Tuesday, March 15, 2005
(5:25 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Tone
It seems like there's been a lot of discussion lately in which the idea of tone has figured heavily -- primarily the Wealth Bondage vs. Tim Burke and Michael Bérubé vs. Robert "KC" Johnson exchanges. (I would provide links, but no one would bother to follow them.) Some people seem to be saying that those who use an angry or sarcastic tone are doing something very problematic, no matter what the provocation. Others claim that such a tone is sometimes appropriate and even necessary, even if reasonable people could disagree about when the line necessitating such a response has been drawn.As one who has historically tended toward the "asshole" end of the spectrum and is trying to reform -- while not letting my sphincter muscles atrophy by any measure! -- I wonder about the ethics of tone. Are certain types of tone simply unacceptable, or subject to such a high burden of proof that they are effectively impossible to justify? I tend to notice a pattern whereby liberals are more roundly castigated for their rhetorical lapses than are conservatives, and I also tend to think that such criticisms are hugely hypocritical given the dismissive invective that characterizes much of popular conservative political discourse. (It's possible that my own ideology is blinding me here, or my own fatigue at being constantly criticized for my tone rather than for the substance of my ideas.)
I tend to think that people should loosen up with regard to tone in general and that meta-discussions on the topic of tone (such as this one) are almost always counter-productive. In fact, I usually only indulge in such meta-discussions when I am called out on my tone and then find many exmples ready-to-hand of others whose tone is just as vituperative -- my goal, in essence, is to say, "Hey, we're all assholes here, so maybe we should get back on topic," but historically the result has been ever-greater navel-gazing and tearing off of the Band-Aids where someone has hurt my precious feelings.
Am I wrong about that? Are the issues to be decided, finally, on the basis of tone, of who conducts herself most ethically in discussion? Are we arguing on the basis of effectiveness, that the reasonable person usually ends up winning the argument in the long-run, while the asshole ends up looking like an asshole? (It seems to me that such an argument won't stand up under close scrutiny -- plenty of vituperative assholes have said offensively-worded and malicious things that turn out to have been correct.) Or should we be more Kantian and use whatever is called "civil" discourse -- in our situation, that seems to be discourse that never mentions the person's position of enunciation (up to the point of disallowing outright any accusation that someone is lying) -- simply out of duty? The conservatives might be able to win political battles through the use of dishonest smear tactics and characterization of careful thought as "flip-flopping," but our father who sees in secret....
