Building Platforms and Dopamine Politics

Introduction

One of the great privileges I have had in my life is that of teaching my children and grandchildren in many varied classroom settings. I bring this up now because I just had the privilege of grading a paper submitted by one of my grandsons, and it is to him that I am indebted for two great phrases. The first is that this cultural moment we are living through is a mash-up of “1984 and The Office.” The second is the phrase that I used in the title of this post—dopamine politics.

There is a world of wisdom embedded in that phrase, and it applies in many different settings, in many different ways, left, right, and center. And this presents a real problem for those who are called conservatives today because at the end of the day it can find them ferociously fighting to conserve what is behind them, but what is right behind them is an empty box and some scattered packing paper. And I suppose I should explain what I mean.

First, the Biblical Tension

As we are going to be addressing what it means to be a Christian in public, and because today the public most certainly includes the online public, we need to start by acknowledging what the Lord taught about testimony, witness, and showing off. We are all called to be gymnasts, and here is the true balance beam.

That is the warning directed at the showboaters. But then, on the other hand, we read this:

And this:

We are to be very private about certain things, but we are to do so while living in community, where other people genuinely know us, and if we are living right, they will see it. They should see it. One of the ways they see it is that the Lord rewards us openly because He has seen us, like Nathaniel, praying under the fig tree (John 1:48). At the same time, we are sternly instructed not to position ourselves for that open reward, because then we are giving alms on the street corner, trumpeter by our side.

There is no way to preach to people without being there, and when you are there, they can see you, and they can hear you. You can be there effectively and powerfully, and a preacher should seek to learn what that means. Homiletics is not an ungodly pursuit.

“And so spake . . .” At the same time, there is an important sense in which the preacher must remember that he is not the message, but rather just the messenger.

These are obviously perennial issues, and we have always had them, but the arrival of the digital age has served as something like Miracle-Gro for this particular set of temptations. Not only were we not ready for it, we were not close to ready.

Dopamine Generation

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter and hormone that delivers little “pleasure hits.” Remembering that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, it is obvious that Jesus is the Lord of dopamine, as the one who created it. Consequently it has all kinds of marvelous functions. The point is not that dopamine is bad. But dopamine is not a god either. One of the things we have learned how to do in our day is to artificially stimulate it. Screen time releases dopamine, and if we accumulate tons of screen time, then certain dopamine pathways get carved out in the brain. The law of diminishing returns sets in and it becomes needful to increase the screen time in order to get the same pleasure rush as before. This is an obvious player with things like online porn, but it is also a clear factor with every form of click bait.

If you go to google images, and there type in dopamine, one of the prompts that will come up is “dopamine tattoo.” Don’t believe me? Clearly a number of people have adjusted their priorities in a negative direction. The problem is that many Christians have done exactly the same thing, but without acknowledging it to themselves. It is not a great achievement to live the same way, but without the tattoo.

And this is where the balance beam illustration comes back to us.

Where the People Are

Christians should be online, as Christians, because we are supposed to let our light shine before men. This is where the people are, and we are to live among them. But there are three great temptations for Christians to avoid as we do this. These are not the only temptations, but these are big ones. We are to be there online, but not in the same way that the heathen are there.

The outside of the cup: Platforms like Instagram make it easy to showcase your life, and to show it to the world with just the right filters applied. I don’t want to give anyone any ideas, but I don’t think it will be long before some of the filters have special names for evangelicals to use. What filter should I use if it is a snapshot of an “open Bible and a steaming cup of coffee, early morning?”

There are two aspects of this. One is that you should be concerned that the image you present is not a lie. It is one thing to clean your house before company comes over, which is just the decent, responsible thing to do. It is quite another to have one pristine room for company while everything else about the house is trashed, all the time. If your Instagram account is that one room, always ready for anybody to come and be impressed with you, then you are in grave danger.

The second thing is that you should reserve and hold back a significant part of your life and work so that you and your family can be clear in your minds that you made that meal for them, and not for the sake of applause from your followers. There is no way to live stream everything without distorting everything. The big problem with reality television is how unreal it is. So reserve a spacious place in your lives for your people, and your people alone. This does not compete with hospitality—it actually makes hospitality a possibility.

Always keep in mind that having an online persona is a set up that makes hypocrisy easy, and when you get clicks from it, the dopamine rush makes that very same hypocrisy fun. Not a good place to be.

Conflict is interesting: When a fist fight breaks out in a junior high school, one of the things that also happens is that a crowd gathers. This is natural enough, and there is no sense trying to legislate against it. Writers of novels know that conflict is interesting, and Raymond Chandler once advised that when things start to drag in the narrative you should bring someone in with a gun.

But this goes back to the balance beam. There is no doubt that when Paul rebuked Peter at Antioch, a hush fell on the crowd, and every eye in the room was riveted on the two men. It is a sign of Paul’s faithfulness that he delivered the rebuke in that setting, and a sign of Peter’s faithfulness that he received it. But suppose someone read that account and took the wrong lesson away from it. Instead of thinking that “if we want Peter to repent, and if we want to thwart the Judaizers, then we should . . .” and started to think that “if we want every eye to be riveted on us then we should . . .” The former is high faithfulness, and the latter is low and full of cunning.

In our current culture war, the ongoing conflict is necessary, and important, and unavoidable. There is a war on, remember. But even under such conditions, and especially under such conditions, it is easy to justify conflict (for the sake of the cause) when the real justification is so that people will see you fighting for the cause valiantly.

More than one officer has gone to war, not for the love of country, but because it was part of his plan for political advancement. Remember that John Kerry’s tour in Vietnam could be measured in hours.

Growth is not an end in itself: Of course, if we are faithful, we should want our ministries to thrive and grow. But we should want a godly ministry to thrive and grow, and we should not define whether or not it is godly by whether it is thriving and growing. Colon cancer grows. Canadian thistle grows. Federal red ink grows.

So the faithfulness of a ministry is not defined by Google Analytics. What does it profit if a man builds a platform that encompasses the world, and yet he loses his own soul (Mark 8:36)? Faithfulness, not followers. It is better to have a platform that is on the teeny end than to be a reprobate whose platform is flourishing like a green bay tree.

This is how the book of Proverbs teaches us to reason. But if God grants reformation and revival, then there will be platforms that are true to the Word and are also large. That said, we should not justify anything with a simple appeal to numbers. So if the doctrine is sound, and the lives are straight, then praise God for the numbers. But not until then.

Canon+

I am sure that someone is going to say in response to this that they have, ahem, noticed that Canon+ is hard at work in this new media space, churning out a torrent of content. And, not to be coy, a bunch of that content has my mug on it, speaking straight to the camera. I would prefer to say visage rather than mug, but still, the point stands.

So if someone were to ask—and I think they should ask—whether or not we are trying to live in the light of all the cautions stated above, I would simply say yes—these cautions and others. Much of it lies in the realm of motive, but some of it has to do with how you structure your lives, how you aim the cameras, and where you permit the mics to go.

But the center of it has to do with whether or not you have ordinary lives with your people, lives that are lived out in an incarnational space, in three dimensions. You need to be living with saints, breathing the same air in the same rooms, and they need to be people you would die for. Another way of saying this is that koinonia cannot really be uploaded to the cloud, and true community cannot be downloaded.

Digital media has replaced the parchments and scrolls, but nothing replaces life together in Christ.