For Civil Discourse, or: Please Stop Destroying America
Background
Let me give some background to explain the “destroying America” bit.
(1) We’re incredibly lucky
As everybody knows, or should know, things in America are going just about as well as possible. “WHAT?! How can he say that? Things are going terribly!!”, said every political partisan.
Relax. I mean compared to all the other human societies that have existed in history (not compared to the utopia you can imagine). Most of those have been primitive tribes, where your life expectancy would be <35 years, and you’d have about a 20-25% chance of dying by murder, usually by a neighboring tribe. Among those societies with a developed state, almost all have been dictatorships, in which one person or a small ruling class forcibly oppresses everyone else.
Almost everyone in history, and even today, has been living in what you would consider the most abject poverty; in other words, if you’re in America, you’re probably fabulously wealthy. You probably live better than the kings of earlier centuries. The median U.S. household income ($68,703) puts you at the 99th percentile of income in the world. (https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-270.html, https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i?income=68703&countryCode=USA&household%5Badults%5D=1&household%5Bchildren%5D=0).
So that’s the first bit of background. America, and the West more generally, is an extremely unusual and incredibly good phenomenon, by the standards of human history. So our top political priority should be to preserve what's going right.
(2) We are respectful discussants
And what’s different about America? A lot of things.
But here is a news story that I’m often reminded of. It was after the U.S. victory in the 2003 Iraq war. The U.S. government was trying to build a stable Iraqi democracy (a project ultimately doomed to failure, but nevermind that). An item in the newspaper said that some Iraqis had come to America to see how things are done here. And when they observed a local government meeting, what they were most struck by was how respectful our political disagreements were.
I hadn’t appreciated until then that our discourse was respectful. (Like the fish who doesn’t know what water is.) But then I thought that that is an important part of why things are going well here. When we disagree, we discuss the issue respectfully and professionally. Or at least we used to. This clip from the 1980 Presidential debates illustrates how political debates used to be conducted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN7gDRjTNf4
Why is this important? Because among human beings, there is a long history of disagreements resulting in violence, and when that happens, everything else in your society is messed up. If you don’t have peace, you can’t have prosperity, or freedom, or justice, or anything else you might want. Having people talk to each other is the main alternative to violence. This is why it is important that open discussion be available.
Threats to Discourse
These are the main threats to civil discourse that I see in our society:
(1) Cancel culture
The first threat is the increasingly popular practice of visiting personal harm on someone because they express ideas that you find objectionable. Like trying to get them fired, etc. (I don’t care if that’s what “cancel culture” refers to or should refer to; that’s the problem I’m talking about.) Obviously, if people can’t speak their minds without fear of someone trying to ruin their lives, then there can’t be an open discussion of matters of controversy. If we can’t talk through matters of controversy, then we’re abandoning the core liberal method of dealing with disagreement. The main alternative method in human history is violence.
You might think “Oh, well let’s just reserve the cancelling for people who have really bad ideas.” That rule will obviously be immediately abused by all the intolerant people who can’t defend their ideas rationally and who just want to stop anyone from refuting their ideas. This is precisely abandoning the principle of liberal society.
(2) Insularity
The second problem is that we don’t have much dialogue in our society, because everyone just chooses to talk to other people who already agree with them. Or your social media apps make that decision for you.
(3) Being an asshole
The third problem is that many people don’t know how to carry on a reasoned, civilized debate. They quickly turn to insulting each other, and then discussion breaks down. I want to say more about this problem in particular.
What I’m talking about
To clarify, I’m not talking about attacking a public figure, like the President or someone else who is in the national news. Whether a public figure is a good or a bad person may be a legitimate matter of public interest, which therefore should be open to debate. I’m talking about attacking the person you’re talking to, as a person. E.g., it’s very common to accuse other people of dishonesty when they disagree with you. But, whether or not intellectual dishonesty is common, the alleged dishonesty of the person you are now talking to is generally not an appropriate topic for public debate, nor does it advance discussion about whatever you disagreed with that person about to begin with.
How it happens
I suspect that when people wind up in insult contests (“flame wars”), frequently both people regard themselves as innocent and think that the other person started it. The reason for this is that people are way more sensitive to possible slights against themselves than they are to slights they might be directing at others.
There are psychological studies on “conflict spirals” – events in which two people or groups have an escalating conflict, because each side keeps retaliating against the other side’s last action with a slightly more aggressive action. This can even lead to war between nations. This happens because we systematically under-appreciate the provocativeness of our own actions, and over-perceive the provocativeness of other people’s actions toward us. (Because humans are biased, self-centered jerks. That’s how nature made us.)
However, conflict spirals are rarer in face-to-face communication, because normal social emotions kick in that support cooperation and oppose offending others. This is largely why politeness exists. Conflict spirals are more common on the internet, because you don’t see the people you are talking to, and thus your cooperative social emotions and training regarding politeness don’t properly engage.
Why we do it
Why do people start insulting each other to begin with?
Probably it’s usually just an expression of negative emotional reactions that people fail to control. You hear thesis X, which is contrary to what you and your tribe support, and you feel a negative emotion. That emotion directly influences you to use harsh or disrespectful language that expresses how you are feeling. Few people take the time to edit out inappropriate remarks before posting on the internet.
People are also instinctively uncharitable toward “the other side” but charitable towards their own side. So they interpret their “opponent” as saying the dumbest thing that’s compatible with his words (or sometimes even one that’s not compatible with his words). Upon doing that, they quickly conclude that the other person is a moron, or evil, or something like that, whereupon it feels appropriate to attack them personally.
Another possibility is that people start insult contests with each other as a subconscious belief-system defense mechanism. If another person argues for X (which you dislike), and you respond by attacking the other person, that very often has the effect of changing the subject. The other person responds by attacking you. And just like that, you’re no longer talking about X, but instead are talking about which of you is the bigger asshole. This prevents you from having to do intellectual work to confront their argument.
The other likely result is that the other person stops talking to you. Then you don’t have to be confronted by challenges to your belief system anymore.
Please Don’t Be an Asshole
Now I’m going to talk about why you shouldn’t be an asshole (that’s a technical term – I mean why you shouldn’t express disrespect toward the other person while having intellectual discussions).
(1) You’re not persuading the other person
Obviously, when you start insulting the other person, they are not then persuaded that you’re right. Rather, they tend to be pushed further away from your position. Now if they encounter evidence in favor of your view (if, say, some non-asshole later tries to reason with them), they will be emotionally disposed to reject any such evidence and dig in their heels.
Now, you might think that you’re going to socially pressure someone into changing their views, by making them feel that their current views are socially unacceptable. But, first, this won’t work if the person is already part of a faction (a group of like-minded individuals); in that case, your attacks will just be seen, by your interlocutor as well as other observers, as a tribal squabble, and the other person will dig in in support of their faction; that is how humans work. Ex.: If you try to socially pressure Republicans into rejecting Trump, they’ll just see that as typical bad behavior by the Democrats, and they’ll move further into their Republican bubbles.
Second, it’s not at all likely that you could create a general social norm that no one may disagree with you. What you’re more likely to create is a norm that everyone irrationally attacks whomever they disagree with.
(2) You’re not persuading third parties
When third parties see you start the insult contest (and they will perceive this more easily than you will, because they’re not biased in favor of you in the way that you are), they will not conclude that you’re right. Rather, they will likely understand the points I made above under “why we do it”. Therefore, they will conclude that (a) you are unable to control your emotions, (b) you prefer to change the subject so that you don’t have to confront the other person’s arguments, (c) you prefer to not have other people challenge your beliefs in the future. From (a), (b), and (c), these third parties are likely to infer, justifiedly, that you are more likely to be wrong. (This is exactly what I think when I see that behavior.)
(3) You're probably wrong
Abstract away from yourself and your current beliefs. Just as a general matter, among human beings, how often is the person who first resorts to personal attacks in a discussion actually correct, or actually has the better case?
I would say, not very often. If you're doing that, it is likely that you are wrong, and your subconscious mind is trying to prevent you from fully recognizing that fact by short-circuiting reasoned discourse. But maintaining false beliefs is bad, not good, so you should welcome reasoned discourse.
(4) You’re destroying America
Human beings are big imitators. That’s basically what culture is – people doing stuff because that’s what people around here do.
When you engage in uncivil discourse, you contribute to altering our culture in the direction of a culture where people cannot have respectful disagreements. You undermine the norms of liberal society for dealing with disagreement and move us more toward the norms of terrible, violent societies like those that have dominated human history.
All that, incidentally, explains why I don’t allow personal insults on my blog or my social media. I don’t engage with them (even if the author also makes some non-insult point) but instead delete them unceremoniously.
More on how to argue well:
https://fakenous.net/?p=46
https://fakenous.net/?p=54