Avoiding "Friendly Fire"

Today I want to post about something very important that I've been learning in the last year (through the election and with the confederate statues issue, etc)...


"I can't go to bed yet, someone is wrong on the internet"

It's common to decry the anger and lack of civility in arguments online, for politics or theology or anything else. This is partly because the semi-anonymity of online comments tends to bring out the worst in people; also when you aren't face to face with someone, there is a tendency to respond to "wrong ideas" and forget that you are really responding to a person. (I think one could make the argument that someone who has decided to become an avatar or promoting conduit for those ideas deserves to be treated as such, but otherwise not.) Also, people are sinful and many simply have zero interest in treating other people well and enjoy trolling, insulting, and/or disputing, and the internet is a convenient tool doing so.

But one more specific danger of arguing on social media, for those who do it for reasons more or less involving what is true and what is not, and not because they simply enjoy it, is that you don't know the context of error that people live in and are responding against. So they may be coming at the issue from a different angle from you, and may indeed be wrong on some particular aspects which you may be pointing out accurately. But if you were to enter into their context, and see the errors they are confronted with and responding against, you would find you were fighting on the same side as them.

As the graduate of a well-known seminary, I and many of my former classmates have trouble not responding to error when we see it, especially theological error. (Yes, sometimes things are not a matter of perspective, but violate basic truths. If you believe the Bible is true, then you believe it's worth arguing about; for humans, one necessitates the other) We certainly have many issues where we disagree; part of going to seminary is being exposed to the scriptural fountain of theological truth whose water is poured (along with many sweeteners and artificial flavors and dyes) into the giant soda fountain of theological opinion, and we all have our favorite flavors of soda even when we did not come to seminary already possessing deep worldview differences that influence how we approach even that pure fountain.

But on the occasions when I have taken issue online with a fellow seminarian or anyone else either expressing a truth unclearly or expressing what was not true, I have often found that their intent was to combat an error they had seen in some other place. Perhaps they had been reading Genesis 1 and 2 and thinking about God's command to humans to be stewards of the earth, and then, stung by a video they saw of environmental devastation somewhere, posted an article which strayed over into dangerous "climate care is the gospel" territory. It is not wrong to stand against that error, indeed it is necessary to do so, but one needs to understand their motivation for posting to address the errors in a constructive way.

Understand 1, before deciding whether engaging 1 or 2 is better worth spending the time for 3

Attacking the wrong they saw, not the one you see

A vivid ongoing example would be the endless array of opinions possessed by American Christians regarding President Trump: If you live in a context (online and/or offline) where most people react to Trump with visceral hatred as a mascot of everything they despise, moving in the direction of truth requires setting aside those emotions and considering the actual ramifications of his actions as president, at least some of which have been positive and helpful, as was also true for Obama. So this is something it was fair to challenge people to do when Obama was the president they loved to hate, and it's fair now that we have a traditionalist authoritarian narcissist in the White House instead of a progressive ideological narcissist.

On the other hand, if you live in a context where there are a lot of people who consider Trump as God's gift to the Church, and to America, which are considered more or less the same thing, then moving in the direction of truth does require challenging some very erroneous assumptions there. (My own stance is that we must be more pragmatic and recognize that, like Treebeard in LotR, the Church should not be on any politician's "side," because none of them are on our "side," and certainly the political machine and swamp of corruption are hostile and corrosive to even those comparatively good men who find their way into positions of power. It is good to be concerned for the state of one's nation and culture; we do not give up our passports or our hard-won freedoms or stop paying taxes or stop driving across local bridges when we enter God's kingdom, for His kingdom is not of this world. But we also don't need the influence of Washington to get things done, and we greatly weaken ourselves to lean on that splintered staff; for we are the adopted sons and daughters of God Almighty)

With our current social media environment (exacerbated by the desire of companies like Facebook to become a walled garden that you never need to leave, by bringing news and everything else into the FB bubble) these arguments all fall into the same space. So I can see posts praising good actions by the president met with offensive hostility by Trump haters, and posts attacking the conflation of what is Caesar's and what is God's met with defensive hostility by Trump supporters, all on my FB wall on the same day.

I have written elsewhere of how the two camps and other zero-sum ideological groups could attempt to live together in relative peace by regarding each other as different nations in the same country. But what I'm talking about today is another way, especially for those being pulled to one side or the other but not yet "in the camp." Sometimes protesting the particular errors around them can drive people too far in a particular direction; many historical evils would be less inexplicable (though not less wrong) if we could feel what it was like to be in a particular context, the unfairness, the personal pain, etc. I see a dangerous tendency to use that kind of language now. In the past, violence usually follows, and that's been true for a couple of years now in America.

So while it's as important as ever to engage and combat falsehood, and keep ideological thinking from undermining the truth that changes not, it's also important to recognize that lots of people's worldviews are being pushed to extremes in our crazy fragmenting society, and attacking their ideas without understanding where they come from is not defeating that extreme thinking but is strengthening it and pushing those attacked to double down on those ideas. This is true of theology as well as politics, since we don't necessarily treat those convictions differently.

So, is it necessary to stop arguing about important issues in "the commons" for which social media has become a very poor replacement? It's useless to even try to say that people shouldn't argue online, but actually I don't think it's necessary to say that. We should argue sometimes, it's an important part of discovering and defending truth. But if truth is indeed our motivation, we should try as much as possible to argue constructively.

Avoiding Friendly Fire

So how do we engage error online when we consider it an appropriate situation to do so, yet focus on attacking the untruth while still loving the person? And more specifically for this post, how do we figure out if there is really a point of disagreement worth engaging, or whether the person is responding to their own context and not yours (or since you are part of their context if you can see what they are posting, we could say, responding to a different part of their context) I think we can do so by making use of two questions:


Important Question #1: What do you think the greatest danger/problem here is?

By asking this question, you do two things. You let the other person feel listened to (because you are in fact offering to listen), which tends to diffuse a lot of potential badfeel if constructive disagreement is going to follow. You also identify what really motivates them in the argument. If you were arguing with a robot, you wouldn't need that, but since even INTPs are people too, it's always more helpful to respond to that motivation too and not merely its symptoms.

In asking, you may find that you don't disagree in any fundamental way, you just don't consider the thing they've honed in on to be the primary issue at stake. In that case you can either end the discussion on friendly terms, agreeing that they are right to be concerned about that thing, or you can shift the argument to whether that thing is really the primary issue. In that case you may need to ask some more questions to find out why they are so worried about that particular issue.

One example of this would be the churches that consider drinking any alcohol to be sinful. That is scripturally indefensible, and the attempt to do so leads to convoluted absurdities of interpretation. However, one often finds that when normally sound, bible-loving pastors also preach this extra-scriptural rule, there are usually strong personal reasons for doing so. (A loved one was lost to a drunk driver, or ruined their own life through alcoholism, etc.)
It is right to stand against misuse of scripture even (especially?) when it has good motives, for that is how heresies tend to begin, with the best of motives. But at the same time, when attacking someone's error, it's important to know what the real motivation behind it is. All the arguing about alcohol in scripture may have been useless, where the person in question may have really needed someone to walk through the grief of their loss with them, so that they did not need to deal with it by bringing the authority of scripture to attack the source of their pain.

Important Question #2: If you were in charge, how would you solve this?

This is an invitation to constructive and not destructive thinking. Sometimes people have never thought this far, and it stops them short. Sometimes they have thought about it a great deal, and will be relieved that someone wants to hear them out.

It seems (at least to me) that a reply to this question of "I'm not saying I have all the answers, just that this isn't right" is basically a cop out. They just want to express disapproval, there is no substance to their opinion to argue over. On the other hand, as Sun Tzu teaches us in the Art of War, it's often wise to leave your opponent one line of retreat. Often lines such as the one above are a way of retreating from the artillery of reason offered in good faith with dignity and order intact.

This question is also one in which you're more likely to come away with something useful for yourself. It's highly unlikely that you are going to convince anyone of anything online via an argument, even a polite and constructive one, but this means that at least one side gets to be heard, and invites the other side to respond in kind. If you have an audience, asking them how they'd solve it also invites the audience to think in a critical way about your opponents proposed solution. If it's implausible or problematic in other ways, that's usually going to much more obvious to bystanders than when you're arguing about the problem itself.

Potatoes argue from identity. Don't be like a potato. Also the cake is a lie.

So...

In an age of ideological conflict and identity fragmentation, Jesus said it best: "whoever is not against us is for us." When we attack the arguments of people who are addressing problems from their own contexts, we need to at least understand their motives. We might be accidentally engaging in friendly fire, distracting or defeating their efforts to engage people in a different context from ours.

I have done this. As an INTP, for an argument I don't shoot a tiny missile at the other person as in my diagram above. I cease to restrain the hungry attack raptors and they devour anything in the argument that's not rock solid. I am not saying I win every argument, there is much I don't know and many other skilled debaters around, and if it comes down to good-sounding rhetoric or emotionally resonant language I'm okay at best. But I am good at seeing what is inconsistent or weak in an argument and articulately dismantling it. And, due to that, there have been times when everything I said was correct and every issue I raised was legitimate, but it was a misdirection from another real problem that needed dealing with, which I wasn't aware of. That didn't delegitimize my own statements, but it made them less helpful in the overall struggle against falsehood.
So today's post is written as much to myself as to anyone else reading it.

I do think arguing online can be selectively useful, and I also do it much less than I used to, partly from being busier with worthwhile things. I usually approach it from the stance that I want to learn more about what other people think and also demonstrate when a position is logically indefensible. Those have been tricky goals over the past year on many topics, especially when emotions and identity are so commonly involved. So my advice to everyone (most of all myself) is to only go into an argument 1) as much as possible not because you are "triggered" by something that seems indefensibly wrong and know exactly how to reduce it to a pile of shattered inconsistencies (or raptor poop), 2) having pictured what realistically winning the argument or having a profitable discussion as a result would look like and making that your goal, and 3) use the questions above and similar ones as needed to keep ideas and people separate, and show that you are willing to listen and learn, and yet that listening and learning doesn't mean conceding the point.

That's all for this post. Have a Resplendent Reformation Day and Happy Halloween!