This statement of policy was posted to Facebook, but it is relevant for any social media platforms with which I’ve been involved.
I’ve been around various social media platforms since the 1990s. I’ve had lots of spirited disagreements with people through the years. I’ve also seen the toxicity that can result when intellectually dishonest bad-faith actors engage in reprehensible personal attacks. I have learned not to even dignify those kinds of attacks with a “No comment.”
But over the past ten years, that toxicity has reached fever pitch. It led me to reduce my Facebook ‘friend’ tally from 5,000 to the current 590 ‘friends’ (and dropping). And if I don’t know you personally, I’m not likely to add you as a friend. In the last few weeks, I’ve unfriended a few other individuals who think that abusive, insulting personal attacks are a substitute for reasonable disagreement.
I don’t require agreement with my posts. I don’t require that people agree with one another. But if you can’t practice civility with me and other discussants, you’re out of here. Go peddle your poisons elsewhere.
Postscript: Many on the left have criticized “civility” as “tone policing”, which is designed to marginalize the plight of the oppressed and to downplay fundamental conflicts and injustices.
Let me not be misunderstood: I have no problem with the passionate expression of views or passionate opposition to social injustices. I have been passionately expressing my opposition to such injustices for decades.
But I am also a passionate defender of dialectical method—and dialectic is cognate with the Greek ‘dialegesthai’ and ‘dialogos’ or ‘dialogue’. Dialogue is most helpful when the discussants shed light, rather than heat, in their interactions. One doesn’t have to buy into the worldview of Jurgen Habermas to appreciate the virtues of an “ideal speech situation”, in which no force prevails except that of the better argument. Intellectual honesty is nourished through critical engagement and open inquiry, rather than through personal abuse, strategic distortions, lies, and manipulations.
Dialogue conflicts with the incivilities of strategic distortions, lies, and manipulations. “Speaking truth to power” remains essential; there is no virtue in being civil at the point of a gun.
Notablog 