The Polemicist's Vice

On the merits and demerits of polemicism

Epistemic status: largely just an excuse to quote a bunch of polemical passages I’ve enjoyed.

By disposition, I love polemicism. There is little I enjoy more than a good literary smackdown. Even when I substantively disagree with the writer, I find there to be something awe-inspiring about good polemics. Even people whose arguments I am often unimpressed by, I enjoy a little too much so long as the polemicism is good. Though I generally do not find David Bentley Hart’s arguments good—in part because he rarely seems particularly interested in making them—I find him delightful to read for the disses. For example:

Did Gopnik bother to read what he was writing there? I ask only because it is so colossally silly. If my dog were to utter such words, I should be deeply disappointed in my dog’s powers of reasoning. If my salad at lunch were suddenly to deliver itself of such an opinion, my only thought would be “What a very stupid salad.” Before all else, there is the preposterous temerity of the proprietary claim; it is like some fugitive from a local asylum appearing at the door to tell you that “all this realm” is his inalienable feudal appanage and that you must evacuate the premises forthwith.

Or alternatively:

I know I have a predilection for writing prose rather than bullet-points, and this may have confused Feser; but his misstatements are so bizarre and extravagant that there are only two possibilities: either he did not actually read the book, but at most skimmed bits of it in his rush to write a review he had already concocted in his mind while doing something else (kicking a puppy, perhaps); or he is, when reading a complex text that has not been carefully explained to him several times in advance, damned near a functional illiterate. Of course, both things may be true at once, but I believe the former to be unarguably true in this case.

I even enjoyed Hart’s criticisms of me, which some might say is indicative of a darkened mind:

The second experience, which was slightly more irksome, involved someone sending me links to some Substack articles by a fellow going by the moniker ‘Bentham’s Bulldog’, proclaiming in a tone of bluffing bombast that, while ‘analytic’ philosophers make arguments and write clearly and are held to standards of logical solvency, ‘continental’ philosophers merely make assertions and write obscurely and refuse to submit to logical rules. This is an old and tedious line that no one should have much patience for. It certainly fails as a description of analytical process except in its most idealized and self-aggrandizing delusions about itself. By ‘continental’ philosophy, moreover, it turned out that Mr. Bulldog meant certain tendencies found in French poststructuralists and postmodernists of a few decades back and in their American epigones—though he also had his keen canine eyes trained further into the background on the slouching figure of Heidegger and, still further back, on Hegel (who did indeed make impenetrable prose respectable in German and other schools of European thought, but whom only a philosophical illiterate would accuse of a want of dialectical thoroughness). It really was all a bit vacuous.

I considered writing a response at the time, but seeing as it was Hart’s usual fare of making confident assertions with a few brief pointers in the direction of further arguments—arguments he has seemingly no interest in providing—I decided that there wasn’t enough of substance for it to be worth replying.

Feser’s polemics are similarly fun to read. For example:

New Atheist pamphleteer John Loftus is like a train wreck orchestrated by Zeno of Elea: As Loftus rams headlong into the devastating objections of his critics, the chassis, wheels, gears, and passenger body parts that are the contents of his mind proceed through ever more thorough stages of pulverization. And yet somehow, the grisly disaster just never stops. Loftus continues on at full speed, tiny bits of metal and flesh reduced to even smaller bits, and those to yet smaller ones, ad infinitum. You feel you ought to turn away in horror, but nevertheless find yourself settling back, metaphysically transfixed and reaching for the Jiffy Pop.

Or:

Being insulted by the pop atheist writer John Loftus is, to borrow Denis Healey’s famous line, like being savaged by a dead sheep. It is hard to imagine that a human being could be more devoid of argumentative or polemical skill.

And my personal favorite:

Now, I certainly want the record to be correct. But if it isn’t true that Dawkins refuses to debate Craig, where could anyone have gotten the idea that he does refuse? Well, for starters, from the fact that Dawkins published an article in the Guardian just this past October with the title “Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig” -- an article reprinted on the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and widely discussed online. That does rather give the impression that Dawkins refuses to debate Craig, no? So, perhaps Dawkins should send himself an email demanding a correction. And if, in future, he doesn’t want people to get the idea that he refuses to debate with William Lane Craig, he might consider not saying -- loudly, publicly, online and in print -- things like “I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig.”

Chomsky’s polemics are similarly enjoyable:

Alan Dershowitz’s regular little performances are eminently ignorable, including the one reproduced below. But since I’ve been asked several times for comments on this one, a few follow.

…

By Dershowitz standards, this fabrication is very minor, but it is of some interest nonetheless. Dershowitz readers will be aware that whenever his sensitive antennae pick up a phrase that might be critical of Israeli government policies, if my name is even remotely associated, it quickly becomes the “hard left gang of Israel bashers” led by the evil demon Chomsky.

None of these writers are ones who I agree with to any great degree. I enjoy polemics even more when they are correct. I loved reading Richard’s takedown of The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does:

The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism (eds. Adams, Crary, & Gruen) puts me in mind of Bastiat’s Candlestick Makers' Petition. For any proposed change—be it the invention of electricity, or even the sun rising—there will be some in a position to complain. This is a book of such complaints. There is much recounting of various “harms” caused by EA (primarily to social justice activists who are no longer as competitive for grant funding). But nowhere in the volume is there any serious attempt to compare these costs against the gains to others—especially the populations supposedly served by charitable work, as opposed to the workers themselves—to determine which is greater. (One gets the impression that cost-benefit analysis is too capitalistic for these authors to even consider.) The word “trade-off” does not appear in this volume.

Michael Tracey is another writer with the knack for polemics of the best kind. For example:

It was driving me crazy that no one with any minimal fluency in the Epstein matter was making any kind of proactive defense of Noam Chomsky, amid this utterly repellent crusade over the past two weeks to denounce and disavow him — which has included his cowardly former “friends” and collaborators. The firehose of defamatory garbage is all the more repellent given Chomsky’s current age and physical condition, incapacitated by a stroke and unable to respond — despite, I’m told, at times being able to understand things communicated to him. Self-righteous charlatans like Chris Hedges felt no need to do the slightest examination of the relevant facts and evidence before rattling off their melodramatic excoriations of a 97-year-old stroke victim whom they once revered as the titanic intellect of our age. And not only have they excoriated him, they’ve declared that his entire life’s work is irreparably tainted.

There are other writers who I agree with more but find far less exciting than Feser, Hart, Chomsky, and the others. The sentences you find in Parfit are mostly correct and always clear (at least, provided one is, unlike a surprising number of his critics, apprised of the relevant concepts) but rarely exciting. For example:

Things can be good or bad by having features that might give us reasons to respond to these things in certain ways. Events can be good or bad for particular people, or impersonally good or bad, in reason-implying senses. On some widely accepted views about reasons, nothing could be in these ways good or bad.

Some writers are prone, by disposition, to make modest and narrow claims. I am not one such writer. To quote an amusing passage from Parfit:

Kant seldom uses words like 'most', 'many', 'several, or 'some', preferring to write only 'all' or 'none'. Kant uses 'good', he says, to mean 'practically necessary'. And he seldom uses the concept of a reason: a fact that merely counts in favour of some act, since his preferred normative concepts are required, permitted, and forbidden. Temperamentally, I am an extremist too, who has to struggle to be more like Sidgwick.

In this respect, and few others, I am like Kant.

All of this is to say that by disposition, I enjoy little more than polemicism. I’ll even enjoy a writer who I consider, by and large, to be sloppy, provided their writing has adequate flair. But I worry that this is a vice. Polemicism, while at times appropriate, is frequently gratuitous.

There are times when it is appropriate. Some things are very bad and merit sharp criticism if one is to call a spade a spade. I feel no embarrassment over my review of The AI Con because the book was really as bad as I suggested. Nearly every argument in the book was bad, nearly every claim false or misleading, and the writers combined an overblown self-assurance with a complete refusal to consider counterarguments. To call it a vortex of insanity would be an insult to vortexes of insanity.

But there are other polemics over the years that I feel less good about. Several years ago, I wrote a piece titled Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong. My aim in the piece was to suggest that one shouldn’t defer to Eliezer because he is frequently confidently egregiously wrong. In my defense, he is frequently confidently egregiously wrong. Yet I think the piece’s rhetoric was in various places overblown. While I think the substance of the piece holds up, I am now somewhat embarrassed by the style.

Polemics are generally better for convincing those who already agree with you than fence-sitters. You convince the undecided by being measured and reasonable. My aim in the piece was to suggest that people should be less deferential to Eliezer, especially on philosophical topics where he often misrepresents crucial arguments. Had the piece been more measured, it likely would have been more convincing.

I also don’t think the piece adequately conveyed that I don’t actually have a negative opinion of Eliezer. Much of what he says is interesting, some of it very clever. I do not think he is consistently careful to be worth deferring to much, but he is quite useful as a wellspring of interesting ideas. He is also clearly very intelligent.

I was more prone to overblown polemicism when I was younger. In the olden days of Bentham’s Bulldog, I was more of a bulldog. This is a common pattern with writers: they get less fiery as they age. For example, Richard Yetter Chappell, back in the day, was prone to write things like:

Many otherwise-intelligent people have an unfortunate tendency to dismiss entire realms of inquiry out of hand. Perhaps the most common example of this is the failure to appreciate the possibility of a priori or non-scientific rational inquiry, i.e. philosophy. The prevalence of ignorant scientism in this thread (bashing Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument) is remarkable -- though sadly not atypical.

One commenter suggests that an untestable hypothesis must consequently be classified as either ‘myth’ or ‘garbage’. (He did not tell us how to test this very suggestion. I can only assume he was storytelling.) Another calls Bostrom’s argument “pseudoscience gibberish”.

Scott Alexander was also much more polemical in the days of his youth. As he’s gotten older, my sense of his writing is that it’s become more careful and less fiery. When I read old SSC posts, I generally find them more Cathartic and less careful. Polemics, like crime, are generally carried out by young men. Likely I am similarly doomed to become more measured with age.

Many people are too measured at the margins. EA writing is often unduly hedged and dreary. Rather than saying “P,” they’ll say “I broadly find P or something in the vicinity broadly plausible.” My guess is my writing is not measured enough at the margins. Ideally I would be more careful and hedged (plausibly).

Writing in an understated way also has the potential to be more devastating than fiery polemics. Some of the most savage beatdowns I’ve read have come from Michael Huemer being understated. For instance:

Block questions whether I am a genuine libertarian. If you’re not sure if I’m a libertarian, here are some relevant details: I have written in defense of gun rights, for drug legalization, for open immigration (based on individual rights), for anarcho-capitalism, for libertarianism in general, against all government authority, against wealth redistribution, against regulation, and against taxation (as a form of theft). I scored 156/160 on Caplan’s Libertarian Purity Test (after declining to answer two questions about the Federal Reserve).

I think Walter Block may be the only person in the universe who thinks I’m not a libertarian. Where did he get that idea?

I think it’s because in my book, Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism, I failed to argue from libertarianism in defending ethical vegetarianism; instead, I gave the argument listed in sec. 1 above.

The mistake: To be a libertarian, you just have to hold libertarian political views. It’s not required that those be the only views you have, or that everything you believe be based on libertarianism.

3. Utilitarianism

Block may also be the only person who thinks I am a utilitarian. I guess he thinks this because I oppose factory farming on the grounds that it causes enormous suffering for trivial benefits. This is certainly something utilitarians would agree with me about.

The mistake: utilitarians are not the only ones who think you shouldn’t cause vast suffering for trivial benefits; that is common to every reasonable ethical theory. What is distinctive of utilitarianism is that it claims that only pleasure and pain matter (or preference satisfaction, or welfare), whereas other people think that there are other things that matter (e.g., rights, virtue, respect, equality). Although I say that pleasure and pain matter, I never said they are the only things that matter.

The article would not have been improved stylistically by Huemer stating that Block’s arguments were crazy. Even though they obviously were.

So those are the tradeoffs of polemicism. The more polemically you write, the more fiery and vibrant your writing will be. It will also be more cathartic to those who agree and it has some possibility of shocking people out of complacent agreement with the arguments that you are criticizing. On the other hand, it may come off as overblown, be less persuasive, and be alienating. Those who find themselves aesthetically drawn to polemicism should probably be less polemical, while those who find themselves naturally shy and timid should be more polemical. Virtue lies somewhere between Chomsky and Parfit.