Perhaps you are aware, if you’re inclined to follow such things, of the ongoing feud between Taylor Swift and Kanye West (and, apparently between Taylor Swift and most people). I, because I am not inclined to follow such things, was unaware until a few weeks ago. My younger (and cooler) brother who helps me keep up with the better--or at least more interesting--parts of pop culture wanted me to watch the lyric video for Taylor Swift’s new song “Look What You Made Me Do.”
I’m not qualified to offer an in-depth commentary on the song or the story behind it, 1 but it’s quite obviously a dark turn of style and content for Swift. She even coldly states in the song that the “Old Taylor” is dead and satirizes her past self as seeming naive and fake. The overall tone of the song is vindictive and sinister as she throws shade at just about everyone, including herself.
It’s not my purpose here to make a judgment about Swift or her music, per se. The reason I bring it up is because I was reminded of it during the Gospel reading at Mass a few Sundays ago.
Jesus says, "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.” 2
It struck me that, though what Jesus commands is common sense, it is so incredibly countercultural. In an age of celebrity worship, it seems there is nothing people enjoy more than the schadenfreude they feel at someone’s downfall. If you are in the spotlight in any capacity--whether as an athlete, a politician, a religious leader, an actor, a musician--there will likely be little compassion if you slip up. And even if you don’t, someone will probably make up a story that you did.
While this tendency is not peculiar to our generation, 3 I would still argue that there has been an explosion of this type of content with the advent of television, and now social media, which provide us with entire structures dedicated to lurid busybodyness. Tabloids, reality shows, and social media outlets all stand to make money on our desire to know who’s cheating on whom, who just got checked into rehab, who’s got a kinky past, who came out as gay, etc., etc., etc.
It’s not unlike our compulsion to rubberneck at an accident scene. We find it difficult to look away when something bad is unfolding, but rarely do we stop to see if we can help.
Why do we do this? Why are people so obsessed with watching the ruin of other people?
I’m sure there are a number of psychological studies on such phenomena that could give us an insight, but I would like to posit that this propensity simply stems from a desire for catharsis. We live in a broken world with fractured relationships and fragile peace, and we often carry the weight of that within ourselves. We seek to relieve some of that pressure by blaming. Brene Brown has a short, entertaining video about blame in which she describes blame as “simply the discharging of discomfort and pain,” which has an “inverse relationship to accountability.” Basically, to blame gives us a sense of catharsis.
Even though we want to experience emotional catharsis, we are often not willing to deal with our own relationships or our own authentic emotions; rather we ogle the mistakes or misfortunes of others. There is a kind of voyeurism to it. We engage in a kind of unholy cultural scapegoating that distracts and numbs us, that offers us some sort of release, while disregarding the human dignity of the people involved. In some way, it’s unsurprising to me how pornography has become such an epidemic because, really, it’s just the same process applied to sexuality.
Our culture runs after license (what is mistakenly considered “freedom”) with a voracious appetite; the right to do whatever we want, whenever we want, with whomever we want is guarded at all costs. This culture, however, is also devoid of forgiveness. If you make a mistake with your “freedom,” it’s game over. Once your reputation is dead, there is no resurrection, except perhaps a kind of undead existence as you find ways to pull your enemies down with you.
Cardinal Francis George once wrote, “The world permits everything and forgives nothing. God and the Church do not permit everything but forgive everything.”4 The truth offered by the Church, though, is one of true freedom. Not permission to do whatever we want, but a freedom that leads us to our real telos. And when we sin--as we all have--we are offered mercy, offered resurrection. Christ is the one Who gives us true cleansing, real healing, genuine catharsis. Rather than leering at the sins of others, and airing our grievances loudly, let us cast our cares upon Him Whose yoke is easy and burden light.
1 In preparation for writing this post, I attempted to educate myself about the Swift-West vendetta via youtube and wanted to gouge my eyes out after about 4 minutes.↩
3 In Confessions, Augustine describes a similar phenomenon, both in his love for the theatre (Bk 3, Ch 2), and in his friend Alypius’ love of gladiatorial games (Bk 6, Ch 8). He cautions against both things, concluding that they are both empty spectacles that cause us to experience negative emotions for no particular end.↩
4 There are a number of variations of this quotation floating around that make it difficult to verify, but the sentiment still stands.↩
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