How to Be Nice Online
Words by Blaine Eldredge
The internet is our Colosseum.
I mean, really. Sometimes I think our digital environments are an experiment—designed by a misanthropic robot—sprung on the West to see how much hatred people will communicate before they give up and sign off.
Online, you are not a person.
Consider, for example, your Facebook feed. When people talk there, what are they concerned about? Is it, 1, the story of the person in front of them, that long and often tortured epic whose many surprising turns have built their worldview, to which their beliefs are attached, like advertisements to telephone poles? Or, is it, 2, the facts? Those odd, disjointed specks of information that have no context, no value, no—as Edna St. Vincent Millay put it—“loom to weave them into a fabric.”
Of course, it’s #2. Online, you are not a person. You are a constellation, a cluster of opinions with no human substance, most of which must be annihilated if we’re going to achieve political paradise. The problem is, an opinion is a collection of facts interpreted by a story. Very few people really know how stories are formed.
But we all know how the typical conversation goes.
We post, The world needs to change.
And then that uncle everyone has replies, Oh really? Because I just Googled that phrase, and it turns out most young people think that. You’re a nearsighted neophyte.
We post, I’m feeling sad.
And then an old friend from college writes back: You’re trying to use emotions to obscure rational conversation! That’s what the communists did!
And so we say: Oh really? Because in the 20th century, most card-carrying members of the communist party were Russian, so the word you should have used is коммунист.
Or we just write, I love hippos!
And someone else says, Not to be mean, but a hippo is three bean bag chairs sewn together and given sabertooth tiger teeth. Just saying.
You get the point.
“Not a promising environment, if friendships matter to you. But then, most folks are not online to make friends. They’re there to make a difference. They’re trying to fix the facts.”
Not a promising environment, if friendships matter to you. But then, most folks are not online to make friends. They’re there to make a difference. They’re trying to fix the facts.
But there’s a problem. When we focus on the facts, or the opinions, or the arguments of our “friends,” we miss the heart, and when we do, we show how little we know about the source of change. Which is, of course, the aforementioned heart.
How do you change that? Well, as Alexander McCall Smith wrote in his “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” installment “The Double Comfort Safari Club” (which is, in spite of not being fashionable lit, still totally fun), “You don’t change people by yelling at them.” At least, you don’t change them for the better.
You change the human heart by engaging the story, and substance, and soul, of the person in front of you. Including your irritating online friends.
How do you do that? Easy: you change people as you are changed. You love as you are loved. You forgive as you are forgiven. All virtue in the Bible works that way. “We who are beholding the glory of the Lord are becoming like him” (2 Cor 3:18). Fact is, you can’t give a person a better picture of Jesus than the one you have. You can’t generate a better love than the love that you’re experiencing. All glory is derivative.
Which means, start with your union with God. Start with the activities that made you fall in love with God. Start with the stories, even if they’re myths or parables, that showed you Jesus. I’m thinking of “The Lord of the Rings” here, or “The Divine Conspiracy,” or “Tattoos on the Heart,” or “Peace Like A River.” Then, engage those people you’ve been given to love. Ask for their story. Help them see who they are in the Larger Story. Help them see the love of God. Help them deal with the spiritual oppression suffocating them. I’m telling you. When you’ve seen Jesus face to face, you’ll find yourself loving your worst enemy, whether they’re a Liberal student with a plan to change the world or card-carrying NRA Republican or a protestor or a police officer. You’ll find yourself crossing the greatest of all divides, which is the division between heaven and earth, as you bring the restoration of all things into the present tense.
That’s a tall order, and I don’t think it can be done online, at least, not often. But it can be done in the territory of our everyday lives, as we learn to pursue even our most evidently misguided friends.
Like this. Let’s say someone we’re close to posts something inflammatory. This isn’t a stranger we can’t touch; this is our neighbor. If you have to reply, how about saying: That’s an interesting point. If you’re up for it, why don’t we grab a beer and talk about it? Or, So sorry this season is so hard. I’m going on a run tomorrow, want to come? Ask Jesus for his heart for them.
Remember: restoring the heart, settings captives free, binding up the broken-hearted, that’s our mission.
Who are these broken-hearted captives? They are the pundits, the uncles, the radical cousins, the thick-headed coworkers that make up our relational world. They’re stacked up in our social feeds. As C.S. Lewis had it:
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.”
Print isn’t dead.
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