I have been a blogger at Feminist
Philosophers for about 5 years. I
resigned from the blog over the summer but now want to do so publicly. I may still occasionally post here, where
things are quiet, but I have stepped away from engagement with the more
high-traffic online philosophy culture.
My primary area of research and interest concerns early
Chinese ethics and its focus on civility and manners. That’s largely the idiom from which I blogged
at FP, my posts most often focusing on intersections in feminism and civility
or spurred by my own commitments to civility.
Perhaps that was always an awkward fit, given that calls for civility
have historically seated uneasily with progressive politics, at least for
some. But whatever the case, I left the
blog out of a sense that the fit just isn’t right and want to say at least a
little about the wider atmosphere in online discourse among philosophers.
Until I began blogging, I avoided online conversations, not
eager to enter the fray when conversations could so often be heated, inhumane,
and unpleasant. So too, online
discussions often favor the quick and agile, the aggressive and insistent,
people who like (or at least can ably engage) the rough and tumble of agonistic
back and forth – and most of all those who are confidently certain. Honestly,
the rough and tumble mostly makes me sad and I often have a shortage of
certainty.
Reading both social media and blog conversations among
philosophers, I often feel demoralized.
The people who speak most and most insistently seem not only to be
absolutely clear about what they think, but think there is no other legitimate,
respectable, or even moral way to think.
My trouble is usually not that I think otherwise, but that I don’t
entirely know what I think. And not
knowing what to think is itself sometimes cast as shameful. In too many contexts, to confess confusion or
uncertainty is to confess deficiency – sometimes in philosophical acumen,
sometimes in “smarts,” sometimes in moral clarity, sometimes even in basic
humanity.
Most broadly, I despair of the quick condemnation, scorn,
and contempt that so often animates the commentary offered by the certain,
whatever the direction of their certainty.
I worry that we incentivize both certainty and hiding confusion. Or, more accurately, that we encourage people
to *perform* their engagement in online conversations as if their views are
confidently, firmly settled – worse, as if all alternatives are justly derided
and scorned. We also thereby suppress
contributions by those who can’t or won’t do this.
I do understand that calls for civility can be weaponized to
stifle opposing views and expressions of righteous anger. I understand that calls for civility can work
as but “tone policing.” But I don’t know
what to do with that, assuming we want more than “dialogue” in the unrestrained
fashion of cage-matches that leave all bloodied. And assuming we want to interact with more
than those whose certainties mirror our own and offer no complicating confusions. I likewise worry that we grow so cynical
about civility that we assume its *only* motivation can be to stifle and
police. Human motivations are a nasty
mess so maybe it is right to doubt desires for civility. But where cynicism is concerned, if I’m in
for a penny, I’ll go in for a pound and also doubt that few of us are as
righteous as we think when we eagerly and aggressively assail. Maybe it’s sometimes good to punch for
justice, but maybe doing it too much and too often just cultivates an appetite
to punch. That, at least, is one of my
reservations.
In my experience blogging, I’ve inevitably been unsteady in
my own practice of civility. In truth,
I’m losing the thread, finding it ever harder to want engagement of any sort
online. Recognizing this is what initially tempted me to quit the discursive
field, to just recede into handling my confusions elsewhere, off the FP blog,
with others or in solitude.
Then this past summer, just as I was trying to decide once
and for all about resigning from FP, I came upon a wreck near our farm moments
after it happened. We are miles from
town, so it took about 40 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. While we waited, a neighbor and I did our
best to help and comfort the driver, an elderly man with a severe head
wound. I also set to work tracking down
his people. When I reached his kin, I
was told that the man was freshly bereaved – his wife had died two days before. I would find out that evening that he died
too, that her funeral would now be joined with his.
But stopped there on the side of the road, with my shirt
against his bleeding head and helpless to do naught but wait, I abruptly found
a clarity I rarely enjoy and just stopped caring in some fundamental way about
public online involvement in philosophy.
The meanness, the derision and shaming, the inhumanity of our
interactions online are too difficult to absorb into the life I really
want. It wasn’t that I suddenly contemplated
the waste of my finite mortal hours on a blog.
It is that I want to use whatever I have in labors that encourage me to
attend to life’s big confusions gently, with trepidation, and away from the
hastening, importunate ire of agonistic contests between those already wholly
certain. I don’t see that impulse
enjoying much place in our online conversations. So I am done.
