We have all admired the sermon of Bishop Mariann Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C., her simple words about the teaching of Christ, spoken to people of power. The president was sitting right there in front of her, in the National Cathedral of Washington, and what she said was courageous and true.
Words matter. Words are actions. The American Catholic bishops have issued a fine statement making it clear that as followers of Christ we have to protect the poor and the migrant and the vulnerable. It makes me proud to be Catholic.
Many people are speaking the truth, with eloquence and conviction and sincerity, and I admire them for that.
But I wonder, too, for at least some of us some of the time, how much our anxiety and anger and our continual announcing of it, our daily displaying of it, has more to do with making sure we’re seen as one of the good guys, as people on the right side, than of wanting to do real good. Public outrage can give us status, as Musa Al-Gharbi says in a remarkable new book I’m reading, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of the New Elite. Expressions of what many call “wokeness,” Al-Gharbi says, “have come to serve as signs that someone is of an elite background.” They are “increasingly a means of identifying who is part of the club”–and of who isn’t, who is “unworthy.”
It’s not as if most of us are at risk personally, Al-Ghabri says. It’s not as if those of us in the elite—educated, more or less comfortable financially, politically progressive—it’s not as if most of us are in any real way threatened, at least immediately, though we act as if we are. Al-Gharbi saw this when he was a graduate student at Columbia the day after the 2016 election, when elite students and elite faculty at an elite institution were walking around in tears, as if their world had been shattered, their lives ruined, while all the time ignoring the poor and the people of color all around them, the people working as landscapers and janitors and cooks to keep that campus up and running every day, people far more vulnerable to the new politics.
Al-Gharbi is exaggerating, and he knows he is. I know many people who are doing real, practical things for the poor and the threatened, and have been for a long time, who are walking the talk, but I still think there’s a danger here—for me and for all of us who are so anxious and afraid—of wanting to be outraged every day, of being addicted to the triggering that happens when we scroll the news sites—of liking that excitement, that charge, and liking, too, the feeling we get when we join with all the others who are expressing their indignation, are one with them–of liking that sense of rightness, of righteousness, and certainly of finding solace and support in the community of others like us, which of course isn’t a bad thing in itself.
Things have shifted. Al-Gharbi’s book just came out, and yet in the last few months the situation has gotten still more serious. Shock. Disgust. Moral indignation. These are appropriate responses, necessary responses, and more and more I think they come out of genuine conviction and genuine compassion, out of a deep sense of something being wrong.
And yet even so the interior dangers remain. Our addictions persist.
Look at how in the intensity of our political commitments we can become just as judgmental as any judge in any witch trial—condemning the other without qualms, and enjoying it. This is a great temptation, a temptation that in my own anger I have felt many times.
Look at the internet itself, at how in its speed and its brightness it stimulates the very pleasure centers of the brain.
In Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked—another brilliant book—Adam Alter describes an experiment designed by psychologists in 2014. People were asked to sit alone in a room for ten to twenty minutes without any stimulus or distraction except for a button they could push if they wanted to. That’s all. A quiet, empty room. And a button.
What the button did was transmit a brief electric shock. A quick charge. It zapped people, and the people in the experiment knew that, and they did it anyway, almost all of them. They could have just sat there, just been there for a while, but most of the people in that room pressed that button at least a few times, and many pressed it more than a few times. One young man pressed it 190 times.
190 times. In 20 minutes. That’s an electric shock every six seconds.
We’d rather do anything than sit alone with our own thoughts and feelings. We’d rather do anything than sit alone facing our own anger and sadness and fear. We’d rather do anything, Jung said, than “face our own souls.”
We’d rather be zapped.
What is it that we are trying to avoid? Is raging about the injustice in the world a way of facing the facts or of evading them? Is joining in the common outrage a way of avoiding the hard, inner work we first have to do?
It’s not either/or—we need to face both the inner and the outer worlds—but I do think it’s sequential.
If we don’t first face who we really are, if we are not first grounded in a healthy self-awareness, how can we keep our actions and protests from simply projecting our own violence and will to power?