Biblical Social Media

In You, Lord, I have taken refuge; let me never be put to shame.  Psalm 71:1  NASB

Put to shame – It isn’t surprising to find out that social media is one of the sources of psychological distress in young people.  A recent study confirms the negative effects on teenagers,[1] but I suspect that we adults didn’t need a scientific study to tell us what we already observe.  Shame is rampant in our Western culture.  The wider we cast our relationship networks, the more likely we are to encounter shaming behavior, especially if we view those peripheral relationships as important elements in self-identity.  There’s a joke about social media that makes the point.  A teenager is sick and sent to the hospital.  The doctor asks if her friends know about her circumstances.  She replies, “Sure, I have 940 friends on Facebook.  They all know,” to which the doctor asks, “How many have come to see you?”  The answer is obvious.  None.

Shame wasn’t always determined by lack of popularity, and in the ancient world it wasn’t about an inner self-confidence.  Perhaps it’s worth recognizing how hard it is to really identify shame.  In the modern West, shame is often associated with an inner sense of worthlessness or a belief that somehow I am a flawed person.  “Shame can be defined as a feeling of embarrassment or humiliation that arises in relation to the perception of having done something dishonorable, immoral, or improper.”[2]  Shame is accompanied by embarrassment, humiliation, and guilt.  You will notice that the definition and the symptoms are internally focused.  Shame is a feeling.  Self-worth is under attack.  Treatment is a psychological issue.

Lionel Trilling observes:

“ . . . a new kind of personality . . . emerges . . . what we call an ‘individual’: at a certain point in history men became individuals.”[3]

“Taken in isolation, the statement is absurd.  How was a man different from an individual?  A person born before a certain date, a man—had he not eyes? Had he not hands? Organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?  If you pricked him, he bled and if you tickled him, he laughed.  But certain things he did not have or do until be became an individual.  He did not have an awareness of what one historian, George Gusdorf, calls internal space.  He did not, as Delany puts it, imagine himself in more than one role, standing outside or above his own personality; he did not suppose that he might be an object of interest to his fellow man not for the reason that he had achieved something notable or been witness to great events but simply because as an individual he was of consequence.  It is when he becomes an individual that a man lives more and more in private rooms; whether the privacy makes the individuality or the individuality requires the privacy the historians do not say.  The individual looks into mirrors, larger and much brighter than those that were formerly held up to magistrates.  The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lucan believes that the development of the ‘Je’ was advanced by the manufacturer of mirrors: again it cannot be decided whether man’s belief that he is a ‘Je’ is the result of the Venetian craftsmen’s having learned how to make plate-glass or whether the demand for looking-glasses stimulated this technological success.  If he is an artist the individual is likely to paint self-portraits; if he is Rembrandt, he paints some threescore of them.  And he begins to use the word ‘self’ not as a mere reflexive or intensive, but as an autonomous noun referring, the O.E.D. tells us, to ‘that  . . . in a person [which] is really and intrinsically he (in contradistinction of what is adventitious)’, as that which he must cherish for its own sake and show to the world for the sake of good faith.  The subject of an autobiography is just such a self, bent on revealing himself in all his truth, bent, that is to say, on demonstrating his sincerity.  His conception of his private and uniquely interesting individuality, together with his impulse to reveal his self, to demonstrate that in it which is to be admired and trusted, are, we may believe, his responses to the newly available sense of an audience, of that public which society created.”[4]

“All roads in our period have led to individualism.  More rooms in better-off houses, use of glass in windows (common for copyholders and ordinary poor only since the Civil War, Aubrey says); use of coal in grates, replacement of benches by chairs—all this made possible greater comfort and privacy for at least the upper half of the population.  Privacy contributed to the introspection and soul-searching of radical Puritanism, to the keeping of diaries and spiritual journals.”[5]

“ . .  the ever more powerful existence of the public, that human entity which is defined by its urban habitat, its multitudinousness, and its ready accessibility to opinion.  The individual who lives in this new circumstance is subject to the constant influence, the literal in-flowing, of the mental processes of others, which in the degree that they stimulate or enlarge his consciousness, make it less his own.  He finds it ever more difficult to know what his own self is and what being true to it consists in.  It is with the psychological and moral consequences of the modern public dispensation in mind that Rousseau invents his famous savage, one of whose defining traits is the perfect autonomy of his consciousness.  ‘The savage lives within himself, . .  the sociable man knows how to live only in the opinion of others, . .”[6]

The ancient world doesn’t deny the presence of these feelings, but it essentially ignores them.  Why?  Because shame (bôš) in the ancient Semitic world is not about how you feel; it’s about how you’re perceived in the public arena.  Shame is disgrace in public reputation.  You are shamed by actions, not feelings.  In the modern world the concept of self dominates.  Self-respect, self-awareness, self-identity, self-determination—all common to our psycho-emotive vocabulary—were concepts that did not exist even three hundred years ago, as Trilling observes.  The ancient world is a world of familial connections, of tribal affiliations, or city citizenship.  There were no nation-states, no global governance, not even universal gods.  The ancient world was the world of local community where a person was known by his works, his behavior, his demeanor because his life was known to those who shared it.  You might ask yourself why there were no prisons in ancient Israel.  Did men not commit crimes?  Of course they did, but punishment wasn’t viewed as necessary incarceration.  Why?

The psalmist isn’t asking God to prevent feelings of worthlessness or inner embarrassment.  He’s asking God to uphold his reputation.  How is that accomplished, by doing whatever you wish and asking God to make it right or by covering it up?  The ancient Israelite knew that his actions carried his reputation.  He is asking God to help Him act righteously so that his righteousness might be the characteristic men see.  WYSIWYG is biblical social media.  No avatars, no pretense, no inflated egos.  Just out in the open, straightforward, “this is me—look and see.”  When we think of righteousness, especially in our “inner feelings” world, we must remember that actions are the center of faithfulness in ancient Israel.  Believe whatever you wish.  Feel whatever you feel.  But do the right thing no matter what.

Topical Index: social media, shame, bôš, reputation, self, individual, public, Psalm 71:1

[1] https://www.slashgear.com/814149/study-ties-increased-social-media-use-to-lower-life-satisfaction/

[2] https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-shame-5115076

[3] Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 24.

[4] Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, pp. 24-25.

[5] Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution: 1603-1741 (Norton: New York, 1961), p. 253.

[6] Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, pp. 61-62.