The Death Throes of the Discourse
The honest man is an athlete who loves to wrestle naked
I think I’m gonna cancel my subscription to the “marketplace of ideas”.
Where did it come from, anyway? It’s a cute idea, a nice abstraction. Hmm. Sounds like the Enlightenment — yep. Borrowed from an analogy with economic liberalism, budding at the time. In the marketplace, the best will out. Err. Maybe not the best — but what people want the most. The things that get product-market fit. Which involves a product, which can be good or bad. But also a market, which can want a more efficient way to manage its payroll or to tickle itself to death on TikTok. Anyway.
The Enlightenment [sic] took root in a society buckling under the weight of an accumulated tradition that had undergone rigor mortis. The world was a garden in need of weeding. In such a world — in such an intellectual marketplace — the ideas that won — those that found PMF — were those that were best able to cast off the millstone around the collective neck by a seductively simple return to first principles. Instead of dealing directly with a society that had become impossibly tangled, a hypothetical society was instead simulated by the philosophers, and ideas were tested in this context.
If you make man rational, copy-paste a million of him and call it a society, and hit the play button, it is easy to see that to combat prejudice, bias, wrongness — sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Has reality conformed to this simulation?
The history of propaganda, marketing tactics, and even the teaching of rhetorical skills answer resoundingly: no. In no case has it been found that the best way to advance your ideas is to robotically advance syllogisms. Argument as Code — an idea for the autists (put it on the blockchain) — this would not work. What even is this ambiguous thing called style that we insist on inserting in places where the naked truth ought to reign?
Persuasive arguments and intellectually honest arguments exist on different planes. We are told that in arguing we should “meet the other person where they are” and work from there to where we think they “should be”.
The issue here is that this is inherently sophistic — at least, it serves no chance of mutually advancing understanding, because at least one person is playing pretend. Disagreements arise over conflicting premises, and meeting the other person where they are means pretending like you share their premises and arguing from them towards your conclusion. This does not bring anyone closer to truth — only conformity.
And the problem is that the premises are never litigated and probably can’t be. So we play-act at argumentation (which is fun) and ultimately bump up against something immovable. “That’s not happening and it is good that it is.” First a contrived argument is advanced to wriggle out of an attack. This is easily disassembled, and the fundamental conflict over things with quaint names like The Good leaves us mute.
Our fundamental mistake is to conflate the domination-oriented art of persuasion with the truth-seeking goal of philosophy, and hope somehow that sophistic means will serve philosophical ends. This following the long dream of the perfect System, the great Process by which private vice is alchemized into public virtue.
If the Enlightenment was tired of the arbitrary hold of custom and sought to replace it with rational debate, we are similarly tired of the interminable logomania that constitutes the discourse. Twitter is full of it, the universities are overflowing with papers that are never read, all around we are surrounded by words in which, like Borges’ Library of Babel, everything is written.
And now the forces are assembling to enlist a billion bots to join the war. I came recently across an example of a troll using ChatGPT to drag ten “NPCs” into debates that went around and around forever, the bot imitating their tone and priorities, running them to death by brute perserverance, like an ancient man marathoning after a bison. Trying to parse it all one feels like Laocoön dragged into the sea by the serpents.
You cannot talk your way out of this predicament. You have to cut their heads off. At some point, the System dream fails, and you have to make a value judgement. Can’t I just do that? There is an ancient principle, unjustly fallen out of fashion: “By their fruits shall ye know them.”
Our collective obsession with professed “beliefs” and “opinions”, in terms of which we have redefined morality, is a disease of a too-abstracted society. Philosophy rightly understood is a force that animates a life: the tools for evaluating the quality of this life are ones we naturally possess. These are the only tools we need to evaluate a debate. Look for vitality, taking cues from style, which hints at it.
And so I guess I am back with my old enemy Rousseau, paradoxically an imperfect exponent of an unimpeachable idea: the way to win is not to argue, but to be.