by Joseph Shieber
One of the aspects of contemporary intellectual life that I find baffling is the extent to which online culture revels in ad hominem attacks. By this I don’t only mean the way in which someone who offers up an argument is “called out” for some personal transgression of theirs that is utterly unrelated to the argument they’re presenting. I also mean the way in which the mere names of long-serving opinion writers can serve as a short-hand for a type of writing or position reviled by a certain internet subcommunity. (In a recent post at Three-Toed Sloth, Cosma Shalizi suggests that these aspects are endemic to literary life more generally; I should drop the qualifier “online”.)
So, for example, you might read that “pundit types … seem to forget that [Matt] Yglesias rose to the top of the blogosphere based on being from Harvard and being early in the game and that’s it. Nearly two decades later and it’s just bullshit all the way down.” Or that “[Thomas] Friedman’s true peak of influence was in the late 90s through the 00s, when he combined random fake conversations with taxi drivers, Friedman Unit facile discussions of the Iraq War, and paeans to globalization as our savior that routinely made fun of the anti-globalization movement as hopeless Luddites who wanted to hold the world back.”
(I chose these examples from the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog – a blog I greatly admire! – but I could no doubt just as easily have found similar snark on right-leaning blogs about, say, Robert Reich or Paul Krugman.)
In one sense, of course, such snark isn’t baffling at all. It’s fun to read! Also, Yglesias and Friedman are both enormously successful and enjoy outsized public platforms, something that’s likely to engender at least a smidgen of jealousy from academics and others who rarely achieve those rarified levels of public prominence.
What puzzles me is that, if the goal of a discussion is intellectual engagement with an idea or argument, then such ad hominem broadsides are at best a distraction – and at worst positively obstructive to appreciating whatever might be gained from considering that idea or argument. Read more »