“The modes of trolling are many,” writes Rachel Barney in her wonderful mock-Aristotelian treatise, “On Trolling.” Characteristic techniques include treating small problems as if they were large ones, disputing what everyone knows to be true, criticizing what everyone knows to be admirable and masking hostility with claims of friendship. If that sounds like the kind of thing Socrates got up to, this is no accident—for like Socrates, the troll claims “that he is a gadfly and beneficial, and without him to ‘stir up’ the thread it would become dull and unintelligent.” The difference, says Barney, is that while Socrates may have annoyed people, that was never his goal; he simply wanted to convince his fellow Athenians that they lacked wisdom and needed to care for their souls. The troll, by contrast, intentionally aims to generate “confusion and strife among a community who really agree,” whether for amusement or for profit or for partisan gain. Socrates was a philosopher, in other words; the troll is just an arsehole.
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Fortunately, the possibilities afforded by the written word made it possible for Socrates’s followers to find new and arguably more effective ways of being Socratic. Plato, for example, invented (or at least mastered) the dialogue form, which allowed both author and reader to examine their own convictions by confronting a multitude of competing views, including those of card-carrying arseholes like Callicles and Thrasymachus. And then Montaigne introduced the personal essay, which depicted that multitude as inhering within the narrator himself, and so, by implication, within the reader as well: “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.” Both forms allow intellectuals to express arseholish thoughts without fully endorsing them, and both therefore permit a degree of honesty that in other contexts might violate social norms. By suggesting that the most important disagreements are those that we have with ourselves, moreover, they offer us a way of being good citizens in both the philosophical and the political senses—to disagree without being disagreeable, as Barack Obama was once fond of saying.
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Fortunately, the possibilities afforded by the written word made it possible for Socrates’s followers to find new and arguably more effective ways of being Socratic. Plato, for example, invented (or at least mastered) the dialogue form, which allowed both author and reader to examine their own convictions by confronting a multitude of competing views, including those of card-carrying arseholes like Callicles and Thrasymachus. And then Montaigne introduced the personal essay, which depicted that multitude as inhering within the narrator himself, and so, by implication, within the reader as well: “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.” Both forms allow intellectuals to express arseholish thoughts without fully endorsing them, and both therefore permit a degree of honesty that in other contexts might violate social norms. By suggesting that the most important disagreements are those that we have with ourselves, moreover, they offer us a way of being good citizens in both the philosophical and the political senses—to disagree without being disagreeable, as Barack Obama was once fond of saying.
- More Here
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