How to have better arguments on the internet

It’s no secret that people spend a lot of time online arguing with each other. Sometimes these take the form of a debate, but mostly they’re just all-out, all caps, screaming matches. Because people don’t like the screaming matches, there’s an entire body of literature out there about the best ways to argue, usually with a focus on convincing people that you’re right: how and when to deploy statistics; whether to appeal to people’s brains, hearts, guts or other misc. body parts; if it’s okay, or helpful, or necessary to insult people who disagree with you.

The problem is, there’s no reason to spend your time trying to convince people that you’re right about anything. This is partly because you’re probably not but mainly for a slightly more abstruse reason which you’ll only discover — surprise! — if you read below the fold.

Now, when it comes to simple matters of fact, like whether vaccines are safe (they are) or whether anthropogenic climate change is happening (it is), it’s probably okay for me to argue with people who are wrong about those things. Every kind of evidence we could possibly have says that the mainstream expert consensus on these things is correct. All I have to do is point people towards the evidence and the expertise. It’s possible that I’m wrong about both, because the mainstream expert consensus has been wrong before, but if it is in these cases, we’ll only know about it if new evidence comes to light. Based on what we know right now, there’s no reason to doubt these things. We should behave as though they’re true unless we’re given a very good reason to doubt them.

For anything more controversial, we have a problem. And then we have a bigger problem, because ‘anything more controversial’ includes virtually all political questions. For example, I’m inclined to think that leftwing views are basically the right ones both morally and factually, but there is, quite obviously, no consensus whatsoever about this. Nor can there ever be. We are literally never going to know the answer to questions like, What is the best way to govern a country? Even the prevailing expert consensus isn’t very helpful here: ‘some sort of liberal democracy with fairly free markets’ is probably the consensus, but only in parts of the developed world, and even there, the questions of how liberal, how democratic, how free market, and how to judge those three are, shall we say, vexed.

Naturally, I think I know the answers to these questions (very, very, and not very, respectively). The problem is that I have no particular reason to think I’m right about things. I think it’s fair to say that I’m an unusually intelligent and thoughtful person, but even if that’s true, it must also be the case that there are literally billions of people in the category ‘unusually intelligent and thoughtful’, who disagree with me. As soon as I say ‘I’m leftwing’ (or, for that matter, ‘I’m right wing’), I’m also by definition saying ‘Most people disagree with me’. What’s special about me? Very little. Even if I were in the top one percent most intelligent and thoughtful people in the world (something which I very much do not believe), there would still be no consensus among my hypothetical fellow one-percenters.

I also, it’s fair to say, have very little expertise on actual policy detail. How do you write a good law? When do you need a new law rather than some other change in policy? I don’t know. In all likelihood, nor do you. Even in the fields that I do know fairly well, having worked in them, I don’t know much about, e.g., how to actually run a university. I know how it feels to work in a poorly run university or a well-run one, having done both, so I have some perspective which might be helpful, but in terms of actually making them run better as individual institutions, never mind as a functioning part of an economy as a whole, I’m clueless.

This being the case, on what basis do I (or does anyone) have the right to try to convince someone to (e.g.) vote Labour or to not vote Tory? Obviously, I have the right to free speech, but that’s a pretty basic foundation. I can say any old nonsense based on my right to say it. If I want people actually to listen, I would need a little more, but I just don’t have it.

So, should we stop arguing on the internet altogether? I don’t think so. I’ve been exposed to all kinds of views I disagree with by chatting with people online and I think it’s actually improved my understanding of other people, which is a good thing. I don’t want to stop talking about things or expressing my views, or disagreeing with people whose views I don’t share. What I want is to stop trying to change people’s minds. This is not a valid way to spend my time.

Instead, I’m going to focus on explaining why I think things. You can take the attitude that another person is an opponent whose views you have to batter down, but apart from making yourself very annoying to talk to, you almost certainly have no right to think so. This is where a lot of people on the left, especially, seem to go wrong. How often have you heard someone say something like, We just have to get out there and make the case for socialism. Why should we? Are you open to the case for Conservatism? To be quite honest with you, I’m not. So why should I expect anything different from them?

Instead of thinking, ‘It’s my duty to persuade this person,’ we should be thinking ‘It’s my duty to understand this person and to help them understand me’.

What I’ve been up to

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I started the year re-reading The Complete Poems of John Keats, which is always a good idea. I skipped some of the longer, more boring ones (I’ve never liked ‘Lamia’ very much and no one likes Otho the Great), because Keats is mainly a lyric poet, rather than an epic poet. I think it’s probably a good thing that poets no longer feel like the epics are a higher form of art and I think we probably partly have Keats to thank for this. It’s more or less impossible to imagine a better poem than ‘To Autumn’ and equally impossible to imagine a poem that sustains that level of perfection over more than a few stanzas. Possibly, Keats’ failure to write a decent epic poem or verse drama was part of what killed off the forms: if John Keats couldn’t write a good epic poem, what chance do the rest of us have?

This led me down the next obvious train of thought: what was the last good example of either of these mediums? Don Juan is good, even though Byron didn’t finish it. The Cantos are meant to be an epic but a) they’re not really and b) they’re not good. I suppose The Waste Land is kind of an epic poem but, like The Cantos, it’s not uniform in style or form, which I feel is part of what makes an epic.

With plays it’s even harder. Byron, Percy Shelley and Keats all had a crack at verse drama. Byron, again, was probably most successful. Manfred, intended as a closet drama (i.e., not to actually be performed), was even adapted as a radio play by the BBC a few years ago (it was pretty good!). Shelley also wrote Prometheus Unbound as a closet drama, and it’s usually cited as among his major works although, like Keats, he’s definitely best known for his shorter poetry.

I can’t think of many poets now who even attempt epics or drama. Can anyone think of any post-Romantic epics or verse dramas?

Having read all his verse but still wanting more, I then read all Keats’ extant letters (available on Project Gutenberg). They’re interesting largely because they contain most of his philosophy of art, although he never expounded it in great detail, unfortunately. Of course, they get increasingly stressful and sad towards the end; they are after all the private correspondence of a young man who knew he was going to die and thought he was going to die a failure. Normally when asked the time machine question, I say I’d go back to the Globe to see William Shakespeare performing his own plays (where I imagine I’d bump into Keats, if he had also been given the same opportunity). Currently, though, I think I’d go back to 1795 and give Keats a BCG vaccine.

I’ve been continuing to listen to every album Thurston Moore mentions in Sonic Life. There’s a lot of rather tuneless glam rock in there and I’m quite looking forward to leaving the early ’70s and getting into some punk rock, which, if I didn’t before, I now understand the necessity of.

I’ve also been watching film versions of as much Shakespeare as possible. Most recently, I watched the version of Richard III (1995, dir. Richard Loncraine) with Ian McKellen in the title role. The play’s updated to a dystopian 1930s of Britain, with Richard III played as a version of Oswald Mosley (compare the moustaches). It’s mostly very good. McKellen is brilliant as usual and there are some great performances from the rest of the cast, particularly Annette Bening as Queen Elizabeth (no, not that one; not that one, either). It goes a bit awry at the end, with a slightly half-baked action scene featuring a young Dominic West as Richmond (soon to be Henry VII) driving an armoured car around Battersea Power Station. But, overall, it’s definitely worth watching.

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