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One of the buzz words theologians toss around is interrupts. That is, God is seen as interrupting the trajectories of history, both globally and personally. My read is that the theologians are using interrupts as a close synonym for prophetic. The prophetic voice interrupts our plans, assumptions, status, and sense of security or superiority.
But if God is a Black Swan, as I think he might be, then perhaps a stronger word is needed. God not only interrupts, God disrupts. Let me explain.
To be a Christian is to make a claim so radical about God that it can be destabilizing if properly internalized. That most Christians are unaware of the claim they are tacitly making goes to illustrate Taleb's observation about retrospective certainty in the aftermath of the Black Swan.
To be a Christian is to claim that God can be so disruptive (i.e., a Black Swan) as to create a whole new world religion. That is, God's actions in Jesus were so unanticipated, so novel, and so different that a rupture was created between the trajectory of the Jewish faith and the subsequent Christian faith. In the language of the gospel of John, the Word entered the World and the World did not recognize him.
This rupture is so theologically problematic that the most sophisticated theological treatise from the early church--the Epistle to the Romans--is devoted to rescuing God's reputation in the face of this rupture. Summarizing, Romans is essentially about how God can be trusted if God does, in fact, act like a Black Swan (as he apparently did in Jesus Christ). That is, it could be claimed that God's actions in Jesus were so disruptive that it gave the Jews no realistic chance to accept Jesus as the Messiah. If this is so, how can God then judge the Jews? The fault is rather on God's Black Swan disruption. God was, in short, too surprising.
(BTW, Islam doubles down on this problem claiming that God acted, post-Jesus, in a second disruptive, world-religion-creating, Black Swan action.)
This, then, is the claim I think Christians often fail to confront: Christianity claims that God acted in such a disruptive fashion in salvation history to effectively create a whole new world religion. That is a bit more than interruptive, it's downright disruptive.
If Christians claim this, as I think we must, then how can we ever claim to predict God's current or future activity? To be a Christian is to say that God acts like a Black Swan. And if God is a Black Swan are we not just as likely to find ourselves in the position the Jews faced when they encountered Jesus?
This worry echos in the Christian consciousness. We often ask ourselves: Would we recognize Jesus if he came to us today? We wonder, would Jesus even BE a Christian? Would Jesus go to my church? Would he attend a Christian university? Would he be white? Male? American? What if Jesus was a poor women from a third world country from a different religion? Is that scenario even possible? Isn't being a Christian a claim that, yes, indeed, such a disruptive act from God is possible?
All this makes your head spin.
One of the ways we can prevent this disorientation is to retrospectively look back at the Incarnational rupture and tell a story how, if the Jews just knew their bibles a bit better, Jesus would not have been disruptive but wholly expected. Can't we look at all the fulfilled prophecies about Jesus as a bridge over the rupture? Can't we see that signs were in place, functioning as sutures in a wound, at the time of Jesus' arrival?
No doubt prophetic pointers were in place (the New Testament points to many of them), but we must beware of what Taleb calls the narrative fallacy, the tendency to misremember the randomness by smoothing over the surprise of the Black Swan with post hoc story-telling. Events always look inevitable in the rearview mirror. Look at 9/11. After the events of 9/11 all kinds of data came to our attention suggesting that someone in the government should have see the attacks coming. Someone was to blame because the signs were there. But this kind of retrospective analysis misses the fact that signal and noise are not so easily separated in real time. Hindsight is always 20/20, but we can't expect that kind of clarity from people trying to peer into the future. In short, yes, there were prophecies about Jesus in place but we expect too much to suggest that the Jews should have read those signs clearly. An appeal to prophecy doesn't appreciably attenuate the disruptive character of Jesus.
So where does this leave us? How do we do theology in a faith created by a Black Swan? How are we to peer into life and the future knowing that God has, and can, act in highly disruptive and surprising ways?
Taleb has a suggestion. He suggests that we pay more attention to what we don't know than to what we do know. He suggests that we become antischolars rather than scholars (pp. 1-2). That is, we study what we don't know and about the limits of our knowledge. Taleb has a name for this person, an epistemocrat. An epistemocrat is someone possessed of epistemic humility. As Taleb describes: "Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say 'I don't know.' He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion." Taleb is, I believe, using a bit of hyperbole here, but his point is well taken. Would that churches were filled with epistemocrats! That churches would function, to use Taleb's word, as an epistemocracy! A place filled with epistemic humility where people are introspective and even tortured about their claims concerning God and are more than willing to say "I don't know."
Because, it seems to me, as I argued above, that to be a Christian one must function in just this manner. The Chrisitan faith was founded upon a Black Swan rupture. To be a Christian, therefore, means that we must believe in a way that allows God to surprise us, and radically so. Our beliefs must allow room for God's Black Swan activity.
Many of the Church Fathers understood this. And like Taleb's antischolar, the Fathers posited a kind of antitheology. It is called, grandly, the Via Negativa, the "Negative Way." This is also called apophatic theology, a theology focused on what cannot be said about God. Apophatic theology converges with Taleb's account in that (p. 192) "The Black Swan [epistemic] asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right." That is, we are always going to be much more confident about what we don't know about God than about what we do know. The antitheologian will claim that the only claim you can make about God is simply this: "I don't know." And in that claim God's radical freedom and Otherness, His Black Swan character, is recognized, honored, and preserved.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Is God a Black Swan?: Part 2, Disruption, the Narrative Fallacy, and Antitheology
Friday, May 16, 2008
Into the World--Chapter Six: The Voice of Conscience
Contents Prologue and Abstract
Chapter Two: The Layered Gospel Context
Chapter Three: Today’s Warring Intellectual Context
Chapter Four: A Perpetual Warring Intellectual Context
Chapter Five: A Primer—The Bible’s Broadest Theme
Chapter Six: The Voice of Conscience
Chapter Eight: The Message of the Cross as Supreme Answer
Chapter Nine: The View from Enlightened Self-Interest
Chapter Ten: The Challenge from Kantian Autonomy
Chapter Eleven: The View from James’ Radical Question
Chapter Twelve: The View from Sartre’s Bad Faith
Chapter Thirteen: Kierkegaard’s Challenge to Intelligibility—First Part
Chapter Thirteen: Kierkegaard’s Challenge to Intelligibility—Second Part
Epilogue
[A recapitulation may be helpful: Chapter One accepts the challenge to Christian faith expressed in Nietzsche's view that Pilate's "What is truth?" is the "annihilation" of the New Testament. Chapter Two digs into the text of The Gospel According to John to see whether the irony of Scripture's silence following Pilate's question can be explained, but a much bigger irony is encountered instead: A man subject to human judgment and condemnation does not look like "the Son of God." It is immediately apparent that the irony must rest in our view of God or the view of God presented by the trial and crucifixion of Jesus cannot depict the truth about God. Chapter Three uses compelling quotes from Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Isaac Asimov to show that Pilate's famous question still animates vocal modern critics of Christian faith. In Chapter Four the Apostle Paul's contrast between godly and worldly wisdom places the irony of the divine Logos tried and crucified in us, but we are still left wondering what precisely the truth about God is that Jesus came into the world to reveal. Finally, in Chapter Five we discover that the passion narrative precisely foils the Serpent's view of God as represented in the Genesis story of the fall, and the contrast between the narratives of the fall and the passion set up the Bible's overarching theme, as the passion narrative corrects the false view of God set up at the fall. This addresses the irony of the divine Logos subjected to human judgment and condemnation. In Chapter Six we now look more closely into the context of Jesus' exchange with Pilate in The Gospel According to John. You will discover that the text strongly suggests that Jesus was speaking--and very loudly--to Pilate at the very point that Pilate asked, "What is truth?" That allows us to reverse our judgment that Scripture is silent on Pilate's question, and it provides a core scriptural truth claim that we can--and will in future chapters--examine.]
We do not yet appreciate the full irony of Jesus’ silence following Pilate’s question. The comment that directly inspired it was, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” (John 18:37) The set-up was perfect. All that Scripture needed to do was to have Jesus answer Pilate’s question, and it would have given Pilate—and through Scripture countless others—an account of the purported truth. Instead Scripture allows silence here and maintains it throughout (see the Introduction). Does that mean that Scripture provides no answer?
Not necessarily. That would depend on what is meant by “my voice.” If we were to take Scripture's words literally at this point, only those who could have directly heard Jesus' voice while he lived in Palestine for about the first thirty years C.E. had a chance to listen to, and hence belong to, the truth. That is false by any reasonable interpretation of the text. In fact, there would have been no reason to commit the words ascribed to Jesus to writing, if that were the case.
Did John's Jesus mean “listen” in the sense of “are willing to take the words of Scripture to heart,” then? That is an improvement over the inane sense just considered. Yet this interpretation also suffers from a form of the same defect. As one must be in earshot of Jesus to have a chance to belong to the truth in the first case, here one must either read the Bible for oneself or be within earshot of someone else who is reciting it out loud to belong to the truth. (Yes, that is ridiculously literal, but it is helpful to make that explicit!) That interpretation, however, is incompatible with "belonging to the truth" being the condition of listening to Jesus’ voice. For if the condition of belonging to the truth must be in place for a person to listen to Jesus’ voice, reading or hearing Jesus’ words themselves does not prompt the listening that marks the presence of truth in the person’s life. Thus, belonging to “the truth”—by dint of being a pre-condition of listening to Jesus’ voice—does not equate with acquiescing in hearing or reading the words of Scripture. Set that aside then too.
The point at which the accusers brought Jesus before Pilate provides several telling observations. First, the accusers would not enter the Praetorium—Pilate’s residence and the Roman headquarters—“…so as to avoid ritual defilement…” (John 18:28) The implication for Pilate could only be insulting. Adding to the insult, the circumstance forced Pilate to accommodate the accusers in order to hear their case. The circumstance would have been annoying to the Roman Governor in the least.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Welcoming the Stranger and Entertaining Angels
A recent sermon I delivered at the Highland church on hospitality, Rublev's icon, and welcoming God in the stranger.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Is God a Black Swan?: Part 1, Black Swans and the Triplet of Opacity
Two of the more interesting books I've read in the last year are Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable both by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Both Fooled and The Black Swan are about issues of chance and randomness. Fooled is a cautionary tale focused mainly on investing and financial markets. The basic argument is this: Nobody knows how to predict markets but enough people are playing this game of roulette that, by chance alone, some people are "successful" in their investments. And yet, we regularly misunderstand this success, mistaking chance for causality. We see the successful as skilled rather than lucky.
The Black Swan continues this meditation on chance and randomness but it is more philosophical and epistemological in nature. If you are interested in the markets read Fooled. If you are interested in epistemology read The Black Swan.
The metaphor of "the black swan" comes from the notorious problem of induction from Philosophy 101. It goes something like this:
Every swan you have ever seen, read, or heard about is white. Thus, you conclude that "All swans are white." This form of reasoning is called induction. You reason from particulars to a general conclusion. But are you truly justified in this conclusion? The conclusion seems reasonable. All the data point to the truth of the conclusion. And yet this conclusion is very fragile. All it takes is one black swan to immediately falsify your claim. And here's the thing, how do you know you've checked thoroughly for the black swan? Just because YOU haven't seen or heard of one doesn't mean they don't exist.
For Taleb the black swan from the classic problem of induction becomes a metaphor for his project: Pointing out to us how we confidently predict the future based upon our past experiences when in reality we have no real idea what the future will bring. We routinely predict a future full of white swans because that is what we've always known. And yet black swans enter our world and disrupt the cosy plans we built upon our can't miss forecasts. Many of these black swan events are hugely disruptive and radically alter the course of the future. And yet, despite their huge impact, these events were wholly unexpected.
Taleb argues that Black Swan events are what drive the history world. From the computer to the Internet to nuclear bombs to the invention of the printing press. Prior to the onset of these Black Swans the future appeared orderly and predictable: Tomorrow will be like today and all the days before. But either quickly or slowly the Black Swan took history into a completely different direction, a direction no one had imagined or predicted.
One of Taleb's main concerns is this: How shall we regard forecasts of the future in a world of Black Swans? His answer, not surprisingly, is this: We should ignore them. Why? Because no one really knows what tomorrow will bring. Black Swans are, by definition, unpredictable. If you could predict them, well, they wouldn't be Black Swans.
Let's give Taleb's definition of a Black Swan:
"First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable." (pp. xvii-xviii)
Black Swans occur when there is a disjoint between what we know and what we think we know. Black Swans come from beyond our epistemic horizons. This disjoint is fueled by facets of human psychology that make us overconfident in our pronouncements about the future. Taleb calls three important features of this psychology the triplet of opacity:
"a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize;
b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality) and
c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories..." (p. 8)
Taleb is a provocative writer and thinker. I encourage you to read either Fooled or The Black Swan. As I read the books I couldn't help but think about them from my fused psychotheological stance. Again, Taleb's interests are empirical and pragmatic. I doubt he would smile on theological applications, And yet, I kept wondering "Is God a Black Swan?"
Specifically, I thought of the Call of Abraham, the Exodus, and the Incarnation. Each event fit features of Taleb's definition of a Black Swan: A rare, high impact event that only retrospectively "makes sense." And I also wondered at how, given God's Black Swan character, religious people might also suffer from the triplet of opacity. Don't religious people suffer from the illusion that they know what God is up to? Don't religious people clean up the past making God's actions appear more expected and rational than how they really appeared at the time of their occurrence? And might preachers, church authorities, theologians, or other "learned persons" be particularly prone to overconfidence when guessing what God is up to?
So I wondered, is God a Black Swan? And if so, what are the implications for the religious life?
Friday, May 09, 2008
Into the World--Chapter Five: A Primer--The Bible's Broadest Theme
Contents Prologue and Abstract
Chapter Two: The Layered Gospel Context
Chapter Three: Today’s Warring Intellectual Context
Chapter Four: A Perpetual Warring Intellectual Context
Chapter Five: A Primer—The Bible’s Broadest Theme
Chapter Seven: The Voice of God
Chapter Eight: The Message of the Cross as Supreme Answer
Chapter Nine: The View from Enlightened Self-Interest
Chapter Ten: The Challenge from Kantian Autonomy
Chapter Eleven: The View from James’ Radical Question
Chapter Twelve: The View from Sartre’s Bad Faith
Chapter Thirteen: Kierkegaard’s Challenge to Intelligibility—First Part
Chapter Thirteen: Kierkegaard’s Challenge to Intelligibility—Second Part
Epilogue
The first three chapters of the Bible are among the most famous, covering the two creation stories followed immediately by the story of “the fall.” Having created the world, the story tells us that God set Adam in charge of the Garden of Eden with only one prohibition: “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” (Genesis 2:16-17) In the story God brings all the animals that he has created to Adam to be named. While performing the task it becomes clear to Adam that he has no partner, and God creates Eve to be Adam’s by taking flesh from his side. According to the story, the first couple were “naked, and were not ashamed.” (Genesis 2:25)
Into this primal picture of innocence creeps a Serpent who asks Eve for clarification about the prohibition. The Serpent then contradicts God’s warning, saying, “You will not die…” (Genesis 3:4) The contradictory statement, of course, sets up a dilemma, whether to believe God or the Serpent.
To bolster his chances of winning her trust, the Serpent casts doubt on God’s motive for the prohibition. “…God knows that when you eat of [the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil] …you will be like God.” (Genesis 3:5) The story goes on to tell us that Eve saw that the tree was beautiful, had fruit that looked good to eat, and—if the Serpent was to be believed—made one wise. Thus, by casting doubt on God’s motive for the prohibition, advancing the possibility of becoming godlike by breaking it, and appealing to the tree’s desirability, the Serpent gained Eve’s trust, and through her Adam’s too.
As long as Adam and Eve could assume that any good thing should be made available to them, God is automatically suspect for keeping an apparent good from them. Armed with that assumption, the Serpent’s words are free to do their work. God does not want me to have a good thing that is clearly available; so, apparently, God does not want what is good for me. At that point disregarding God’s prohibition and trusting the Serpent makes sense.
But does the assumption make sense when questioned? Doesn’t the assumption that any good thing should be made available to me fly in the face of the fact that others have good things that I have no right to take? Isn’t being friends with other persons incompatible with a boundless prerogative to pursue self-interest? Clearly these considerations are the case; just as clearly the operating assumption, which on the face of it seemed reasonable, turns out to be false in the context of a caring, trusting relationship.
In fact, friendship can sometimes only be maintained at great personal cost. Returning to The Gospel According to John for commentary, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:13) On that almost tautologically true view, the greater a friendship is the greater the willingness of a friend is to make sacrifices for the friendship. Thus, friendship puts at least some limit on the pursuit of self-interest—to cite the most pertinent instance, not stealing from persons who are my friends, as Adam and Eve surely should have understood. And a person who does not understand that does not have the capacity to be a friend.
Accordingly, the story of the fall ends with a visit from God in the garden; followed by the revelation of Adam and Eve’s theft; and then this: “[God] drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed…a sword…to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Genesis 3:24) Dramatically, emphatically, friendship with God ended.
What does one make of this story? In a search for the source of an intellectual conversion to a false view of God, it certainly stands out. It would constitute a clear and decisive origin in Scripture for the false conceptual conversion, if it can be agreed that it is so. And it clearly colors all of Scripture to follow; for never again in the Bible is humankind pictured in a caring, trusting relationship with God. But does the story of the fall produce a view of God contrary to the Supreme Irony? If so, the desiderata noted at the end of the last chapter will have been met.
In fact, the basic elements of the story of the fall do form a foil to the Supreme Irony. First, whereas the Serpent brings to the fore what God will not give to humanity, the message of the cross, when we look to the most famous portion of the text of The Gospel According to John, is that there is nothing so precious that God will not give it for the sake of humanity: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes…” (John 3:16)
Second, that which God withholds from humanity in the Genesis story forms the basis for the seed of doubt that the Serpent uses to call God’s words into question. By contrast, in the message of God on the cross, that which God does not spare for the sake of humanity—his Son—forms the basis of Christian faith in God.
And third, whereas Scripture tells us that believing the Serpent’s account of God lead to death, believing “the message of the cross” brings eternal life: “…so that everyone who believes…may have eternal life.” (John 3:16) It surely appears to be the case that to believe the message of the cross is to believe in a view of God that foils the view that the Serpent preached to Eve in the garden.4
More interestingly, when in the Genesis story the first humans chose to act on the temptation to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they chose to put self-interest above their friendship with God as evidenced by (1) that they chose not to trust God, (2) that they chose to violate God’s prohibition, (3) that they did so rather than protect their relationship with God, and (4) that they implicitly chose to believe that God did not have their best interest in mind. By acting to pursue what they believed to be in their best interest, then, Adam and Eve broke their relationship with God; they chose self-interest over preserving their relationship with God. The image of the first humans hiding from God at the end of the story of the fall depicts their awareness of the implications of their choice.
Most interestingly, if we allow the message of the cross to be used as a commentary on the fall, by placing their perceived interests above their friendship with God, Adam and Eve became ungodly. For to be godly in Christian terms means becoming like Jesus who, in the words of an early hymn that Paul quotes, “emptied himself” in order to obediently convey divine love to humanity:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
Who, though he was in the form
of God,
did not regard equality with
God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking on the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the
point of death—
even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:6-8)
The contrast is unmistakable. Humanity takes from God with the hope of becoming like God, whereas godliness is emulated by giving. The message of the cross—the Supreme Irony as Supreme Being—corrects that error by enacting the Supreme Gift and making faith in it the crucial aspect of authentic faith. It could not be clearer: The message of the cross corrects the serpent’s message at the fall.
Moreover, this view comports with the core Christian view of God as love. For love is a transitive concept and so can only be realized in a relationship. Adam and Eve broke their relationship with God when they placed self-interest over remaining true to the relationship. In doing so they became antithetical to what it means to be godlike, as expressed by Christian Scripture.
In short, for a human being to be godlike—from the perspective of Christian faith—means to be like Jesus, and to be like Jesus means to be willing to sacrifice oneself for the sake of one’s love for others. Hence, loving self-sacrifice for one’s friends versus self-seeking sacrifice of the trust integral to one’s relationships are the contrary views which emerge when we juxtapose the Genesis story with the message of the cross—the message that Paul calls foolishness from the side of “the world’s wisdom.”
And clearly there is much to the contrast beyond the scriptural text. For if one asks whether self-interest or loyalty in human relationships ought to serve as the primary motivation when those two domains of human value come into conflict, the question tears the human psyche in two. What is humanity, at bottom, a mass of self-seeking individuals, or a mass of individuals willing to sacrifice self-interest when necessary to preserve the integrity of the web of relationships that comprises human society? If I give up what I value most, I am a fool. The question is, “Which choice will define foolishness for me?” The answer is determined by what I choose as my primary source of motivation, and that choice informs the core of Christian faith and belief.
The message of God on the cross—the Supreme Irony as Supreme Being—clearly has its foil in the story of the fall. Thus, for Christian Scripture to be understood as literature in the most basic sense, the Supreme Irony of God on the cross as a corrective to the Genesis fall must be understood. At the most basic level, the message of the cross serves as the moral complement to the story of the fall, and that complementary nexus informs the Christian Bible’s overarching message and comprises its broadest unifying theme.
That theme sets up a point of view that comports fully with Ken Miller’s view that Genesis should be regarded as a story that expresses a spiritual truth as opposed to a scientific truth. It seems reasonable that one should judge literature by the value of what it says, as opposed to what it does not say. What the Genesis story does say contributes fundamentally to understanding the Christian Bible’s core meaning. If one returns to attitudes expressed toward the Bible by the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins, it is clear that their remarks fail to comprehend this most basic level of scriptural meaning: “But what does that mean!?”4 It is a telling question.
CHAPTER FIVE NOTES
1. The overview sought here can be interpreted conservatively or liberally. These posts will not touch on the question of how to integrate this overview with one's wider theological commitments. But perhaps a short comment is in order. A conservative interpretation needs no explanation. But the liberal pole, if it is to be more than a ceding of literalism to the advance of scholarship, may not be apparent. A brief quote from Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology, Volume Two, will create some interpretive space: "...[Christian theology] has to say that Jesus as the Christ is related to that historical development of which he is the center, determining its beginning and its end. It begins the moment human beings start realizing their existential estrangement and raise the question of the New Being. Obviously, such a beginning cannot be determined by historical research but must be told in legendary and mythical terms..." (The University of Chicago Press, 1957) p. 100. For Tillich, then, the problem of ceding a literal interpretation to the advance of scholarship does not arise. The dynamic this sets up between faith and understanding, however, is too subtle to do more than cite here.
2. Quoted in Stephen S. Hall, “Darwin’s Rottweiler,” Discover, Vol. 26 No. 9, September 2005 (www.discover.com/issues/sep-05/features/darwins-rottweiler).
5. Hall, ibid.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
PostSecret: Part 5, The PostSecret Experience
Last post in this series. I hope you enjoyed it. And thanks to Frank Warren, creator of PostSecret, for his comments.
One of the papers we presented at the SWPA conference involved data we collected from PostSecret participants, people who have mailed in a secret to PostSecret. Specifically, we asked PostSecret participants to take an online survey we created to capture facets of their PostSecret experience. Among the things we inquired about were three big questions:
1. What are the motives of PostSecret participants? Why are they mailing in secrets?
2. Did participating in PostSecret affect other forms of secret sharing?
3. What was the psychological and emotional experience of mailing a secret to PostSecret?
To date, 117 participants have completed the survey. Of the data we have analyzed these participants report having mailed in an average of 3.17 secrets to PostSecret.
Regarding our first big question, we asked these participants why they mailed in their secrets. Some people might think that these participants were mainly interested in getting posted/published or to have some fun. But we suspected that many people were mailing in secrets for psychotherapeutic reasons. So, we asked two forced-choice questions regarding motive (% responding in parentheses):
1. If you had to choose between the following, which was the MOST important motive for mailing in a secret?
To get published/posted (14%)
Share/Participate (86%)
2. if you had to choose between the following, which was the MOST important motive for mailing in a secret?
Personal growth/healing (86%)
Fun/Entertainment (14%)
Overall, then, in their own eyes, most PostSecret participants report that their motives for sharing were therapeutic in nature rather than a form of idle entertainment or from the desire to "get picked" by PostSecret.
Concerning our second big question, quite interestingly, mailing in a secret to PostSecret seems to lead to subsequent disclosure and secret-sharing. Specifically, 58% of respondents stated that they went on to tell someone in their life the secret they had sent in anonymously to PostSecret. This seems to suggest that people may be using PostSecret as a "first step" in gaining the mastery and courage needed to share their secrets with people in their life. PostSecret may be empowering people toward greater transparency beyond the PostSecret community.
Finally, we asked respondents about the psychological and emotional experience of participating in PostSecret. To start, 56% of respondents stated that sharing their secret with PostSecret had been moderately to very beneficial to them, emotionally speaking. We went on to ask a variety of questions about the emotions of sharing the secret. Specifically, we asked about the degree of fear, excitement, regret and relief they felt when they dropped their secret in the mail. (One may ask why there was fear in an anonymous process. Interestingly, 7% of the respondents said that someone did discover their identity after the secret was published/posted by PostSecret.)
After collecting the emotional response ratings we correlated them with the ratings of emotional benefit. Interestingly, those reporting the greatest benefit from sharing with PostSecret reported experiencing the following emotional features:
More difficulty in sharing.
Greater relief after sharing.
Greater fear of possible identification after sharing.
In short, those who experienced the greatest (self-reported) benefit from PostSecret were people who experienced the PostSecret disclosure in a way similar to risky interpersonal discosure. That is, these participants report that the disclosure was hard to do, risky, and cathartic. Conversely, those dropping secrets in the mail with little emotional connection don't seem to get much benefit from sharing/participating.
In short, people participate in PostSecret for lots of reasons. But many people approach the mailbox with trembling hands and hearts. What they are about to do is affecting them powerfully. Further, it seems that after the mailing these people appear empowered to go forward with face-to-face disclosure with the people in their life.
Finally, we asked the respondents if they would share, roughly, the basic content of the secret (or the most recent of multiple secrets) they had sent in. Sixty-seven people answered:
1 my educational challenges
2 a pregnancy scare
3 my possible unwanted pregnancy.
4 I remember that one of them was "I'm scared my medication defines me." but I don't remember the others. I guess that means that they're no longer that big of a burden :]
5 cutting, suicide, depression, fear, change, nightmares
6 They were about how i was feeling at a very difficult time in my life.
7 Not being worth anything when my friends aren't around.
8 Marriage. Life after Rape.
9 my love
10 "I flirt with men in the military because they have the future my parent wouldn't let me have"
11 I emailed a photo of a £10 English note which read "I can't pretend everything is okay anymore" it was liberating to see it up on post secret but also now its somewhere else being used and I don't know where!
12 about having a crush one someone I have never met in real life
13 one was about how i feel about the "right one"
14 I sent three. 1- a bad relationship 2- lost loved one 3- finally finding love, in the most bizarre place.
15 One of my biggest regrets--my instigation of the end of a close friendship.
16 Relationships
17 none of my friends understanding my motives for doing something, and how i felt.
18 rape
19 It was about realizing how scared I am to move away from my family and friends.
20 I seriously consider moving to another country and changing my name to get away from my father.
21 Not being able to talk to a friend because I didn't want to date him and therefore it lead to us avoiding each other since then.
22 my sexuality.
23 desire/lust I had for a dance partner - both while I had a boyfriend and after we broke up
24 Moving across the country and leaving everyone behind. I didn't realize how much I needed them until it was too late.
25 "He was the biggest mistake I ever made, but he was worth it." I cheated on my ex-boyfriend, and that was definitely one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. I still feel like I learned something from it about myself and about how my actions have consequences and what it means to be used.
26 an old friend
27 religion
28 Living with a disorder that everyone thinks I've overcome (trichotillomania).
29 sex, relationships, marriage, father, etc...
30 Something I did that i fear will jeopardize a close friendship.
31 How my father killed my mother
32 Self harm
33 My secrets were about being gay, falling in love with my bestfriend, and how being a homosexual related with Church of Christ religious upbringing and background.
34 cutting
35 leaving school, at the time i was terrified
36 me having an abortion when i was 13 after being raped at a party i wasn't supposed to be at.
37 The one secret I shared was about my first orgasm...it was too embarrassing to tell anyone I know, but I felt that other people might benefit from seeing it. Post Secret has also led me to share a much more significant secret with people that care about me, although I did not mail it in.
38 Doubt about my sexual orientation.
39 one was about my bulimia, the others were about my crush on my best friend with a girlfriend
40 three blues, two greens & a beer. you're the only one that know what that means. and i like that.
41 The most important one was about uncertainty in regards to a previous relationship - about why it didn't work out.
42 Both of my secrets delt with lonliness and personal flaws.
43 My friend's choice to have an abortion and my regret at not trying harder to stop her or find other options.
44 I am 18, Mormon, and Gay, I am In Love with him, I have had sex with him, but I am still going on a mission, is that wrong?
45 Love.
46 letting go of a past relationship
47 Insomnia
48 1) masturbation. 2) ex boyfriend x2.
49 relationship
50 not knowing who I really am. If I'm the good guy that I was being raised to be
51 it sounds silly, and verry teenage girl-ish but, it was about a boy, of course, and for 3 years, it was like he was the only person i could see. we tried..but it failed..and i could never find someone that gave me the same feeling. i still have a lot of feelins for him.
52 Family problems, love problems, sadness (I submitted several)
53 I had a few....
54 my sexual orientation, my relationships with people, stuff I wish I could say to people but never really would in real life... that sort of stuff.
55 Cutting
56 Race
57 The loss of my love and fear of wasting my life
58 my then girlfriend (now ex)
59 Loosing my virginity, even though I'm a devout christian and vowed to wait for marriage. It made it even worse that he was drunk and barely remembered it. i've not had sex since, but i know that i could have waited if i wanted to. its just disappointing because i never knew i cud let myself down.
60 A variety of things. Mainly about feelings.
61 I'd just committed adultery with a man 12 years my senior.
62 sexual experiences
63 It said, "I keep hoping he'll get drunk and want to kiss me again." It was about my ex-boyfriend and how I felt unwanted and thought that the only way someone would want to be with me was if they were drinking.
64 The one I had posted on the PostSecret website this past summer 2007 said, "Every time I see a black person in passing, I worry that they're thinking I'm a racist."
65 Some secrets were about family, some were about friends, some about my ex-boyfriend. My most significant was a picture of my three-month-old niece on the day she was born. On the picture I wrote, "You might have saved my life."
66 Being gay, Loving my best friend, and Church
67 me and an ex boyfriend, how I still care about him and he has completly moved of from me
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
PostSecret: Part 4, PostSecret, Experimental Disclosure, and Virtual Confession Boxes
One of the striking features of PostSecret are the consistent reports of psychological healing and release that PostSecret has provided persons (go back and watch the second video from my first post in this series). As a research group we wanted to investigate these reports.
Our first question is one you might have asked: Can mailing in an anonymous secret be a source of psychological healing?
The answer might surprise you. To begin, let's back up and talk about the psychological research regarding experimental disclosure.
It is widely known that people, after positive and negative life events, share with others about those events and their reactions to them. This disclosure, particularly for negative events, is considered desirable and healthy. We recognize that people need to talk, share, and process their strong emotions. But what, exactly, are the curative facets of self-disclosure?
In pioneering work begun in the mid-80s, James Pennebaker had people come in to a laboratory and engage in a disclosure exercise. Specifically, across 3 to 5 days Pennebaker had participants come in and expressively write for 15-20 minutes about a traumatic or stressful incident in their life. After this period of writing, when compared to control participants, the participants in the experimental disclosure condition showed improved psychological and physical health. In short, simply writing about a trauma or significant life stressor produces physical and mental health benefits.
The effects of experimental disclosure have been replicated across hundreds of studies. Multiple meta-analytic reviews have summarized this work and all have reached the same conclusion: Writing expressively about negative life events can improve your health, physically and psychologically.
It should be noted that the effects of expressive writing are not as robust as those for psychotherapy. But given that expressive writing is so quick, easy, and cheap relative to therapy its more modest gains are not to be sniffed at.
Why does expressive writing produce these positive benefits? Three answers are typically offered.
First, the writing may be producing cathartic benefits. In this view, disclosure is mainly aimed at "getting things off your chest", emotionally speaking. This catharsis can be achieved by talking or writing.
A second idea is that what is gained in disclosure is insight. That is, as we talk or write we begin to objectify the events in our lives and our emotions. In disclosure we begin to step back and observe our inner responses. This "stepping back" grants us a bit of distance between ourselves and our problems. From this vantage we are better placed to explore healthier perspectives.
Finally, disclosure may be helping us achieve mastery over our emotions. Emotions can be chaotic and out of control. We feel pushed around by our emotions. Disclosure allows us to begin the process of regaining control of our feelings. We sort them out, label them, and channel them. Through disclosure we begin to tame and integrate our feelings into our self-concept.
I expect that disclosure involves all these factors--catharsis, insight, mastery--each contributing to the healing factor of disclosure.
The point I'd like to emphasize regarding the experimental disclosure research is that these features--catharsis, insight, mastery--don't necessarily require that we disclose to another person. Clearly, most of the time we do disclose, talk, and share with other people. But the healing effects may have less to do with the other person than the fact that we are externalizing our emotions. This externalizing allows us to vent, gain insight, and reacquire mastery.
I think we can now see how PostSecret can be producing mental health benefits. By writing down a secret, working on a creative way to communicate that secret, and physically dropping the postcard into a mailbox a person is activating those features we find in experimental disclosure: Catharsis, insight, and mastery.
In short, for a psychologist aware of the relevant literature it is actually not surprising at all that PostSecret has therapeutic benefits. Hundreds of studies have been done showing how expressive activities of this sort can improve psychological and physical health.
This literature also allows us to get a handle on the what strikes many skeptics of PostSecret to be odd and deviant: The anonymous nature of the process. I know among my professorial peers the anonymous nature of PostSecret seems to undermine its credibility as a mental health intervention. We assume that disclosure, to be effective, must be face-to-face and interpersonal. No doubt this kind of disclosure is preferable for a host of other reasons (e.g., communal cohesion) but this does not imply that anonymous secret sharing is unhealthy. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite conclusion: The health benefits of secret sharing don't wholly reside in the interpersonal aspect. Simply writing about events and emotions provides demonstrable benefits.
Perhaps this conclusion gains spiritual respectability when we think about the confession box used in Catholic confession where the penitent confesses to the priest through a screen. Of course, the goal of confession isn't psychological well-being, but, as we have seen, there are psychological benefits in disclosing emotionally distressing material. And in the confessional box this disclosure is anonymous.
And times are changing. The diaries and journals of times past, now seen from the perspective of this post as a source of psychological coping and healing, are giving way to online formats: blogging, Facebook or MySpace notes, and PostSecret. This makes our "stuff" much more publicly accessible, creating a host of issues and risks associated with this kind of disclosure. However, the psychological research suggests that these online forms of disclosure may not be solely driven by cultural pathology. Rather, these forms of disclosure flourish because they are producing tangible emotional and psychological benefits.
P.S.
Of course, one could write and not hit the Publish button. But what's the fun in that?
