Woman interacting with smartphone device for social media communication and entertainment. Photo by See Less via Adobe Stock.
David DeCosse is the director of religious and Catholic Ethics with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Views are his own.
It doesn’t have to be the case but it is: Our digital world has provided us at scale with countless reasons to stereotype, vilify, and make an enemy out of anyone. We have already traveled dangerously far down this dead-end road. And we need nothing less than systemic cultural change to stop the racing progress of this systemic cultural vice.
Religions can be at the forefront of making this change. And, among other tools in their traditions, religions can help make this change by a relentless focus on human dignity. Of course, there has always been a human propensity to stereotype, vilify, and make enemies. But what’s happening now is a vast digital process that has become the default way by which we communicate at all. It has also become one of the primary ways by which we earn wealth and gain political power. And I mean astonishing wealth and immense political power.
The process has been straightforward enough: Use social media to stoke fear and anger for stereotyped, vilified, and hated others, and watch your wealth and power grow. The presidential election in November 2024 followed this perverse logic of digital media. Tech billionaires got involved in politics to keep the binary processes in place that made them wildly rich. Politicians doubled down on dispensing with any need to be truthful in favor of using information to stoke the fear and anger that would energize votes.
Religions that have allied themselves with nationalist movements have played a role in furthering this fall into digital demonization. But there’s nothing in most religions that requires such a mistaken engagement with the morally lazy, destructive binaries of nationalism.
In fact, religions have ample resources to push back against the distortion of these digital and political processes. Religions understand that human beings have a value that can’t be limited by national borders. They also have long traditions of welcoming strangers and loving enemies and finding the divine in the outcast “other”–all considered impossibilities in a world ruled by zeroes and ones.
To be sure, philosophers have objected to the haziness of appeals to dignity. The concept can mean almost anything, some say. Or the concept is criticized as a vague rhetorical device invoked to say that we all agree about some complex thing when we actually don’t. Or dignity just means the freedom to choose whatever we want and we shouldn’t make it more complicated than that.
But I think these criticisms are mistaken. They presume a need for theoretical clarity that is incompatible with the concrete, truthful force of dignity. We sense and recognize and respect a visceral, inalienable goodness in any person and call that dignity. We see a man affirm the truth in the face of threatening power and we recognize his dignity. We see a man fawn over a liar’s lies and we recognize the fawning man’s indignity. In the face of digital demonization, religions should insist on three dimensions of this visceral concept.
First, there’s dignity understood as the inalienable capacity of every person for freedom and responsibility in a context of truth and goodness. Even when we use our freedom wrongly, we may impair our dignity, but we don’t lose it. It remains with us as an awareness of guilt and as a capacity for change. The blinding speed of our digital lives can deceive us into thinking that we’ve lost our freedom. But we haven’t. Even when we become a demonizer on social media, we’re responsible for doing so.
Second, this inalienable dignity belongs equally to all. Of course, people are different. But in an essential way there is an equal quality of dignity belonging to all that is constantly threatened in our digital world. Pope Francis spoke of this threat when he said: “No one will ever openly deny that they are human beings, yet in practice, by our decisions and the way we treat them, we can show that we consider them less worthy, less important, less human.”
Third, there is dignity understood as the cry that says: “I belong! No one may cast me out of the community of humankind!” Dignity understood in this way can help push back against the digital forces of relentless division. Pope Francis captured the tenor of those forces when he said: “New walls are erected for self-preservation, the outside world ceases to exist and leaves only ‘my’ world, to the point that others, no longer considered human beings possessed of an inalienable dignity, become only ‘them.’”
Digital demonization is incompatible with human dignity. Religions need to lead our badly needed cultural change.
