Blame Belongs with the Blame-shifters

This weeks’ blog comes from David Zahl. You can find this post (lightly edited below for context) and others at mbird.com. This week’s post is part of a series David wrote based on a class he was teaching, Things You Won’t Hear Anywhere Else (But Church), for fuller context read the intro to the series.

Jennifer Breheny Wallace’s book, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Turns Toxic — and What To Do About It details the plight of an unexpected group of at-risk children. Unexpected because these are not children in foster care or with incarcerated parents. They are the predominantly upper middle class children who attend “high-achieving schools.” It turns out that the likelihood of this cohort suffering from depression, anxiety, and substance abuse is almost on par with those two other demographics. What is going on?

There’s a moment at the end of Wallace’s recent podcast interview with Scott Galloway that sheds some light. Galloway suggests that social media use is the decisive factor involved. The “toxic benchmarking” that happens on Instagram in particular (number of likes, shares, etc) must be where things go wrong for these affluent young people.

Wallace objects. She says:

Social media is certainly a magnifier and an accelerant to these toxic pressures but it’s not the root of it. The root of this is a lack of mattering universally. A lack of feeling valued for who we are at our core. We feel valued now for what we achieve, how much money we make. Society tells us certain people matter more. ‘Those influencers matter more.’ Those with the most likes matter more. What I see as a social media crisis is a crisis of mattering and that goes much deeper than social media.

Her diagnosis struck me as a profound and helpful corrective. I know I’ve fallen prey to the temptation Galloway expresses here, laying the blame for the vast majority of modern ills at the feet of the internet — blaming the screens. How can you not? The internet is so consuming, so omnipresent, so seductive, so rigged, so enraging. If it’s a magnifier and accelerant, the web is in a class by itself.

Nevertheless!

Breheny Wallace refuses to blame these children’s problems on an external form of technology, even one as pervasive as social media. Because the real problem is internal. ‘A crisis of mattering’ is how she puts it, and it fuels the dysfunctional use of tech, not the other way around. She goes on to cite research that says, “The kids who were struggling the most felt like their mattering was contingent on their performance; that their parents only valued or cared about them when they were performing.” (Parents who, she observes, usually feel that that their entire worth is tied up with their children’s excellence, but that’s another post). ‘I only matter to the extent I’m excelling according to this absurdly narrow set of metrics.’

Both children and parents alike have lost — or have had it taken from them — a sense of inherent mattering by virtue of being alive. In response, they have outsourced their dignity to Silicon Valley and our nation’s College Admissions departments. Add to that a sense of economic insecurity and the stakes grow to life-or-death proportions.

Which brings me to this week’s aphorism: Blame Belongs With the Blame-Shifters.

None of us escape the pain of being alive. Being a person is incredibly hard. Life is impossible, I’ve heard it said. And so, we scan the horizon, looking for someone or something to blame. Blame is a form of control, and like all such forms, it can be very comforting in the short term. Pay attention to the headlines, and you’ll be confronted nonstop with theories of who’s at fault (and how much) for, well, everything. It sometimes feels like we spend twenty three and a half hours a day in this pursuit. No one ever lost money playing the blame game. Then again, no one ever won that game, either.

To be clear, you will find echoes of the aphorism above in many a therapist’s office. A good couple’s counselor will enable their clients to see how counterproductive blame is in their relationship. How destructive. It goes nowhere, just festers and squashes affection. A relationship that works is one that can successfully move beyond blame as its primary rubric of relating.

A good church goes further, though. It does this first by asserting that evil and suffering and injustice cannot be reduced to external systems or external influences. Their spark lies within the sinful human heart, not outside it. This notion does not garner nearly as many clicks, but it happens to be true.

Secondly, part of what sin looks like is a reflex toward blame-shifting that actually amplifies suffering and injustice (Genesis 3:12). This is not to say that fault doesn’t exist. But the belief that finger-pointing serves a constructive function is often, well, to blame for the endless recriminations that keep us chained to our resentments.

We raise our voices in blame for many reasons. Sometimes out of righteous indignation, sure. Sometimes to distract others from looking too closely at us. Sometimes to feel a little bit of power when we feel like we don’t matter. But even when there is something ‘just’ at work, the Christian remains skeptical of any blame that is directed fully or even chiefly at an outside target.

We take our cue from a critique that Jesus himself levels in the book of Mark. In the seventh chapter, after his disciples are caught violating the Pharisees’ understanding of Jewish laws of ritual purity (by virtue of their unwashed hands), these religious authorities press Jesus on the nature of defilement. He responds, “Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them” (Mk 7:15).

More than offering a simple retort to the question, Jesus’ answer undermines our well-worn attempts to locate the primary source of defilement — what today is called toxicity — over there, in that place, with those people. His answer contradicts the belief that if we can just remove that person or obstacle from our life then harmony will be restored, and progress can move forward.

What you’ll hear at church and nowhere else, I hope, is that the human blame-shifting impulse is neither benign nor efficacious. It is inextricable from the same cycle of reciprocity and revenge which landed our savior on a cross.

Yet Calvary is also where the bondage of blame is broken. In his death and resurrection, Christ did the only productive thing one can do with blame: he absorbed and forgave it. Not because fault doesn’t matter but because you and I matter so much more.

Which is a long-winded way of saying, the screens are not the issue. Just don’t tell my phone-less 13 year old that.