From the Salmon

I’d like to pick up a thread of conversation that started back in my Conversation Peace series. If you remember, this discussion started with a proposal that, in a medium fraught with fractious debate that only hardens already entrenched positions, it might be possible to pursue a new kind of conversation that could point to transformation and reconciliation. Such conversation, I suggested, should be characterized by truthfulness, openness and humility.

That’s a challenging model, to be sure, even when we’re actually inclined to seek these kinds of conversations. But we’re certainly not always inclined to do so as we write. Sometimes we write because we’re angry. Sometimes we write because we’re outraged. The question we asked several days ago was: is there a place in this kind of conversation for outrage? Brandon and Kristen have each explored this question on their sites, and I finally feel ready to add my own ideas to theirs.

I’m not sure I have a lot of answers, so I think I’m going to pour myself a glass of wine and start asking a lot of questions. Maybe by the end, I’ll have figured out something or other.

The Why of Outrage

First of all, I think we need to ask ourselves: why are we outraged? Or, more to the point, why are we writing about it?

Are we writing in outrage because we’ve witnessed or discovered something that truly offends our sense of fairness and justice? For Christians, are we writing because we’ve witnessed or discovered someone claiming to speak for God in a way that truly offends our sense of God’s character and calling? In essence, are we actually outraged? Or are we simply choosing to appear outraged because it’s a cheap and easy way to score points against people we disagree with?

I think these are more necessary questions than they might seem to be at first glance. I know that I’m prone to the latter, and I would imagine that you are, too. Sometimes it’s actually fun to get all hot and bothered about something. But I’m not sure that true outrage should be fun.

Or perhaps we’re writing simply as an act of catharsis. I don’t want to dismiss that, since I think this can be a tremendous outlet to let fly with how we really feel about something or someone. But as I wrote in a previous comment, I think we need to do so with our eyes fully open to just how self-indulgent that is. That’s no great surprise, I suppose, since these sites are by their very nature self-indulgent. But nonetheless, while we might feel better after going off in our anger, we most likely harden people’s existing defenses and change very little.

I guess I’m suggesting that if we’re interested in this kind of conversation, we should save outrage for when we really mean it. It should be a bubbling over.

The How of Outrage

Assuming we are writing because we are actually outraged, how do we express our outrage in a way that might lead to transformational conversation? To use Brandon’s phrase, what is our Ethic of Outrage?

A caveat: I’ll admit that I’m never sure when or if what I write will lead to conversation at all, much less anything that approaches transformational conversation. So maybe I’m not your guy for this. Or maybe we’re back to the limitations of this medium as a venue for such conversations. Regardless, I still think this is a worthwhile topic.

In a way, we’ve already talked about how to do this with our previous model. If we are called to speak the truth in love, or more accurately to truth in love, then our outrage should be marked by love. (I know, it’s hard for me to picture, too.) If we are called to open a place in ourselves for others, then perhaps we need to do our best to understand that which has affronted us so. Or, at the very least, we should acknowledge the humanity of the target of our outrage. If we forget that, we might unleash some pretty horrific rhetoric.

The last characteristic — humility — is particularly important to this discussion. When talking about humility in outrage, I’m reminded of a line from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 speech ”Beyond Vietnam.” King begins his oration by responding to the idea that “silence is betrayal”:

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

If we are truly outraged, we must speak. But King says we need to do so with humility. It’s his “through a glass darkly” clause. Do we have the full story? Could our source be biased? We need to be open to the idea that, even in our outrage, we are wrong. This is particularly important if, in our outrage, we are claiming to speak for God. That’s such an audacious enterprise to begin with that we should naturally only do so with great care and humility.

But I think humility dictates that we also ask ourselves a crucial question: do we need to be outraged at ourselves as well? It’s one thing to get frothy about Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, but have we ourselves advocated for policies that lead to death, be they military or economic? Acutally, if we are to apply the standard suggested by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, have we looked at other people with hateful anger? Before we express our outrage, I think we need to search our own hearts and own up to our own outrageous behaviors and attitudes. By doing so, we are in no way excusing the outrageous behavior of others. But we’re admitting, even in a small way, that we’re part of the same problem.

This kind of introspective humility can, at the very least, lead to our own growth. But by taking our self-righteousness down a few notches, it also lays the groundwork for others to join us in a conversation that might actually go somewhere, rather than just piling on.

Well, I guess I had some things to say after all. And you’re no doubt already outraged at how long this post is. There’s more to say about the dangers of being outraged all the time, but Kristen already covered that beautifully. There’s more to say about anger vs. malice, but maybe that’s for another day.

I guess that by writing this, I’m inviting you to call me on this in later posts. Because I’m no doubt going to fail in this again and again.

So, um, bring it on?