duty_calls


For those incurably PC—you may want to avoid the entire text the below is excerpted from—it starts off with a discussion of theological acrimony between two embattled factions of the Church of England. Readers of a more liberal (not necessarily Liberal) bent may enjoy the entire piece written by Alan Jacobs, a professor of English at Wheaton College. He writes the Text Patterns blog at The New Atlantis, a journal of technology and society.


…A now-famous cartoon on the xkcd “webcomics” site shows a stick figure typing away at his computer keyboard as a voice from outside the frame says, “Are you coming to bed?” The figure replies: “I can’t. This is important… . Someone is wrong on the Internet.” I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues.

[…]

In the 18th century, when modern political journalism was just beginning, Samuel Johnson wrote: “How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Johnson wrote as someone who, as a young man, had observed and commented extensively on debates in Parliament. But few of us would agree with him today. We expect our laws and kings — that is, our politicians and the state — to try to cure or avert a great many of the hardships that “human hearts endure.”

And so, as we have come to focus our attention ever more on politics and the arts of public justice, we have increasingly defined our private, familial, and communal lives in similar terms. The pursuit of justice has come to define acts and experiences that once were governed largely by other virtues. It is this particular transformation that Wendell Berry was lamenting when he wrote, “Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.” That is, it has become a matter of justice rather than of love, an assertion of rights rather than a self-giving.

This same logic governs our responses to one another on the Internet. We clothe ourselves in the manifest justice of our favorite causes, and so clothed we cannot help being righteous (“Someone is wrong on the Internet”). In our online debates, we not only fail to cultivate charity and humility, we come to think of them as vices: forms of weakness that compromise our advocacy. And so we go forth to war with one another.

This comes close to what Thomas Hobbes, writing four centuries ago, famously called the “war of every man against every man.” As he pointed out, such a war may begin in the name of justice, but justice cannot long survive its depredations. In such an environment, “this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place… . Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.”

[…]


The entire article is here.