Selfie is the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year. My spell check hasn’t caught up with that yet as it still suggests that I really want to write ‘Elfie’ or ‘Shellie’. The Oxford Dictionary people noted that the use of the word ‘selfie’ had spiked 17,000 per cent since this time last year. As Dan Zak of the Washington Post has written, “we have become selfie-reliant, and now the lexicon has wholly absorbed the modern way to label the ancient fascination with self”.

The ancient fascination with self! As humans we have always been taken with working out who we are and why we are here. These are two of the biggest existential searches that we encounter and all the ‘advances’ of our 21^st Century don’t seem to make any difference to the questions that are asked. Zak quotes Psychologist Sarah Gervais writing in Psychology Today, saying “self-portraiture on social media is as good for self-empowerment as it is for self-objectification’ because it ‘offers a quiet resistance to the barrage of perfect images that we face in the traditional media”.

So, if I’m reading this right, taking a selfie and posting it on social media is not a form of narcissism or self-obsession but a form of healthy self-acceptance and a desire to be accepted for who I am, what I look like, and where I am. There’s some truth in this possibility.

However, in another article this week another existential struggle is posed. Sam de Brito of ‘All men are liars’ fame writes in an article called ‘The evil genius of selfless love’ that life is a struggle between self-preservation and self-reproduction. He ponders the meaning of life by asking what properties you would start with if you had the task of creating life. “The most obvious is the will to live, a survival instinct that, as the organism increases in complexity, becomes a sense of self-preservation, selfishness, or self-interest.”

The second property is ‘the will to reproduce’. To have his DNA growing up in another human being is extraordinary and there is “literally nothing I would not do to protect her”. And that’s where the two essential properties of humanness come together. My self-preservation becomes a drive toward love and protectiveness for my child, my self-reproduction. The struggle is that this may lead to self-sacrifice which is not exactly on par with self-preservation.

There are other problems as well. De Brito adds

The “evil genius” of this love is I can rationalise it as selflessness, as I’m certain billions of humans have done to justify all sorts of barbarity, from conquest to colonisation, cruelty, crime and conspicuous consumption… Our savage love for our own has made Homo sapiens the most powerful and destructive species on the planet…

De Brito concludes

I doubt even a minority of humans have the awareness or altruism to consider the fate of others above their own by ignoring these impulses. Self-sacrifice might help save the planet but it won’t see your DNA reproduced, will it?

These two articles could be summarised in the ideas of the search for self and the search to move beyond the self. Volumes could be (and have been) written on these topics. Psychology, philosophy and religion give enormous amounts of time and space and dollars to seeking answers to the questions arising. This short column is not the place to open up a whole lot of cans of worms but I do want to make a couple of points.

First, selfies may be a way of saying ‘I’m OK’ but they can very easily become an obsession with the self that expects the world to revolve around me and my interests like what I had for dinner tonight and what my plate and I look like now I’ve finished it. Perhaps this is a form of an overdeveloped self-preservation that de Brito is talking about. I wonder if biblical wisdom such as ‘do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you (Romans 12:3)’ applies to this problem? I think this type of selfie culture can get in the way of the development of a mindset of selfless love.

Second the biblical wisdom found in the Gospel story is that God gave up his son, his ‘own DNA’, for the sake of others. Such self-sacrifice is the essence of what the New Testament calls ‘Agape’ love and it is a calling that followers of Jesus have received. He said, in the context of his own self-sacrificing love, ‘My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:12)’.

Third, the selfless love that Sam de Brito suggests would be hard to find amongst human beings is the very selfless love that Jesus expressed and the very love that his followers have been called to. De Brito ends his article with the challenge

This makes me wonder if the purpose of the grand experiment we call life is to see whether our species can make the leap in consciousness to override our own base coding and put others before ourselves?

Make a good movie.

Well, it is the basis of a good Book. In fact some people call it the Good Book, and if de Brito is right then it’s no wonder it bears such a title!

Food for thought.

Dr David R Wilson is Director of Sophia Think Tank, a Bible Society Australia project. 

Image: Winlati, from Flickr under CC Licence.