On Pitilessness
“A masterful young jockey, that;—’ll have his own road, if ever anybody would.”
“Yes,” cried Ursula, in her hot, overbearing voice. “Why couldn’t he take the horse away, till the trucks had gone by? He’s a fool, and a bully. Does he think it’s manly, to torture a horse? It’s a living thing, why should he bully it and torture it?”
–D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
For this post, I’m putting the thesis right out front, so you can read it even if you have only one minute to spare: D. H. Lawrence once wrote that a living thing should not earn our contempt just because it can be destroyed. Actually, its vulnerability is what makes it a living thing. We are under no obligation to extirpate weakness by seeing who can survive bombshells. I like to hear what people say when they feel they will be treated respectfully.
The cost of a flame war is not something we know, for the following reason: the tendency of flame wars to produce a lot of links back and forth, and a lot of enthusiastic comments, makes them look terrific. However, we have no idea how many people decide they will never write a comment, or decide not to start a blog, or decide not to weigh in on their own blogs on a given subject. If that decision is based on trouble refuting well-made counter-arguments, so be it. But if it’s based on verbal abuse? Where is our triumph then?
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(NB: A lot of people hold up BlackAmazon as their apostle of righteous anger, and I like what I’ve read of her [including her newest piece on Children of Men, my #1 movie of last year] so I’m adding her to the blogroll.)
It’s been an interesting day in the blogosphere, to put it mildly. Queer Dewd has just posted, sort of in response to my recent post, an essay about flame wars where he argues that he enjoys flame wars, and considers them a legitimate response to oppression, and then gives the entirety of some other guy’s essay on Milton and Rush Limbaugh. (Queer Dewd’s gender is complicated; I’m using the male pronoun because I think that’s what he would prefer.)
Of course I got into the blogging world in order to have interesting conversations, debates included. (My debate with surlacarte over Paul de Man is still going, and at no point has even faintly resembled a flame war.) Our opinions about politics and culture are not some essential part of ourselves, beyond the reach of legitimate reproach. It is furthermore a good idea to put our arguments in the strongest possible terms.
However, we are not talking here about disagreement. We’re talking about a particular kind of disagreement that primarily makes use of mockery, damaging speculation, name-calling, and reiteration. At its core is the philosophy of pitilessness: “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
I’m going to respond specifically to Queer Dewd and his spokesperson, but I think the issue is broadly applicable.
a. “Only the bourgeois oppressor wants us to conform to his standards of etiquette, which are designed to neutralize us.”
Sure, I believe in being uncompromising about political ideals. But the flip side of the justification for argument — that a position is not essential to the person holding it — is that attacking the person rather than the position is actually wrong. I don’t believe in being wrong. I like to leave that to my opponents. We can be angry. We can write angry. But if anger starts to muddy the message and decay our words into generic insults, then it is the sign of powerlessness. Powerlessness is going to make all the wrong people happy.
A word about this nonsensical appropriation of Marxism. What the bourgeoisie really wants, 23 hours of the day when it isn’t tea-time, is for us to believe that life consists of eliminating the weak and promoting the strong. They’ll let us take just about any position we like as long as the mode is competition. That’s what being assimilated means. Anybody whose position can be summed up as “let the rest of the sniveling babies go crying to their mommies” is being both pitiless, and, frequently, sexist. For example, in the Hawkes essay cited by Queer Dewd, we learn that “misplaced morality” condemns us to “eternal impotence.” Pro-flame preening can’t go ten seconds without lapsing into masculinist rhetoric.
b. “Flaming is what makes the right wing great. We should learn from them.”
We could learn to imitate nasty, unscrupulous bullies. Or we could stick to our strengths. You know what makes the progressives great? Their sense of humor. They can be very, very funny.
There’s a difference between humor and nastiness, which sometimes likes to pretend it’s humor. Nastiness makes another person out to be a plague, a poison, a sick or defective individual. Humor makes another person out to be foolish. We are all foolish sometimes; that takes forgiveness. Nobody should be treated like a plague. There is an obvious correspondence between types of thinking, types of rhetoric, and personal politics. If you think it’s harder, more risky, to take the high road, you’re right. There I don’t feel any pity.
If you think any of the bad karma that’s been going around is really funny reading, you’re looking at different threads than me.
We have other strengths too. Recently we have heard a great deal dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King. He didn’t sound at all like Limbaugh; nor, for that matter, did Malcolm. Were they less effective because of it?
c. “The opposite of flaming is boredom.”
The opposite of having a strong opinion is boredom. The opposite of flaming is reason. Anger is not entertainment; it’s a call to action. Meanwhile, a simply entertaining post is not a flame war post.
I’m not going to write angry so other people can feed off that for thrills; maybe they will anyway, but that’s not why I write. Furthermore, this principle of negative entertainment is a bad habit, nothing more; writers like uncomplicatedly give us the opportunity to be engaged by clarity, pathos, compassion, insight — all things that sound like and are the opposite of war.
d. “People who plead for gentler proceedings are hypocritical, because we all have sadistic impulses.”
Hypocrisy means saying one thing, and doing another. It does not mean the difference between your imaginary X-ray of my head, and what I write or do. If this is supposed to be a brilliant insight derived from Freud, then believe me, Freud was 100% in favor of that kind of hypocrisy, and termed it “sublimation.”
Sure, we all feel angry and contemptuous in the midst of proceedings like these. On the other hand, we have other impulses, too. Like our impulse towards unheard voices. Not to speak for them, but to make them unafraid of speaking. Meanwhile, I’m always astonished when a writer switches fluently from rhetoric to the jargon of authenticity, as though these things were the slightest bit compatible.
Since many of these arguments read like a second-rate version of what somebody thought Friedrich Nietzsche was saying, let me end by quoting Nietzsche on intellectuals who found their thinking on “impulses”:
Alas, I knew noble men who lost their highest hope. Then they slandered all high hopes. [...] Spirit too is lust, so they said. Then the wings of their spirit broke: and now their spirit crawls about and soils what it gnaws.
That is saying enough for now.
Good post. I have to go do official Work. So I’ll just say the opposite of boredom isn’t flame wars, it’s engagement. There are stronger ways of being un-bourgeois than by engaging in flame wars.
Well said!
It’s worth noting that Lawrence also lets the rider speak for himself: after that incident in Women In Love, Gerald goes on to mount a fairly eloquent defense of his actions, saying that the horse is only valuable to him, and therefore valuable as a horse, insofar as it will do what he wants. Of course, we know what eventually happens to him. Lawrence was certainly familiar with the urge to use violence to bend people, things, and ideas to one’s will, and the importance of resisting that urge.
I agree that this is a good post, not least because it proves that reasoned, civil argument can also be strongly-worded, biting, and uncompromising. The dichotomy between polite, unoffensive prose and full-throated attack is completely spurious.
I am a lurker of the feminists blogs. I have been reading for about 2 months now, never commenting and I do not have a blog either, but I find a lot of the writing very interesting because it’s a place where I feel like I can learn about something I do not know a lot about. I have to say that when I initially started reading certain feminists blogs, I was very impressed with the way the women interacted with one another. There seemed to be a real camaraderie and respect amongst women and since I was basically a reader of “mommy blogs” I found that really refreshing. A lot of the “mommy blogs” for lack of a better term, were always turning into mini soap operas where the women would resort to name calling and condescension that I found offensive and demeaning.
But then I started reading some feminists blogs and I thought I had stepped into an entirely different world. A topic was written about and women flocked to discuss the topic and for the most part, what I saw I liked. Shortly thereafter, I started seeing the same sort of flaming going on in the feminists blogs that I saw in the “mommy blogs” and it was discouraging to me– the name calling, the bashing, the anger, the ganging up on those who presented a different point of view and I did not dare offer up a comment for fear of being on the receiving end of that sort of attack because this is new to me, after all, and I am bound to write the wrong thing and insult someone. I do not have an army of people to step up and support me should I blunder, and so it is easier to remain on the sidelines, quietly observing.
This is what I believe with my heart, however: as women, we can be our own worst enemies sometimes. Every time I see someone point their finger in the direction of a man and hear them say that the patriarchy is to blame, what I am thinking is that we as women do not support each other the way we should be supporting each other and this is what men see when they click open these blogs. Why should we demand respect from men when we do not demand it from each other, that is what I want to know? I have seen such degrading remarks made about women BY women, and never, ever have I experienced this sort of name-calling from a man towards myself. It has been my experience that women attack me more viciously than any man ever has.
Profacero, girldetective, tomemos: thanks!
Heather, thank you for writing in.
Most feminist blogs have a mixture of male and female readers and commenters, so nothing happening there is the fault of women qua women.
You may not have experienced nastiness, name-calling, bullying, and other such harassment from a man, but many women do experience that or worse on a daily basis. That is one of the reasons the feminist blogosphere exists.
I am certain that feminist bloggers do not care what a man thinks, as a man, when he clicks on a feminist blog and reads the proceedings. They would really want to avoid thinking of a feminist blog as a sort of performance intended to win the approval of sympathetic males.
Your characterization of the sorts of nastiness that can take over the blogosphere (anywhere, not just on a feminist blog), and the way it has affected your participation, makes a lot of sense to me. I am, however, uncomfortable with the way your comment characterizes each gender.
“Nastiness makes another person out to be a plague, a poison, a sick or defective individual. Humor makes another person out to be foolish. We are all foolish sometimes; that takes forgiveness. Nobody should be treated like a plague.”
I must admit, I’ve been turning this one over for a couple of days, and I quite like it. Well put. While I have sometimes thought you foolish, I have never thought you poisonous.
Conrad:
Of course, as a matter of historical accuracy, we are obliged to turn to your response to my first Valve post, where, as I recall, you characterized my writing as a “particularly mephitic exhalation.”
Mephitic
1. Esp. of a gas or vapour: offensive to the smell, foul-smelling; noxious, poisonous, pestilential. Also fig. Now arch. and literary.
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But that was then, this is now. Thank you for your kind compliment; I am very flattered that you (and Nanette in the previous post) spent some days forming your opinion of what was posted here.
Touché–you made me laugh out loud! But then, that was back in the 17th century, or some such, wasn’t it?
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