Burying My Head in the Sand
Barack Obama was elected for the first time about the same time I was latching onto social media. Up until that point, I had been blissfully unaware of what people thought about politics in particular, but even just generally about a variety of topics. I had opinions and ways of thinking that were my own, and everyone else did, too. The only place we intersected was on the specific topics that facilitated our intersection in life.
Social media began opening up a whole new world to me. It seemed like an opportunity to learn from how other reasonable people thought about things. And I did learn a lot about what people thought, but the “reasonable” part seemed strikingly absent in lots of ways. Most disappointingly, this was true among many who profess to share my faith - the types of folks that say the right things at church or around church people, but when looking at their Facebook profiles, you would think that they had never heard of Jesus based on the hateful and demonstrably false information they announced proudly to the world or idolization of public figures of terrible moral character.
I regard myself and my wife as having had two pretty typical categories of public education - mine from a large school, hers from a tiny country school. We came from very different early lives and family backgrounds. We did not appreciably change our life philosophies as a result of having attended college (i.e., higher education didn’t “ruin” us or “turn us liberal”). We are not severe outliers on the intelligence curve (though I regard Raeyna as extremely intelligent). But I believe we do both have some basic skills that were somehow developed along the way in the manner of skepticism, critical thinking, and a desire to represent the truth in what we do and say.
I can’t necessarily attribute these things to our education, because I know many people much more educated and intelligent than we are who still do not exhibit this same drive to discriminate fact from fiction. I also don’t think we can point to common elements in our upbringings, either. Whatever the factor is, I had hoped in my hubris that I could encourage others toward the goals of relying on evidence rather than opinion to shape our own. Perhaps the hubris is really that I do this at all - it is possible that I am deceiving myself in this regard. If so, I would invite someone to point out how.
In any case, I have decided to risk accusation of creating an echo chamber and unfollow those I see conducting themselves this way online. I don’t know who is willing to simply lie to me or endorse treating others terribly or claim that good character is a pipe dream, while at the same time calling themselves Christians. I wasn’t doing any good influencing them anyway. If I was, as some have suggested, perhaps it was among a silent population of folks that for whatever reason do not make themselves known. But I feel like what I find is destroying my relationships with these folks in such a way that it is better that I don’t know how they conduct themselves or what they really believe when they’re not in a church setting. I should focus on how I conduct myself instead and avoid topics that would reveal the worst in those I respect the most.
