10 Steps to Winning a Theological Combox War
Comboxes (or comments boxes) suck. I mean, really suck.
Sure, I admit, it would be hard to gauge how a post or any content is faring without them. Every once in awhile, I do get an encouraging note or pertinent piece of advice.
For the most part, however, I have seen combox threads devolve into a battleground over matters that have only tangential relevance to the content that was originally posted. I say tangential, because our erstwhile keyboard warriors usually have not read the content.
The pattern seems so well established it might as well be tradition. In fact, let us call it “The Tradition”, since as a faithful son of the Church, I regard anything done more than twice as tradition:
See headline on post
Identify keyword in headline
Position keyword either within or against established social, cultural, political, religious or intra-denominational position in online culture war
Take position within said culture war
Ignore content in post
Comment on keyword in accordance with said position
Regard any difference with said position as expression from opposing position, with whom one must fight to the death, since difference always equals opposition. Under such conditions, nuance and paradox are impossible.
Regard either lack of response or inundation of responses from opposing position as proof of the rightness of your argument, and righteousness of your character
Rejoice in playing part in defense of civilisation, goodness, and truth (God optional here) against the infidel. Wrap oneself in quote by George Orwell about how much people who hate truth hate those who tell it.
Await next headline
Whether it is about statues, elections, recipes for lettuce, synods, or lectures, it seems that The Tradition has become the norm in online discourse.
There are exceptions, of course, to the Tradition. Every once in a while, a modernist hippie will chirp in and draw upon dark masonic forces like the Church Fathers, papal encylicals, Christian art or literature or even…scripture. Even darker still, there will be an even more modernist hippie who would bring these forces to bear on the actual content of the original post, because they also read the post.
I know, right…?
However, those seem to be smothered by the carpet bombing of comments from the faithful followers of the Tradition.
It later occurred to me that, though this seemed like a very recent (read postmodern) phenomenon, the Tradition was actually more traditional than I originally thought.
For back in the early 1920s, somebody had already laid the theoretical foundations for what we now call “tribalism” (I have written about this at The Distributist Review) in the “Combox Wars”. It is here that we turn to the thought of the jurist, Carl Schmitt.
Schmitt might be a familiar name to readers who are familiar with the theological sub-discipline of political theology. Indeed, Schmitt was the one who coined the term, thanks to the publication of his 1922 essay Politische Theologie or “Political Theology”.
According to Schmitt, the foundational task of political ordering is the establishment of the criterion of association. If this is true then, “Political Theology” argues, “the distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or disassociation”. In other words, before one can engage in any political discourse, it is first necessary to determine who is inside - and more importantly, outside - the polis. The first objective of political discourse, then is finding out who one’s friends and enemies are.
When discourse is framed in these terms then, Schmitt suggests, theological categories become reframed into political ones and become subordinated to fit this primary political task of defining friend from foe. Though this is not explicitly stated in Schmitt’s work itself, critics of Schmitt argue that the logical endpoint of Politsche Theologie is that the demands of the Gospel, such as Jesus’ command to love one another and especially one’s enemies, no longer apply to the treatment of the enemies of the polis.
Thus, while the platform and frequency of the kind of “tit for that” discourse may have changed, the foundations for this are part of an almost century-long Schmittian tradition. The identification of one’s tribe before finding out what is spoken about may not be exactly as old as the hills, but it is another instance of that adage from Ecclesiastes that “there is nothing new under the sun”.
I think quoting scripture makes me a modernist hippie now.
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