers on a recent blog post of mine exemplified it. Someone construed my blog post to be a trumpeting support of Donald Trump and Republicans (it wasn’t). Someone responded and called into question this man’s intelligence and accused him of perverse sexual desires. Then a third person came on and accused the second man of not understanding anything of import, along with stating that he was genetically deficient. The word grenades being tossed back and forth were actually tame by compared to what you can unearth when you go down a comment vortex. I replied to all of them, and said “I can’t force you to do anything but I would ask you to be polite with your comments on my page”. No admonishment or demand. I’m dealing with other adults, so I’m not in the place to scold or order them around. And of course they didn’t. They probably saw this as a normal thing to do, and not of anymore consequence than brushing one’s teeth before bed or saying “excuse me” after burping. It’s sickening because of how normal it is becoming. As I said above, it’s also terribly efficient, making it all the more pervasive. You don’t need to put on pants and leave the house to engage in hateful interaction with others.
Anyone who wishes to post content online must accept the fact that they are opening themselves up to constructive criticism. But it too often veers into the nasty and off-topic. When I gifted my first novel to my mentor, I was nervous because I knew he was one of my toughest critics. Contrary to what I thought would happen, he praised it, had a few notes on the plot, but said he liked it overall. Still, the process wracked my nerves. But when he gave me his thoughts, he didn’t blend them with nasty non sequitur comments on the size of my nose, the shape of my head, the gray in my beard, how much hair protrudes from my ears, my struggles with weight, the way I comb my hair, the color and tone of my skin (a thing that originated with white people, I will concede but which has been tragically adopted by the black community), the hairiness of my knuckles, how large my feet are, my skin tags, moles, acne scars, how I grunt when I get out of a chair, my tendency to breathe out of my mouth, how winded I get when I exert myself, my lack of skill in areas he possesses skill, the casual (almost bum-like) manner I prefer to dress, the thickness of the rims on my glasses, my poor credit, my bad romantic decisions, or a million other things people use as excuses to abuse a person who finds themselves online and in the cross hairs of a mean person. And it seems more and more like we are all mean, all hyper-critical, all out of control. That can only denote one thing; we are all dehumanizing of others.
A good looking woman can’t be online asking (implicitly or explicitly) others to value her intelligence without getting vulgar comments on the sexually desirable state of their body. An ugly woman can’t get online asking (implicitly or explicitly) others to value her intelligence without getting vulgar comments on the sexually undesirable state of her body. A man can’t be online asking others to value his opinion without being torn apart for things completely unrelated to the matter at hand, or being ripped apart by comments only glancing-ly related to the matter at hand. Those who use their online content to objectify themselves (ex. “look at my muscles”, “watch me twerk”, “ogle my naked body”, etc.) invite dehumanization and exponentially multiply its normalcy when others who don’t use their content to objectify themselves become victims of this insidious virus.
We educators in the digital age have introduced consequences in our schools for cyber-bullying. But what other type of bullying is so pervasive, so ubiquitous, so all-encompassing? Most adults don’t punch a nerd for refusing to hand over lunch money. But most adults do get online and make fun of other adults. What kind of example is this? Kids don’t see cyber-bullying as real bullying, so they just wait until the school consequences are no longer there. This practice crosses, obliterates, and erases entirely from existence all racial, religious, societal, generational, and socioeconomic lines. I’ll see an atheist rip apart a Christian for foolishly believing in a “Sky Daddy” and a “Christian” respond with Jesus and the f-word in the same sentence. I’ll see a black supremacist say that blacks are descended directly from God, and a white supremacist respond by spouting out hateful drivel about needing to return to slavery times. I’ll see a millennial spouting nonsense about the baby boomers failing America completely, and a baby boomer telling a kid to shut the front door until they’ve lived a little more. I’ll see a socialist call being a millionaire immoral and a capitalist wishing violence and rape on their daughter. If I didn’t write blogs and use social media to market them, I’d tap out of the whole thing out of a desire to preserve any shred of sanity still in my possession.
What I do try to do, along with my aforementioned requests of commentators on my page, and other things I post is to give the people who “follow” me a glimpse of the best side of my life. I use social media to highlight the beautiful parts of my life, make folks chuckle without resorting to vulgarity or profanity, make them think without provoking them to anger, and give glory to God with my public communication. Were someone to look at my content, they could reasonably assume I had a drama-free life without any struggles. I do have drama and struggles, of course, but I don’t broadcast them to the world. Forgive the virtue signalling, if you will. I would love it if someone read this paragraph and decided to scrub their social media of offensive and dehumanizing content, and followed a similar self-imposed rule moving forward. As it is, people only scrub their Twitter proclamations when they run afoul of a special interest group or demographic whose scorn they’d rather do without, or when they’ve been pink-slipped at work. They don’t scrub their social media when they insult, degrade, and dehumanize their fellow man. Rather the complete opposite, as whole websites are devoted to the best insults, the most savage clap-backs, the cleverest ways to decimate and downgrade the lives of others.
See folks, this is just one more among the multitude of reasons I’m a Christian. Using social media like this stems from haughtiness; a low view of others, and pride; a high view of oneself. While I’ve been guilty of pride and a haughty spirit, it’s nice to have a standard to return to once I’ve fallen out of alignment. As a Christian I have to accept and practice the belief that a person’s worth isn’t up to me and how I feel about them. It’s intrinsically stamped upon them by the Creator who makes them in His own image, bearing a soul that will go on once the body has expired. Their worth is not extrinsically earned by hard work, money, fame, power, acclaim, or any other form of merit we can devise. That person’s worth exists so far out of my reach it’s laughable to even think about presuming to devalue them. This goes for the greatest among us and the worst among us. The people who give themselves over to monstrous behavior still have the value of bearing the image (but not the holy nature) of God, and deserve the chance to be spiritually saved from their sins, whether or not they’ve earned consequences in the temporal. I don’t hate those who hurt others. I pity them. They do what they do out of hate, and if they had even one nanosecond’s glimpse of Christ’s love, they might be turned from their ways. I don’t hate those who disagree with me, nor do I want to force them to see things my way. I don’t place higher in value those who agree with me. We are all equal in the eyes of God, and our material worth does not follow us in the life to come. Christianity is, so far as I can see, the only worldview that starts and ends us all on a level field.
A glaring contradiction of the current sexual revolution is the idea of conservatives dehumanizing those whose sexual desires run contrary to traditional morality. Conservatives certainly have, are, and will continue to do this, but certainly should have never done it in the first place, should stop, and should not do it in the future. But the sexual revolution also comes from the camp of word soldiers who have (generally but not in all cases) rejected the authority of a creator God. Problems is that were God non-existent, they must needs prove and earn their worth with temporal means, as man is not stamped with the image of God but is nothing more than a highly evolved, rational, and problem solving animal which uses propositional language. They have to use the carnal engines of this world to show their worth in the mind of those whose acceptance is important to them. They hamstring their argument from the get-go. Were I to have a public voice, I’d tell progressives to at least put on a show of accepting God as a higher authority, and make the appeal to deist conservatives as being fellow bearers of God’s image; the most precious of all values we humans are bequeathed by very dint of our humanity. Or at least make that part of their aggregate of arguments. Deist conservatives would have no recourse but to concede the point. Instead, the aforementioned word soldiers spit in the face of belief in God and yet ask others to value their humanity. It’s contradictory and causes confusion.
But this is an age of self-worship. That wicked practice, in cahoots with identity politics, have poisoned Shame, stabbed to death the positive elements of Guilt, and given terminal cancer to Admitting You are Ever Wrong. If you can’t be wrong, any choice you make that doesn’t violate the law is equally valid with the choices of any other human, unless they run aground on the craggy shores of Your Ego, of course. Sprinkle in the rationalization and justification of responding in kind when someone abuses you, and you’ve got the horrible mess we are now faced with. What’s the solution? Even if you don’t agree with my spiritual view of what comprises humanity or practice the same social media rules as myself, realize and practice out of the realization that it’s a person of inestimable value and potential you’re engaging with, even if they are only represented by the three-dot-currently-composing-a-comment symbol.
