What Does Digital Life Have to Do With Our Moral Obligations?
Vocation, Moral Obligation, and Why Clickbait Writers Will End Up in the Limbo in Dante's Inferno
Surprise! A bonus reflection this week on moral obligations and vocations, the first of two posts on the way in which the Internet alters our sense of obligation.—The Management
The way we exercise our obligations in a digital age is affected by two dimensions (at least): 1) the way we live them out, and 2) how we come to understand the scope of our obligations. We’ll talk about the second one next week, but for now, I want to give some scrutiny to the way in which digital life alters how we live out our vocations, given that our vocations are part of how we live out our obligations to God. Part of being a human creature, I take it, is that we have been created in God’s image, and meant to have that image restored: to refuse to pick up that calling is to deny one of our key obligations we have toward God.
Vocation and Obligation: Some Preliminary Considerations
The first thing for us to establish is the way in which a vocation is related to moral obligations.
By “vocation”, I mean something stronger than “a job”. A vocation is an activity which is intrinsic to our calling-into-being from God, a drawing out of what we are by God. God is the One who calls to us, who draws us out of ourselves toward what we have been meant to be, an ongoing process of repentance and sanctification, and our vocations—the practice of doing a thing excellently—is part of how God reshapes and redeems us. For the writer (the case I’ll be considering here), the Word calls forth all that is, and so, our words are meant to follow that, such that working with words is a learning to bring shape to the relative voids of the world. To learn to be a writer is to learn to convey the truth of things, to wrestle truthfulness to the ground into something resembling wisdom.
Our vocations are obligatory in this way, then: the way of our redemption is tied into a particular practice by which a person is made who they have been called to be. To not take up this practice well is, then, to refuse to take up the way of sanctification given to us by God, a way which draws up all of what we are toward God. Vocations are more than particular jobs; they are practices and habits which make us what are meant to be, practices which might make us money, but are ultimately meant to make us holy. They are obligatory upon us because we are meant to be children of God, and our vocations are part of the means by which this sanctifying work of God occurs.
And so, in the case of the writer, bad writing is a problem in a superficial way because it’s unlovely—aesthetically a failure. But mostly, the problem is because it’s a failure of writing as a vocation. Any vocation is not a job which we pick up or put down: it is a calling of God to be a certain kind of person, one made in the image of Christ, and our particular vocational forms facilitate that work of God. And so, the problem of the Internet for the writer is far worse than contributing to general cultural dumbness: it risks the ruin of a calling of God.
Bad Writing Was Always Possible: The Perennial Threat to Vocation and Its New Foe
So, first things first: platforms like Twitter deform us all, and none of us should be on it for extended periods of time. I think that much is clear by now, and largely beyond contesting. But among the many, many, many reasons that Twitter (and other like-designed social media) should be engaged in very limited fashion, is that it destroys the way that writing as a vocation, a calling of God happens. It’s one of the reasons that this newsletter’s tagline is “Cold Takes and Nuance”: we are drowning in social media; social media is corrosive to careful thinking, and bad thinking leads to reactionary , cheap, and dumb writing.
But it’s not like bad writing is a new possibility which social media makes possible. The complaints about bad writing and bad thinking are as old as there has been writing: everyone from Sinclair Lewis to Ernest Hemmingway to Virginia Woolf have been accused of being writing hacks. And to be fair: any time a writer has had to write to eat, not everything they put out is going to be great. For every The Sun Also Rises, there’s an In Our Time or The Garden of Eden. The question, then, is what it is about social media that makes for distinctively bad writing, and a distinct threat to the writer living out their obligation to God to be formed morally in the act of writing.
In a phrase? Immediate Attention. Online, everything comes quickly, and Twitter disposes us to a format in which words (and thinking) have to happen quickly, and in reactionary form. When writing in that modality occurs, the earlier dynamics of deadline writing for dollars combines with a new dynamic: immediate eyeballs and attention. Insofar as writers working in a social media ecosystem operate with the need for attention as well as money, the writing becomes more shallow, recycling familiar tropes that the audience can latch onto, and less inclined to strike out in original thinking which might slow down the cycle of reading and consumption.
Giving an audience what they want is a sure plan for eyeballs and success, but ultimately, it kills a vocation in this way: the more writing becomes predictable, following those well-worn grooves, the more it enters into a closed loop of response and stimuli. And in entering into that chase of attention, the writer risks trading a pursuit of truthfulness for an eternally repeating loop, a box of substitutable clichés and beats guaranteed to produce the right responses.
Limbo, the borderlands next to the Inferno (in Dante’s Inferno), is reserved for those who remained indeterminate in their moral lives. Forever chased between opinions in life, but never choosing anything, they are relentlessly chased by hornets for eternity. This is the Internet-Bound writer’s prototype: seeking the ever-elusive eyeballs, which is to say, taking those words which were meant for them to mirror the Word who speaks all things into being, and using those words to chase attention without respect for what those words are doing or where they are going.
How to Corrupt a Vocation: Exchanging a Craft for a Chase
I’m going to resist the temptation to link to any particular bad actors on social media here, in part because it seems evident when someone writes to get eyeballs as opposed to seeking out truthfulness. When writing is done in a caustic and inflammatory manner, “calling out” opponents, or offering shoddy arguments, the whole point isn’t good thinking but to garner attention for one’s self or one’s own cause. And if a vocation (in this case, writing) is obligatory for us in the way I’ve noted above, then to write in a way which draws attention to itself is a close nihillist cousin to saying that one should write for the sake of writing, or produce art for its own sake.1
Any writer who understands their art as a vocation should resist this dynamic which presses on them, a dynamic manifested in a particularly bad way by social media. There are innumerable ways to drown a vocation. And I think the dynamic I’ve described helps point out why the Internet corrupts so many different kinds of vocations:
—the minister who lives on fame, telling inspirational stories, rather than unadvertised faithfulness
—the teacher who turns all teaching stories into Tik Toks rather than honing their craft with their peers
—the political analyst who becomes a provocateur instead of a thinker
The examples above, succuming to the eyeballs, trade slow thinking for captured eyeballs, and in doing so, subject their craft to the infinite tyranny of limbo: always circulating, never at rest, never going anywhere in particular. Vocations are wonderful, and God gives them to us for our good. All the more reason, I think, that failing to pick them up for something so fleeting as attention is more tragedy than sin.
Paying Attention:
The Supreme Court tells a Yeshiva school to seek relief at the state level, rather than ruling that a religious school does not have to host an LGBTQ group. This will be a case worth keeping track of, I think, as it makes its way back up to the Court inevitably.
A sheriff fired for not disclosing that he killed someone when he was 14. This is the stuff ethics case studies are made of: the statutes for forgiveness, lying, whether most ethics boards are interested in anything other than legal compliance.
The question of whether or not all the attention given to neuroscience when it comes to sorting out questions of moral judgment is worth it. Anything with “neuroscience” in it is hot stuff right now in ethics, trying to get at the question of whether our morality is just a chemical sequence in our brains. But when the psychiatrists’ own moral framework is left unquestioned, it begs the question as to whether or not data about our brains and morality is simply in the eye of the beholder.
Reading
Finished The Haunting of Hill House, which was a nice level of creepy for September. Started in on Cicero’s De Oficiis, both to learn more on how obligations are teased out for him, and because my Cicero exposure is exactly zero (the kids are learning Latin in home school, and Dad is woefully overmatched). The second of the Green Ember series with the kids, doing all the voices when I read out loud.
There are elaborate and elegant arguments for the notion about art-for-art’s-sake, but I take these to mostly be reactionary: we live in an instrumentalist age in which the humanities and the arts have to defend themselves according to the dominant logic of profits and outcomes. Major in English! These skills will make you a ton of money in the PR world! It’s pretty vile to ask literature to have to do that. But the alternative, I don’t think is to say that art has no point except to exist: nothing in the world creates itself, but comes into being for some reason, and art is no different. It exists to express beauty, truthfulness, to instruct and delight, and those are good things on their own, but that’s different than saying that we create art for its own sake, for no other reason than creating. Everything we do has some end in mind; creatures literally don’t do anything without some kind of intent behind it, whether natural or rational. Some of these reasons can’t defend themselves in a world of economic criteria, but the answer isn’t to say that there’s no reason they exist: that’s just teeing up the critics of art to say “then why do it?”