The Modern Puritanical Listicle

Last updated on: January 4, 2016 at 10:11 am by Anne Kennedy

The Modern Puritanical Listicle 2016-01-04T10:11:23-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I am a person of lists, which drives Matt crazy. I have one big list that is subdivided into many other lists, by category, and as long as I keep my list in my busy little hand, I have a pretty decent sense of order and accomplishment. Occasionally, of course, I am stupid enough to try to put my list in my phone, which means I will forget to look at it, or worse, I put it somewhere safe, and then it’s gone forever and I have to start over. A list, filled with the details of a person’s life, I think, can be an interesting glimpse into the interior life, the priorities and worries a person carries around.

I’m not alone in my love of lists. I am truly ordinary in this regard. One way you know a good homeschool blog is if there are multiple photos of that person’s lists, and of their homeschool planner. You can know that I’m a terrible homeschooler because even though I do take those pictures, because I forget to write on my list ‘post pictures of list’, I never actually do it.

But there is another kind of list that I’m discovering everywhere, particularly on Facebook. This list isn’t made for you by yourself. It’s not an organized grouping of things you have to do as part of your life or job. It’s not the responsibilities that you accumulate to yourself based on your knowledge of your circumstances, your commitments to other people, or really reality in general. This new kind of list feels like an old kind of Temperance Movement, the kind of preachy strictures the puritans are always being blamed for. I’ve been casting about for a name for this kind of list, although, I think you have probably guessed by now that it’s not really a list, it’s a Listicle. Here is an example of one.

This one is fifty items long. The very first item is to stop drinking caffeine and includes other horrors like taking a cold shower, buying a juicer and juicing, writing a nice note for someone every day, and, well, you can go look for yourself. Maybe it will be exactly the thing you’ve been looking for. Maybe it will solve all your problems. Maybe it will make you into the better person you’ve been hoping to become.

For me, looking at a list like that, two things instantaneously happen. I am, in one single tragic moment, overwhelmed with guilt and flooded with despair. It is the modern version of going to church and hearing the Ten Commandments every Sunday. You say them out, along with everybody else, and if you’re a decent sort person, you say them without the self deceptive lie of the rich young ruler, who says, sure, I’ve done all that. Instead you say that with a twitch of sarcasm. ‘Suuuurrrreeee, I’ll just do that.’ I’ll just love God and not covet. Mmhhmmm. The guilt and despair of looking at the law of God is good and purposeful. You can’t do it, obviously. You’re meant to look at the list, give up, and fling yourself on the mercy of Jesus.

But not so with this Pelagian Be A Better Person Listicle. These are not laws handed down from heaven. These are cultural norms that will help you, if you really do them, love yourself more and look down on the rest of us rubes who are bound by human weakness. The person who actually did all of these fifty things, perfectly, would be most insufferable. You would fear, despise, and envy them, which, I’m pretty sure is the point.

Moreover, because the list isn’t made by you, it is tapping into the dark side of preaching. There are two kinds of preaching, one good, one bad. The good one is where the preacher opens up the bible and says, ‘this is what the text says’. You sit in your pew and the Holy Spirit splays you open and then puts you back together. The preacher, leaning over the pulpit, didn’t know what your issues were, he wasn’t pointing at you, even if if felt like it, he was just unfolding the text. The bad kind of preaching is really Preachiness. It’s the thing we do to each other, in person and in blog posts. It’s the ‘you know what I would do if I were you’ and then you go on and hold yourself out as a good example for someone else to follow. Preachiness discovers something helpful in a singular, individual way and then lathers it all over the landscape to make other people feel bad. I don’t enjoy drinking coffee, well You Better Not Either.

And now I will go amend my list to include ‘saying sorry for hating the person who made that Listicle.’

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