We Need No Urging to Hate Humans
I’m still on Facebook. I have about forty friends, only a dozen of whom regularly post, so most of my feed is provided by the algorithm. Which gets boring. So I made a few tweaks to my profile in hopes of seeing different stuff.
Some of the different stuff has been delightful. Every day I get two or three Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, and occasionally The Far Side and Dilbert. Once a day, sometimes more, the feed includes a pithy quote from the early twentieth-century British philosopher Bertrand Russell.
Other different stuff has been, shall we say, interesting. I now get a feature called Reels and Short Videos, which I’m guessing is Meta’s effort to compete with TikTok. Almost every video features a long-haired, buxom young Brazilian woman in crop top and cutoffs doing a provocative dance. Hell yes, I watch! I may be married, but I’m not dead.
And still other different stuff reminds me how social media have hastened the demise of common courtesy and exacerbated polarization.
One site posted what it claimed is a Cree proverb: “When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.” Many of the roughly 1,200 commenters questioned the quote’s attribution, including one person sure it came from Dr. “Suez’s” The Lorax. Others questioned the premise, noting that if you boil it and add plenty of spice, you can eat money (paper bills, anyway).
But most of the respondents went religious or political. Here’s one typical religious response: “Our Father in Heaven IS in control, he has an agenda and in Time all will be revealed, speak to him so that he will know you.”
I doubt that true believer is even dimly aware of the eternal, unresolvable theological question her post raises: is there free will? If said father controls everything, then free will doesn’t exist. But if he doesn’t know you and you need to explain yourself, then he doesn’t control everything (certainly not you, anyway) and free will does exist. Her self-contradicting comment suggests her faith runs at a rudimentary level; no seminary student she. So why not let the comment pass? There are only three reasons to reply to it, none of which she’s likely to welcome: to introduce her to hermeneutics; to persuade her she’s wrong; or to mock her.
But her comment got lots of responses, and guess which type they all were?
Over the last few months I’ve grown more convinced that we need to tone down our public discourse. If we’re disappointed in the views of people we cherish, okay, let’s challenge them — privately and gently. But hurling verbal grenades across a public forum at total strangers? That behavior should be unworthy of us. Let’s leave it to the culture war entrepreneurs, those cynics seeking fortune and fame by inflaming public sentiment — creatures who remind me of that old Star Trek episode where an alien subsists on the enmity between humans and Klingons.
As the Klingon (played by Michael Ansara) tells the alien, “We need no urging to hate humans. But for the present, only a fool fights in a burning house.”
The burning house metaphor is fairly apt for our political moment. No doubt Bertrand Russell describes our plight even better, but that quote hasn’t popped up on my new Facebook feed yet. And yesterday I got something from Meghan Markle. So I think I need to tweak my profile again.
