What if the way forward in public moral discourse first happens by ceasing to participate?
Against Arguing on the Internet (For Now?)
In the previous installment, I suggested that moral discourse in public isn’t dead, even if it is perpetually deadlocked, because of what happens before public coalitions come into view: the horse-trading, the bitter arguments over ends and means and goals, all of which makes possible something like a hardened position once the position breaks out into public.
To continue fleshing this out, I want to start by suggesting the following: go cold turkey on public debates.
For a series suggesting that we need a better form of public moral debate, this is going to require a little unpacking: we have to stop debating online, for a long period, if not for good. The verdict is out on its possibility for the long term, but for the moment, let’s presume, since we’re in the middle of Lent, that this might give us all the cover we need. Play it off as a Lenten practice, a need to pull back from the endless clutter—and in truth, these aren’t bad rationales. Better moral discourse is a matter of our devotion:
With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be. Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? My brothers and sisters, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water.1
In this passage, there is an analogue to the kind of virtues we have, wherever we use words, online or not. But taken alone, this passage lends itself to a kind of tone-policing, that what we need is to refrain from bullying, from slandering, from bad-mouthing and the like, that perhaps the question isn’t so much the substance or the form, but the aesthetics of argument. That strikes me as both incomplete analysis of how we argue, and honestly, a special pleading for Internet arguments that can’t stand up.
But the approach I’m taking here isn’t just one of prudence: it’s that moral argument, if it is to survive, must go offline again. In future editions, I’ll get into why I take that to be the case more fully, but the first task is not to defend a full-blown theory of Getting Offline in Argument, but to get us to go cold turkey and see what happens.
What We Gain In Online Affinity
The “networked” model of sociality has won, full stop, and brought with it the expectation that any deliberation of goods has to be done not only within groups of likeminded persons, but in the ecosystem in which I can most easily find those persons: the Internet. In contrast to an older model of how people socialize—that we find one another in local establishments or ordinary institutions—the “networked” model proposes that we are fundamentally individuals, and that connectivity occurs in “finding our people”. The advent of the Internet is a boon here, because it accelerates that process of being connected with others, and thus, accelerates you finding your voice, your politics, your meaning of life.
The old joke about the telegraph was this: it made possible people from New York to talk to people in New Mexico, but what on earth would they have to talk about? The answer is this: things which don’t require you to be from anywhere in particular. To talk to a non-local online, they don’t have to know Abilene: they just need to have been exposed to the same news stories I have, stories which are increasingly those calibrated in an online economy to attract attention. And so, I can talk to anyone anywhere who’s been soaked in Internet discourse, because we know the same attention-oriented topics.
When it comes to more specified kinds of knowledge—politics, religion, ethics—the phenomenon of the networked self still operates, still assuming that the formation in a topic that I’ve had in one place is in search of others elsewhere, whether in New York or New Mexico. If I’ve read Ivan Illich, for example, I might be somewhat interested in connecting to a random stranger with a criticism of Illich, but more likely, I’ll connect with a stranger who already agrees Illich is worth reading. In this way, it might avoid the more banal connections over celebrities or music, but still falls into the trap of like finding like.
The point is this: whether the road is quick and painless or slower and arduous, a networked mode of connecting intellectually, made possible by online discourse, gets us to the same place. Is this unavoidable? Is it just a principle of human sociality that we’ll inevitably find “our people” and that the Internet is just a faster way of doing that across time and space? I’m disinclined to agree, for two reasons:
It’s hard to disentangle the pleasure of being known by others from the pleasure of pursuing a good that you have in common. If I find others who appreciate the nuances of baseball, is it that I’m glad to find other baseball nuts, or is it that I’m glad to be able to appreciate baseball better? It’s probably both, but when finding your people comes hand in hand with pursuing things we perceive as good, we’re less likely to give up the good things because we’ve found our place in the world. And losing that place is rough.
It’s entirely possible that the good thing I’ve detected isn’t good at all, and that finding my people just makes me worse. This is the darker version of this problem, manifested in being radicalized online, dropping into online affinities which bolster my identity but at the expense of it being about that which is good for me. I refuse to get into the nihilist mode that insists that these are all fine, and that people just need something: this is a deeply sub-Christian mode of argument which presumes that life and death are ultimately just illuminated shades of grey.
Put these two together, and online arguments about moral topics are always and ever group activities: you are one hashtag away from being able to reinforce your position with others, not because you’re right, but because there are others who agree with you.
The First Step: Ascesis
As with any kind of speech, the first step then is to go cold turkey: pull the plug entirely. Or as someone put it, the way forward with our virtuous speech is not to speak nicely but to come away from public speech entirely:
And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.2
It’s Lent, and thus, a perfect time to covertly abandon online discourse, that in the end, we might be able to go again into the online world and more adequately talk about hard and difficult things. Or not! It’s perfectly fine to never do that—and may be even preferable! But we’re not there yet. The first step is simply to disengage, to feel the itch, and to not scratch it.3
To step away from public prayer is like stepping away from online moral debates in this way: it is a settling into a place where the truth of one’s words has no public acclaim to back them up. It is an invitation to detach from having one’s insights bolstered, and to ask why the words are spoken in the first place. It is an invitation to think alone, that we might think well with others. This is a harder place to go, and a disorienting one: this time out of the public discourse is not forever, but must be for a time.
James 3:9-11
Matthew 6:5-8
I’m increasingly skeptical of the possibility of public intellectuals being able to do so except by becoming the kind of person capable to talking to folks from New York and New Mexico with the greatest of ease, which is to say, driven by the Topic At Hand and never able to disengage from it. Gain the audience, and lose whatever made your words interesting in the first place.