Of the Rewriting of the Moral Past, There Can Be No End
Further Meditations on the Internet and How Visions of the Moral Life are Disseminated
Over at Tsh Oxenreider’s Commonplace, I published a review of Justin E.H. Smith’s The Internet is Not What You Think, an electric and illuminating book that makes the case that the Internet works in large part because it is rooted in myriad natural processes. As such, the Internet is the latest way of drawing nature’s relations closer and of making connections across great distances. You can read my review of it here, but mostly, you should just read the book.
Writing this built on the meditation that I wrote on the way that the Internet remembers, and specifically, what it means that the Internet’s past is a movable past, one which doesn’t stand still. The digital past of the Internet is a long series of revisions and edits, contested remembrances and erasures. It’s a place that is never stable ground, never remembered the same way twice, mostly because it’s always being constructed. In that way, it’s not dissimilar from the way that our own memories work: over time, hard memories give way to gratitudes, sharp edges become either softened or accentuated to the only edge there was.
The Internet is not alone in doing this. Our own memories work in this way, operated on constantly as we live out the bleeding edge of the past: the present. It’s what allows Christians to name the Fall as the felix culpa, the “Happy Fall” which occasions the coming of Christ into the world, what allows Paul to say that God works in all things for the good of those who are called. The fights that I have with siblings or friends lose their acuity over time, softened by the broader contours of our relationships; the pains of betrayal or disappointments in workplaces ease with time. This is, I think, one of the graces that can be present even in dementia: my grandmother is in the final stages now, and when she talks, it’s good reminiscences.
This summer, I’m working on my next book project, and particularly thinking about the question of apostolicity: what does it mean that the Christian faith is communicated over time with anything like continuity with the apostles, and what counts as apostolicity? Smith’s book in particular, alongside a piece from Michael Sacasas that I mentioned last week, have helped me to see the connection to my own project: our technologies (and not just the Internet) play a tremendous role in this work of communicating and transmitting the faith from one place and time to the next.
In the New Testament, the role of received teaching from a physically present person was the dominant, but not the only way this happens: the epistle and the proxy traveler make appearances, but so do—and I think we cannot underestimate this in an Internet age—reconfigured variations of the apostolic teaching. This is where questions of “pseudo-Paul” come in: Ephesians and Colossians, for example, bear the style and most of the substance of Paul, but with some variations worth noting. What is interesting here, setting aside the arguments of whether or not these are authoritative even if Paul didn’t write them1, they open up the question of how the past is received and shaped by technologies which are, in some ways, not in our control.
To communicate anything is to open up the possibility of something new emerging which was not intended; the possibilities for this proliferate endlessly the more people are involved. The interpretative act of two people talking is in this way nothing like what happens on a Reddit board or Wikipedia, as thousands of people engage in real-time reception of the past, configuring it en masse for the present.
So, apostolicity—the desire for a faithful transmission of the faith—runs into the very real issue of reception. And in an Internet age, reception runs wild. The careful nuances of, say, a Baptist theologian and ethicist on a newsletter stand alongside conspiracy theorist website glossed with Bible verses, and both of these are accessible online next to the Vatican website. To be clear: there is no undoing this, at least not barring the utter obliteration of the Internet. It’s not clear to me that this was ever a reality within theological life, though, and thus I find myself drawn to this question of how these changing traditions help shape our moral worlds.
If Smith and Sacasas are right, then what we find illuminated by the Internet’s making of the past has, in some way, always been true about history-making. The ramifications for how we understand the moral guidance of the past are at least three-fold here:
The received moral wisdom of the past comes to us as a invitation to test it. The past does not come to us as an unchecked body to affirm, but as a combatant in a contest. All of us enter come to hear the voices of John Chrystostom, Dorothy Day, Dorothee Soelle, Kazoh Kitamori, and others as potential friends, but also as those whose voices approach us from the outside. They are not native speakers to us, but those whose stories and witness compel us to taste and see. Their writings and their words bear the weight of centuries before them, and the rejection of part of those centuries: to read Dorothy Day, for example, is not to read a clean repetition of Catholic social teaching, but one which is inflected through a life of poverty inseparable from her understanding of it. Like Jacob with the angel, we wrestle with it until it gives to us a blessing.
The moral wisdom of the past comes to us as an interruption.
In the questions of what counts as “apostolic”, one of the recent arguments, put forward by John Flett and earlier by C.K. Barrett, is that with Acts, apostolicity comes not as a fluid transmission, but as a series of interruptions. The Christian life, entering like a bombshell into our world, both brings forward some of the elements of the past, but disrupts others, and it is impossible to know in the middle which will be which. The future, the “right side of history” is not a metric: the Arians of the 4th century won quite a lot for decades, despite having been anathematized, and the peace witness of the Anabaptists, despite being a minority, has never gone away. Christian moral wisdom, coming from so many different times and places, enters into this time and place as a confrontation with some of the world we live in, and will not be easily subsumed by it.
The technologies by which we convey the past matter.
In saying this, I am not saying that the Internet cannot play a role here, but that it plays an outsized role, both in terms of what we understand about the past and where and how the past is received. Gone (or mostly gone) are the days when speaker conferences or stadiums provided the mass medium of moral formation: I went to many a youth conference and church rally, and these, my friends, are not coming back any time soon. That being said, the proliferation of the past, and its moral wisdom, always comes piecemeal online, conveyed according to the needs of the conveyer: the moral wisdom of the church never comes in its full-orbed splendor, but as a means to get the attention of eyeballs. This doesn’t make what it conveys wrong, but partial and probably weaponized. Lector Emptor.
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Reading: Still plugging through Confessions bits at a time. Starting in on Steve Harmon’s Baptists, Catholics, and the Whole Church. My wife has me starting in on The Green Ember, a middle-grade author she’s liked. My fiction reading was bountiful earlier in 2022, and has basically slowed up entirely, with a couple of exceptions, since April.
Writing: as mentioned above, Tsh Oxenreider was kind enough to let me review Justin E.H. Smith’s new book on her newsletter (linked above). Thursday, I’ll have a review on a recent book on just war and martyrdom, coming out in Comment. Alongside the aforementioned book project (also for Baker Academic, like my last two books), I’m beginning work on a piece on why loneliness isn’t a problem for the Christian life, but an enduring feature. In my most recent book, From Isolation to Community, I left this as an open question, and am more and more persuaded that thick community doesn’t mean the end of loneliness: loneliness may just be a feature of human life that community aids us in bearing.
They have been received and canonized by Christians since the beginning as authoritatively conveying the Word of the Lord, and as such, are authoritative. Moving right along.