Our Lazy Online Arguments & Clapbacks Broke Our Conversational Democracy: The Answer Is 42
Dear Readers,
Our 20 year experiment in oversharing has been awful. I once had a professor who said that online people “say and become nonsense to one another.” Okay, he used more, shall I say, colorful language but it is my essay so I am cleaning it up.
Social media makes us lazy arguers. It rewards the in-group clapback, not the hard work of convincing someone who does not already agree. So we do not learn how to win arguments—by which I mean, how to earn a change of mind—or how to concede them without bitterness. We confuse visibility with victory. A dunk that thrills your friends often hardens your opponent. You might "win" the thread and lose the person. We do not know how to obtain or grant loser's consent, so we cannot conclude our disputes. Loser's consent means that when you lose a fair competition—an election, a vote, a decision—you accept that loss as legitimate and agree to keep playing by the same rules next time. You do not have to like the outcome, but you acknowledge it was reached fairly and you will work within the system to change it later. And when you see the clear consensus is against you on a matter of some finality you accept it and move on to the next issue, you do not keep relitigating the past. Without this no society can advance to deal with the issues of the future because the big issues are not allowed to be resolved. They persist and fester. In such a situation you can have neither public trust nor public peace. Sometimes this is because you are in fact dealing with renegades and subversives and they just have to be beaten.
But today a problem is that narrow majorities govern as if they have mandates. 50% +1 is not enough when the 49% do not understand why they lost. Without that understanding, the minority simply waits to become the majority and reverse everything - creating a cycle of perpetual overturning rather than durable progress. Temporary electoral victories are not the same as moral victories.
I think this is why I have a new found appreciation for old academic debates and journals. You cannot get by simply through throwing shade and getting snaps.
The big platforms pay in attention. The fastest way to get it is to flatter your side and humiliate the other. That social economy punishes the work of translation. Why attempt a careful bridge if your own followers might call it weakness? Why grant a fair reading when a snarky misread travels farther?
Put another way, trending is not persuading. And there is another problem: Elijah Syndrome "I alone am left." I once worked - or tried to work - with a person who always thought that everyone who disagreed with them was part of the problem, and it was their burden and privilege to be the only one in the fight for good and the right. Say the wrong thing and you were clearly the wicked one. Everyone else is compromised or wicked. If that is your stance, disagreement becomes an affront, not a normal feature of human life. You stop trying to interpret your opponent's words as they meant them. You cannot even see when you have failed to be persuasive—or when you have actually lost the argument. Any setback is just confirmation of your goodness and the struggle against the baddies.
This is not just irrational—it is a cruel narcissism. I never realized how prevalent narcissism was until a good friend of mine, a brilliant psychologist explained to me just how prevalent it was, especially in politics. As a society we have become addicted to the dopamine hit of being "right", and surrounded by people who tell us so. We live for it, and we are dying because of it.
And when we cannot admit loss, we cannot grant loser's consent. That norm is oxygen for democracies, churches, schools, families. No loser's consent, no shared future. Just permanent crisis and crisis performance.
Stephen G. Adubato solved the riddle of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy’s Ultimate Question. I mean, yes, the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is “42.” I think Stephen pointed us to the question when he effectively asked how should we communicate with others. The answer was Code Switching as Stephen wrote, or as George Washington would say “42”
Let your ceremonies in Courtesy be proper to the Dignity of his place with whom you converse for it is absurd to act the same with a Clown and a Prince.
We used to call this manners. Today we call it code-switching. Either way, the point is simple: adjust your language to meet people where they are. That is not fakery. This is respect. This idea is that it can be disrespectful to act the same way with every person regardless of who they are. You modify your approach in mannerism and vocabulary if you want meet people where they are and in a way that seems real to them. You do not want to be rude nor so over the top that you come off as phony.
"But diversifying your speech is fake," some say. "Truth should not need translation. Speak straight or do not speak." Sure, we should reject pandering and, okay, we should tell the truth without gloss. Yet there is a difference between lying and choosing intelligible words and context for the other person. When did relating become a bad thing? The courtesy of conversational empathy is not capitulation. Translation can carry hard truths more faithfully than unfiltered bluntness can. Code-switching and reframing can be the needed evidence of the genuine desire to engage that opens the door to being truly heard. Be genuine. We do want to convince people right? I mean maybe we want just to speak truth to power, without results, but, I think we would all benefit from taking and using power for the common good and that means being a people who can truly converse with those we wish to dialogue with. And to consider them worthy of dialogue.
To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to gain Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might gain those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not outside God’s law but am within Christ’s law) so that I might gain those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might gain the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. — Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 9:20-22
Furthermore, what others see as being fake - reframing and modulating your communication - I see as the backbone of diplomacy. Solving the crises in the Levant between Israel and the Palestinians, or Israel and Syria is going to require prudential word choices to get the sides to see the situations with enough similarity to even get to the bargaining table. Consider the Camp David Accords of 1978. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin responded to appeals about Jewish survival, security and recognition. Egyptian President Muhammad Anwar es-Sadat needed frameworks of Egyptian Arab dignity and the restoration of their lands. The peace has held ever since they shook hands before the late US President James Earl Carter Jr.
We need better habits to break out of our bad ones learned in the arena of online spats; well, in addition to probably deleting social media from our phones. Here is a short attempt at a list:
Name the audience to yourself. Who are you actually trying to move? Picture a real person, not a caricature.
State their case fairly. Write their argument in a paragraph they would sign. If you cannot do that, you are not ready to answer them.
Translate the moral core. Honestly frame your point in value terms they recognize—security, liberty, loyalty, fairness, care, sanctity, opportunity.
Separate person from claim. "You are incorrect about X" is different from "You are X." Attack arguments, not identities.
Concede out loud. Give the other side its best points. Public concession buys trust.
No-sell the win. When you win you want the other side as much as possible to come with you. As much as possible you should be aiming to convert not conquer. This is easier when you do not frame the win as their defeat, instead, you position it as the resolution to whatever the disagreement was.
These are small acts of civic grace. Grace scales with usage and becomes the habit that harnesses good will. The internet taught us to rack up points. Being good neighbors should induce us to earn agreement or at least acceptance, rather than trying to score. The difference determines our societal character.
Of course, this approach has limits. It assumes good faith on both sides. When facing genuine bad actors—those who lie deliberately, argue to waste time, or negotiate only to gain advantage—different tactics may be needed. I have seen this way too often lately when the “very online” Catholics and Protestants caricature the other. Reading their barbs you would think Catholics never read the Bible or that Protestants cannot write impactful fiction or make art, like Bram Stoker, Robert Jordan, William Holman Hunt, John Constable, Dorothy Sayers, or the Dutch masters did not exist. It is not a good look. The lazy generalizations are a sign of disrespect. It is unnecessary and unhelpful.
However, we often assume bad faith too quickly, using it as an excuse to avoid the hard work of persuasion and consensus building. Again, it is very hard to imagine international diplomacy without the willingness to reframe disputes for the benefit of the other side. Perhaps we should think of the mission of elevating the civil discourse as something like domestic diplomacy?
When we choose the quick hit of tribal approval over the patient work of popular persuasion the result is a politics and social discourse of permanent resentment where no one has incentive to find common ground or to clearly state real grievances which can be addressed. Yet, we can choose to meet people where they are and seek resolution. We do not have to let social media's habits of "owning" the other make us into lazy citizens and bad neighbors.
You have to convince people if you want them go along with you on something you both care about. That is simply a part of life. Every generation of Americans has faced the choice between earning consensus or kicking the can down the road while blaming someone else for the failure to get things done. Social media tested our commitment to persuasion and found it wanting. Even so, we can relearn civic grace. The question is whether we do so before we completely lose the habits of mind that made us world-beating problem solvers.