Humility - The Lost Virtue - Part 2

After last week's post, it occurred to me that I really only scratched the surface.  I stopped at the 80's, and that was only the beginning of the end when it comes to teaching humility.  I never thought I would look back on the "everybody gets a trophy days" as only the first step, but that is only because I didn't have enough imagination to know what smartphones would do to our view of the world and our view of how the world views us.

I'm not anti-technology.  As you know, I have a blog.  I work in a school that has a one-to-one program, and I am fully invested in the benefits of that.  I have often said that there is no way I could go back to teaching without every student having a computer in front of them.  I can do low or no tech days, but I could never go back to a year of teaching in which I am the only person in the room with a computer.

I am not anti-technology.  I am, however, anti-dependence.  It makes me crazy that everywhere I go, I see kids and adults alike staring at rectangles.  Kids are actually better at interacting with each other while using their rectangles than adults are, but I still have concerns that we have subjected them to a massive sociological experiment.  Ask a teenager if you can look at the pictures on their phone, and you will find a thousand selfies.  Go to their social media, and you will find out where all those selfies went.  An event hasn't actually happened, it seems, if we don't document that we were there for it and post it for all the world to see.  A picture of fireworks isn't enough.  We must be standing in front of the fireworks.  When we stand in front of the majesty that is the Grand Canyon, we are still thinking about ourselves.  I know that even back in the film days, people took photos of themselves in front of tourist attractions, but it was one or two photos, usually of the whole family, not a hundred photos of a duck-faced, good-side, downward-angled, Snapchat-filtered, posed, etc. . .  I'm pretty sure Narcissus would find us vain.  He only looked at his own reflection; he didn't insist that others look at him as well.

Smartphones have also distorted our sense of time.  It never takes longer than two seconds to get the answer to a question, watch a video we want to watch, or text a friend.  And when we do text, if it takes long than three seconds for the three dots to turn into an answer, we get angry that the person hasn't responded immediately.  We say things like, "Why does she even have a phone if she isn't going to answer?"  This infects other parts of our lives as we impatiently tap our foot next to the microwave, forgetting that it used to take hours to make a meal.  This impatience with time is about our pride, revealing our belief that we should get what we want instantly.

The day of my last post, I had an interaction that reinforced the weird relationship even our most humble students have with their social media.  Our art teacher is having our students participate in the global Kindness Rocks Project.  Because social media can be a place for good, people all over the world are decorating rocks with uplifting images or messages and hiding them with a hashtag so that you can let the world know you have found it and are either keeping it or hiding it again with a clue to where you have hidden it.  This should be a fun and low-stress school project.   As our art teacher was explaining it to a small group of students, one of them said, "This will ruin my Instagram, so I don't want to put it there."  To be fair, I am not on Instagram, so maybe the problem is with my ignorance, but I can't help wondering how a person's Instagram can be ruined by one picture.  Other students understood her concern about messing up the design and colors.  Another teacher, who is friends with this student on Instagram looked at her feed and said that it was all artsy selfies in front of sunsets.  She talked about making a separate account just for this project, but she decided to use her mom's twitter account instead.  I've never imagined this kind of conversation.  Basically, what she was saying was that this picture would be off-brand, and we can't have that.  The idea that her design would be ruined and that she would be embarrassed if she posted one photo that doesn't fit with her image is surely a sign of the pride social media has embedded in us.

Our overinflation of our online image also magnifies our sense of our own influence online.  The rise of "slactivism," from ice buckets to hashtags to the "me too" fad, reveals our belief that we are making a difference by doing nothing.  When a disaster happens, we change our profile picture to a certain color to show our solidarity.  That's it.  The people of Puerto Rico can eat or drink our red, white, and blue profile picture; but we feel good about ourselves because we "raised awareness," as though that is an end.  While our ancestors, only a generation ago, marched on Washington to show their support for Civil Rights, we plop down a hashtag and feel proud of how "woke" we are.  This is pride, and we should take a good hard look at how little we do that has actual value.

This can be fixed, but like everything else, we must do it intentionally.  We must stop and reflect on our actions.  We must model humility for our kids instead of complaining that they don't have any.  We must recognize our place before God, as bearers of the Imago Dei who have been damaged by sin, and place our sins, including our pride, at the Cross.