The Internet and the Rise of Underhanded Power

A year or so ago I read through Robert Farrar Capon's Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Vindication and Outrage in Jesus' Parables. It was a formative book in my understanding of theology in that it gave me words to talk about power, specifically the different kinds of power at work in the world. Capon calls the powers of this world right-handed power. Right-handed power will punch you in the face, arrest you or shoot you with a gun. Fights are all about right-handed power; wars use right-handed power. Jesus, however, was about left-handed--or sacrificial--power. For Jesus, power was giving up the self and telling the right-handed powers, No, I will not play by your rules. Left-handed power looks a lot like weakness until its very conclusion, when death has its say, and then the balance switches and what had seemed to be weakness before is demonstrated incontrovertibly as the most powerful power of all.

Yes, this is Rick Barry shooting an under-handed free throw, and yes, it has nothing to do with this article.

The last few days have led me to rethink this two-fold understanding of power dynamics, as friends have linked again and again to political and religious pieces filled with hateful, thoughtless and otherwise depressing comments and reactions. I realized after some thought that this certainly isn't left-handed power, but it isn't exactly right-handed power either. The power that these people have is that they are untouchable in a physical sense--or virtually so. Nobody is going to punch them in the face for spouting hate on the internet, but they aren't punching anybody in the face either. Likewise, nobody is likely to arrest them; their words don't mean anything in a strict sense, and yet they have an effect--both on those with whom they agree and those with whom they disagree. Their words are mostly cowardice, irreverent, snotty and arrogant. This is a third kind of power: what I consider to be"underhanded" power.

The perks of underhanded power are several: you can blow off steam among like-minded individuals, there are no negative repercussions for your opinions, and you can do it with a good deal of anonymity. If the internet demonstrates one thing it is that a lot of people have a lot of steam to blow off. Internet debates--which most often occur in the "comments section" of a news-site, Facebook, or blog post--are construed as determining who is right and who is wrong; whose beliefs are truer; or whose authority is stronger. However, the results of underhanded debating are not as fruitful as debate in an academic setting; in fact, rather than contributing to understanding our mutual differences internet debate most often creates further division. Lines are drawn in the sand. The emphasis isn't on advancing our understanding of what is true and good in the world. The goal of underhanded power is to be right--even if your opinion has only the smallest semblance of truth in it. Truth is a casualty of the sake of justification of the self; self-righteousness in one's own opinions is paramount.

I cannot state enough that this is a huge problem. It's a problem because it is unproductive, because it dehumanizes people, because it caricatures political and religious stances; it is a problem because it suggests that Ad hominem and Straw man fallacies are not only acceptable but the only way to effectively argue. In short, underhanded power is teaching us to create a false reality that only vaguely resembles opinions we disagree with and then rail against that ignorant distortion. Underhanded power is emotionally, philosophically and psychologically dangerous to individuals, but it is far more corrosive when it moves from an individual rant to a societal norm.

Hate is hate, I've heard said before, equating the kind of drivel posted on message boards and comments pages with the kind of stuff we might see in a genocidal regime or a KKK meeting. This is true in some sense, but it is untrue in another. Hate on its own has no power over anything; it must be utilized by right-handed means. The internet does not allow for these means, but--and this is important--it can lead to them. Underhanded power cannot steer us toward left-handed power; it's a one-way street to bashing somebody's skull in, not taking up one's cross.

So, what shall the sane among us do in such a world?

Leave it alone. I know, it's tough. I know it seems like we're copping out, like we're giving in to their words, but actually it's quite the opposite. There is a kind of left-handed power available to us on the internet, and it is the power to not respond. This is the power that we have when we disagree with someone but hold our fingers over the keys and elect not to type. It seems like weakness for all the world, and it will continue to look like it all the way until the end. But when death comes, when the internet and all its banalities are finally put to rest, then and only then will our silence show its strength.

Meanwhile, I suggest planting a tree.