I think a lot about culture and its impact on faith and ethics. Of particular interest, are social media and media in general. It seems to me that media’s objective is to create a alternative reality that fuels our imaginations. Social media enables me to create and shape an identity that, may, or may not, have any relationship to who I really am. Media, in general, as exemplified in advertising, rarely portrays reality, but appeals to the imagination. This a powerful force that appeals to my self-deception. When is the last time you watched a commercial depicting reality? Essentially reality becomes a social construct.
My musings attracted me to Fr. Stephen Freeman’s latest post related to the idea of reality as a social construct. A pertinent excerpt follows with a link to the entire post.
The further we move away from the hard reality of the material world, the more deeply we press into delusion and fantasy. Part of the brutality of our modern age is bound up with our drive to force hard material reality to conform to our imagination. We find the undeniable humanity and personhood of a child in the womb to be an inconvenient obstacle to our lifestyle. Our fantasy and delusion turn to murder.
The goodness of God, however, abides in the very materiality of the world (and of our own selves). No matter how we might distort the thoughts of our minds, material reality remains unchanged. At most, we can only urge and coerce others to agree with false configurations of what actually is. Such efforts can only be maintained through some form of violence (and coercion) for they have no reality of their own to argue their case. Left alone, reality has an eloquence of its own. Gravity speaks with a clear voice as we fall from the heights.
FR. Stephen Freeman