The internet was supposed to expand us. It was supposed to help us to become better people as we reached out into a world of things and people we were previously closed off from. And I believed that as I was visiting Encyclopedias online as a teenager, but what has become incredibly obvious to all of us is that this was a lie. It’s hard to really pinpoint the reason, but G.K. Chesterton helped me out with this.
I am a fan of G.K. Chesterton. I know he ended up a Roman Catholic, but that doesn’t change my feelings toward him. He is the only writer I know that could come up with big insights all because he managed to pull mundane things out of his pocket because he forgot to bring a book with him on a carriage ride. If you doubt me read his essay, “What I Found In My Pocket”. Anyway, I read his essay recently entitled, “On Certain Modern Writers And The Institution Of The Family” and felt that much of what we experience in our time was explained in an instant even though he was writing this in the early 1900’s.
Here is an excerpt.
It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the willfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.
G.K. Chesterton, In Defense Of Sanity, Ignatius Press, 2011 p. 10 taken from his essay, “On Certain Modern Writers And The Institution Of The Family”
There was no internet when this was written. In fact, he died in 1936. But his understanding of what happens when a person grasps for a larger community is spot on.
When a person in their early 20’s moves away from small town Arkansas and moves to New York City they think they are moving to a much larger world. And in a lot of ways they are. But in the ways that matter they are not. I have seen this happen over and over again. Rather than being forced to live among people who are not like them, they go somewhere larger and find a group of people just like them to be with. This means that rather than having variant points of view among their friends, their beliefs get smaller. They get more narrow due to the narrowness of their influences, much like when we go to a place online and find a lot of people who agree with us.
The Internet
The internet does the same thing that moving to a large city does. Instead of having to go through the hassle of finding your clique as you bump into people participating in the activities you enjoy, from the comfort of your own phone you bump into people who believe the same thing you do. You have met a new person who thinks like you do. You are now in the clique.
The difference, however, is that there are a lot more people on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other Social Media sites than could ever fit into New York City. You could believe that a pink unicorn crop dusts the trees in spring to make them colorful and you could probably find someone else that believes the same thing you do. The point is that you can go to this very big place and find a clique for you no matter how “unique” you are. But that doesn’t expand your horizons. That doesn’t help you understand the world at all. That makes you more firmly planted in your beliefs. It makes you more narrow. It makes you smaller.
On the internet the cliques fight more openly than the Jocks and the Hippies did when you were in High School, but they function in much the same way. You get angry at the other side and draw back to your corner with ferocity. There is no listening to the other side at that point. And it’s obvious to everyone involved where the cliques stand with one another.
Social Media
Here is where things have gotten interesting in recent days. The turmoil between the cliques in the very large place we call the Internet has gotten so bad that the cliques don’t feel like they can even meet at the same market anymore. Every time someone shows up they nearly go to fisticuffs over politics. And quite honestly we’re all afraid that the egg cart is going to get turned over soon. So, one clique decides it’s going to go spend their time at another market. Let’s just call this market Parler. Over at Parler you get much the same thing but everyone over there is part of the same clique.
One would think that would solve problems. But it hasn’t. Somehow, people have gotten even smaller. Their beliefs have gotten so narrow that they can’t even imagine what another person might be thinking. But they do miss the conflict that occurred when there was another voice in the room. So they work to shut down the market that the opposing clique shopped at. And the other side stays just involved enough to keep yelling at the other clique.
This doesn’t make any sense.
But I’m sure someone will figure out a way to explain it while not really explaining it.
The Remedy
I do have a remedy for this. And I think it’s the right one. It’s also very simple.
Stop thinking nationally and globally and start thinking about those around you.
Talk to your neighbor. They may be a wacko. And, if you find them dangerous, you should stay away from them. But get to know the people around you. You might even consider…doing something with them.
Go to church. Get involved with a group of people that you care deeply about. And don’t go to a church because it is the hip place to be with lights and fog machines where you can hide your life from people. Go somewhere and live life with a small community of people.
Eat dinner with your family tonight with the telephone in a different room. Spend some time with the people that you did not choose to have in your life, but received as a gift from God. Talk about the things that happened during the day, not a meme you saw on Social Media. Discuss your concerns, your joys, and pray together.
As Chesterton wrote in the same essay,
The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.
G.K. Chesterton, In Defense Of Sanity, Ignatius Press, 2011 p. 17 taken from his essay, “On Certain Modern Writers And The Institution Of The Family”
The answer to this is not that you make some grandiose proclamation about American Christianity. You don’t become a bigger person by doing bigger things. You’ll become a bigger person by listening and caring about what is happening right around you. And there, where there is going to be variance because you’re not in a clique, you’ll find that you actually grow as a person.
R. Dwain Minor
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