The Shape of Our Hearts

I’ve lost track of the number of articles, podcasts, video clips, etc. I’ve seen over the last few days bearing a headline or title something along the lines of, “Will Charlie Kirk’s death be a turning point for America?” American media, Canadian media, international media (because of course, American culture wars are among their many exports to the rest of the world). I haven’t clicked on many of these links mostly because I think the answer to the question is a rather obvious, “almost certainly not.”

There are three reasons for this, and they are all deeply, even inseparably connected. There are others, certainly, but these three seem transparently obvious to me. The first is that we increasingly live and move and have our being online. A frightening number of people spend a frightening number of hours every day marinating in algorithmically engineered echo chambers that reinforce the righteousness of their causes, the virtues of their tribes, and the heroism of their pursuits. And, of course, the corresponding wickedness and dangerous stupidity of those on the other side (hatred of one’s enemies is such a delicious drug!). Few of us are ignorant, by now, of how social media and probably the internet in general is engineered to addict us by inflaming our outrage, our fear, our anxiety, and above all to keep us clicking and engaging in content (the infinite scroll). And yet, we persist. And we drift further and further apart. We become increasingly incomprehensible to one another. As Utah governor Spencer Cox put it in the aftermath of the Kirk shooting” “The worst of humanity is in our pockets.” Indeed.

The second reason Charlie Kirk’s death will almost certainly not be a turning point for America (and beyond) follows directly from the first. Put bluntly, ideological polarization and political violence are enormously profitable. They generate an outrageous amount of online content and a staggering volume of “engagement” with said content. Reactions, reactions to reactions, outrage over reactions, speculation about reactions, wild fantasies about speculations to reactions, video clips showing people reacting to things, clips showing people reacting to their reactions… It literally never ends. And all of it keeps us clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, reacting, reacting, reacting. We are, apparently, hungry for this kind of trash. Our appetites are, apparently, insatiable. And the tech bros of Silicon Valley continue to rake in their billions.

Put even more bluntly, the business model that dominates much of twenty-first century life requires polarization and perhaps even political violence, no matter how earnestly we might try to express/perform our outrage about it. I was listening to a roundtable podcast the other day that was soaked in sadness over the Kirk assassination, that had all the grave, somber intonations that you would expect, that at least pretended to be exploring what we could do to “move past” this violence. But the host could rarely stop bringing up the all the reactions to the reactions to the speculations and the revenge fantasies… “What do you think about reaction x that I saw on platform y this morning? Did you see that?  Can you believe people would celebrate a murder? What should be done about such people?” Even as the people claimed to be seeking a way past the polarization and political violence, the very media platform they were engaging on required it. Their livelihoods demanded it. The flames of outrage must be stoked to keep customers listening and advertisers spending. As one commenter put it, “All the incentives are in the direction of extremism, demagoguery, and a politics of spectacle.”

Which leads to the final reason Charlie Kirk’s death likely won’t be a turning point for anything: boring old human nature. I have said so much about this over the years—about our inability or unwillingness to tell an honest story about who we are, about how theological anthropology is the defining issue of our time, etc.—that I won’t repeat myself here. I will, instead, direct you to an excellent article written by Elizabeth Stice that I came across this morning. I cannot improve upon her analysis:

There is a famous quote attributed to Anaïs Nin that suggests “we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” There is considerable truth in that. It is common to suggest that Twitter or Bluesky or Tik Tok, or whatever, is full of trash and clickbait and outrage-inducing content. And it is, but that is more of a reflection of us than we realize. While the algorithms for any social media will push you content—some of which you truly don’t desire—for the most part, the algorithm feeds you based on your preferences. On most social media platforms, you can choose a private account, which limits your interactions with strangers. And you always make some choices about who and what you follow. If you log on to a site and see nothing but disturbing things, look no further than yourself for the source. 

We complain all the time about the horrible things that are on the internet. But the “internet” is not self-aware and it does not have any volition. Every horrible thing online was put there by a person. Not all of us contribute to every horrible thing, but most of our social media feeds are shaped by our desires. What about bots and trolls? They succeed because we interact with them. We retweet them, we let them raise our blood pressure, we find them affirming our views. It may be a somewhat distorted mirror that you see when you log on, but it is more a reflection of you than it is of the world.

These are dark and troubling times because we are dark and troubling people… The shape of society reflects the shape of our hearts.

I think Stice nails it. The world is the way it is because we are the way we are (and because we exist in a digital ecosystem engineered to bring out the worst in us and monetize it). So, no, sadly, I don’t think that Charlie Kirk’s death will be any kind of turning point for America or anywhere in the orbit of its cultural exports. Our desires are disordered. Our hearts are misshapen. We need to be converted to something better and truer.