I have had many disputes and debates on social sites. This was far from the ugliest one, far from the longest one, and it had far from the largest number of trash-talkers. During this one, the verbal diarrhea began to run immediately after I made a six word comment: “I will always be against it.” Just being against a feminist opinion, and not in many words, resulted in a mob objecting, hysterical screeching, and attempted censorship. Six words of protest can draw a swarm of abuse and a session of verbal stoning. A person can be surrounded; but he can still overcome. A mob can gang up; but a man can beat a mob—at least online. And the squabble that his innocent comment puts him at the center of can be the avenue to a thoughtful article. I was going to copy the fifty comments down and make them part of this article in order to show how unmindful and heedless people generally are—after cleaning up, of course, the foul language, and making neat sentences out of raving exclamations. But everyone who has argued on social media sites knows what their comment threads look like, sound like, and feel like. And who has not at least read a comment thread or two? We are all familiar with their complexion. What happens in them? Not enough thinking and too much typing; overreaction and attack; little regard for truth, civility, fairness, and reputation; and seldom any fear of bearing false witness. The average comment thread is a snapshot of our society. A society like that is a sinking ship. The country, whose citizens, instead of thinking and interacting, act like rioters when someone disagrees, is on a plunging downward course. If that comment thread had been on the corner of a street, violence had gone with it, along with arson and looting ‘just because.’ Whatever Christian capital this country had, which was never much, along with the moral sensitivity that Christianity confers, is gone. For decades, now, our teachers have not been teaching students to think, engage, and behave. Now even most of our adults are uneducated, uncultured, and disgraceful. We have, for a long time, been taught lies and been convinced to thoughtlessly act on those lies. And what we have been taught to accept is as dangerous and destructive as it is false: radical feminism instead of femininity for women; effeminacy instead of manliness for men; tax-raising scams like global warming; perverted psychology like gender-bending; nation-destroying lawlessness like open borders; God-denying theories like macro-evolution; and hell-condemning atrocities like abortion and euthanasia. “Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge?” (Psalm 14.4.) We work iniquity because we have no knowledge of the LORD. And while we stupidly work our iniquity out, our politicians work themselves into our lives to ruin our families by institutional indoctrination, and to divest us of our earnings through varieties of taxes. Ignorance of God leads, not only to iniquity, but to servitude and punishment. Citizens are little more than slaves to centralized government at this point. When moral standards are low and sin is unrestrained, government becomes large; and this is how a nation self-destructs and gets divinely judged.
Social media threads draw out the depths and dregs of our foolishness and wickedness, which otherwise would at least lie dormant. Some people hold that those who argue on social media sites are troublemakers and that the rest of the population is not like that. Even if we grant that this generalization is true, the people who don’t argue on the internet are not tipping the scales toward peace and righteousness any more than media arguers do, are they? We need to debate, argue, shame, and convince—even digitally on social media platforms in some instances. We need to do what we can to lead people to truth, no matter if this truth be scientific, political, moral, or theological. It is a fallacy that arguing our point does no good and that we should be more concerned with winning approval than actually winning an argument. Thirty-five minutes into a Munk debate about political correctness, Stephen Fry affirmed one of the most popular fallacies of our time, for which he received generous applause: “I believe that one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective” (Political Correctness: a Force for Good?) The alternative to this postmodern saw is to be effective but wrong. This must be what Fry believes is better than being right and ineffective. And I think the context shows that this is what he believes. Our position and practice, rather, must be this: to be right, to know that we are right, to make sure that we are right, to convince others of what is right, and to impress these others with a sense of rightness so that they will be converted to our view or at least be shamed. For this to happen, we must engage, even hotly, and not only stand our ground, but advance against the scorching heat of invective and scorn. When misled bullies are pushed back into corners by thoughtful persons who push back, their browbeating can turn to contemplation and change of mind. Bullies might lash out first; but, because they believe a lie, they will be doing evil along the line of that lie, anyway, until they are convinced to turn from it. The Bible says that there is a time to answer a fool and a time not to answer a fool. Sometimes, regrettably, we answer when we should not. But when we sense that the mouth of a fool ‘calleth for strokes’ (Proverbs 18.6), we may strike, at least verbally. We might not win the fool over by a verbal altercation; but neither will we gain him by being silent. Some persons will always gnash their teeth at a good message (Acts 7.54.) That didn’t stop Stephen; it shouldn’t stop us.
