Monday, June 11, 2007
(12:02 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Reasonable Violence
One thing that is often overlooked is the violent potential contained in reason itself. Hegel of course analyzed this, concluding that the revolutionary Terror was a necessary moment in the imposition of abstract reason. But to understand this point, we don't need to look to world-historical trends: we can look to our own blog-comment threads.Here we have an environment where, in some interpretations at least, the Habermasian "public sphere" is finally, at least in principle, realized -- where "no one knows you're a dog," where we are cut off from the normal restraints of social convention (for instance, deference to people in a higher social position). Abstract reason rules -- again, at least in principle.
Yet we often have comment threads that we are constrained to describe as violent. And here I am going to propose something that goes against all of our pious rationalizations: the most violent people in such debates aren't finally the ones arguing in bad faith, the ones with an axe to grind, the racists, sexists, etc. Those people are, in the last analysis, pathetic -- their "violent" rhetoric is just an expression of their impotence. The most violent people are the ones who are right -- not just the people who wrongly think they're right, but especially the ones who really are right.
The person with reason on his side has the most powerful, most coercive weapon available -- no one is entitled to reject the claims of reason. Hence the bullying that we so often see, the gratuitous, endless battles against an already defeated opponent, precisely on the part of people who are objectively in the right. It's not simply a matter of putting the matter out there for an enlightened public to judge -- no, one must impose reason on one's opponent, in a process that resembles nothing so much as the vintage playground struggle to make someone say "uncle." (I've succumbed to this temptation myself, most notably in the unfortunate incident of Adam Roberts and the impossible circle.)
Having reason on one's side produces not -- as one would expect -- a calm self-assurance that thinks nothing of the petty attacks of one's detractors, but rather the licence for the greatest possible rhetorical violence, for kicking the opponent when they're down, again, and again, and again, and again. No truce is possible -- one would be betraying reason itself. The petty "violence" one's opponent hurls back in return only serves to prove all the more that reason must be imposed upon them.
Nothing is more violent than reason unleashed.
