Article
Ambition
Comment
General Election 24
Politics
5 min read

Is it really time to “go for the jugular”?  

How to handle political enemies.
A screen grab of a news paper report with a headline and picture. The headline reads: 'Go for Keir Starmer’s jugular to rescue campaign, Rishi Sunak urged'.
The Times' 16 June headline.
The Times.

As the election campaigns trundle down the hill to election day, poll trackers have shown little meaningful change for weeks. Amongst my friends and acquaintances, I can find barely anyone who is bothering to read the campaign coverage. No doubt, news editors are just as bored as we are with the same-old, same-old. Perhaps it is they who are leaning on commentators to spice up their language, saying things like it is time to “go for the jugular”. Are they straining for headlines by provoking candidates to stop waving manifestos and start lobbing personal attacks? (And did anyone stop to consider the irresponsibility of such language, following the awful, violent murders of MPs Jo Cox and David Amess?)    

It is very uncomfortable to have enemies, which only makes it all the more astonishing that anyone ever goes into politics – professional enemy-making, if you will. And there is an incredible subtlety to the business. As a politician, one needs to be a convincing enemy to one’s enemy, but at the same time, a convincing friend to one’s enemy’s friends (in the hope that they might switch their allegiance). Then, if elected, one must serve a whole constituency, including many ‘enemies’ who didn’t actually vote for you, and probably never will. In such a complicated game of gregarious gymnastics, and with the ever worrying rise of violence and threats against MP’s, how on earth does a politician maintain any reasonable sense of safety and of self? 

An enemy who has lost his temper is one of the few people that you can trust to tell you the truth about yourself. 

Reflecting on this, I wonder whether the game of politics gives a fresh insight into those very famous words that Jesus once said: “Love your enemies.” This instruction has long baffled and inspired the great thinkers of this world. Why would Jesus say such a thing? Some focus on the way in which loving one’s enemies benefits the lover. Desmond Tutu, for example, said, “Love your enemy: it will ruin his reputation.” Or Mark Twain, somewhat more cynically, said, “Love your enemy: it will scare the hell out of them.” There are many others I could quote here, but the general theme is one of power. Loving empowers the lover to keep going in the face of hate, and it is surely the only way an MP can get through the day, serving so many people who didn’t actually vote for them.  

But looking at those who speak of enemies, there is another general theme that can be identified, one which pre-dates Jesus’ command to love enemies, and one that is to do with the way in which they help to define us. The Greek Philosopher Antisthenes is reported to have said that an enemy who has lost his temper is one of the few people that you can trust to tell you the truth about yourself. As a thinker, Antisthenes was famously cynical, one who very much subscribed to a “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” kind of vibe, even welcoming ill-repute because it could help one to grow in virtue.  

Given the popularity of Greek Philosophy in the first century, it is possible that many of Jesus’ listeners had Antisthenes pithy advice, or something like it, in the back of their minds when Jesus uttered his famous words. Of the many ways to understand “love your enemies”, some may have heard it as a reminder that enemies do us a kind of service. They help us to define ourselves, giving a profound (if somewhat uncomfortable) reflection of how we appear to others. Of course, enemies are biased. Like a distorted mirror, they over emphasise our bad propensities and overlook the good. But taken in the right spirit, this serves as a foil to our friends and acquaintances who may well distort the uncomfortable truth about ourselves in the opposite direction.  

Perhaps it is no bad thing for our politicians to admit their mutual enmity – not in the sense of tearing each other down but in the sense of sharpening each other up... 

As a young adult, I was given the advice not to fear enemies, but to divide them up into two categories: enemies in residence and enemies in exile. The exiled ones are the ones who are simply dangerous or nasty – the bullies, the gossips and those who may tend towards violence. To love these people is to pity them and to pray for them, but also to keep them far enough away so that they cannot do you harm. Enemies in residence, however, are the useful ones. These are the enemies that you keep just close enough so that you can hear what they have to say. They will scrutinise your words and your actions, they will cast doubt on your motivations, and they will scoff at your ambitions. All of this is both miserably uncomfortable and highly valuable, sowing just enough seeds of self-doubt that you check yourself, analyse yourself and strive to be the best that you can be.  

Perhaps Antisthenes was on to something: when it comes to harsh critique from enemies, what doesn’t kill you does indeed make you stronger. And perhaps this is one of the ways to interpret Jesus’ words, “love your enemies” – in the sense of loving what they do for you in terms of personal growth. If this is the case, then perhaps it is no bad thing for our politicians to admit their mutual enmity – not in the sense of tearing each other down but in the sense of sharpening each other up, of spurring each other on to be the best, most clearly defined versions of themselves that they can be.  

So, it is fine with me if there are enemies in politics: a person with enemies is a person who knows who they are and what they stand for. Enemies should, as Jesus advised, love each other enough to do the job properly and fairly – (this is no inlet for cowardly keyboard warriors). But even so, I didn’t care for the cheap, headline-grabbing phrase “go for the jugular” – it all sounds unnecessarily violent. As much as we and our politicians should love one another enough to be enemies, let us not love one other to death.   

Article
Comment
Digital
Film & TV
Masculinity
4 min read

How our social media turns us against ourselves

We treat others differently when our eyes and hearts are forced inwards.
An unhappy father sits next to a scared son in a police interview room.
Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper star in Adolescence.
Netflix.

My wife turned to me this week whilst watching the compelling Netflix drama Adolescence and asked if it was based on a true story. That proves the quality of the acting, script, and storyline. But it also demonstrates the drama’s prophetic nature. Conceived two and a half years ago by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, the perversion of Jamie’s underdeveloped brain and developing masculinity by social media forces has come to reflect real-life extreme violence by young men. With the sentencings of murderers Axel Radakubana and Nicholas Prosper in recent weeks, Jamie’s actions resonate deeply. Adolescence isn’t based on a specific true story, but that doesn’t prevent it from being true. 

What about the role of social media in these narratives? Radakubana and Prosper were radicalised by violent content they had accessed online. With social media, extreme content does well, particularly on sites with no filters on pornography and violence like Reddit and X. We are beginning to discover that content algorithms are not neutral, instead siloing us into echo chambers that are deliberately forming us into better consumers of content, advertising, and objects. Social media harvests our data and sells it on- meaning it cultivates us as the product. 

Yet these manipulations cover over the deepest issue. Social media depersonalises us, preventing us from making genuine human connection and perverting our view of anybody but us. The German philosopher Martin Buber differentiated between two different ways for humans to exist in the world. One was I-It; in a person treats everyone and everything they come into contact with as an ‘It’- something to be used or taken advantage of. 

The other was I-Thou, in which humans approach every other person as a unique being, with resources to offer the I which ensures that a mutual, open, present connection ensues. For Buber, the ultimate ‘Thou’ was God, with whom humans can have the deepest and most transformative connection. 

Social media ensures we see life in ‘I/It’ mode by removing genuine contact with others and providing curated, fake, existences that can never be open to genuine connection with others. Love and affection become commodified; likes, follows, reactions. Our presentation of ourselves becomes more extreme, more perfect, more beautified, to keep mining the commodities. Our eyes and our hearts are forced inwards, and we lose any sense of encountering a ‘Thou’ on the way. We just keep encountering the I: our own thoughts, needs, desires, self-radicalised by our own insular minds. 

This can be our contribution to the conversation on the culture our young people, and particularly young men, are growing up in. To live I/Thou lives.

The great St Augustine back in the fourth century developed the idea of ‘original sin.’ All humans are prone to destruction: it’s in our DNA. The evidence for such an idea is found in every human experience, as the destructor and the one destructed. Left unchecked without genuine connections with others to challenge and expand our hearts, an I/It life digs deeper and deeper into these destructive impulses until our humanity is twisted into violent obsessions. 

The I/It life focuses completely on self-glorification through any means, something amplified by social media. What if we don’t get enough likes, follows, reactions? What if we cannot achieve self-glory through the more banal mediums of attraction, attention, popularity?  

Both Radakubana and Prosper said they wanted to be notorious, attempting to find the most extreme channel for their violence as possible to ensure they are never forgotten. They will not be the last. Jamie continues to deny his crime but in episode three of Adolescence he states that he could do whatever he wanted to Katie, the young girl he murdered. The same impulses come through; others as objects to take advantage of in achieving self-satisfaction. 

The good intentions for human connection that some of those early social media sites were set up for has been largely lost. But the good intention can remain in our own resolution to live an I/Thou life. Putting down social media and picking up connections with humans in the real world by seeing the other with curiosity and openness will ensure that we are constantly turning our heart outwards, embracing genuine relationships, and finding space in our heart to think of the other before ourselves. These are the relationships that will make us more human. 

Ultimately, Buber was right that the ultimate ‘Thou’ connection we can make is with God. The Christian story is full of God’s desire to seek out relationship with humanity, to allow us to find a connection with God that surpasses our own human experience and transforms us to be people that slowly grow away from our destructive instincts.  

What might Christian faith have to contribute to the conversation on the culture young men are growing up in? To live I/Thou lives that are curious, open, and seeking truest divine and human connection. Such a life might even touch those who have been ravaged by social media and ignored by other I/It lives. It might even inspire them to compassion and curiosity that look beyond the content that turns them inwards, to turn outwards and find a healthier future. 

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