Ben has recently done us all a service in his superb work on the nature of blogging as theological discourse. Without a doubt blogging is changing the nature of theological writing, both for good and for ill in many respects. In thinking on this for the last week or so, I’ve come to see that one of the key temptations that blogging offers is its lack of accountability. If you publish a book you have to live with it for at least a good little while. On the other hand, blog authors retain a very high level of control over the material they publish and its availability. If you write something foolish, rude, or stupid you can easily delete the material, and, unless some dutiful reader is saving your material themselves, there’s a good chance you won’t ever have to really be accountable for such writing. It vanishes into the void of the interwebs, to never trouble you again.
This is one of the temptations blogging poses. It offers a golden opportunity to speak far too quickly, and after tempers have cooled to simply make a poorly-placed rant go away. As such blogging presents a temptation to opportunism and cowardice in writing. Without patience in writing (which blogging doesn’t itself instill or foster) we’re likely to end up posting quite a few rants that later on we kind of wish we really hadn’t written. I know I have. And then that delete key starts to look pretty nice indeed. We are able to edit our blogs constantly, shaping them into the perfect picture we want to portray of ourselves, our writing skills, and our opinions.
I came across a rather bizarre and extreme example of this recently. A blogger had posted a massive rant inspired by a news story he had read which alleged that the British government was planning to install thousands of closed circuit cameras in the homes of families who were big social problems (history of crime, drugs, etc.). This led to some quite delusional railings about totalitarianism, in which the Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls was likened to Hitler and Stalin in some pretty explicit terms:
Alexander Solzhensitsyn[sic] spend years in the Gulag because as a young army officer he wrote as letter criticizing Stalin, which was opened and read by army censors. That was pretty efficient totalitarianism, wasn’t it? No, it was inefficient and mickey mouse. Stalin eat your heart out! You never had electronic survellience[sic] methods like this. You were small time as dictators go. Let Ed Balls teach you a thing or two.
I’ve commented a time or two on the lunacy, mendacity, fatuity and immorality of this government on this blog. They hand out condoms to 12 year olds. They publish pamphlets telling parents not to tell their children to abstain from sex outside of marriage. They are trying to get abortion commercials on TV in prime time. But this one reveals just how totalitarian they are.
The Nazis might just as well have conquored[sic] Britain in 1941. All those brave men who gave their lives in the Battle of Britain died – for what? So a supposedly democratic government could spy on citizens in their own homes? So the government could undermine parental rights, adopt policies designed to destroy families and then swoop in to take over child-rearing? They died for this type of behaviour? They died to make Orwell’s prophecies come true?
There was no need. All they had to do was invite Hitler in. Wait – maybe that is just what they did when they elected the Labour Party.
Now, I’m certainly a fan of rhetorical flourish. Far be it from me to deny this. But I do think that when we make explicit comparisons between contemporary events and figures and the greatest mass murders in modern history, we had better be careful and correct. However, as it turns out the story behind this whole rant was a complete fabrication (which the right wing newspaper it appeared in has yet to retract or acknowledge). I pointed this out to the author at which point he followed up the post with another that simply continued to press his case without acknowledging, say that maybe all the Stalin and Hitler comparisons were a little out of line:
Given the prevelance[sic] of CCTV cameras all over Britain and the impossibility of having staff literally “supervising” every family 24 hours per day it appears that someone jumped to the conclusion that the CCTV cameras would be installed. This does not appear to be the case, although it is interesting that so many are ready to believe the government capable of such a thing.
If the government continues to pursue policies that divide and degrade families (such as facilitating teenaged[sic] girls having abortions without parental notification and promotiong[sic] contraception to children as young as 12), there can be little doubt that massive and intrusive behaviour-control methods of intervention will be required to maintain social order. The family historically has been the means by which children are socialized and taught self-discipline. Things were almost this bad in 18th century Britain and the whole society was changed by the Methodist revival. Unfortunately, the Methodists have morphed into the Labour Party and no one is looking to the church for help now. Without this bulwark against original sin, social chaos is inevitable. If it isn’t done by CCTV cameras, such intervention will likely be done in some manner.
Here is another temptation the blogosphere can present us with: the temptation to simply dig our heals in and bury our head in the sand when caught in a, shall we say, factually-deficient rant. It is all to easy to simply get hard-nosed and leave any semblance of humility behind. When I pressed the author on exactly this point, at first he accused me of being a totalitarian stooge for the Labour Party and then a few minutes later the posts both mysteriously vanished, never to be heard from again. I happened to have saved them and that is the only reason you’re hearing anything about them.
Now, of course this is an absurdly comical example of what I’m talking about in regards to blogging as theological discourse. Clearly the sort of rampant pugnacity and careless reactionism displayed here is quite inflated and most of us can pat ourselves on the back and assure ourselves that we are nothing like that. However, to do so would be a mistake. This cautionary tale serves as a helpful example of the temptations to opportunism, cowardice, and blind stubbornness that we all face in blogging. It testifies to the ongoing need for theology bloggers to resist the sort of haste that blogging so easily engenders. This medium is a great one in many different ways, but it must be disciplined by humility and patience if it is to bear the fruit of which it is capable.
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