No, I Do Not Want to Talk to You

Only conversation can save us! So why don't people want to engage in it?

Hi. It’s been a while. No, I’ve not given up on writing, but in recent weeks I’ve had less time for the sort of extended disquisitions to which you have become accustomed. I just finished an extended year-end vacation visiting family, and we are dealing with various issues that make life more complicated than usual. With all of that, I have been writing, but with interruptions. This post is over 6,700 words, about 3,600 of which are for free subscribers. Thanks for bearing with me.

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Above: Ibram X. Kendi, who is scared to debate. Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

You might have noticed that Twitter is undergoing, um, changes. Near the end of 2022, my friend Ken White wrote a piece in which he said that he is leaving the platform, and gave his reasons why. I thought his piece, together with an older piece from John McWhorter, might serve as a springboard for a discussion about why we talk to each other online, and how, and whether we should try at all. (Maybe you’ll be grateful for a single piece that isn’t about the silly Speaker of the House fight.)

Let’s start with McWhorter’s argument, which I bring up because I found it jarring, persuasive in some superficial respects, but ultimately unsatisfying.

It’s OK That You Don’t Want to Talk to Me Because I Don’t Want to Talk to You

In August of 2021, John McWhorter responded to people who called Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, or Nikole Hannah-Jones cowards for refusing to debate people like McWhorter or Coleman Hughes. McWhorter defended these people, saying he can understand why they wouldn’t want to debate him, because he doesn’t want to debate them:

If social media is any indication, many people seem to be of the opinion that people like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo should want to “debate” people like me and Glenn Loury. These people are roasted endlessly on social media for not engaging in “debate.”

It isn’t fair. I completely understand why they don’t.

. . . .

[G]iven the way people like me or Glenn Loury have discussed people like Kendi and DiAngelo on line and in print, how reasonable is it to expect them to “debate” us? I wasn’t nice to White Fragility last year and meant it, as that review needed to be written – but fully get why DiAngelo thereafter did not want to appear with me on Morning Joe. I didn’t write that review expecting DiAngelo to put on the gloves and “debate” me – I knew full well it meant that sometime in the future we’d be in a talk show green room carefully avoiding eye contact. Glenn has called Kendi an “empty suit” in our conversations and it has gotten around; I guarantee that I would never appear on the show of someone who called me that.

McWhorter goes on to defend this point of view with several distinct if related arguments, with differing levels of persuasiveness.

I Don’t Want to Talk to You Because Life Is Too Short to Debate Jerks

McWhorter starts out by arguing that life is short. Why must you spend your limited time on the planet engaged in a poo-flinging contest with people who deride you?

Some may be thinking that people like that are responsible for defending themselves in public competition, that this is the burden of the public intellectual. But the question is why they are supposed to do this in a live, back-and-forth sparring match.

Life is short. Why should someone spend even an hour or two of their time engaging with someone who has given all indication that they heartily disapprove of their work and even find them off-putting personally? Whether it was about winning or losing, who does this?

The most unpersuasive part of this, which I address more fully below, is McWhorter’s move in drawing a moral equivalence between himself and the likes of Kendi. As you can see in the block quote above, McWhorter basically says: I have been mean to DiAngelo, and my co-host Loury has been mean to Kendi . . . and after all, I would never debate with people who are critical of me in such a nasty way! And so, we are told, it’s likewise fair for them not to want to talk to him. I’ll return to this moral equivalence argument below, when I address the true nature of the KenDiAngelos.

Placing the incorrect moral equivalence to one side for the moment, McWhorter basically concedes that he does have a duty as a public intellectual to justify his arguments, and to respond to counter-arguments made by prominent people with opposing positions. So apparently life is not too “short” to do such things. He’s just complaining about the setting. He is willing to make his arguments in print and in podcasts, but is uncomfortable with doing so “in a live, back-and-forth sparring match.” The “life is short” argument is just an excuse for avoiding a setting that, one suspects, he would avoid even if he were immortal and his life were as long as the universe itself.

So let’s move on to the question of the setting of the argument, because that’s where McWhorter goes next . . . and I think he’s on to something there.

I Don’t Want to Talk to You Because the Setting Is Not One That Promotes Meaningful Discourse

McWhorter starts to get a little more persuasive as he tells the story of being invited on a radio show by a mystery personality:

A long time ago, a certain black commentator I will not name asked me to guest on his radio show. I agreed to do it because we had gotten along fine in the past. But then I happened to catch on Twitter that he was planning to roast me, with his fans all salivating at the prospect of seeing evil race traitor me getting what I deserved. I pulled out. For a little while after, the fans and the host accused me of refusing to debate.

McWhorter says “the goal was not to hear me out but to call me out for a beating. Nothing I said would have mattered – between jokes, buzzwords and volume, that host would have held all the cards.”

I can readily understand declining to engage in such a spectacle. It reminds me of Ted Cruz engaging a snaggle-toothed yokel Trumper in Indiana just before the Indiana primary in 2016:

Go ahead and click and watch, even if you have seen it before. Here, Cruz attempts to calmly reason with a crowd of idiots yelling “LYIN’ TED” and “WE DON’T WANT YOU.”

I think reasonable people could watch the clip and reach different conclusions about the wisdom of Cruz’s decision to debate the voter. Watching the clip is almost like a Rorschach test that reveals people’s opinions about the value of rational discourse.

To one reasonable person, Cruz’s gambit in wading into the crowd is courageous and principled. After all, Cruz is obviously not trying to persuade Cletus the Slack-Jawed Indiana Voter. He is using the man as a foil, to demonstrate to onlookers that Trump fans could not defend their preference on the facts.

But to another reasonable onlooker, Cruz arguably ended up looking like a fool for trying to talk rationally to a semi-demented Trumper automaton in the midst of a crowd of people screaming “DO THE MATH.” Arguably, it makes no sense to engage a group of idiots like that. It’s like trying to have a rational debate about a complex subject on a cable news panel with four hostile talking heads shooting uninformed but catchy zingers at you as you are constantly interrupted and talked over. It’s like trying to take on the lefty cabal on Bill Maher’s show, or Jon Stewart’s show, on a topic where the host and the audience are your collective enemy. Any point you make will be drowned out by the hoots and hollers of the ignorant. Why would anyone do that?

But, of course, McWhorter could insist on a suitable forum if such a debate were to happen at all. There exist Oxford-style debates in which each side is strictly allocated time to respond to the opposing viewpoint—but the rules strictly forbid interrupting by either debater or the audience. A format like that greatly minimizes playing to the crowd with wisecracks and smears designed to gin up mindless applause while drowning out reason.

Regular readers are familiar with my views about Twitter as a format, and I’ll return to that issue below when I consider the remarks recently made by Ken White. But I do think the setting of a debate matters. Nobody should have to try to engage in an argument while people are throwing rotten fruit at their face, whether literally or even metaphorically.

I Don’t Want to Talk to You Because You Are an Unreasonable Jerk

There is some overlap between the issue of the setting and the issue of the honesty of the interlocutor. A big part of what makes the Cruz clip above so pointless is that Cruz is speaking to a person who is clearly impervious to reason. Cruz can make whatever rational points he likes, but ol’ Cletus there isn’t going to listen.

I think McWhorter’s piece gets more persuasive as he starts to get a bit more directly critical of his potential interlocutors, arguing that it is pointless to debate the likes of Kendi, regardless of the setting, because they are helpless to debate in a manner that is constructive. I find this argument simultaneously persuasive and utterly maddening.

McWhorter portrays Kendi as a creature of a class of race scholars who never face serious challenges to their arguments, and thus reflexively respond with irritation to any criticism. Says McWhorter:

I can’t work with that. Because he has never had to actually defend himself, he would have a hard time getting past just accusing me of making things up or being a racist. I would make quite sure it was clear neither of those things held the slightest water, upon which what I would get for my trouble was looking like a bully with 15 years on him. All he could see in me is an aging Uncle Tom running him down. What I would see in him is what I just wrote.

OK, but you aren’t doing this for one another. Nobody thinks the point of a public debate between John McWhorter and Ibram X. Kendi would be for Kendi to persuade McWhorter or McWhorter to persuade Kendi. And that’s not how Oxford-style debates are scored. We don’t measure success by whether the opponent came away persuaded, but by the degree to which the audience was moved to change its opinion. These debates are for the benefit of the onlookers. And that’s what Ted Cruz was no doubt thinking when he took on the mindless hillbilly in the clip above. He was banking on persuading the people watching the video, not Cletus himself.

It doesn’t matter that McWhorter would come away from the debate continuing to think that Kendi is a hyperactive attack dog who sees racism behind every corner. The question is whether the audience would come away thinking that.

And in the right setting—not on a Bill Maher or Jon Stewart sound stage, but in a setting with genuinely enforceable rules about the conduct of debater and audience—that could be a productive enterprise.

And here, McWhorter infuriatingly circles back to the first point of drawing a moral equivalence between himself and the KenDiAngelos:

None of us of any stripe are interested in climbing into a cage with people who find us unimpressive, and that makes us not cowards but ordinary human beings seeking life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I shall not seek, and I will not accept, calls to “debate” people who find me dismissible, and I fully respect the same sentiment in others.

And as he retreats from criticism of his opponents, his argument collapses.

I think McWhorter is wonderful—but he has a flaw, in my judgment: he’s one of those people who bends over backwards to be reasonable and nonjudgmental, and sometimes that turns him a bit . . . pretzelly. Now, I like reasonable and nonjudgmental people, and I like it when people try very hard to be reasonable and nonjudgmental. And if someone is going to err on the side of being too reasonable/nonjudgmental or not reasonable enough, I’ll take “too reasonable” without hesitation.

But McWhorter is simply a more honest and reasonable person than Ibram X. Kendi or Nikole Hannah-Jones. I’m not going to waste any time here convincing you of that proposition. Either you already know it, or you can easily learn it, or you will deny it regardless of the facts you learn. I suspect most of you fall in the first category. Some might fall in the second, in which case I invite you to “do your own research”—but I ask you to understand that a full discussion of their unreasonableness and dishonesty is beyond the scope of this missive. And those of you in the third category . . . well, I don’t want to talk to you.

Which is kind of what McWhorter is saying, right? He just doesn’t want to talk to Kendi or Hannah-Jones. Only he is giving Kendi and Hannah-Jones a kind of credit that they don’t deserve. He almost justifies refusing to debate them by arguing that it is pointless to talk to unreasonable jerks like them. He approaches that argument when he says that Kendi never has to deal with people seriously challenging his ideas, and that Kendi responds to any criticism by insulting his critics and calling them racists. But then McWhorter retreats to the position: hey, I have said mean things about him, and if he said mean things about me, I would not want to talk to him. So we’re just alike!

That doesn’t wash.

But let’s take on McWhorter’s argument, to the extent he makes it, that he ought not have to debate Kendi because Kendi is a jerk. Does that argument hold water?

Why Not Just Find a More Civil Kendi?

At first glance, it seems that McWhorter has a point. It is annoying to debate jerks. If McWhorter is to debate these issues at all, shouldn’t he find someone who holds the same positions but is nicer and more reasonable?

It sounds attractive, doesn’t it? Imagine that there existed an Ibram X. Kendi who was famously civil and welcomed all comers. This Kendi once believed all white people were literally extraterrestial aliens (as Kendi has said) . . . but now he sees them as merely a “different breed of human” and is happy to discuss his views with them in a nonjudgmental manner! Why, sure, this nicer gentler version of Kendi believes, as Kendi does, in creating a department within the federal government that can invalidate literally any policy it believes might have disparate outcomes for the races . . . but the nicer and gentler version is free, open, and honest in discussing his ideas! Wouldn’t you like to hear that guy talk to John McWhorter?

The problem is, such a person is hard to imagine, isn’t it? Part of the problem is that certain positions are strongly correlated with people who engage in counterproductive argument styles. In fact, it would be shocking if this were otherwise. To take an extreme example, you don’t expect someone who is a Holocaust denier to be the sort of fellow who will argue honestly, hew to the facts, keep an open mind, change his mind when contrary facts emerge, and so forth. If he were capable of using this type of argument style, he would not be a Holocaust denier. The same goes for an Election Truther who is dead convinced that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. It’s going to be a tall order to find such a person who is willing to argue rationally, fairly consider evidence on both sides, avoid logical fallacies, and grapple with your best arguments. If someone were willing to do all those things, they wouldn’t be an Election Truther.

This is a problem I run into frequently on Twitter. I will encounter someone who has what I believe to be a fairly radical and ill-informed perspective—usually a pro-Trump perspective, but not always—who initially presents himself (it’s always a “him”) as if he is desirous of a genuine back-and-forth based on the facts. Sometimes he will claim that I am unwilling to discuss matters rationally. I get taken in by such people far too often. Guess what happens? I start to engage them, ask questions to probe the basis of their opinions, and quickly run into double-talk, insults, evasions, motivated reasoning, and so forth. It has happened so often that I have come to associate certain opinions with rank stupidity. What is the point of discussions with such people?

The Best Person to Challenge Your Point of View Is Someone Who Actually Believes You Are Wrong

And yet John Stuart Mill, Jonathan Rauch, and others have firmly and convincingly made the case that literally any opinion you can imagine needs to be able to withstand scrutiny. That there are no sacred cows that are beyond debate. And the thing is: the debate must be held with someone who actually believes in the opposing point of view. I’m not going to take a long time to make the case, but a familiar quote from On Liberty can make it for me:

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.

I have bolded that last part because it is the most important part of the quote for present purposes. If McWhorter is going to take on the Ibram X. Kendi mindset, it really won’t do to debate someone who doesn’t believe in that mindset, but instead tries to fairly summarize Kendi’s positions from a position of neutrality. You have to debate Kendi himself, or someone who actually agrees with him.

So here is the conundrum. How do you debate a mindset when it’s typically jerks who have that mindset? Aren’t you thereby committing to debating with jerks? Should you have to make such a commitment? Is it my responsibility to engage every yokel who thinks Biden stole the election from Trump? Do I need to go on said yokel’s podcast so that he and his twelve insane listeners can heap abuse on me? Do I need to wander into the comment section at Ace of Spades and calmly explain the facts of the 2020 election to people who call me a “cuck” when they’re feeling kind?

No, I don’t think so.

But I find myself unsatisfied with the idea that we can simply and collectively declare ourselves aloof from the need to engage any opposing positions, in any setting, with any rules, simply because the opposing side is so obviously crazy. It may not be the individual responsibility of every citizen to engage every stupid argument they run across, but we need to be alert to the existence of arguments we don’t like, and make sure that if someone else has done the work of refutation, and the issue is important, we are satisfied that the refutation is correct. And if we aren’t—and again, if the issue is important—then maybe we do have a responsibility to evaluate that argument ourselves. If not us, then who?

And if anyone has a responsibility to do this, it’s someone like John McWhorter, who is a very public face of a set of views that don’t get enough traction in today’s society. Opposition to what its proponents laughably call “antiracism” is Very Unpopular. It takes someone with guts to take it on. So we need the McWhorters of the world to do it.

So what about McWhorter’s implicit assertion that these debates can take place “in articles, on podcasts, and sometimes in tweets”? And, in context, his assertion that this debate need not be “mano-a-mano” but can consist of person x making an assertion, and person y addressing that assertion in his own piece, and person x responding, and so forth?

Well, I think the answer depends on the level of actual engagement with the other person’s view. The Oxford-style debates I mentioned minimize interruptions. They thus arguably allow one side to dodge a point—but only for a while. If someone consistently avoids an answer to a question or point, the format calls for direct questions from one side to another. If you really think your interlocutor is intentionally ignoring your best arguments, you can reveal that in the question and answer process.

This kind of real interaction and debate is hard to do in writing. It requires a commitment from two sides to spend some time going back and forth, giving each side a chance to respond to the other guy’s (or gal’s) points, their counter-points, and their counter-counterpoints. Without that commitment, which generally is not forthcoming, you can’t have a satisfactory interchange. I’ve seen that kind of discussion online, and even participated in one, but it’s rare.

So, in summary, I disagree with McWhorter. He does have a responsibility to debate someone like Kendi, and he has a responsibility to do so in a setting where each side can explore the other’s weakest points. But the setting matters.

Speaking of the setting being important, I think we have reached the point where I want to discuss what has been happening to Twitter lately.