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Breaking the Outrage Porn Habit

It was only fairly recently that I became aware of the term "outrage porn," but I just learned from Wikipedia that it's been around since 2009, when a New York Times writer said:

It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulses to judge and punish and get us all riled up with righteous indignation.

The Wikipedia article reveals that the phenomenon has been the object of study and analysis, mainly on the question of why and how journalists use it to attract and keep the attention of readers and/or viewers. 

But I didn't need anyone's analysis to recognize the phenomenon as soon as I encountered the term. I recognized it because it obviously referred to a tendency which I long ago noticed in myself: a perverse pleasure in being outraged, normally by someone else's misdeeds. Never mind the whole question of deliberate manipulation; I don't need to be manipulated into it, because I do it to myself. 

I first noticed it many years ago in reading the Catholic press. For as long as I've been a Christian the struggle between orthodox and progressive theology has been a highly visible fact of life in the Christian world. (I'm using "progressive" as a convenient way of referring to the tendency to reduce the faith to a matter of literature and psychology.) Given two items in a Catholic publication, one offering a meditation on some aspect of the faith and the other exposing some cleric or theologian's manifest heresy, it was the latter that I wanted urgently to read. The justification for the impulse--that it was important to know about these malign influences--was pretty thin. How much of my reaction was a genuine desire or need to know, and how much of it was the pleasure of thinking Isn't that awful? Aren't the people doing it terrible? I must read more, so that I can better understand how awful and terrible it all is.

Self-righteousness is certainly part of it, but it's much more than the normal "Lord, I thank thee that I am not as this sinner." It also includes personal anger provoked by a sense of being attacked; the sinner is not just doing something wrong which you, in your righteousness, are not doing, but engaged in something which damages you, or something or someone you love.

I did recognize it as an unhealthy tendency, but I don't know that I resisted it very hard. And that was before the internet, which, as we all know, has given that unhealthy impulse an injection of some kind of growth hormone. Thinking about it now, I see that I've sometimes, or often, forgotten even to recognize that it's unhealthy, or to be restrained by that recognition.

Culturally speaking, it has become a monster. We live in an angry and unhappy culture now, and the impulse that makes us propagate and enjoy--yes, that is the word--outrage porn is making us even more angry and unhappy than we would otherwise be.

This is on my mind because Rod Dreher's blog at The American Conservative has ended, and I'm trying to decide whether or not to follow him to his Substack site, Rod Dreher's Diary, which requires a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) for much or most of what he posts there. Dreher has a lot of worthwhile things to say, but he also, as I think he admits, has a tendency to revel in outrage porn. And I know that's the reason why a new post from him has always been the first thing I read at TAC. I can afford the subscription, but should I? Shouldn't I perhaps just try to break myself of the outrage porn habit, or at least make a continual effort to suppress it?

Here are two current Dreher stories:

The ‘Idyllically Sex-Positive World’
Crackpot therapist showcased by BBC calls for self-drugging women for fetish freaks

Stanford Law Students Are The Enemy
By humiliating federal judge, ruling class shows contempt for liberal democracy

The second article is available to non-subscribers, so you can read it if you want to. You may have read about the incident he's referring to: the usual shout-down of an unwelcome speaker by our version of the Red Guards. It's alarming and infuriating. Dreher says:

I cannot bear these people, these Stanford Law students and their grotesque Dean Steinbach. These people are the Enemy. I will vote for anybody who will stop them. They are destroying our liberal democracy. Every one of those students are going to go into the ruling class, and will spend their careers in the law trying to oppress the people they have decided don’t have a right to be free, or respected, or anything but crushed as wrongthinkers and Bad People.

And I agree with him, all too vigorously. But is any purpose served by my reading about this? It's not as if I can do anything about it. Is it not better that I tend my own garden, reading good books, listening to music, participating in the world as it presents itself directly to me, in general pursuing the good in the ways that are available to me? Obviously one can do both: tend one's garden and stay informed about what's happening in the world. And if one's culture is collapsing one ought to be aware of it. But where is the right balance? As things are going now, it's more or less impossible to be aware of current events and not be disturbed.

I still haven't made up my mind about Dreher's Substack, but thinking about it has made me realize that I need to resist more strongly the somewhat sick impulse to seek out things that anger and offend me. 

*

I think I would be correct in saying that for most of my adult life Christians have more often than not been the villains in popular culture. I don't have any hard data for that, of course. And it's not uniform; I think immediately of the reasonable and not unsympathetic treatment of the clergyman in Broadchurch. But I watch a lot of (too many) British crime dramas, and generally when an identifiably Christian character appears he or she is probably going to be somewhere between obnoxious and wicked. This may well be worse in American film and television.

Well, okay, as I say it's been that way for decades. Still, I was unprepared for something I ran across the other day. I have a mild taste for certain video games, and was reading this article about indie games (more likely than the big names to interest me) when I encountered a description of a game called The Binding of Isaac Rebirth:

The game follows Isaac through an unknown world, as he makes a quick escape into a trap door hidden in his bedroom to flee his devout Christian mother hellbent on sacrificing him.

That opens a vista of ignorance and malice beyond anything I had imagined.

More and more it seems that a great many people, especially young people, have somehow absorbed a great hostility to Christianity without having any clear idea of what it is. 

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I'm also trying to decide whether or not to subscribe to Rod Dreher on Substack. I'll probably wait a while and see how much comes up for free; I can't read all of it anyway. I share your reservations about the tone of some of it, but on the other hand I feel like I get a lot of "news" from him that I don't get elsewhere.

I did notice that he has over 12000 subscribers. Are those paid subscribers? Even at the minimum ($5/month) that's a lot of money.

Speaking of anti-Christian bias, here is an interesting article about some guy I've never heard of named Rainn Wilson criticizing Hollywood for its anti-Christian bias. This was in response to an HBO zombie series I've never heard of that is based on a video game I've never heard of. The makers of the TV show decided to make the cannibalistic villain of the video game into a Christian pastor. For no reason.

https://www.ncregister.com/cna/the-office-star-reacting-to-cannibal-pastor-in-the-last-of-us-blasts-anti-christian-bias-in-hollywood

This kind of thing makes me raving mad! :)

Well, even though you're a Christian I hope you won't lose it and start killing and eating people. Faint hope, I guess.

I saw that mentioned elsewhere earlier today. And I know just what he's talking about: guy starts reading scripture and odds are very high that he's at best a creep, at worst...this, I guess.


Craig, I don't have any idea whether those are paid subscribers or not. I'd sort of be surprised if they are, but what do I know?

'... on the other hand I feel like I get a lot of "news" from him that I don't get elsewhere.'

Yeah, that's true for me, too. He could change the name of his site to Your One-Stop Shop for Terrible News.

Rainn Wilson was Dwight Schrute on The Office! Interesting, about him.

I was watching a sports show on HBO Max last night, can't remember what it is called, but Bomani Jones is the host. I like him because he is black and brings up so many things that I would not have thought of too much about race and sports. Like the idea that SEC football is the new plantation in the South, for one. Anyway, to keep on point, part of his 30 minute show always has him standing out in the streets in NYC asking passing people short questions that will refer back to his topic that he will be talking about. A rather benign question about which awful country you would go to to see a concert by an artist you like provoked the answer "Vatican City" by one guy. I was pretty shocked to hear that after so many said what you would expect: China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc.

I think I am more on the progressive side of Catholicism than the rest of you, and the only time I spend at all reading about our culture's attacks on Christianity is in this blog. Nonetheless I was saddened to hear the guy say that. To his credit Bomani also seemed pretty surprised, as he probably was.

I would never have recognized him as Dwight. I haven't seen all that many episodes of The Office, but enough that I recognize Dwight when he appears in memes etc.

Funny thing about the name "Dwight." Clearly it's meant to be uncool or nerdy, which amuses me because I knew a guy named Dwight in 7th grade or so and he was kind of a jerk.

I've heard the comparison of SEC football to the plantation, and there's a bit of a point there, but not much of one. I doubt the slaves on actual plantations would have thought much of the comparison. And it makes no sense to single out the SEC, except that it's always fun to beat up on the South. That said, I do think the whole college football thing is pretty sick.

I'm not especially surprised by the Vatican City remark. It might be more or less annoying depending on the tone.

That Vatican City comment shouldn't come as a surprise, considering how Christians, and especially Catholics, have been depicted in a whole lot of popular movies. The Catholic film critic, Steven Greydanus, wrote a piece in 2016 discussing some of them. So glad I missed The Legend of Tarzan:

"Not one of the articles I read on questions of racism and sexism in The Legend of Tarzan noted that the villain, played by Christoph Waltz, is never without a rosary in his hand, not as an aid to prayer, but as a bizarrely weaponized token that he whips about with the precision of a fetishistic Indiana Jones, immobilizing or even strangling victims with it.

Waltz’s villain explains to Margot Robbie’s Jane — whom he has taken captive, and whose desperate attack he easily thwarts with the beaded weapon — that the rosary (made of 'Madagascar spider silk') was a gift to him at the age of nine from his priest. 'You must have been close to your priest,' Jane smirks in an apparent pedophile priest joke."

More examples in the piece: http://decentfilms.com/articles/hollywood-religion-problem

All too typical. Michael Medved wrote a book called Hollywood Hates America, probably 20 or more years ago, making a similar point not about anti-Christian stuff specifically but the general tendency to trash cultural norms. I remember reading about a remake, also probably at least 20 years ago, of an old film, maybe Cape Fear, in which the villain was made more evil than the original, and also Christian.

I try to walk a middle line on this stuff, not always successfully. I have friends who pretty much ignore all of it, and thus are somewhat in the dark about how prevalent it is. I don't want to be in that boat, but on the other hand, neither do I want to be a Chicken Little. Dreher gets accused of that all the time, but he said recently that he catalogues all these things in order to make a point: "Ok, now do you see there's a problem?" In other words, he's trying to demonstrate the existence of certain trends to people who dismiss them all by considering the examples only in isolation.

I know people that do this, and my response is always, "How many examples do you need before you stop simply saying, 'Nothing to see here, move along!'? How many more times are you going to say, 'If they do one more thing...' ?"

I guess the middle line for me is to pay attention, don't ignore it, but don't revel in it either.

I agree with that in principle. But I'm not sure I even need to pay very much attention to it at this point. I totally agree with Dreher about the significance of the many sick things he writes about: I do see that there's a problem, and a big one. Adding more examples doesn't change anything for me. He is absolutely correct that radical progressivism wants to implement soft totalitarianism.

I haven't read Live Not By Lies, but I think I know from Dreher's many discussions of it and quotes from it what it's all about, and I think the title phrase really is a key part of dealing with what's going on. As Orwell illustrated in 1984, it's really important to totalitarians to break the will of its subjects, and forcing them to agree that something which both parties know to be false is true is a good way of doing that. It's Dreher's seeing that in action all around us, and exposing it, that's made his work valuable, even if he goes over the top sometimes.

True. I definitely pay more attention to it than I really need to.

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