Did you want a couple thousand words on why I call people “dipshits”? No? Well, here you go anyway.

This essay was originally uploaded on Medium.com under another pseudonym, which was subsequently nuked from the site when I proved to be too effective at dunking on their room-temperature IQ, hive-mind user base. It is reproduced here for purposes of preservation and (I’ll admit it) appreciation. It should be remembered that it was originally intended for an audience of other writers, hence the invitation at the end.

Following my “13 Answers for Tim Wise about Critical Race Theory,” a few people responded to tell me that, though they might be inclined to agree with certain of my points, the antagonism in that piece was unnecessary and possibly even damaging to my persuasiveness.

I disagree.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that I disagree with their assessment of their own feelings; that would be silly. Rather I disagree with what I perceive as a fixation on “civility.”

But if I can extend a frail olive branch, I will say that I was once just like you. But over the course of my evacuation from the political Left, I’ve been forced to discard a number of once-treasured shibboleths, this one included.

And if there’s a reason why it’s been discarded, it’s that, for years now, I have watched it fail over and over again. In fact, it seems that it has done nothing but fail for better part of the last decade, a fact which liberals (those few that are left, and no, I am not referring to leftists or progressives) have not been able to reconcile. If civility is such an obvious good? Why does it keep losing? Why is our discourse becoming increasingly uncivil?

The Trouble with Discourse

For those unfamiliar, Destiny (aka Steven Bonnell) is a political streamer on Twitch and Youtube, and at this date, the (mostly) uncontested king of the “Debate Bros.” Destiny spent his first years on Twitch gathering appeal as an edgy gamer who said edgy things as he played Starcraft or League of Legends or …whatever. You could be forgiven if you don’t know or care about literally any part of this. This is just the backstory, what his fans called the “lore.” But after the election of Trump, Destiny earned a certain degree of political e-clout when he “outed” JonTron (youtube personality/comedian) as a “Nazi.” From there he went on to debate just about everyone, and I’ve watched (or perhaps “hate-watched” is the better term) an unhealthy number of those debates.

It has changed me.

Which is to say that it has taught me a great deal about the nature of discourse and why we’re all fucked.

The trouble with discourse is pretty straightforward: the audience.

What matters today is not whether or not a point is good or whether it might hold up to scrutiny if given a more lengthy examination, but instead, whether it dove-tails well enough with the audience’s currently held attitudes and preconceptions in a way that creates the impression of plausibility. In a world where views equal money, audiences are not informed by their engagement with these personalities; they are merely collected, poached from one camp to the next.

Part of this is a modern problem and one for which we are ourselves bear no small amount of responsibility. We have allowed ourselves to be inducted into a lifestyle which, in virtually every aspect, militates against serious reflection. In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr opines for a couple hundred pages on how the very nature of how we interact with the web has changed how we think. The skinny is that we have been trained to be good at diffusing our attention across a wide array of subjects, but very bad at concentrating it on any single one.

In the modern world of debate, brevity and swagger are king. As Destiny himself has pointed out in conversations with other e-commentators, the most important thing is to be able to make powerful points incredibly quickly, if you want to “win.”

I hope it doesn’t take a genius to understand that this fixation on optics, this method of performing to the audience, creates an all but insurmountable barrier to more sophisticated points. Destiny, more than even the others in his sphere, has crafted a brand off of winning debates, which he does by any means necessary. This is not to say that he never engages in civil conversations, only that prolonged viewing of his performances reveals that his civility rarely (I would say “never” except that I have not watched all of his debates) extends to the point of gracefully conceding a point or admitting that he is wrong on anything substantial. Instead, he will frequently resort to various rhetorical devices of audience manipulation in order to secure the impression of being more “correct” than his interlocutors, even going so far as to engage in certain rhetorical tactics (such as ad hominem) minutes after condemning their use by his opposition.

No matter how we might wish it were otherwise, the world runs on rhetoric.

Sad to say, but for a large segment of people, how one allows oneself to be treated is indicative of one’s worth. If one is treated with disrespect, constantly and wrongly maligned as being morally or intellectually inferior by narcissists and idiots, then a (I’m not saying “the”) proper reaction is to respond in kind.

On Civility

What all too many liberals fail to appreciate are the basic assumptions baked into their commitment to politeness:

1. an assurance in the efficacy of rationalism
2. a moral compass which hangs upon values that are essentially utilitarian.

In the last twenty years (this is a truncated timeline but it’ll do for present purposes), both of these assumptions have been challenged.

To understand this, one has to go back to the beginning, to the origins of Liberalism itself. Needless to say, I’m not going to give this subject adequate treatment here, but an extremely abbreviated summary is that Liberalism arose in the 17th century, in large part, as a response to the horrors of the religious sectarian wars that had tormented Europe. It was an attempt to find a new basis for a political order, one that sought to take advantage of a relatively broad moral consensus about the nature of the good life. It applied a utilitarian standard to a world that had previously been dominated by religion and monarchy.

And for a very long time, it worked pretty well. But we are rapidly approaching the end of Liberalism’s tenure. As Alasdair MacIntyre (who, incidentally, wins for “Best Name of All Time”) skillfully demonstrates in A Short History of Ethics, utilitarianism is an inescapably parasitic moral paradigm. Whenever it claims “the greatest good” it is forever haunted by the rejoinder “whose good?” To answer this question, it has always invisibly relied on a moral consensus that it was itself incapable of creating.

And in his excellent work, Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen observes an almost identical flaw in the origins of Liberalism. Namely, that it relies on expending a certain kind of cultural and social capital which it cannot replenish.

Why am I talking about this?

Because without understanding these origins, it is impossible to realize how serious our modern disagreements truly are, how deep the ethical fissures which divide us truly run. One must understand that much of what divides us today are not technical questions which may be resolved by the correct application of reason, but deep and irreconcilable differences in the values that we hold to.

The Value of Contempt

I’m ashamed to admit it, but all that I have retained of Edmund Burke’s seminal work Reflections on the Revolution in France, aside from some vague recollections of the political absurdities and obvious failures of statecraft for which he criticizes the French radicals, is one particular sentence which will forever remain in my mind as the most perfect expression of disdain. It occurs when he is responding to the suggestion that the French could gather funds by melting down the bells of the churches which were already being heavily suppressed and making coin out of them.

There are some follies which baffle argument; which go beyond ridicule; and which excite no feeling in us but disgust; and therefore I say no more upon it.

Snarky Twitter snipers wish they could have this much sass. 
But aside from being a beautiful bit of word craft, it illustrates an important fact: there are some things for which contempt is the only appropriate reaction.

All in all, I think that most Americans have lost the capacity for contempt, and that is a truly tragic thing. The decades of cultural acclimation to varying “lifestyles” and “modes of existence” has weakened their ability to see anything as truly abhorrent (unless instructed to feel so by the media they consume). The air has been filled with ironic condemnations of “judgmental” attitudes. Lifestyles and subcultures which once made use of the liberal appeal for tolerance (meaning that we co-exist without trying to actively harm one another) have shifted tact to demanding “recognition” and “respect,” to now demanding outright praise.

The liberal ideal of civil discourse and conversation was always a noble one, but it failed to realize how narrow the limits within which it could successfully operate truly were. Civility is, and must be, an agreement between mutually respectful parties who share an equal commitment to reason and a mostly-aligned vision of the moral good. Against the barbaric or duplicitous or malicious, civility is at best a optical gambit and at worse a self-defeating commitment to what is essentially an aesthetic choice.

All this to say…

And now, after leading you on for nearly two thousand words, I’m going to admit that my title is, in fact, a lie: I don’t actually despise civility. (The subtitle is a lie too; this piece is only 1762 words long.) In fact, I prefer it. But I recognize its limits.

The debate over civility or incivility is essentially a watered down version of the contest between Tolstoy and Ivan Ilyin over the legitimate use of violence. I’ve found the side I find most compelling, but its fine if you disagree.

Ask yourself a question: would Martin Luther King have had as much success without Malcom X? When one really begins to think about it, I think one has to admit that the answer is “no.” Sometimes, opposing forces work together for the common good.

So if you disagree with my methods, then be my foil, be the other half of the equation. I have not made the mistake of believing that because I am a hammer, all problems are nails. I would urge you to not make the mistake of believing that because you are not a hammer, there is no need for them.