@itfgothicno6 I principally have in mind the platform itself. And the problem is more one of a failure to design for healthy human interaction. The platform amplifies our weaknesses, vices, and dysfunctions.
There are many ways it does this, but here are a few that immediately come to mind.
@itfgothicno6 Wise speech is speech in season—the right words, to the right persons, by the right person, in the right time and place. However, on Twitter a myriad contexts are collapsed into each other, so you are speaking to everyone, everywhere, all at once. It makes wise speech impossible.
@itfgothicno6 Twitter is simultaneously a realm of social connection and a realm of open discourse. This tends to make tweeting simultaneously about self-identifying, belonging, and alignment and about statements in and of themselves. This confuses things and makes discussion overly personal.
@itfgothicno6 Connected to this, on Twitter words are *live*, rather than inert as they are on a page. A tweet is not just an abstract proposition, but an *act* and *signal*. Consequently, Twitter is probably more about reading between the lines than about reading the lines themselves.
@itfgothicno6 This encourages lots of cynical speech and cynical reading and heightens a hermeneutic of suspicion. You can't take a person's statement just as a statement, you need to divine how they are positioning themselves by it, how and to whom they are signalling, etc.
@itfgothicno6 Twitter moves far, far too quickly, discouraging careful deliberation and reflection, followed by considered response, and feeds kneejerk reaction.
@itfgothicno6 Twitter tends to elevate ideology, by removing the ballast of context and particularity. People on Twitter can seem like avatars of their favoured ideology, rather than people speaking and acting from complex identities, social contexts, backgrounds, and beliefs.
@itfgothicno6 And because shared contexts are lacking, people will tend to affiliate ideologically. And these ideologies, because they are about decontextualized tribal antagonisms, will tend to flatten out the complex realities to which they claim to relate.
@itfgothicno6 By removing boundaries of discourse, Twitter destroys the niches within which variegated thought and discourses can thrive. The result tends to be an antagonistic monoculture of discourse.
@itfgothicno6 The saturated sociality of Twitter also makes it difficult for us to have the breathing space to weigh things up privately and away from intense social pressure. New ideas come to us so entangled in our existing social antagonisms that we can't truly open ourselves up to them.
@itfgothicno6 Due to the dynamics of virality, Twitter amplifies issues that we sharply disagree about. It encourages each group to fixate upon the worst abuses of their adversaries, while failing to address the worst faults on their own sides.
@itfgothicno6 The result is constant alienating exposure to political others, rather than clarifying and moderating exchange.
Because it blinds us to persons, we are dulled to the ways strange or unhealthy thinking often arises from personal pain, mental health issues, neuroatypicality, etc.
@itfgothicno6 Consequently, there is little mercy or grace shown, whereas most of us would recognize that people we know in person are a lot more complex than their bad beliefs might suggest. And we can be firm friends with people with whom we have vast differences of belief.
@itfgothicno6 Then there is the way that Twitter blurs the difference between official and unofficial speech, public and private speech, publicized and obscure speech, serious and ironic speech, exploratory or tentative and firm or declarative speech, etc., etc.
@itfgothicno6 I could say a LOT, LOT more, but that is a start.
In constructing so much of our realm of discourse on Twitter we are building upon a swamp.
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No small part of the problem with nationalism in the American context is that, by several of the definitions that people are using, America really doesn't fit the category of 'nation' very well and Americans aren't really a 'people'.
You can look back at the American founding and argue that America was an Anglo-Protestant 'nation'. Of course, the fact that the slave population was so large in certain states (~40% in SC and VA) needs to be taken into account. Hardly an 'Anglo' people there!
Of course, a nationalist interpretation of the Union was also quite controversial. A number of the founders would have considered their country to be their *state*, not the USA. The United States as a nation and state sovereignty weren't really settled issues until after Lincoln.
This is an important concern, which I largely share.
However, I think there ARE non-cynical reasons to arrive at such an impression here, especially for those of us who have both seen and heard lots of testimony of how things can be behind the scenes in evangelical circles.
At the outset, the claim I made concerned 'many leading Christians', not each and every figure in the thread I linked. We should treat individual cases individually, but we should not be at all blind to general tendencies and trends.
Nor should we be blind to the underlying forces that influence such general tendencies and trends. Evangelicalism in the US is largely a populist movement, driven by the masses, the market, popular ideology, and donors.
This is a key point in the conclusion of an important thread.
We need to be a lot more clearsighted about the racism, neo-nazism, rebellion, tinfoil hattism, etc. that has existed and still exists on or adjacent to the margins of the Christian political right.
There is no shortage of people from such murky networks who see their opportunity in extreme political polarization, radical distrust and delegitimation of authorities, appetite for more belligerent rhetoric, and desire for more uncompromising measures.
ISTM that the Internet has enabled extremists to co-ordinate on a greater scale, on account of the obscurity of the Internet. On the other hand, social media gives them much greater and less easily constrained reach and increased capacity to infiltrate the mainstream.
The British monarch has tended to maintain a strict political neutrality, neither voting nor able to stand for election, nor expressing political positions, even though the monarch counsels prime ministers and the government act in the monarch's name.
In resisting entanglement in political conflict and refraining from participation in public political debate, the monarch guards their true character and influence. They stand for something that greatly exceeds political conflicts and party interests, even highly charged ones.
I think there is much Christian ministers can learn from this. The sovereignty of Christ is not elevated when its formal representatives get publicly entangled in partisan politics. Quite the opposite. Knowing you are about a higher throne and kingdom will lead to caution here.
Second, the passage is an acrostic. This woman is the A-Z—the complete—woman. One might also argue that the acrostic suggests that this is a complete summing up of something more generally. The 'Proverbs 31 woman' might be related to more expansive themes.
Third, looking at the broader structure and themes of Proverbs, the position and character of the Proverbs 31 woman becomes more striking. The book frames the quest for wisdom as the choice between Lady Wisdom and the Woman Folly and between the adulteress and the good wife.