Note: This article includes significant discussion of profanity.
The previous record for most f-bombs and insults aimed at me in an e-message was from a graduate student’s mother who was upset with her adult child’s grade in my class.
Rabid mom’s email rhetorically questioned why there was a f***** class where the students watched, wrote about and discussed the dialogue and actions of characters in f****** movies. I thought, “Well, your adult child did sign up for a class titled Cinema Therapy.”
The new record for f-bombs and insults in one exchange came during a recent online discussion — set to public viewing — about the war between Israel and Hamas. A friend posted a meme about standing with Israel, and I responded with a comment and link to an article about human rights violations on both sides of the conflict. In the ensuing responses, I was left wondering how we foster peace when calmly delivered arguments result in verbal violence. Some ask, “Why even bother trying to discuss politics and theology online?”
Brad Bull
In the discussion thread about the war, one person didn’t use profanity but abandoned the discussion when it moved into deeper analysis than bandwagon talking points would cover. In the course of the discussion, I had shared Mark Wingfield’s article “In This War, There Are No ‘Good Guys.’” The respondent who was not verbally abusive said the article lost its effectiveness because it was snarky. (One of the most honest and objective people I know gave the article a 1 out of 10 on the snark scale.)
I responded to the person in the thread with something like this: “I admit I likely am seeing things through my own bias. What parts of the article do you see as snarky?” (Before posting this comment, I deleted the part where I pointed out the “it was snarky” argument committed the logical fallacy of ad hominem — attacking not the substance of the argument but the character of the proponent. I figured making this assertion would come off as snarky.) At this point, after making multiple posts, the person said something like this: “I’m not going to spend my time locating examples of the word snark. Social media posts never change minds anyway.”
You might be noticing I keep saying, “said something like.” When I went back to review the details of the conversation, all the pertinent comments had been deleted. This likely was triggered by a private conversation in which I said to the host of the thread that I usually delete abusive comments or at least warn participants to be civil. The host apologized for missing any abusiveness while asleep or at work. However, before the comments were deleted and even though I had burst out laughing since his abusiveness undermined my opponent, I had taken some screenshots of what I considered the abusive part of the discourse. I’ll come back to that.
Why do we keep doing this?
For now, what is the purpose of having such discussions? Is it right that social media posts never change minds? If so, why do we — especially those who don’t think they make a difference — keep posting?
With a shoutout to Kate Bowler and her brilliant book Everything Happens for a Reason — and Other Lies I’ve Loved, the suggestion that social media posts never change minds is a lie I love to hate.
“The person who was supposedly opposed to snark said — with apparent snarkiness — ‘Well, you win Facebook!’”
Upon reading the comment that social media discussions never change minds, I responded with something like, “Really? My mind was recently changed by a social media discussion when I encountered new information.” The person who was supposedly opposed to snark said — with apparent snarkiness — “Well, you win Facebook!”
An attempt at peacemaking
Then, there was the person who launched the barrage of profanity and insults. I dug deep in my peacemaking training to respond. During seminary, I didn’t have the late Glenn Stassen for ethics, but my section of the class with the late Paul Simmons did read Stassen’s book on peacemaking. My main takeaway was that peacemaking begins with finding something we can agree with or affirm.
I tried that. With one exception, I think taking this approach is evidenced in the following very abbreviated reconstruction of the conversation I had with the person who was f-bombing me — a person I came to learn was a U.S. military veteran.
Me: There is no justification for either side’s terrorism. … We can and should hold both sides responsible. The tenor of popular opinion, especially by evangelical Christians, is one reason politicians fear addressing both sides. We, the people, must change our attitudes.
US Military Veteran (USMV): F**k you asshole. The Jews don’t commit terrorism. GTFOH with your self(-)righteous lefty BS (curse emoji and middle finger emoji).
Me (responding to a previous comment made by someone else): There is no endorsement of Hamas in the need to condemn the Israeli government’s own gross violation of human rights. Even if “not equal,” our failure to condemn ANY Israeli behavior only foment(s) the problem.
USMV: Brad Bull you are mistaken. You are a man with soft hands who has no idea what it’s like to stand on the wall and protect your family and friends … .
“I pictured Jack Nicholson as the abusive Col. Jessep in A Few Good Men.”
I pictured Jack Nicholson as the abusive Col. Jessep in A Few Good Men bellowing, “You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall! You need me on that wall!” However, pointing out the source of USMV’s line wouldn’t help. I took a breath and looked up the person’s social media profile and found they were a veteran. Then I wrote:
Me: As I tell my veteran clients, “Neither my father nor grandfathers served in the military. But my parents took me to a movie about the Holocaust when I was 12. I couldn’t sleep that night, and I’m glad. It instilled in me a deep appreciation for the those who put themselves in harm’s way to protect civilians and promote freedom. Part of why I enjoy working with veterans is to express my appreciation by helping you get to a better place.” (USMV), while we clearly disagree, I sincerely appreciate your courage and service that has helped me have the freedom to express my views and you to express yours. Again, thank you.
USMV: (Smile and blush emoji; thinking emoji.)
The final part of the conversation was not fully captured by my screen shots. I recall mentioning that about two years ago I heard an American doctor, who had volunteered in Palestine, say Israel was diverting water from Gaza, the Palestinians were suffering, and it was creating a powder keg. I provided a link from just two months before to an Associated Press article on this subject.
USMV replied that the AP is biased to the left. He then shared a long history of Israel in which he used “we,” leading me to think he might have been Israeli American. He concluded by saying Israel had not diverted water from Gaza, but, if they had, it was OK because the water belongs to Israel. Then he asked me, “Are things starting to make sense now?”
I replied something like: I looked at an analysis of media bias, and the AP is, in fact, listed as left of center. However, Reuters is listed at dead center, and they have multiple articles with the same information as the AP article. Still, Hamas would do better to learn from Gandhi and King rather than slaughtering innocents. However, on the other side, the assertion that it’s OK to leave 2 million people to thirst does bring clarity.
USMV (apparently after looking up information about me and seeing I perform at storytelling events): It’s called war. I’ve spent my whole life at war in places you’ve never heard of so you have no idea story boy. Now kindly F**k off.
USMV: Monsters can’t learn from Gandhi and King. They’re monsters … .
I supposed my “clarity” comment was snarky. I wrestled with it and — either arrogantly or with righteous indignation — decided an attempt at “whitewashed-wall” rhetoric was warranted to call out hypocrisy in the face of human suffering. Regardless, that dialogue swayed USMV and Mr. You-Win-Facebook not one iota.
Five reasons I engage on social media
So why attempt social media dialog? Here are a few reasons I engage.
First, notice that I said “dialogue” rather than “debate.” I was on the college debate team. I love the process of discovery. I used to organize weekly debates between college students in the classes I taught. But I changed the wording in my syllabi when a colleague taught me something he heard at a conference: “Debate is about winning an argument. The focus becomes winning and losing. Dialogue is about learning and growing.”
Thus, it often is most effective to ask questions rather than just make comments. If arguments made in a discussion are off base, questions will eventually lead to mental dissonance — the realization something doesn’t add up. In the discussion reported above, I did ask what parts of the article the person found snarky. Other than that, I did not do a good job of asking questions.
Second, my Myers-Briggs personality type is ENF (look, a bird!) P. For the unfamiliar, that means I am most comfortable when I can be extroverted, intuitive, feeling and perceiving. My Feeling score is on the border with Thinking. But the others are pretty much off the scale. As an extrovert, I process information by acting, rather than processing and then acting. (I have to discipline myself on this; the dangers are pretty apparent, especially when near cliffs.)
This is compounded by my iNtuitive nature. In contrast to Ss who prefer to use the five senses, we Ns prefer abstractions and to think things out loud. I have a friend who also is an ENFP. He says his wife once said, “Stop arguing with me!” He replied, “I’m not arguing, I’m THINKING!” I totally get that.
“It’s a flawed location though, because in written discourse, there is no tone of voice or facial expression.”
It’s easy to see how Ss and Ns can collide like ships in the night. However, we have to figure out a way to work together, and, when well used, social media offers us a great location to put this in practice. It’s a flawed location though, because in written discourse, there is no tone of voice or facial expression. Plus, with the distance of a keyboard, it’s easy to get hostile. Yet the same thing happens on TV where there is tone of voice and facial expression.
That brings us to my third reason for engaging in social media dialogue. For the last 50 years, we have had a constant diet of hostile discourse on TV and radio. It seems to have started during the 1968 presidential campaign.
The 2016 documentary Best of Enemies describes how ABC News was in the ratings dungeon. They invited conservative William F. Buckley and leftist Gore Vidal to be talking heads. Vidal goaded the devout Catholic Buckley until he snapped and said, on live TV, “Now, listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock in your goddamn face, and you will stay plastered.”
ABC News then leaped to first place in the convention coverage ratings. Media corporations learned that we, the people, love verbal blood sport rather than dialogue. It’s not the media, it’s us. Until we change our tastes to an adult diet, we will continue to be fed pabulum. One way to change our tastes in what we hear and watch is to practice constructiveness in how we speak.
Fourth, I make posts on social media because it is our modern-day Wittenberg door. Imagine Martin Luther being told, “Posts on church doors never change anyone’s mind.” True, Luther’s post came in the fulness of the zeitgeist of the day, but a zeitgeist happens only through the interaction of leaders and the people.
Do I suffer from grandiose thinking that my posts might have the impact of Luther? No, but I grew up reading about the Dutch boy who stuck his finger in a leaky dike until the townspeople could be gathered to repair the problem. Doing nothing can be disastrous; doing a little can accomplish a lot.
Fifth and finally, I make political and theological comments on social media because of an important lesson from the classic social psychology experiment by Solomon Asch. As the son of Jews who immigrated from Poland prior to World War II, Asch was curious what led people to conform to bandwagon mentality like Nazism.
In his experiment, Asch had male college students compare the length of lines and try to identify which two lines were the same length. The subjects didn’t know the other people in the room were confederates of the researcher. When the confederates gave the wrong answer, subjects went along with the wrong answer 75% of the time, even though there was no overt pressure to do so. As also stated in A Few Good Men, they just “followed the crowd at chow time.” The study was criticized for using only males and only college students. However — and don’t shoot the messenger here — a 1990 mixed-sex replication of the study (but again with just college students) found a 72.7% conformity rate to apparent popular opinion, with 92% of females and 50% of males conforming to a wrong answer at least once.
Now, here is the key finding that influences my thinking. Although a subsequent variation of the study in Japan did not gain the same results, Asch’s 1956 version of the study “found that even the presence of just one confederate that goes against the majority choice can reduce conformity by as much as 80%.” Just. One. Objector. helped encourage observers to reject the bandwagon.
“People often overhear better than they hear.”
Thus, when people ask me why I “waste my time” talking to dogmatic folks who never will change their minds, I say, “If it’s clear folks aren’t open to changing their minds, I’m not trying to change their minds. I’m trying to get a better understanding of their position and challenge my own. Ultimately, I’m actually talking to people who are following the conversation in silence and might be influenced not to join a bandwagon headed over a cliff.”
That is the key reason. People often overhear better than they hear. Our posts can help create an atmosphere of critical analysis and dissent.
Cliffs from any angle
Speaking of cliffs, they have a right, middle and left. Another lie I love to hate is that only the right is dogmatic and closed minded. After Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, I saw an online conversation of left-leaning folks celebrating the beauty of Garth Brooks singing Amazing Grace. Knowing this same crowd fervently supported separation of church and state, I started asking questions about whether a Christian hymn was the best way to promote unity. Might such a hymn be more appropriate at the National Cathedral during the president’s chosen worship service rather than at all the people’s inauguration? While some said things like “good point,” others got heated very quickly. One person went so far as to say Amazing Grace had become more of a secular anthem than Christian hymn. That was my point. God help us.
Bandwagons can go over cliffs to left or right or down the middle. Hopefully, just one person can help pump the brakes — gently and peacefully, albeit with passionate conviction. The script is ours to write.
Brad Bull is an ordained Baptist minister and licensed marriage and family therapist who, after several years serving as a minister and then university professor, is now in private practice. The first debate he won with The first dialogue in which he successfully achieved consensus with his father was at age 15 when he asked, “If we don’t have $75 for me to take scuba lessons, why do we have $75 for me to take piano lessons?” His retreat and counseling services operate through DrBradBull.com. He can’t play piano at retreats, but he’s a licensed scuba diver.