From the Salmon

If you read yesterday’s bit of navel gazing, I talked a little about this medium as being at its essence both interactive and conversational. I also mentioned that I saw this site as an entry point into a particular conversation or, quite possibly, even a community. Over the next few days, I’d like to explore a little bit about what I mean by that, about whether community is even possible in this setting, and to the extent that it is, what that community should look like.

A few weeks ago, Brandon at Bad Christian began a series he’s calling ”A Christ-Haunted Life.” The title is a reference to David Dark’s The Gospel According to America. Brandon looks at Dark’s idea that part of authentic confessional conversation is “remembrance” — telling our stories. I’ll get to that idea later, but for this post, I’d like to take a step back and come at Dark’s book from a slightly different angle than Brandon did.

Dark starts with the idea that the lifeblood of a vital community, be it that of the American democracy or the Christian church, is the lively give-and-take of honest conversation. That’s not all community is, but in this one aspect, I think that this interactive medium has the potential to lead to a community of sorts. It certainly allows for lively conversation. Often too lively.

The conversations that I’ve been particularly drawn to often center around people who are more or less part of the same American and Christian communities that I am and who have similar questions about the direction those communities are taking and the way they are organized. And it’s this group, however loosely defined, that I have in mind as I write this. In many ways, it’s people like this who make up Dark’s audience as well.

How we conduct this conversation matters. Our conduct will determine what trajectory this community takes. In future posts, I’ll write about a more positive vision for transformative conversation. But tonight, I’d like to start with a more cautionary approach.

The first and perhaps most natural course for this community to take is divisive and fractious. Let’s face it, this is a medium that doesn’t put too high a premium on civil discourse. Many of its most prominent voices are provocative and contentious. And the conversations that result are often driven by kneejerk vitriol. If you’ve been around long enough, you know exactly what I mean.

Part of this is because there is an inherent distance built into the discussion. It’s much easier to blast someone you’ll likely never meet. It’s easy to have conversations derailed by anonymous drive-by provocateurs. There’s no requirement for anyone to invest themselves in the community in order to participate.

Another part of this is that a lot of us write what we write because this is our outlet to express our anger and frustration. There’s certainly value and honesty in that, and it might make us more tolerable people to be around outside of the Interweb. But it sets an attacking tone that begets escalating counterattacks.

Dark says that:

our legacy of liberty is lost when we lose the ability to think past mischaracterizing categories and the will to ask questions to which we don’t already know the answers. The tribal storytellers have to be engaged and challenged as they render us the service of trying to invent our reality for us. Being vigilant is not a matter of spending hours combing the Internet for jokes and stories that make our adversaries look stupid and our preferred parties righteous. Looking harder at their language and our own is the only way to sustain the interests of discipleship and democracy.
(p. 39, emphasis mine)

Ouch, right?

In this passage, Dark gets at another contributing factor to this divisiveness. As we write, as we seek to flesh out an identity for ourselves and our sites, we’re overwhelmingly tempted to pick a side, surround ourselves with likeminded allies, and start firing away at those who disagree with us. If we’re taking potshots at people who will never show up to defend themselves, all the better. It’s us vs. them, baby, and we’re right and they’re crazy.

Our culture only encourages this. Whether it’s the split-scream of cable news shows or the struggle to claim God’s blessing for a particular cause, to be extreme is to be heard. But, Dark writes,

The trouble with a sound-bite culture that resents complexity and lacks the patience to listen to (or read) any account of people, places, or events that doesn’t somehow prove we’re in the right is that it eventually becomes a sort of feedback loop playing over in our heads even when we aren’t tuned in to the television, radio, or computer screen. [...]

Sooner or later, we avoid the company of people who don’t buy into our chosen slogans or respond favorably to our mass e-mails, and we unknowingly define our community by the people who agree with us or who have at least learned to dutifully avoid particular topics in our company. Tragically, it can become what we mean when we think of friendship. (p. 29)

Another palpable hit. Certainly we think of our “adversaries” as being rigid and closed to dissenting voices. And that may well be true. But are we slow to recognize the same tendencies in ourselves?

Look, this isn’t the way of grace. If our goal is to transform a larger, more diverse community, becoming more and more entrenched is only going to make the divisions in that community worse.

So how do we avoid this? How do we conduct our conversations in a manner that will send our community on a more grace-filled trajectory?

I hate to leave this discussion hanging on such a negative, critical note, but you’ll have to come back for a more positive vision.

But that doesn’t mean that actual discussion has to wait. I’d be interested to hear what you have to say. Do you see this trajactory at work? Perhaps even in your own writing? Do you think community is even possible in this space?