Can You Be A Saint and a Troll ?

Deliberate Offense, Troublemaking, and Pursuing Virtue

Sarcasm is a love language for me.

Words of affirmation, physical touch, and a bit of scathing banter.

With those, you’ll have my heart.

And maybe it’s because I cut my teeth on the great wits and satirists of the past, folk like Twain and Wilde, Voltaire and Orwell, Chesterton and Chaucer, that I struggle so much today.

Wit, satire, and all around social charm are dying graces - a form almost completely replaced by reductionistic trolling, senseless syllogisms, and desperate appeals to a following base. Which, if you ask me, reeks much more of tantrum than charisma.

Provocateurs.

Trouble-makers.

Mindless goading and insult.

Tweets and Instagram posts riddled with terse mic-drop phrases - conflating controversy or yes-manship for influence and support, respectively.

But being a jackass doesn’t make one an “influencer”.

And a handful ( or a thousand handfuls ) of likes and shares doesn’t equate to support.

We’ve settled for the instant and bombastic.

And the great voices of our age are treading a path that leads away from the the wise heraldry of Orwell or Wilde or Chesterton and down into the mire of subtweets, incoming stitches, and whatever banality people can conjure up on twitter.

Solomon, Chesterton, and the Art of the Silver Tongue

Don’t get me wrong - humour and satire are formidable weapons in the battle for Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. There are walls and barricades and snubbed noses that a bit of charm and wit can always help with.

The so-called culture war is fought both in the mind and heart - and you best believe humour can speak to both.

Chesterton once said

'Humour can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.'

And he’s not wrong.

But not everything that makes us giggle is really humour.

And not every clever statement is truly whimsical.

There is a deep wisdom and logic to becoming a wit.

Let’s start with Proverbs 26:18-19

Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death,
Is the man who deceives his neighbor,
And says, “I was only joking!”

Or, in modern vernacular :

Like a maniac who throws a grenade in a crowd is the person who trolls, slanders, maligns with, for example, social media posts and says :

“It’s just a meme, bro.”

We are broadly unaware of the deep damage that our mindless words cause. Beyond deception, in the sense of suggesting this is the way to have a dialogue, we are reducing the broad cultural conversation to its most base derivate.

The outburst.

Proverbs is a great example of wit and wisdom - and while I’d generally suggest buffing up on the bible’s great literature, may I point in another direction ?

Chesterton.

Maybe one of Christendom’s greatest wits and charmers.

Let me share one of my favourite passages from Orthodoxy :

“The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”

Genius.

A very charming way of getting us to assess ideas of equivocation, morality, and absurdity.

And in all of Chesterton’s writings there lays a playful charm, a kind of flirtatious wit that has the same probing and exposing effect.

But, in all of Chesterton that I’ve read, I’ve yet been able to pin the tag “jackassery” on his work. And in all his clever communications, it’s been a seeming impossibility to point out some logical fallacy.

So why the disparity between a man like Chesterton and our modern day Trolls ?

Probably the answer to the question :

Who and how ?

Who have they read and studied from ?

Who do they emulate ?

He was influenced by William Blake, Hillaire Belloc, Edmund Burke, Thomas Aquinas, George MacDonald and many others.

Don’t hear what I’m not saying.

I’m not saying that disqualifying anyone who isn’t some high-minded elite from social commentary.

What I am saying is that if the goal is the kind of charming prose that marks the great people of old - study and learn and hone your craft. There is always something profound to be said, would that we had the minds and tongues to be able to do it - rather than settling for more and more drivel.

Causing Offense and Pursuing Virtue

There seems to be a new method of operations for the online provocateurs, whether they be theological, political, or some demonic hybrid of the two, which is annoyance.

Aggravation.

Which reveals something about purpose.

The goal does not seem to be change, dialogue, and the pursuit of virtue.

The goal seems to be noise, rage, and controversy.

Poke and prod until people get upset enough that the incendiary post catches fire and goes “viral” ( for all the wrong reasons ).

Add to that the foolish retort of “I was only joking,” and all that’s transpired is some short rage fuelled life cycle - and if the fire is to keep burning, if the eyes are to remain on the person, more fuel is needed for the fire.

Rinse and repeat the reductive nightmare.

But when I read Chesterton, or Wilde, I see a different foundation.

I see the hope that conversations might happen. The desire for introspection. Becoming so dumbfounded and perplexed that mechanistic ways of thinking are upended.

In a picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde writes :

“I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.”

And just like that, with only a baker’s dozen of words, he has drawn out questions of identity and insecurity - ones that plague our modern time as well.

But he didn’t do it by calling people insecure frauds, hiding behind all sorts of masks. He didn’t dunk on them or mic-drop them. He opened up his own heart and with real feeling and charm conveyed a feeling we all feel.

Why ?

Because maybe we would think it through.

Because maybe we’d feel a bit of solidarity.

And even on the attack, Wilde has an inviting charm :

“There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.”

Part of why this is so inviting is because it doesn’t seem to be inciting offense. It seems to be exposing vice and dishonesty and greed.

Learning to distinguish between those two is vital.

Critiquing Critics

In writing this I am becoming something I generally disdain :

A critic.

But, I hope, there are levels of criticism.

There is the outrage and virtue-signalling level, replete with noise and fury.

And then there is something quite different, like an Orwell critiquing the use of language to hide meaning rather than reveal it, in his essay Politics and the English Language.

I’m not calling myself Orwell - we are not even playing in the same league. But, I do hope, at the very least, we’re playing the same game. That I am tending that direction.

“The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.” - Wilde

Maybe it’s the artist in me that feels this need to critique the critic - and maybe it’s because I think there’s more to critique than simple facts.

I think the Truth needs to be Good and Beautiful.

I think our way forward is to watch what a bit of virtue and art can do to our commentary - and it’s results.

Imagine, if you will, instead of enraged populace matured on derivative tweets and slanderous memes, a people whose hearts are ignited by the Beauty and Goodness of Truth.