WE LIVE IN such a polarized, divisive world. Some of this can be explained by neuroscience. First, for example, we have an inbuilt bias toward the negative; it captures and holds our attention, because our brains are ever alert to threats. Scientists suggest that this has survival value. It won’t kill us, for example, if we forget the delicious meal we had last night. But to forget that case of food poisoning just might. So we remember the event not only in our mind, but in our body; we may literally have a gut reaction to the very thought of the food that sickened us, or the restaurant where we ate it.

Second, our brains use a disproportionate amount of our energy reserves, burning through 20% of the glucose and oxygen our body requires. Because of this, to conserve energy, our brains are inherently “lazy,” taking a variety of shortcuts known as cognitive biases. That includes jumping to conclusions. It’s easier to simply assume we know what another person is thinking or why they did what they did than it is to do the work of being curious and finding out the truth.

Add to this the way we receive information in a digital age, which creates its own biases. Even before the existence of digital feeds and social media, news was biased toward the negative; when everything goes fine, that’s not news. But now, algorithms track what captures our attention. Clicking links builds a profile of our preferences, and that profile is used to put more of the same in front of us, based on computational predictions of what we’re most likely to click. The end result is that what we consume ends up being what we’re fed; our habits create our digital “reality.”

This isn’t merely the plot of some dystopian science fiction novel. It’s the psychology and economics of what it takes to become more visible and hence more influential in a digital world. But increasingly, my digitally-enhanced reality and yours may not be the same, creating a high-tech version of us-versus-them thinking and conflict. I’m right, and you’re wrong, and I know this is true because my news feeds tell me so. Besides, I Googled it.

The psalmists knew nothing of our strange electronic age; they could not even have imagined it. But they knew what it meant to have friends and enemies, to draw black-and-white distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad, the righteous and the wicked.

Indeed, that moral dichotomy is already given to us in Psalm 1 in the image of two paths in life. The closing verse summarizes that two-sided vision: “For the LORD watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction” (Ps 1:6, NIV). The metaphor of two ways or paths persists throughout the Psalter, and is probably taken for granted in the poet’s outburst against the wicked in Psalm 139.

But as we’ve seen, the psalmist ends by taking a step back from his hate-filled words, and asks God to search his heart:

Search me, God, and know my heart;
    test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
    and lead me in the way everlasting. (Ps 139:23-24)

“Lead me in the way everlasting,” the psalmist implores, or as the Common English Bible has it, “lead me on the eternal path.” That’s an important place for the psalm to end — not with self-righteous anger toward the wicked, but with a commitment to God’s way, to following the path of righteousness.

So let me put the question this way. Which is more important to us: being right, or being righteous?

Of course, sometimes these overlap. But the psalmist lived in a (somewhat) simpler age, albeit a more violent one. It was easier to tell the good guys from the bad guys: who worships and honors God, and who worships and honors idols? The national identity of God’s people was indissolubly linked with their spiritual identity, in a way that clearly distinguished them from other nations. Geopolitical conflict was also theological conflict.

Now? Not so fast. There are dedicated believers on either side of virtually every ideological divide — though we may want to deny this just to keep things simple, to make a cleaner story of heroes and villains. And to an extent that I suspect many of us fail to appreciate, the situation is exacerbated or even encouraged by the market-driven analytics of our information technologies.

To be clear, that’s not to demonize the people behind the algorithms. Rather, as the comic strip character Pogo once so famously said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” We must take responsibility for our own biases.

. . .

PSALM 139 DOESN’T end with words of hate, but with words of humble dedication. The poet does not assume that his hatred for those he considers the enemies of God is necessarily a righteous hatred. And more than anything else, what he wants is to be on God’s path, to be led by God in the way of righteousness.

As I’ve suggested before, those who follow a crucified Savior, who believe in the one who in love fulfilled the requirement of righteousness by taking violence upon himself, are rightly suspicious of words of violence coming from the mouths of the faithful. The violent words of the psalmist, therefore, are not to be taken as the last word on the matter. I like to think that if the psalmist had been able to peer down the long tunnel of history into the future and witness the death and resurrection of Christ, he would first have been astonished, and then would have fallen on his face in worship.

Who knows? But it wouldn’t hurt for us to kindle that same astonishment in the gospel we so easily take for granted, a gospel of love that is so needed in a world that encourages hate.