We Do Not Want to Understand Each Other
I had never heard of Threads before I opened my computer this morning and read an article about it in The New York Times. Evidently, Threads is (or was designed to be) an un-Twitter, er, I mean an un-X or… Whatever. It was to be a “safe space” from the evils of Elon Musk and the festering cesspit of rancour and ignorance and misinformation and disinformation and tribalistic stupidity that he had let loose in the world. Because obviously Twitter was such a peaceful playground of mutuality and rational benevolence before Musk sent it straight to hell.
But back to Threads. I gather that the platform was greeted with great optimism and expectation when it arrived on scene. According to Pamela Paul, “As more participants joined Threads, a palpable enthusiasm, even merriment, broke out; it was like watching a schoolyard of kids unleashed from detention. We’re going to build the best treehouse ever!” How exciting! All the righteous un-Trumpy, un-Musky people would now have an unsoiled canvas upon which to paint all their virtue and tolerance and kindness and love and justice and truth. Threads would be social media without right-wing contamination! And it would be glorious!
Except, well, human nature.
A mere ten months (!) into the Threads experiment, it seems things are not going quite as rosily as anticipated. A few quotes from Paul:
We can see exactly what we built: a full-on bizarro-world X, handcrafted for the left end of the political spectrum, complete with what one user astutely labeled “a cult type vibe.” If progressives and liberals were provoked by Trumpers and Breitbart types on Twitter, on Threads they have the opportunity to be wounded by their own kind…
Threads’ algorithm seems precision-tweaked to confront the user with posts devoted to whichever progressive position is slightly lefter-than-thou. It knows, for example, exactly where — on the left, bien sûr — you stand with regard to the Middle East, gender ideology, D.E.I., body positivity, neurodivergence, Covid and the creative industries and shows you posts screaming from whichever position is just far enough from your own to drive you out of your mind…
There is something guaranteed to offend anyone who wants to get offended — or your money back. Confessions of emotional upheaval and mental health crises operate like a kind of currency, a surefire way to accrue cred…
“There’s some kind of algorithm that’s dusting up the same kind of outrage that Twitter had,” he said. “Threads feels like it’s splintering the left.”
Who could have imagined? I mean, again, other than anyone with even the most cursory awareness of human nature. Or a vague understanding of the business model of literally anything online.
Paul ends her piece musing about Hobbes’ famous assessment of human nature as the perpetual war of all against all. I wouldn’t go quite as far as Hobbes. But it is staggering to me that earnest progressives genuinely seem to have imagined that if they could just get the right kinds of people together on a social media platform, all would be well. It beggars belief that people can walk around with an anthropology that naïve and self-flattering. The human heart is far uglier than that. We require far more than a rebranding or the tweaking of an algorithm.
The phenomenon of Threads points to something rather simple and obvious about human nature. We can fuss around with the digital architecture, we can try to create spaces where only good people are allowed, and imagine that tranquility will flower like a rose in the desert. But the architecture isn’t the main problem. The sad truth of the matter is that very often we simply do not want to understand one another. It’s not so much that we can’t understand. It’s that we won’t. And far too often, it’s that we don’t even want to try. We like our enemies far too much. We wouldn’t know who we were without them. And in all this we reveal just how very similar we all are, however we may try to safely sequester ourselves online (or IRL).
On Monday at the jail, we simply read through the story of Jesus’ passion from Luke’s gospel. After we were finished, I asked the guys who in the story they identified with the most. Some said Peter the denier. Others identified with the crowd baying for blood or the hushed, grief-stricken crowd. Still others pointed to Judas the betrayer, or the criminals nailed to their crosses on either side of Jesus. It was a moving conversation, one where we all, to varying degrees, identified with people at their worst and least inspiring. It wasn’t exactly a joyful conversation but it had the distinct ring of honesty to it.
We’ve entered the hard part of Holy Week. Tonight, Maundy Thursday where Jesus is betrayed, arrested, “tried” and sentenced. Tomorrow, Good Friday, the death of God-in-flesh. Then the wretched, hellish silence of Saturday. It is a haunting, hallowed stretch of time that tells (and shows) us the shattering truth about who God is.
But it also shows us the truth about ourselves. We are, each one of us, betrayers, deniers, cowards, and thieves. We are the curious onlookers mostly interested in a spectacle. We are the self-righteous crowd baying for blood in a pathetic attempt to justify ourselves and find a scapegoat. We are the Herods and the Pilates passing the buck and uselessly attempting to wash the stains from our blood-stained hands. There is no place we can go to escape the bad people for the bad people are us.
Rumblings 
Amen.
Simultaneously, we are his mother Mary, John, and Joseph of Arimathea.
Yes, very true, Jeff. I suppose I emphasized the characters I did in the context of the Times article I was reflecting on. In general, I feel that our cultural error is toward self-righteousness, not an acknowledgement of our common humanity, our common brokenness. And then there is the basic theological claim that Jesus died for the sins of all. But you are surely right to point in the direction of other characters at the foot of Jesus’ cross.
Interestingly, in the jail conversation I referred to in the post, one young man said that he identified with Jesus. Initially, I rather uncharitably thought, “What hubris!” But it turns out the guy was saying that Jesus, like so many, knew what it was to be misunderstood. This, too, tells a deep truth of the human condition.
There are other days to locate ourselves amidst a mothers grief or a disciples care, but this is definitely not that day. On this day we locate ourselves as abject sinners. To do anything else, though understandable even rationally defensable, is to miss the mark, is to miss the point, is to sin.
Who councils sin, Ryan? Who is the Father of sin?
Yes we are Peter, yes we are the mob, yes we are the scourgers of Christ, we drive in those spikes as surely as those who crucified Him did BUT to stay located in those sins is to be driven mad with shame, anger and revenge. To be swallowed up by our sins and eternal dispair.
Or worse, to become indifferent. To deny sin. To deny God. To lead others down the path of sin. Only in the wholly unmeritted grace received by Barrabbas are we found. Though we deserve death, we are given new life. In the most heinous miscarriage of justice imaginable, steeped in the sin of a baying mob, Jesus dies and Barrabbas is saved. Jesus dies and we are saved. We are Barrabbas…
Some say we are the robber on the cross who is forgiven and redeemed and there is some truth in that. Even in our last hours, real repentence can lead to salvation but on every Good Friday, almost all of us who believe have more than a few hours left. Like Barrabbas we still have a life to lead. How shall we live it? A life of gratitude?A life of repentence? Not as easy as it sounds, impossible, of our own accord but through the Holy Spirit, fearfully presenting myself as sinner before God, praying and fasting, there is hope.
As for the rest of you comment, take your criticisms of me and put your name beside them. How does it read to you? Hopefully you see some truth to it applying to you, as you think it applies to me.
Please consider, “careless words” in the following manner. Consider that they just might be Spirit led. Maybe you have a different relationship with the Holy Spirit then I do, or people who I know, do. For me, for us, discernments are brief and to the point. They don’t come as dissertations. Test the Spirits I offer. You should, but you would do better to ask why I said what I said, rather than make accusations. The Spirit will give me the details, if I need them and I will share them with you, as I have here. My experience with the Spirit is that the longer we commune, I need fewer and fewer details. If that reads as careless to you, I don’t mean it to be.
As for the NYP part of this post. Same as it ever was. No need to repeat myself. I was attaching my, “Amen” to your honest accounting of your experiences with the inmates you minister to and not the nonsense that proceeded it.
I am persuaded, through the Holy Spirit, that:
1. One can see one’s sin and one’s story both in the figure of Barabbas and Peter or Mary (or any other character in the Holy Week story). These are by no means mutually exclusive nor is one or another disallowed on an particular day of the Christian calendar.
2. There is nothing whatsoever in the claim that we can see ourselves in various characters in the story that would suggest that we must stay there or have not repented, or that we are denying sin, or have become indifferent, or any other thing that you claim in your comment.
3. Jesus Christ alone has the authority to use a phrase like “Get behind me Satan.”
Additionally, you say:
Perhaps you might consider flipping this one around and applying this criteria to a significant portion of your comments on what I have written here over the years? Particularly when you have felt (and continue to feel) quite free to diagnose my (and others’) spiritual states, relationships with the Holy Spirit, prayer lives, recognition of sin, etc without knowledge of any of the above.
On this day you would locate us among the Mother of God and great Saints! Get thee behind me…
Without exception, we are all Barrabas.
Your tone gets tiresome and, perhaps ironically, almost perfectly illustrates the point of the post. To implicitly say that the claim that we might see something of ourselves in a mother’s grief or a disciple’s care is “Satanic” is beyond ridiculous.
You are wrong, Barabbas does not exhaust the possibilities of who we might identify with on Good Friday (or Holy Week, more generally). It is ludicrous to suggest that we might not also see ourselves in Peter’s hypocrisy or the Roman centurion’s awe or Judas’s guilt or the women from Galilee who simply followed and watched or Joseph of Arimathea who sought to do something good and honourable amidst the horror.
Further to the story I shared above (in response to the comment you so disliked), would you have me tell the men I refer to in the jail that they are only allowed to identify with an insurrectionist and a murderer? Would you have me rebuke a man who derives some comfort from the thought that God himself might know what it is to be understood that he is “not allowed” to identify with Jesus?
(As an aside, you have in the past rebuked me for referring to media like The New York Times in my posts because these are “servants of Satan.” I suppose given your “Amen” above that this it is acceptable to refer to these “servants of Satan” when I am making a point you agree with?
You really need to take more care with your words.)
Yes. Your words strike home for me in so many ways. While many folks abide in a binary world of black and white/good and bad/right and wrong … it is so true, as you say … “[t]here is no place we can go to escape the bad people for the bad people are us.” And yet, it is so hard to see the dark side within ourselves when we believe in “either/or”. It is only when we can give ourselves and others the grace of being “both/and” that we might give ourselves permission to try and understand one another.
Well said, Karen. Thank you.
I am not saying anything like what you assert in points 1 and 2. As for 3 you couldn’t be more wrong.
I’ll take my leave of you now, Ryan.
I’m truly sorry I wasn’t able to offer you more. May God continue to bless you. May you grow in faith.
I wish the same for you.