Public Moral Debate is Dying: Against Polemics

Revisiting the Need to Go Hard Against Bad Moral Opinions

Part of the ongoing series on how moral discussions in public go wrong, and what a better way forward looks like.

The Long Shadow of Polemics

The polemic is, by its nature, a belligerent form of communication. Coming from the Greek “polemikos”, which means “warlike”, the polemic takes an opposing opinion to task not by offering an alternative vision, but by attacking the opposition head on. Polemics are littered throughout the Bible, in prophecies, in letters, in the words of Jesus. From Matthew 23:

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: ² “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. ³ So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. ⁴ They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

⁵ “Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries^[a] wide and the tassels on their garments long; ⁶ they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; ⁷ they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by others.

⁸ “But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. ⁹ 

Here, you see two key aspects to the polemic: 1) identifying the bad parts of one option, and 2) offering a substantive way forward. Early Christian literature did this all the time, particularly in the apologetic literature genre, both against real opponents and imagined ones.¹ The early apologists used polemics to highlight the errors of their interlocutors and of the pagans, but it’s doubtful that most of these were read except by Christians.

These apologetics, and the polemics within them, in other words, weren’t externally used, but internally read.² In a way, this is good pedagogy: you don’t just instruct about what is good, but show the errors of that which is not. But the order here matters, and often times it’s an implicit order: the polemic exists only within the structure of a primary concern of witness to what is true.

Matthew 23, cited above, is a great case in point: taken by itself, it can seems as if the polemic does the work alone, but against the backdrop of Matthew 22—which is Jesus instructing about the Kingdom of Heaven and about this own identity—the polemic simply becomes a contest of wills, a back and forth dunking. Similarly, the polemics of ancient apologies for the faith presumed a context in which people would have been instructed in the faith on a regular basis.

The public contest of truth and error never changes.

The Fate of Polemics: Not Untrue, but Less Possible

All of this points in a very different direction than using the polemic externally, and points us to the possibility of its use internally. And so, the interesting question about polemics is not whether polemics are wrong, but whether they are possible.

To begin, it seems that the polemic, as a mode of diagnosing error, has to be ordered toward Gospel,³ but more than this, it has to be preceded by Gospel. It cannot be, in other words, a ground-clearing exercise which then offers something positive as an opposite vision of the error, because truthfulness is not the opposite of error.

Error, both in Scripture and the early apologists, is not because they were headed in the polar opposite direction, but because they were largely incomplete. The Pharisees were right to praise and love the law; the Gnostics were right to be worried about the temptations of the flesh. But to then build out an entire social life on that error was wrong. Truthfulness doesn’t propose that the opponent is wrong on all points, but rather than their constructions are built on half-truths or a decayed foundation. These adjectives of partiality with respect to truth or foundations matter, both for leading a person out of error, but also because it causes us to speak well of our opponents: a person in error isn’t terrible all the way down, even if they are in error. And error can be amended.

The real question, though, is whether polemic, given the context in which it functions well—sandwiched between instruction—can exist any longer, or at least function in the environment in which most public moral debates take place.

Sun Tzu, who we looked at last time, would see this mode of discourse of total negation, without the foregrounding of truthfulness, as a kind of analogy of fighting on what he called “death ground”, the kind of fighting that is done when your army is surrounded and the only thing to do is survive. On “death ground”, you’re not fighting strategically or in a way which makes friends or allies; you’re fighting all out, because your very survival depends on expending all available energy against the opposition. The death ground fight has no other end in mind other than winning—not shoring up one’s position, not establishing a durable peace after conflict. Because it operates purely in the moment for the sake of survival, it winds up being the most destructive, the most self-defeating, and the least desirable, form of conflict.

Polemics generally takes this form, its current form looking like dunking on Twitter, or screeds on Youtube. It is fighting on the “death ground” for what I think are two reasons, neither of which seem resolvable any time soon:

1. Polemics require not just ordering toward truthfulness, but being preceded by it. This condition, one in which we can see error because we first have a framework that enables us to see it in relief, is a problem of church catechesis. Insofar as we have thick churches capable of casting this vision regularly, of embodying in as a way of life with regularity, polemic can do its work appropriately.

2. Digital life, as our most common form of moral discourse, occurs in fragments and disconnected ways. Both because of algorithmic biases, which always show content which is not necessarily related to the past, and because of the endless scroll function, which shows us the new, the continuity of polemic with Gospel is broken at the level of design.

All polemics take on the appearance of bloodsport in public, sometimes because we don’t have a vision of how a polemic should operate (as a critique leveraged inside a public prepared to hear the criticism well), and sometimes because of the technology in which the polemic happens. Polemic, if it has a use or a future, must be returned to its internal spaces, prepared by a framework and followed up by a constructive frame.

But this leaves us with the question of public engagement. Is the alternative to just never “speak into” public issues, to let the public debates wither or turn into performative spaces, in which speakers just reinforce one another? The alternative, I think, is to bear witness to truthful things, not by negating error in a way denuded from its necessary precursor and follow-up, but by offering a vision of truthfulness which doesn’t fit, to offer witness instead of polemic.⁴ To flesh that out will be the task of the final installment.

1. A good introduction to early Christian apologetic literature is found here: https://oru.libguides.com/patristics/apologists

2. This is, I think, the only productive place of apologetics, for what it’s worth: almost no one is persuaded by the big splashy public debates on the existence of God, not only because we live in an age in which most people are incurious about whether their strongly held opinions are wrong, but because this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how apologetics old and new actually functioned.

3. I take this from Oliver O’Donovan, and from Matthew Lee Anderson, who I deeply respect and who has a more constructive vision for the polemic than I do. You should go read his Substack!

4. No, I don’t mean “winsome”. More next time.