A peril of the mind: that of losing the power of thinking otherwise than polemically, as if one were facing an audience and in presence of the enemy.
— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14
I was angrily chided the other day for being insufficiently attentive to my white male privilege and failing to care about the suffering of vulnerable people. I had expressed my conviction that close attention to the minutiae of the news cycle is not a good way to be meaningfully informed of anything important. The surprising thing, other than the fact that it is not 2014 and this is not Tumblr, was that this came from a real-life friend of over twenty-five years. Honestly, it feels a bit like being mustard-gassed on November 10, 1918. For God’s sake, I served in the trenches all during the twenty-teens and never took any social-justice shrapnel, only for this to happen right as I thought we were all being demobilized.
In all seriousness, the dispiriting thing was the lack of personal recognition in the email. It could have been just an angry drive-by comment from a complete stranger who stumbled upon an old post. I wouldn’t call myself smart, and I certainly wouldn’t claim to be right about everything, but I will claim to be thoughtful, at least. I take ideas seriously; I spend most of my free time reading, pondering, and writing in an effort to think more clearly. From someone with whom I’ve had countless conversations about countless topics, from someone who has a bound collection of some of my writing, I admit I might have expected a little more personal consideration in lieu of amateur sociological boilerplate about how all of what I thought were my deeply-considered convictions were actually just the factory settings of my Caucasian testicles. Ideology begins by explaining strangers and ends by making strangers of friends.
Misunderstandings and heated disagreements are as old as time, of course. And ideology has been oversimplifying reality and sharpening differences since at least the French Revolution. But I can’t help feeling like this is also an instance of a more modern phenomenon, of social media making most of us poorer at careful comprehension and charitable understanding. Even in more casual encounters, I sometimes feel a strange sense of disconnection, as if my interlocutor is speaking not to me, the particular individual, but over my shoulder, to an imaginary audience. I just happened to be the object that set off the motion sensor, triggering the pre-programmed rant.
Serious thinking requires a place — the mind’s “backstage,” maybe —where thoughts can be provisional, contradictory, embarrassing, or only half-formed. You need to be able to consider an idea without immediately deciding whether it helps your side, harms your side, gives comfort to the enemy, or would survive quotation by hostile strangers. The polemical mind has no such private room. Every thought arrives already facing outward, dressed for public appearance and braced for attack. Qualification looks like weakness. Curiosity looks like lack of conviction. Changing one’s mind looks like defeat. Even saying “I don’t know” becomes difficult, because the audience expects a position and the enemy must not be granted an opening.
Social media did not invent polemical thought; Valéry’s aphorism itself disposes of that claim. But it has turned polemics from a genre into a habitat. Formerly, one might enter a debate, write a polemic, attend a political meeting, then leave. The audience and enemy were situational. Platforms supply both continuously, and after enough exposure the arrangement becomes internal. One carries the audience and the enemy away from the screen. The “as if” in Valéry’s sentence becomes a standing psychological condition.
That may be the genuinely new social-media aspect: not that we argue more, but that we have lost the offstage condition from which non-polemical thought was once possible.