Religion & Law

Wheaton College prof Alan Jacobs has a thoughtful reflection on the righteous indignation that pervades the Internet:

A now-famous cartoon on the xkcd ?webcomics? site shows a stick figure typing away at his computer keyboard as a voice from outside the frame says, ?Are you coming to bed?? The figure replies: ?I can?t. This is important. . . . Someone is wrong on the Internet.? I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues. . . .

[A]s we have come to focus our attention ever more on politics and the arts of public justice, we have increasingly defined our private, familial, and communal lives in similar terms. The pursuit of justice has come to define acts and experiences that once were governed largely by other virtues. It is this particular transformation that Wendell Berry was lamenting when he wrote, ?Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ?relationship? involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.? That is, it has become a matter of justice rather than of love, an assertion of rights rather than a self-giving.

This same logic governs our responses to one another on the Internet. We clothe ourselves in the manifest justice of our favorite causes, and so clothed we cannot help being righteous (?Someone is wrong on the Internet?). In our online debates, we not only fail to cultivate charity and humility, we come to think of them as vices: forms of weakness that compromise our advocacy. And so we go forth to war with one another.

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