The ancient Roman festival of Terminalia honors Jupiter Terminus, the god of borders and boundaries. Good Romans celebrated this festival each February 23rd by jointly decorating the very sites that demarcated their properties, offering requisite sacrifices, and then feasting the night away in a communal gathering.
The irony that constitutes this celebration--joining together as a unified community to exalt the importance of individual privacy--should not surprise us. Such logical inversions reveal the very core of our human nature, a human nature that dwells in (and cultivates) what mediaeval theologians called a complexio oppositorum, a "complex of opposites."
Of course, Terminalia-like ceremonies exist today and will never be bleached from human behavior; they simply take new forms and are expressed in new ways. Public elections, to take one example, express the central irony that resides in Terminalia and reveal a stark truth: that the highest gesture of modern democracies certainly takes place in transparent public spaces, but that these great acts of e pluribus unum are normally executed in the shrouded privacy of individual voting booths. Digital culture itself, as Sherry Turkle's recent book Alone Together discloses, is itself built on paradox. Go to a café and commune with those who are elsewhere. Ah, paradox; ah humanity.
The Romans knew a thing or two about human nature; and the anthropological machinery distilled and celebrated in Roman Terminalia is ripe to exert a constructive force today in the newer social terrain of digital culture. To anyone who navigates life in our suddenly screen-oppressed world, the case for reimagining and retrenching basic social boundaries presents itself each and every day.
So many of us are not only ensconced in ceaseless screen life, but we are also often saturated in these cyber worlds in protracted, bi-polar ways. Typically, we either inhabit self-built enclaves of content tailored to our own narrow tastes or we dwell in the cloud of bourgeois-consumerist content built for us by others to appeal to our basest desires and fears. Consider how all of this might integrate into the public sphere (as in "you are what you eat"), and we see how this trend is neither healthy nor sustainable. What we need is a new form of Terminalia--one for the digital age.
There are subtle allusions to Terminalia stitched into Robert Frost's famous "Mending Wall," a poem where Frost explores the paradoxical subtleties of human community by presenting a dialog between two kinds of neighbors--a limitless "elf" type person who delights in the porousness of boundaries and a darker "old-stone savage" who will always hold the wall because "Good fences make good neighbors." Conventional readings from our high school English classrooms have always held that the more evolved of the two neighbors is the "elf" promoting speaker in the poem because he, in stark contrast to his more shadowy neighbor (who, it is important to note, only has the one famous line), is the more humane and magnanimous of the two. This is a reading I have always supported for many reasons. But as we venture further and further into the new terrain of digital human commerce, I wonder if our shadowy Yankee had it right. Good fences do make good neighbors. Why might this be?
Understanding the nature and integrity of boundaries is key; and boundaries are learned in communities that model respect for them. What we are learning in the digital Wild West is that it's not so much boundaries but the rupturing of boundaries that inspires the new consideration of Terminalia. Whether they be belligerent tirades issued by anonymous trollers in comm-boxes or ill-advised late night posts in our own networks, digital terrain makes an ample space for the transgression of social boundaries, transgressions that are increasingly more insidious and toxic. These transgressions, moreover, are not hermetically sealed; they spill over from the digital world into physical life and have, more often than not, deleterious effects--especially when it comes to the civic health of communities and polities. Of course, sometimes such ruptures are entertaining and are completely in line with the "purple prose" of heated human conversation that has given exciting color to social history. But the ruptures in cyber space are upping the ante by significant degrees.
They are increasingly clumsy and mean-spirited--and both the frequency and sheer volume of negative digital speech is simply flooding and polluting the air. The immediate effect of digital hate speech is usually naked and nasty. But the aggregate cost is even more subtle and more expensive. What has been created--as if from a cloud above--is an environment increasingly bereft of human decency, a patchwork of less civil and less humane social environments. This is trending in the wrong direction and even solutions offered online by people of good will seem deficient. Responses of cheap sentimentality or utterances of shared outrage are often inauthentic, disclosing false accord or a cloaked schadenfreude.
For me, to be conscious of a need for some ethos of digital Terminalia is also dicey and not without its problems. As a Catholic theologian, I am all about the beauty of authentic encounter and relationship (modeled on the self-giving love of the interpersonal and triune God). I am with Pope Francis when he warns against "those who would build walls"--whether on borders or around one's heart--and, as pontifex, Pope Francis embodies and counsels the building of bridges instead. I too am no fan of walls between nations; and am deeply concerned about political approaches that would advocate the building of such barriers--not to mention the shoddy thinking that would hatch such plans. More, I am a Gen-Xer and am a fan of the narrative arc of Pink Floyd's landmark LP, The Wall. I respect the way that the band indicts the psychological walls we build that impede our ability to love--especially in our families. Still, even with all of this, the need for meaningful boundaries remain implacable.
What to do? First let us admit that, while there is a meaningful resemblance, digital boundaries are not the same as physical boundaries. Next, as we evolve anthropologically in this increasingly technocratic age, let us not forget an integrated view of the human person. Let us realize that the digital world is more than simply "virtual." It is not a "throw away" place, but is rather a space occupied by humans, a place connected to real, physical life. Like anything else, digital spaces will benefit civic health when they powered by decorum, powered by a sense of conversation that is not only attentive to moral engagement, but to a good sense of humor as well. Anything less is beneath us. Something to think about on this, the Feast of Terminalia.