When Argument Becomes Bloodsport

Online interaction is increasingly a given in academic life, a way that scholars can pursue their work together, even when their paths never cross in person. My own discipline, philosophy, has taken to online media enthusiastically, and one can find philosophers active across blogs, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. These platforms offer philosophers the same promises and possibilities they offer any academic users: a chance to converse with far-flung colleagues over recent scholarly developments, new domains of research, and issues of concern to the ever more precarious health of the profession.

The promises and possibilities may be general, but what philosophers have done with them, I think, is not.

The Roman philosopher Seneca recalls visiting the gladiator spectacles “expecting some fun, wit, and relaxation.” After watching the executions of criminals during intermissions between skilled combats, he is repulsed and demoralized. “I come home,” he recounts, “more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous, and even more cruel and inhuman, because I have been among human beings.” Like Seneca at the games, I usually visit philosophy’s social media or blogs in the spaces of my day that want diversion. And, like him, I often come away demoralized and misanthropic, ready to consider “human beings” an imprecation. I worry that I become more cruel — because I have been among philosophers.

Philosophers have long been known for prizing aggressive argument, but they are also meant to be adept at entertaining complexity. This is deeply woven into the grounding myth of the discipline: Socrates, after all, could find thickets of complication in what others took as simple. Inevitably, an emphasis on recognizing complexity requires a tolerance for uncertainty. This is why Socrates famously ascribes his wisdom to knowing what he does not know. To be sure, we may not believe Socrates’ many professions of uncertainty, but we have long liked him for them nonetheless, and claimed in them a disposition fundamental to philosophy. For philosophical insight will often rest in just the discovery that a problem is far harder than we took it to be — in uncovering patches of weeds where we thought the ground clear.

There are few weeds, though, in online philosophical discourse. There philosophers enact a scorched-earth policy. Philosophy’s online culture is driven largely by blogs, where scholars interact both under their own names and anonymously. The issues addressed are as varied as the discipline itself, but “dialogue” often descends into displays of social dominance, “conversation” naught but contest. Warring certainties rule the day. Those who participate most energetically tend not only to know exactly what they think but also to have concluded that thinking otherwise is downright wrong. And, indeed, that the wrongness is so egregious it must be forced back with an onslaught of scorn, derision, insult, and mockery. Thus, for example, when one of our most reputable blogs hosted a discussion of one philosopher’s effort to revise an introductory class to favor debates on contemporary justice, it generated anonymous commentary such as this:

Other commentators derided the course plan as “professional misconduct,” “indoctrination,” “threatening the very survival of our discipline in the academy”; it would turn “universities into social-justice madrasas.” Of the professor who devised the course, it sufficed to damningly observe: “The proper emotion, having comported himself in this way, is shame.” This is but one example, and not even a dramatic one — many are worse. The debates surrounding Rebecca Tuvel and the journal Hypatia, for instance, even made The New York Times. While the blog comments I quote feature anonymous abuse flowing from more conservative pedagogues to a more liberal one, eagerness to acidly assail and humiliate one’s opponents knows no ideological boundary, nor does it require anonymity, at least for philosophers with tenure.

Philosophers of all stripes wield the heavy weaponry of scorn, derision, and insult online. The rhetorical assaults take a couple of general forms: assailing the basic competence and intelligence of one’s opponent or assailing her moral scruples and humanity. Though the rhetoric typically includes lively flourishes, much of it amounts to slinging charges of stupidity or hatred back and forth. And, because this is philosophy, the slinging can go meta: Philosophers will not only rhetorically punch an opponent — when challenged they may justify their punching with elaborate claims that he needed punching and, by the by, if you’re doubting this, maybe you need punching, too. This is where our online conversations are most demoralizing: Certainty of one’s own views transforms into cruelty cast in self-valorizing terms. Cruelty becomes righteous, the cruel heroic.

The justifications offered for sneering condemnation of one’s colleagues are many and familiar. Some philosophers profess to be “speaking truth to power,” never mind that online spaces lack clear registers for recognizing “power.” Some claim that they merely do what is necessary in order to “hold people accountable,” asserting quasi-judicial rectitude as reason to attack. Others elaborate an ethos of rhetorical combat, though the ethos given varies. There are those who restrict themselves to “punching up,” aiming their blows at those perceived to be more powerful, and there are those who adopt an egalitarian attitude and punch all comers, with the logic that badness ought be rooted out wherever it originates.

Sometimes punching features as beneficence: One can “call out” another’s errors, publicly announcing her stupidity or corruption so that the ensuing shame may motivate salutary self-correction. And one can punch for others, one’s blows nobly dealt on behalf of those who need defense and could use a helpful fist. These justifications are not distinctive to philosophers, nor are they always without merit. But their unchecked flow provides an alibi for much that, in Seneca’s words, looks like “pure murder,” a wanton excess of rhetorical bloodletting that leaves all stained. And this is even so — perhaps especially so — for those uneasy with punching in the open.

Because online philosophical dialogue revels in the punch, it incentivizes finding methods to deliver one’s certainties while shielded from the ire of hostile opponents. That is why some commentators on the blogs ply their wares under cover of anonymity, and why some philosophers adopt pseudonyms on Twitter or Reddit. These hidden sorts simultaneously register and tend to worsen the poisonous climate. They cite the fear induced by the punishing dynamics of dialogue to explain their anonymity. But once safely masked, they often punch all the harder.

Others find cover by avoiding the open fray and use comparatively closed online systems, such as Facebook, where one can deride and deplore in greater assurance of finding like-minded compatriots. My Facebook feed often features some philosopher announcing how terrible a peer is, how bereft of sense or decency. These posts are “liked” a lot. In short, even when we retreat from punching in the open, we yet find means to shake our fists to feel that frisson of release.

The casualties of these pugilistic practices are many, but the one I mourn the most is uncertainty. Philosophers who harbor uncertainty are simply unlikely to participate in online dialogue. The fervent antagonism of the interaction selects against those who have no “side,” so we will rarely hear from the importantly perplexed or learn what new complexities they might discern. But more than this, I think the nature of online dialogue distorts and corrupts uncertainty itself, though I struggle to say just how.

I suspect that uncertainty cannot be effectively expressed. Trepidation, doubt, hesitation — these can be leveraged by the insincere as subtle weapons of attack. A posture of “uncertainty” is sometimes but a battle pose, simulated confusion just one more way to lash and thrash. It is only the woefully naïve who can read a philosopher say, “What I really don’t understand is …" and expect what follows to reliably reflect honest confusion. (In this sort of counterfeit confusion, too many philosophers do indeed follow ironic old Socrates, and more’s the pity. He was cleverer than most and at least he had his daemon — we have only each other.)

If sincere uncertainty may be received as but one more salvo in the escalating wars, better, then, to keep it to oneself. So, too, it’s not clear what one would win if one were taken as sincere. For in our online dialogues, to be found uncertain can itself invite contempt. When dialogue is driven by those not only certain of their views but agonistically scornful of those who think otherwise, harboring doubts and reservations is a form of “otherwise” — in failing to agree outright, one might as well be foe. “We have sorted this out,” the certain effectively proclaim. The work of knowing what to think has long since passed, and “dialogue” has marched onward into battle. If you are not with us, you are against us. And our dialogues everywhere testify to how enemies are treated. Confessions of uncertainty — its cautions, trepidations, confusions, its insistent finding of complexity — these, too, can be turned to testament that one is weak in intellect or prey to callous moral disregard. It would, the certain can suggest, be stupid or hateful not to know just what to think. This is but one more challenge in finding effective expression for uncertainty. But the greater trouble I discern is how dispiriting it is to feel it.

What I notice most acutely is how lonely uncertainty has become. One has nowhere to go with it, or nowhere easy. Technology holds together a philosophical community across vast distances, but the community’s practices maroon the uncertain on islands of their own. Indeed, I have come to despair of the phrase “philosophical community,” for just this phrase is often flung when the certain seek to deplore most forcefully: They condemn and sneer not just for themselves but on behalf of “the philosophical community.” And this has worked on me, on my uncertainty. I have never been entirely sure just what “philosophical community” should be, and I am thus too easily tempted to think this really might be it. It really might be the case that I alone lack certainty. I hope not, but I also doubt that it could matter. Even if we uncertain sorts are legion, our numbers matter little if we are each alone.

At its best, uncertainty is not a state but a practice, a way to put off haste and importunity so that we can wander closely in the weeds. Like most practices, there are ways to do it badly, but doing it with others would guard against this peril. The complexities that each could bring to each would have us tarry long and carefully. We could then be better on our guard, not against being called stupid or hateful, but against being so. We would want each other’s reservations and hesitations because these would make us better, not only smarter but more humane. Uncertainty, I once thought, is what philosophers do. Now I have doubts.

Amy Olberding is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oklahoma.