The Pendulum

 The cultural pendulum, that winding road of human folly and half-wisdom, has seldom swung with such violent delight as it has in our own time. 

A mere generation or two ago, (if you’re under 30 you’ll have to search this out), a policy stood as a kind of civic virtue, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” President Clinton’s 1993 directive was, in its way, a shocking piece of permissive evasion. It did not so much resolve the moral tension as bury it beneath a polite fiction. Lifestyle choices were deemed a private matter, best left unprobed, lest the fragile edifice of our culture collapse under the weight of unwanted knowledge.

In that era, discretion was virtue, praised as maturity, and reticence was strength. To expose another’s hidden life was to commit an indelicacy bordering on cruelty. It was indecent to expose indecency. So it was deemed better to maintain the veil and allow the soul the freedom to hide in its shadowed corners. 

The Gen X culture congratulated itself on its sophistication because we had finally moved beyond the crude interrogations and inquisitions of earlier decades and had not descended into the barbarism of public shaming. Privacy was the lubricant of social peace. Exposure was the vulgar intrusion of prurient or punitive people. Privacy was not yet a sin against authenticity. How strange that all seems now. 

Today we live on the opposite shore. The Me Too generation (and its descendants) has enthroned exposure as the highest moral act. Vulnerability is no longer a private crucible but a public sacrament, and transparency before the whole world is the new righteousness. To withhold someone’s sin (or worse, to withhold your judgment on another) is to collude with the oppressor. Confession is compulsory, accusation is liberation, and the old veil of discretion has been torn to shreds with righteous fury. And herein lies the twisted irony. In seeking to escape the hypocrisies of discretion, we have exchanged one form of coercion for another. Where once the community policed by enforced silence, now it polices by enforced exposure.

Yet this swing has not delivered us to justice untarnished. It has birthed a culture of mob shaming, where the collective gaze turns predatory. Someone once came to me with a grievance against another and asked me to confront them on their behalf, which I did. I asked the grieved party what their ultimate goal was and their response was simply, “I want to see them destroyed.” And there we now stand collectively suspended in the chilling clarity of that declaration. It’s not enough to drain the bath water and save the baby. We are throwing out the baby, the bathwater, and setting the house ablaze, and for some it still isn’t enough. Human vengeance is never a finite act but an infinite hunger, a dark eucharist that consumes without ever being consumed, until nothing remains but the scorched silence where communion once might have been possible.

The pendulum never pauses at equilibrium. It hurtles past it, smashing what lies in its path.

History tells us this with sobering clarity in the Puritan communities of 17th century New England, as written in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In that era, the culture exalted a ferocious transparency in moral matters. Sin was not to be concealed in any fashion, but dragged into the daylight of the meetinghouse and the town square. Public confession, public penance, public shaming (the pillory, the stocks, the scarlet badge) were instruments not just of punishment but of communal purification. Privacy was suspect and smacked of hypocrisy in a refusal to submit to the shared moral order. The saints of the day believed that only through exposure could the soul be healed and the community preserved from corruption.

But the Puritans’ zeal for visibility produced its own distortions. In that culture accusations multiplied in an atmosphere of collective hysteria. The pious mob became judge, jury, and executioner. Mercy was scarce and repentance, when it came, often arrived too little too late. 

The pendulum had swung from the medieval Catholic emphasis on private confession to a radical Protestant insistence on public accountability, and in the swing of that pendulum lay both moral fervor and moral catastrophe.

What, then, can we learn from this echo across the centuries? First, that the human appetite for moral certainty is insatiable, and when frustrated in one direction, it seeks satisfaction in the opposite. The 1990s cult of discretion was a reaction against the perceived moral laxity of earlier eras. Our present cult of exposure is a reaction against the hypocrisies that discretion sheltered. Both are half-truths masquerading as wholes. 

Privacy without accountability breeds corruption, but transparency without grace breeds cruelty.

Second, shaming (whether private or public) can’t reform the soul. It may deter, it may destroy, but it seldom converts. The Puritan experiment showed that enforced visibility can produce outward conformity at the cost of inward authenticity. Our present digital age shows that enforced vulnerability can produce performative contrition at the cost of genuine healing.

As for where we are going, the pendulum will not stop here. It never does. The excesses of mob shaming are already engendering a backlash in a renewed hunger for privacy, for nuance, for something like forgiveness. We will likely see a return to discretion, not as cowardice but as charity. “Exposure fatigue” as some are calling it. We may recognize that some wounds require gentle tending rather than public airing. Or we may oscillate into new extremes like algorithmic surveillance that makes privacy obsolete altogether, or further divide into tribes where exposure is weaponized, but only against outsiders.

The wiser way, the genuinely Christlike path as I see it, lies not in swinging with the pendulum but in stepping off its arc altogether. 

Grace is expressed in the profound, even sacramental possibility that genuine victims, those who have borne the weight of violation in silence and shame, might at last find healing from the very condition of victimhood itself.

True healing is not just the erasure of the wound or a stoic endurance that pretends the scar does not exist. It is the restoration of power, the divine reclamation of a strength that was stolen. In the old era of enforced discretion, the hurting were often consigned to a perpetual silence, their stories locked away lest they disturb the community.

In this present age of compulsory transparency, for all its perils, there is at least this a profound mercy.  The victim has a voice able to speak their story without the crippling shame and fear. To name the harm is, in some measure, to begin to disempower it and to disqualify the victory of the violator, who thrives precisely on enforced silence. When a victim speaks, not as performance for the crowd, but as an act of truthful self-possession, the power that was taken away begins to return.

This is no small matter. The Christian tradition, at its deepest, has always known that confession (true confession, not the coerced spectacle) is a path to liberation. The one who was bound is unbound and the one who was shamed finds a measure of glory restored in the quiet splendor of being seen and heard in one’s full, wounded humanity, and yet loved. Victims are healed from victimhood precisely when they cease to be defined by the wound alone, when the story becomes theirs to tell on their own terms, and when vulnerability is no longer a weapon turned against them but a strength reclaimed in charity.

Yet the digital arena perverts even this good. What should be sacred speech becomes viral commodity and what should heal becomes spectacle for judgment. The pendulum swings and mercy is mangled in the motion.  Mercy tempers justice, privacy honors dignity, exposure, when it comes, should serve healing rather than humiliation. Until we learn that tension is not contradiction but the condition of genuine moral life, we shall continue to lurch from one excess to the other, each time convinced that this time we have found the kingdom.

The Kingdom is always at hand, and riding the old pendulum, we remain pilgrims on a road that bends ever back upon itself.

If we are to step off this arc of excesses, not back into the old hypocrisies of silence or forward into the new tyrannies of exposure, we must learn to recognize that healing requires both the hush of mercy and the courage of utterance.

In the end we will find Kingdom of God is not built on enforced concealment or on mandatory exhibition, but on a love so deep that it can bear to hear the worst without recoiling, and so gentle that it can allow the wounded to speak (or to remain silent) without condemnation. Until we inhabit something like that charity, we’ll continue to oscillate between the two cruelties, each masquerading as virtue, while the genuinely broken wait for a word that truly sets them free.