A Philosophy of Twitter Beef

Debate and Good Faith in the Post-Woke Era

Dear Republic,

In 2019, Agnes Callard asked whether public philosophy was good. Seven years later, we’re revisiting the question: amid the degradation of the humanities and the corrosive nature of online life, is public philosophy even possible? Kicking off our series is professor Barry Lam on how a philosophical understanding of public argument (of the kind we encourage here) could help us move beyond the recursive nature of online debate.

- ROL

A PHILOSOPHY OF TWITTER BEEF

There are two different approaches to speaking and writing. The first I’ll call “assertion as expression.” The idea behind this approach is that whenever you say or write something, you are expressing what you think, as thoroughly and comprehensively as you care capable of articulating at the moment. Say you’re at Thanksgiving dinner and the subject of Uncle Phil comes up, who you think is awful for what he did to Aunt Mildred. When the subject of Phil comes up, you express yourself honestly and thoroughly.

The second approach is “assertion as strategy.” On this approach, you see yourself in the middle of a game-like circumstance whereby there is an aim, and your speaking and writing is a move in that game in the interest of accomplishing that aim. You notice at Thanksgiving that Aunt Mildred has been putting on a facade of strength and resilience, having not mentioned anything about Uncle Phil all night. She seems content not to bring him up, only the blabbermouth Cousin Dave brings up why Uncle Phil isn’t there, and he asks your opinion as to why. You can be honest, or you can be strategic given your read of how Aunt Mildred is acting in this circumstance. The aim of the circumstance as you see it is to save face for Aunt Mildred, so you says “Ah I’m sure Phil had something come up, I’m sure we’ll see him soon,” and avoid expressing your sincere thoughts altogether.

Politicians making assertions is a classic case whereby we are very savvy to the difference. Asked what he thought about same-sex marriage during his first campaign, Barack Obama famously said something to the effect that marriage was between and man and a woman but that he supported civil unions, later saying something like his views were evolving. There was a general consensus at the time amongst politically knowledgeable people that these were strategic assertions. Very few people believed Barack Obama would ever pursue an anti-same-sex marriage agenda. In this case, people took themselves to know Obama’s thoughts, and interpreted his words as strategically misleading. In other cases, like in the case of Democratic leaders currently making expressions about Trump’s ICE raids, politicians say things like “We should require ICE officer to undergo rigorous training in upholding civil liberties.” Most observers do not know whether these assertions are expressions of what these leaders genuinely think, or if they are strategic. Do Democratic leaders really believe that the current problem with violent ICE raids is that its officers are under-trained? Or are they strategic and trying not to alienate Trump-voters who support such raids but might be winnable on other issues, like the economy? Perhaps politicians are being both. The general problem with assertions by politicians is that people know they are strategic, and so the extent to which their expressions are ever sincere reflections of their thinking is opaque. As a result, citizens always read into what politicians think rather than take it to be transparent from their speech.

There has been a lot of soul-searching amongst philosophers in my social media feeds in recent months who want to take stock of the assertions coming out of “the left” during the “peak woke” era, which I would place at the tail-end of the Obama administration. Most of the discussion is about whether things like “defund the police” or “sport is a human right” were strategic errors in the path toward justice.

Some of these philosophers agree with the politics behind these assertions but criticize the strategy. Some of these philosophers disagree with the politics and the strategy. I don’t think any should deny that some of these assertions were made as expressions, others as strategic, and some as both. But there is a general agreement between people who criticize these left assertions of the era that the slogans were “unforced errors” on the part of the people making them, that the backlash to them is far worse than anything these statements could possibly have accomplished. The slogans were neither persuasive nor coalition-building enough to generate lasting change, and they set the stage for reverse-strategies and the “woke right” that is now using institutionalized canceling, the defunding of basic scientific research, concerted governmental efforts to get comedians taken off the air, the removal of Plato and Toni Morrison from college curricula, and so on and so forth.

On the other end of the political spectrum, philosophers I follow on social media believe that the Trump right do not believe anything they say. They think Trump supporters do not genuinely believe that Renee Good was shot out of self-defense, they do not genuinely believe that Trump’s bombing of Venezuelan boats and the removal of the Venezuelan president followed by the sale of Venezuelan oil for American profit abides by international law. Instead, they claim, Trump supporters are simply saying what they need to say to win at the game of political assertion, the game of political propaganda. The aim of the game is to exhibit as widely as possible allegiance to the President so that there is an appearance unity and support behind the President’s agenda. Speech is always strategy, never expression of sincerely held belief.

The question of whether a certain kind of speech makes for good or bad strategy presupposes that speech ought always to be understood as strategy, even if an individual never intends it as such, and is only trying to express their own thinking. Speech, we are told by philosopher J.L. Austin, is an act, and the conditions on rationality and propriety of action reduces to the rationality and propriety of strategies. That is why the working model of the rationality of acts reduces it to the rationality of strategy (game and decision-theory).

But is it true that any and all speech ought to be understood as strategy, and that there ought to be no context whereby we reserve speech as purely unadulterated expression. What would that be like?

In my book Fewer Rules, Better People, I dedicate a chapter lamenting the fact that a setting once concerned sacrosanct for sincere expression has instead become purely strategic. The courtroom is a place where witnesses and defendants swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They are even under threat of penalty and jail for failing to uphold the oath. But now, even the people who enforce those threats, judges, have decided to turn these settings into places of purely strategic speaking. For instance, there is a widespread use of “fictional pleas” in open court, whereby a prosecutor, defense attorney, and the judge know that the defendant is pleading to a crime they did not commit. They do this because the plea is in everyone’s best interest, the defendant, the prosecutor and the judge. I tell the story of a judge who asks a defendant in open court to state that he has not been coerced into pleading guilty, while it is the the judge himself who coerced the defendant to plead guilty to a crime the defendant did not commit, just so the judge could give a lighter sentence in the defendant’s interest. Everyone knows the speech acts happening in court were acts of strategy not expression, even though part of the strategy involved everyone pretending that they were all acts of expression.

Like with courts, the entirety of the public sphere of political discussion has turned into a domain of pure strategy. Even when people are trying just to express, they are read as being strategic, and then criticized for having poor strategy, or praised for having good strategy. Everything has become strategic. Sincere expression is a by-product, not the aim of speaking. I see this everywhere, but to a much smaller extent in discourse between philosophers, both here on Substack and elsewhere. Publicly-engaged philosophy still aspires to be expressive, rather than strategic. Whenever someone makes a claim, they still provide the best possible reasons they can provide, and when challenged, respond with evidence. Whenever someone charges a public philosopher with bad strategy, there is a general consensus that such charges are distasteful (at least, I think this). Outside of philosophical exchanges, however, it is almost all strategy.

Those of us who are specialists in the philosophy of language and engage in bringing philosophy to the public need to be more effective in highlighting why the development in our political and social discourse away from expression and toward strategy is detrimental to our public life. Trust and respect for the truth depends on speaking as being a primarily alethic rather than strategic activity. Alethic activities are aimed at the truth, not at some kind of practical benefit for the speaker or others. If I always think of you as being strategic, then I know that your honesty is always subsidiary (secondary) to your strategy. Strategic speech is about what your speech wants of me and from me, and what you speech wants of others and from others, and not about whether you speech is a reflection of your thinking. Once speech is no longer a reflection of your thinking, speaking and verbal engagement no longer becomes an activity where we hold a person to the truth of their claims as opposed to the effectiveness of their claiming them.

Consider an analogy with sports. The primary aim of baseball is to score more runs than the other team, so as to win the game. The primary aim of gambling on baseball, on the other hand, is winning money. If players gambling on their own games were not only legalized, but became the primary way players made a living, and everyone treated sporting competitions as such, the entirety of sporting would be undermined. The rationality of a strategy in sports would then be solely subsidiary to winning a bet, not winning the game. The fact that a player can bet against their own game undermines trust entirely of sports as an activity of competing to win. There would no longer be any point to watching or playing in sports, thereby undermining the gambling also. This is precisely what is happening to political and social issues discourse. When everything is a strategy, saying what you think it subservient to saying what is best to service your political or social aim.

Outside of political and social issues, it is common knowledge that people in a community together are aiming to speak truly to each other, and can be held responsible for the truth of their claims, unless we have evidence to the contrary. If you pull over to ask for directions from a total stranger, it is part of conventional discourse to assume the stranger is telling you the right directions to the best of their knowledge. If we started assuming that the totality of speech activity was people trying to sell us a product, we would then assume the stranger was directing us to a business where they get a kick back, and the entire practice of asking directions from strangers would be undermined.

When a culture decides that in a certain domain, like in political and social issues, people are almost always speaking strategically, or that we should read, interpret, and evaluate others on strategic grounds, it leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy that those who aim simply to express themselves do not want to take on the burden of being read and evaluated as doing strategy, well or poorly. In fact, we are dangerously close to the idea that maybe people do not think or feel anything sincerely, they are only moved to be strategic in one way or another. That is as far away from alethic discourse as we can get, and very soon everyone is to everyone else simply someone trying to sell them something.

The burden of human communication, J.L Austin taught us, is that strategic speaking is unavoidable, because human thoughts are not transparent to each other, and speaking is just another act like running or jumping. But at the moment we are one of the lowest points of trust in media, in political institutions, in medical institutions, in educational institutions, and in each other than we have ever been. Amongst the many reasons for this, one reasons is that every assertion we now treat as coming from an interest group trying to sell us something, and we respond accordingly. This way of understanding each other has mistrust built into it, and we will never break out. The only we we can break out is to apply a little simple philosophical analysis to every exchange, and start engaging only with those who are trying to be alethic rather than only strategic.

Barry Lam is host and producer of Slate’s Hi-Phi Nation podcast, which will be returning for its next season after a three-year hiatus in April of this year. He is the author of the recently published book, Fewer Rules Better People, at Norton, and is Professor of Philosophy at UC Riverside.