The Secret Life of Hands: On the Ethics of Retweeting Praise

In the book Insurrection, I tell the following story,

Every Sunday the pastor would stand at the front of his church and, with a booming voice, finish his rousing sermon with a plea,

“Each week I go to a nearby town and serve the poor, the oppressed and the downtrodden, what do YOU do? How do you show your compassion to those in need?”

People would applaud at the ministers closing remarks and everyone would wave him off at the end of the service as he hurried away in his little car.

The truth however was that each week he would go to a golf course and play a leisurely eighteen holes away from his congregation, family and friends.

This deception had been going on for years. But eventually it came to the attention of some angels. They were furious at his lies and reported the situation directly to God.

After a little consideration God said to the angels, “I will visit with this minister on Sunday and teach him a lesson he’ll never forget”.

Sure enough, next Sunday, God showed up at the church. Yet again the minister informed his congregation that he was going to go serve the poor. And again he went to the golf course. However this time was different, for this time God intervened. When the minister took his first shot the ball took off, flew through the air, bounced onto the green and dropped into the hole. The minister was amazed.

At the second hole the same thing happened. And the third. And the forth. Right through to the last hole.

With his last stroke the minister sliced the ball badly, but it curved around and, like all the others, found the hole in one.

All the while the angels in heaven watched what took place in utter disbelief. By the time God returned they shouted, “I thought you were going to punish the minister for all his lies, but instead you gave him the perfect round of golf!”

“That may be true”, replied God with a smile, “but ask yourself this, who’s he going to tell?”

In this story we’re confronted with the way in which many of us gain our value by having another witness our acts rather than through the acts themselves. The pastor in the story needs an audience on the sideline bearing witness to, and affirming, his achievements.

No-where is this phenomenon more blatant today than on social media platforms. For instance, on Twitter some public speakers obsessively retweet any compliment that is made about them, any comment that includes them, or any picture that shows them in a good light. Because this isn’t related to the promotion of something (the talk has already been given) the motivation would often seem to lie in the individuals deep seated need for recognition. Mimicking a type of homeopathic logic, the original compliment becomes stronger the more it is diluted around twitter, and so it has to be shared.

In Atheism for Lent we’ve been reading Feuerbach, and I’ve found myself struck by how deeply he grasps this human desire for recognition, along with its pitfalls. An insight that has been subsequently deepened and broadened by many of the thinkers who came after him. For Feuerbach, it’s very natural for us to want this type of recognition, indeed it is a necessary stage in development, but it signals a stage that we must move beyond if we ever want to enter into a healthier, more enriching life.

Here Feuerbach is expressing something that can help us understand the psychoanalytic notion of the cure. An important element of the cure lies in the realization that there is no audience to dance before, placate, or from which to evoke praise.

The cure is then deeply connected to the idea of becoming an ethical subject.

An ethical subject is one who takes responsibility for their actions; not doing things out of coercion, whether that involves punishment or reward.

A child, for instance, might be coerced into apologizing for something they did via a parental threat. But, insofar as the child acts due to a reward/punishment economy, they are not acting as a properly ethical subject. Rather they are a type of citizen under the law.

As we grow up, we don’t move beyond the punishment/reward economy but internalize it, so that the outside authority becomes an inner one. Insofar as we simply move from an external to an internal source of demand, we are not yet, properly speaking in the domain of the ethical.

This is one way of understanding the radical meaning of the biblical passage, “But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Here it takes a step further than simply saying, “don’t show off in front of others.” It claims that we should not show off in front of ourselves, i.e. in front of the internal other who acts as a type of judge or cheerleader. This hints at a type of act that operates in much the same way as a heart beats.

The first ethical act, the act that forms the ethical subject, is then that of moving beyond the economy of law in both its external and internal forms.

Being an ethical subject does not mean being a subject who does ethical acts. It means being a subject who is able to do ethical acts. In other words, the ethical subject is the one who is also able to do properly unethical acts; even if there is a correlation between taking responsibility for ones actions – rather than outsourcing that responsibility onto a religious, political or moral authority – and empathy for ones neighbor.

One might say that, to be an ethical subject, is to be a subject who is able to embrace a way of life animated by the freedom of love rather than the rule of law.

Apart from struggling to become properly ethical (which is a huge struggle), those who feel the compulsion to put any good deed on social media, and retweet every kind word said to them, might find themselves in the same rocky boat as the preacher above: unable to enjoy a good round of golf without having to tell someone about it.