Withdrawal and engagement

Sometimes it's hard to find the proper balance between withdrawal and engagement. It's possible to do too much of one and not enough of the other.

Take a story related by Alan Jacobs at one of his blogs. (I'm going off of memory here, because I haven't been able to find it--so apology to him if I misconstrue or misremember what he said.)

Jacobs liked to play basketball, but he noticed that he tended to get angry and to act on that anger in inappropriate ways. There was something about the game that was, for him, too competitive and that excited too much of a desire for confrontation. Jacobs recognized that he made those choices when playing basketball, and then decided to quit playing. Yet a student of his pointed out that by quitting basketball, Jacobs was actually conceding something valuable. In Jacobs's terms, it was a concession to the devil. Quitting basketball conceded the good fellowship and the chance to learn to place competitiveness in its proper place.

Now take another fact about Jacobs. He has, at his current blog, noted several times that he has cut back on his engagement with social media. If he continues to use tools like Facebook and Twitter, he does so much less often. (Here is a case where I probably could find the posts where he talks about social media, and yet I'm just too lazy to do it. Nevertheless, the same proviso applies--apologies to him is I misconstrue or misremember what he said.)

Jacobs, as I recall, has mentioned that he sometimes found himself saying things he regrets. He also (again, if I recall correctly) has pointed out ways in which social media tend to allow more punchy and destructive comments than would obtain in other forums. For example, most social media posts are more like "first drafts" of something that would require several drafts if published, say, in a journal or a book.

I write this not to pick on Jacobs, but I do want to note an apparent contradiction, assuming I'm not misconstruing what he's saying. He found that it was wrong to quit basketball, but that it was right, or at least advisable, to quit most social media. In the one instance, withdrawal was an unacceptable concession when he should have continued to engage. In the other instance, engagement was for many reasons ill-advised--it brought out the bad in him, it had little good to say about it, etc.--and withdrawal was the answer.

I say it's an "apparent contradiction" and not a fatal contradiction. I haven't "caught" Jacobs in an inconsistency so much as, I think, have noticed a tension. We have the duty, in some senses and some circumstances, to engage and in other senses and circumstances to withdraw.

I notice, by the way, a similar tension in the advocacy, by Jacobs and others, including Rod Dreher, for what they call the "Benedict Option" of withdrawal from the secular world into Christian communities that have more limits or guardrails against the wider world. I almost definitely misunderstand the "Benedict Option" and am probably making a caricature of it. (And I no longer profess the small-o orthodox Christianity they do.) But to me, that option goes against the New Testament's injunction to go into the world and profess the faith.

That's an aside. All I really mean to say is that the tension exists. And I realize that withdrawing from Ordinary Times for Lent is not tension-free, assuming I honor the withdrawal for the entire Lenten period. I run a risk by doing that.