Friends,
In one of life's great mysteries, I've been giving a lot of attention to my devotional blog and almost none to this one, though the readership of Tangent Space(s) dwarfs that of the other one. As the New Radicals crooned in the days of my restless youth, "Someday We'll Know why..."
But now, O readers, I present a Tangent forged in the flames of internal fire (once I committed to the vocative 'O', I had to end the sentence with something alliterative and epic). We discuss a topic that I both love and hate, and love to hate, and hate that I love, a topic not unlike a car crash from which I can't look away...
Arguing on Facebook.
The Facebook Argument Paradox
You can't live without them, and you can't make them better... until now.
Here's the thing. In a perfect world, debates-- ethical, political, religious, or otherwise-- wouldn't primarily occur on a superficial, delete-able, Like-able, unfriend-able, poke-able social media site rife with pictures of duckface selfies and newborns. But I'm afraid that's the world we live in.
The truth is that conversations, whether they turn into arguments or not, about things like marriage equality, gun control, religious freedoms, abortion, etc., ought to be happening. While, again, Facebook is far from the ideal place for this, it happens to be the setting, at least for now, where people share their opinions. I think there ought to be a way for people to discuss important issues in the medium that is currently most popular for having discussions.
The problem (which you already know if you've used Facebook during an election year) is that these, ahem, discussions often deteriorate into the text versions of all-out bar fights. (I have absolutely no idea what an actual version of a bar fight is like, but I've watched plenty of motion pictures.)
How should we respond to the history of mean-spirited, illogical, non sequitur, and/or ad hominem tirades we've seen (or taken part in)? It seems like the two most common responses are to 'sink to their level' by spouting off our own angry outburst, or to flee the scene and not take part in any controversial Facebook conversations.
But what if, instead, we could agree to some ground rules? Because I love Aaron Sorkin, what if we borrowed the rules from the reboot of News Night from his HBO hit The Newsroom (as seen here)?
Facebook Argument 2.0
1. Is this information that people need in the voting booth?
While this isn't the same rubric you or I would use in our Facebook debates, the principle is the same-- is it worth it to weigh in on this? Just like News Night only has 42 minutes of news it can report, you only have so much time and energy to devote to public forums. Choose topics that are important and about which you know something (otherwise just reading and learning would be better).
2. Is this the best possible form of the argument?
Think before you type. Also, read and re-read what you've written before you hit enter. There are many drawbacks to responding in emotion and haste, and making a bad argument is one of them. If after thought and reflection you realize you can't actually argue your point well, again it's probably better to just read up on the topic instead of entering the fray.
3. Is this story in historical context?
Just like it would be shoddy for a news organization to report one event or quotation outside its historical context, so it is when you or I angrily opine on only one facet, element, or quotation from a much larger issue and ignore the many other factors connected to it. This again calls for thoughtfulness; do I understand the entire issue? To give one small but timely example: in the recent Hobby Lobby decision, religious freedom and contraceptive/women's/health rights are both major factors. Both need to be considered. A man has to do his best to understand a woman's perspective. An irreligious person has to do shis best to understand a religious person's perspective.
Just as Mack randomly added a fourth rule, I will do the same:
4. Be kind.
This seems to be the hardest one. Especially when the person you're arguing with is a 'Facebook friend of a Facebook friend', making them essentially not a real person to you. But here's the thing-- they are all real people (except of course for Catfished profiles, but I'm sure they avoid political debates). The people on Facebook, however ignorant, misguided, 'bigoted', short-sighted, unenlightened, or stupid they may be-- are people. You may despise their opinions, beliefs, arguments, etc., but please still show them basic human respect in your disagreement. This allows an environment in which other people can contribute their ideas on all sides of an issue. If you just bash a person, or even bash them back, the conversation is over.
[Note: I've even called out people before for breaking rule 4. Perhaps I shouldn't have, but I have. They usually respond that they were only violently thrashing the person's stance, not the person himself. If that helps someone sleep at night, then okay. But in my opinion, violent thrashing need not enter the picture at all. Saying, "I have no idea what you mean here... your argument makes no sense to me because... I absolutely disagree with your conclusion because" is so much better, to me, than "your idiotic argument... one of the dumbest things I've ever heard... it's insane that anyone would think that way..."]
What has your experience been with Facebook arguments?
Have I forgotten any crucial rules to making Facebook a better forum?
Do you think we can pull it off? Can social networks be a place where conflicting ideas are meaningfully shared with each other?
Jon
 |
| From katu.com |
Friends,
Rather than just apologize for the hundredth time about how it's been almost a month since our last Tangent, I'm going to apologize AND vent my frustration.
Sorry it's been so long. When I started this blog adventure (not to be mistaken with "adventure blog", which I would take to mean a blog about hiking and mountain bikes, which this most certainly is not), I had a handful things I needed to write about. Pro baseball realignment. The good and the bad of being single. When Harry Met Sally, both as a chart topper and a source of relational wisdom.
The problem is that my pool of ideas, while vast, has more or less run dry. Don't panic-- Tangent Space(s) will live on. But I just want you to know, faithful reader(s(?)), that I've used up all my go-to rants about dog crap and traffic merging. From here on out, the regular exchange of ideas that is TS(s) will depend on my discipline and your help with ideas. The former is practically non-existent, so yeah... please help me.
In the meantime, I tackle a problem that is reprehensible, heinous, outright egregious... to my friend Bob. For some reason. I'm going to try to be angry for him.
M&Ms and Human Depravity
Trying to think of some joke about melting in your mouth, not in your hand; failing to do so
If you've ever been to a party, you've probably been to a party with trail mix. If I had my own rant to deliver, it would probably be about how crappy trail mix is. It shouldn't exist. Or maybe its existence should be relegated to the "trail". But this is Bob's rant, and so for the sake of tangentment, please picture a bowl of trail mix at a party.
Now, the thing about trail mix is that it attempts to mix salty and sweet. In one bowl, you find peanuts, cashews, almonds, granola, raisins, a bunch of other crap, and M&Ms. But you're at a party and it's 9pm. You're not interested in protein just now. Fiber is not a high priority. You want chocolate and you want it bad.
This, then, is the trail mix party dilemma-- on a dish serving as a public medley, you are interested in one and only one item.
There are obviously three options before you: eat nothing, eat the trail mix evenly in all its heterogeneity, or pick out and eat the M&Ms.
I'm afraid now we must say the hard truth. Many may disagree. But "sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same" (that's for my mom, who has always loved that lyric from The Fray). Here it is, friends. Only the first two options are ethically permissible.
What's wrong, you might ask, with eating only the M&Ms? The answer is simple-- you ruin the trail mix for everyone else. Suppose the trail mix is 10% chocolate and 90% lame stuff. It won't take you long to eat all 10 of those percents. What you leave behind is an almost-full bowl that has become an abomination.
You might respond with some hopeful thought that the mix and/or chocolate will be replaced. But that simply won't happen, because the bowl will be 90% full! The host won't even notice the change (unless shis hand scoops out the 'lame mix'), and no refill will take place.
This leads me to the point I want to make, the one part of this, umm, important problem that carries over into other parts of life. The violator of the trail mix dilemma typically isn't trying to be cruel, greedy, or self-centered. They legitimately just take the chocolate without thinking about the ramifications.
And that's the problem. In all our actions, large and small, we should be thinking about the ramifications. Will this affect other people? How will it make them feel? Will it make their lives better or worse?
When you eat all the M&Ms and nothing else, it affects us. It makes us feel sad. It makes our lives worse.
Trail Mix and You
Leave comments. It's sort of an "if you build it, they will come" principle in 2 directions
Have you come up against a trail mix devoid of chocolate?
Have you ever broken the ethical code of party food?
Have you any ideas for future tangents?
Jon
Friends,
Before I start in on this topic, I have about a million disclaimers to make. A few of them include the facts that:
- I love facebook
- I love my iPhone and its sundry features
- I check my email all the time (in fact, too many times)
- There's no actual recent example of texting (etc.) that is motivating this blog post, so no need to be paranoid or suspicious (unless you broke up with me in 8th grade via a note; you know who you are)
- I'm not writing this from some moral high ground. I'm writing it from a cocoon of blogging, texting, and emailing from which I rarely emerge
So don't read this as an attack on technology or social media. I'm not one of those oldfangled people griping about how smartphones and the internet have robbed us of face-to-face interactions with each other. I'll never advocate a long-term abandonment of facebook in order to free up more time for, um... honestly, I'm not even sure what else there is in life.
And yet, and yet...
The evils of written text
I was torn between "sundry" and "divers" in that last section, but I was worried you might think I meant "more than one diver"
There are just some things [apologies, confrontations, break-ups, rejections, and the like] that need to be communicated in person. Or, if not that, over Skype. In the absence of physical presence or video chatting, some form of telephone. But don't write it down. Don't ever write it down.
The problem is, written communication, in which you don't have to look a person in the eye, is just so much easier. And that, of course, is why we do it. In the face of something potentially scary or nerve-racking or unpleasant, we'd much rather communicate the words without actually saying them.
The problem with that problem is, people have dignity that demands personal, actual communication. When you need to make one of these communications, I think it's a pretty simple cost-benefit analysis:
the other person's need to be dignified as a human vs. my desire to be comfortable and/or save face
And honestly, I think it pretty much comes down to how selfish we are in that moment.
In sixth grade, it was easier to ask out girls in a note instead of in person or on the phone. So we sometimes did it that way. It must have been much, much easier for those girls to break up with us in a note, too. Because they often did it that way. In high school, when we were too old for notes but before texting had been invented, we sent our friends to tell people we were mad at them, or else did it over AIM. In college, we left a note that said, "Dishes!" on the sink.
The only thing we didn't do was make meaningful noises with our mouths to the actual people involved.
And now, in the information age, we have many more weapons in our talk-dodging arsenal. We've graduated from wide-ruled notebook paper and post-its to texts, emails, and Facebook messages. But the dilemma is the same, and so is the solution.
Look the person in the eye.
Please comment (ironically in written text form)
But there's no dilemma, unless you're planning on breaking up with me via a blog comment
Do you struggle with this communication dilemma?
Have you been hurt by a text that should have been a meeting?
Am I making all of this up?
Jon
Friends,
One of my favorite topics to ponder is memory. Our brains have storage capabilities, but they're very mysterious. I can tell you my multiplication tables or the capital of Florida, but as I attempt to access a memory of an event, things get a little tricky. The images in our minds are blurry, and we can never be quite sure that things happened exactly as we remember them.
One of my favorite things is when an old pleasant memory has lain dormant for a long time, but someone brings it up or something triggers it, and your eyes widen and you say, "That's right!! I'd forgotten all about that!"
I recently read through a facebook message conversation from several years ago and had one of those moments.
So, it is with awe toward the fleeting and hazy aspect of memories that I present to you...
The story of when I almost got in a fight
It's almost happened twice in the last 11 years. This one is by far the funnier.
I went to college once-- enough time has passed that the memories are getting harder to grasp, but I know for sure that I went. While there, I was the president of a Christian student group. What you may not realize is that sometimes the paid employees of Christian student organizations call upon the student presidents to put out fires.
One rainy day sometime around the middle of last decade, I was called upon to put out one of these fires. [Note: in neither of the previous uses of the word fires do I mean a literal fire. I hope that was clear.] Our group had a listserv ("An electronic mailing list of people who wish to receive specified information from the Internet" - thanks Google) so that each week we could update all interested students about our events, schedule, etc. The thing about a listserv, though, is that anyone can email it. All you need is the name of the listserv to email everyone on the list.
The problem was that one student was emailing our listserv to advertise events of a different Christian group, and these events often took place at the same time as our events. So obviously, blatant misuse of the listserv. I won't even go into the many reasons this behavior was absurdly wrong (though if I did, the list would include violation of clearly expressed guidelines, extreme inefficiency, inconsiderate spamming of people's inboxes, ignorance of why separate groups exist...).
Needless to say, the fire had to be put out. Unfortunately, I was the group's student president.
I saw the student (for the sake of the story, we'll call him Jackson, because that's a cool name) as he was leaving the dining hall. He was carrying a djembe, as was his custom. I will not attempt to understand or explain this custom. The following event transpired:
I politely asked Jackson if he would stop using our listserv to promote the other events that were the same time as our events. I told him I understood his heart behind it was for unity, not for the glory of himself or the other group, but that that our listserv was for our events and needs; if we let one other group promote with it, we have to let them all, and soon students will get 3000 emails a day, etc. etc.
At this point I would have bet money that he'd say, "Ok,I understand," or at the very most, that he'd request to speak about the matter further. Alas, I would have lost money, which is the main reason I'm not a betting man.
Jackson: "That's B.S.!!! People use that thing for selling their geology textbooks! You and your whole group pretend you want Christian unity, but you obviously don't care about it and you're hypocrites!"
[It was true that a student had once used the listserv to try to sell a geology textbook. But do I look like the kind of guy who's going to accept the logic of "Oh yeah, well someone else did something worse than what I did, so I take no blame"? If anyone reading this doesn't know me, I'll go ahead and fill you in-- I don't look like that kind of guy.]
As I opened my mouth to verbally dispose of this kindergarten logic, he instantly turned and walked into the men's restroom without another word. I decided I couldn't let him escape this confrontation for any length of time, so I opened the door and proceeded to attempt to reason with him from the doorway.
But Jackson, perhaps feeling that the normal silence in a men's room is covenental and sacred, bullied his way out of my tactic by saying, "I'm trying to piss, Jon. I'm trying to piss Jon. I'm trying to piss, Jon." He just kept saying it.
When he and his djembe returned from the loo, I resumed my efforts. I calmly told him that I understood his point, but that listservs have rules and that we were just kindly, without judgment, asking him to obey them. He replied, "Why you acting pissed off at me? Just cause of a few emails. You shouldn't be pissed off about that!"
[You might be wondering why he kept saying I was mad when, to this point, I had been perfectly calm. I was wondering this too. Looking back on it now, I think maybe he was projecting his own anger onto me, or else was just really paranoid. Or else he misread that whole bathroom strategy.]
"Jackson, I'm not pissed off about your emails. That's why I've been calm and rational. What I'm pissed off about is your disrespectful attitude toward me during this discussion."
Now, I didn't think that was too bad. Jackson thought otherwise.
He set down his djembe drum and spread out his arms, swinging his fingers in the classic, beckoning "come fight me" gesture!
By the grace of God, I've barely been exaggerating the whole calmness thing. I really was feeling pretty chill throughout this, so I was able to respond to this ludicrous, hostile stance with-- "Jackson, why did you put down your drum? Pick it up. I'm talking to you about a few emails, man, come on."
He picked up his huge drum and stormed off. Perhaps he went somewhere to play a tribal song of anger. But he never emailed our listserv again, not even to issue a formal challenge to our group to choose a champion for a 1-on-1 drum-off.
Them's fightin' words
I'm a blogger, not a fighter
Did you ever get in a fight about something stupid? Or just a strong disagreement? Maybe gave someone a funny look?
Jon
It's getting hard to remember now (soon I will step one year closer to "late twenties" -- ugh), but I was once young. Once, back then, I read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I didn't read it because it was supposed to be extremely important to political and economic philosophy, and I certainly didn't read it to expose myself to its ubiquitous references to Rand's Objectivism.
I read it because, like most things I did back then, my friend Brett recommended it. That, and the art on the cover was ballin':
Seriously, that is some simple, elegant cover art.
Anyway, the book drew me in with its awesome characters. In the years and books since, I've only come across a couple characters I've liked more than Atlas's Francisco d'Anconia or Ragnar Danneskjöld. The former is a brilliant industrialist pretending to be a brainless playboy (sort of like Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins), and the latter is a pirate. Yeah, a pirate.
Anyway, while the book is packed with Objectivism, Rand's personal philosphy of "rational self-interest," I mainly just wanted to see what would happen to the characters, and figure out who the heck John Galt was. But later I would take more of an interest in ethics and morality and would realize the significance of Rand's thoughts.
And, from a Christian perspective, some of Rand's quotations about these topics can seem... well, literally the exact opposite of the Christian perspective.
Objectivism
Objectivism, or at least my understanding of it, rests entirely on the assertion that in every area of life, people should pursue their self-interest. In determining what is, in fact, in their best interest, they should trust their rationality alone. And thus, articles on this school of thought are always throwing around "rational self-interest."
In politics, Objectivism calls for an extremely small government and laissez-faire economic system. [This best allows each individual to pursue shis rational self-interest.]
In religion, Objectivism calls for atheism, because God "isn't needed" to explain or decide things, only one's rational mind is.
And in ethics, Objectivism calls for selfishness. Because self-interest is a person's greatest goal, selfishness is the best course of action and is, ironically, the Objectivist's greatest "virtue."
Ayn and Jesus
Christian ethics seems pretty distant from Rand's. The greatest goal for the Christian isn't self-interest, but God's glory and comformity to His desires.
In terms of lifestyle, what brings God glory? What are His desires for us? According to Jesus: giving our possessions to those in need (Matthew 19), giving liberty to the oppressed (Luke 4), befriending the destitute (Luke 14), reconciling with those we've hurt (Matthew 5), praying for our enemies (Matthew 5), the Golden Rule (Matthew 7), etc. In summary, we glorify God and live the way he wants largely by what we do for others. The virtues of Objectivism, you'll recall, are those things we do for ourselves.
To make the contrast as stark as possible, I'll give a remark from each important figure:
"Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life." Ayn Rand
"This is my commandment: Love each other in the same way I have loved you. There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." Jesus
Welcome back, college football Saturdays. Now that my roommate and I have ditched cable, my watching is limited. I'll need to find important (read: WVU) games online, I guess. In the meantime, I have time to kick off our series of tangents by asking what I consider to be one of the toughest ethical questions raised in a major motion picture: the Gone Baby Gone dilemma.
I will give a little background that will lead into the question:
[WARNING: YOU ARE ENTERING SPOILER CITY]
There is a girl with a really bad mother. She's a single mom and is very negligent of the child. She lives a life of partying and debauchery, and if I remember correctly, she has drug problems. The girl has concerned and caring aunt and uncle; they try to help, but feel that as long as the girl lives with her mom, there's only so much they can do for her.
And so, a secret deal is struck between the uncle and the soon-to-retire chief of police. He [the policeman] kidnaps the girl, retires, and starts a new life in which he and his wife lovingly raise the child in a scenic cabin somewhere, focusing solely on providing her with safety, affection, a "normal, happy childhood", etc.
After a while, the girl is declared dead. But eventually a P.I., hired by the aunt or mom, discovers the cabin and sees the girl with her new "parents." The P.I.'s girlfriend happens to be with him when he makes the discovery, and a debate ensues (that will ultimately end their relationship).
Thus, our dilemma. Should the P.I. call the cops and report the kidnapping, or just go home and act like he never saw anything?
I could delve into the complexities of the issue, but I think you can do that yourself. So instead, I'll share one of the reasons I find the question so fascinating -- people's answers are very different, and I've found that, of the people I've asked, it's split about 50/50. It's always interesting to see how the opinions fall down gender lines, political lines, etc.
So I say we conduct a vote. I've added a poll below where you can vote. If you get a chance, comment what you'd do and explain why. If nothing else, though, PLEASE vote in the poll below.
I'll take part, too. Sometime in the next few days I'll write a comment and explain why I'm on the (rules-following, obey-all-authority) side I'm on.
Thanks for weighing in. Enjoy college football. Let's Go Mountaineers!
Jon
