Montaigne Solves the Internet
If sinners can’t cast stones, who will?
Most days, the Internet appears to be one big informal fallacy, with emphasis on the ad hominems. On all sides of the political spectrum, “Appeal to Motive” has been re-branded, as “positionality” on the left and as various dismissals of the lamestream media on the right. Thus online arguments, when they rise above insults at all, become less about propositions than about poisoning the well.
Montaigne has an ingenious response to a subset of these arguments in which an interlocutor brings up the hypocrisy of the speaker.
Hypocrisy and contradiction have lost their capacity to shock, not just because of Trump, though the failure of these to bring Trump down–despite the media’s continued belief that they represent “smoking guns”–demonstrate that this is so. I think this is because we are becoming increasingly aware–through the popularization of neuroscience and behavioral economics–that none of us acts consistently. Thus, the consistency standard is seen as querulous. Furthermore, with the mass capture of public statements made possible by digital media, contradiction mining has become just too easy. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
Montaigne, however, offers a novel way of turning back Appeals to Hypocrisy, as we might call them, while turning New Testament wisdom on its ear. He writes.
Reproaching other people for my own faults does not seem to me to be any more odd than reproaching myself for other people’s (as I often do). We must condemn faults anywhere and everywhere, allowing them no sanctuary whatsoever.
This is a deft move in which Montaigne wins by surrendering his position–that of his own coherence. “Faults” are flaws that remain flaws wherever they might be found and whoever spots them, and removing them from oneself is not a precondition for identifying them in others.
This brings a communal aspect to truth-seeking that seems more realistic than the one presupposed by Appeals to Hypocrisy. We all have blind spots, after all, and it might even be unethical to wait for the log to be removed from one’s own eye before helping one’s brother with his speck. Or so Montaigne seems to argue.
This visions brings to mind the Parable of the Long Spoons, in which Heaven and Hell are identical. In each, denizens have plenty to eat, but only spoons so long that it is impossible to feed oneself. In Heaven, they feed each other. In Hell, they cannot cooperate and starve.
Montaigne is saying it is like this for fault finding. We can’t always see our own faults, so we must spot each other’s. Now we just need to figure out which, in the Parable of Fault Finding, would be Heaven and which would be Hell.
Originally published at milesglorios.us on May 2, 2017.
