Prize Fighters vs. Brawlers

Sonny Bunch’s calling out Freddie for his take down of Robert Stacy McCain struck me as on target, particularly when Bunch pulls out the underlying point of David Denby’s book Snark saying,

[D]iscourse in the age of the Internet is fundamentally nasty and mean-spirited for no good reason and both the nastiness and the mean-spiritedness retards decent conversation

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m in full agreement with Freddie’s critique of McCain and having read John Schwenkler’s post that kicked all of this up I am at a loss to see what McCain chooses to read into it. So there is little question that on some level McCain deserved to be challenged on his reading of John’s post, but the question that stands out is: how best to do that?

The way that Freddie chose is one option, but I quote him back to himself talking about the approach of aggressive atheists,

You don’t argue your way out of niches by constantly thumbing your noses at the people who you’re trying to convert. The question then becomes, are they converting at all? Or are they merely asserting superiority?

Now, Freddie might respond that he’s not seeking to convert McCain and that, in fact, McCain isn’t the type of person who is capable of being “converted”. Fair enough, but then what is the point of thrashing him? I wonder why the  effort put into something that is unlikely to yield any meaningful results.

And I think that Bunch is absolutely correct about this kind of aggressive and ultimately pointless communication permeating the Internet by my lights. It frankly shocks me how often I run into someone commenting on a post who thinks that the only thing he or she is required to do in order to further a conversation is rhetorically pistol whip whomever they happen to disagree with. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that American culture, for all my reading American focused blogs and magazines and the like, remains partially opaque to me, but the sheer lack of civility that informs so much of our online discussion is disheartening for someone who wants to believe that things like blogs and online magazines can act as a means of truly forwarding discourse in meaningful ways. It’s hard to hold out hope for that belief when much of the effort you witness on sites is peoples’ creative means of calling each other fucking morons (pardon the language).

And please don’t misunderstand me to be saying that we can’t get into good vehement rows over important issues, because that isn’t the poit of this lamentation. Some of the best conversations I’ve ever had and some of the best interactions that I’ve been privy to online have also been the hardest hitting. In particular, when I first read this response to a post of mine by Helen Rittelmeyer I felt like I’d been punched in gut, especially rereading this line,

Scott doesn’t want to appear more confident in his ideas than he actually feels, but the flipside of his kind of humility is this: While it may be a kind of pride to argue as if you were certainly right, it is more prideful still to nurse an unwillingness ever to be wrong. It takes the sin of pride to be wrong, but it takes the virtue of humility to be revealed to be wrong.

It hurt because it was true and was a valuable lesson to learn about my shadowy tendencies and arrogant pridefulness in always appearing to be right. In my estimation, Helen didn’t pull any punches with her analysis and I emailed her shortly after reading the post to thank her for its candor. But the only reason I got anything out of the post was because Helen had taken the time to frame it in such a way as to be honest in an unflinching way, but constructive and instructive and most of all supremely civil. Helene’s work in that regard is instructive to how we can go about aggressively challenging each other’s ideas with a modicum of respect that actually contributes to some kind of forward movement in our overall discourse. As she said in that same post: slug it out. But remember when people trained in fighting meet to battle, they bring with them a code of honour that infuses the fight. It is of little consequence to win the battle without honour: you’re not fighter in that instance, but rather a cheap brawler.

I believe that McCain’s response to John was an example of this type of brawling. And though I respect him greatly, I think that Freddie’s response took him from his usual stature of a prize fighter and lowered him to McCain’s level. And in that sense, I believe that McCain actually won.

The blogosphere is full of cheap brawlers who like to fancy themselves as prize fighters. And while those brawlers may delude themselves into believing that their efforts are contributing to some kind of larger movement, really they’re just busy feeding their own petty egos at the expense of real contribution. On a bad day its a pretty sad scene.

Tagged as: brawlers, civility, discourse, ego, prize fighters