Civility norms are one thing. We can argue about how useful they are and/or how much harm they do. I’m generally in favor of them, as it happens, and if you feel like fighting with me about that, we can probably have a fight.
But before we even get to civility norms, there are – let’s call them “you have to present an actual argument” norms.
Which mostly consist of things that amount to “if you want people to agree with you, you have to engage with them and give them some actual reason to agree with you, not just attack them or backbite them for failing to have already done so.”
And those norms aren’t really negotiable, as it turns out, they’re kind of baked into the way that humans work. Attacking people and backbiting them generally doesn’t make them agree with you, not directly.
Now. It’s important to be clear on this point, which is a purely positive pragmatic point, and not a moral endorsement of anything: not every kind of utterance, not every discourse, has to be about getting people to agree with you. You can, for example, try to shame and bully people into pretending to agree with you (or shutting up about their contrary opinions) for fear of the consequences of doing otherwise. That can totally work, if the circumstances line up right. Maybe it will give you what you want, depending on what you want.
But people do like to set up spaces where they can go and try to persuade other people to adopt their beliefs, genuinely. Some people even like to go to spaces where they can be persuaded by compelling arguments. And those spaces are simply not going to be friendly to norms of silencing-through-shaming. Doesn’t matter how right or righteous your point is. If you have something to argue, argue for it, don’t just get mad that there are people who aren’t already on your side, and then make surprised faces when your anger somehow fails to convince them.
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The rationalist-o-sphere sure likes to talk a lot about being a place that is friendly to argumentation and unfriendly to silencing-through-shaming.
This is…not entirely true, although I think it’s far truer of the rationalist-o-sphere than it is of almost any other discursive space I know. In particular, the rationalist-o-sphere is pretty damn accepting of mainline-contemporary-identitarian-left positions, so long as they’re offered as actual positions to be argued and not as edicts handed down from the Egregore of Social Acceptability. The exceptions have more to do with things like traditional strains of theism, which still get met with widespread sneers and attempted shutdowns.
(Heh. It turns out that one consequence of being “friendly to argumentation” is that no issue is ever really 100% done and dusted within your halls. Even if you manage to make your point so convincingly that everyone else concedes and you can claim an uncontested victory – as soon as someone new comes along who didn’t get the memo, you have to make your arguments all over again to convince that person, because the only alternatives are forfeiture and shaming.)
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All of this is almost unrelated to whether or not you’re allowed to call someone a fuckface as you say whatever it is that you have to say.
I am…maybe, a very little bit, sympathetic to the idea that there are people who are just so very traumatized and so very marginalized and so very put-upon that we can’t expect them to abide by civility norms, that their righteous anger will drive them to call other people fuckfaces and the rest of us just have to live with it. Certainly there are a lot of people who are in very bad shape. And, of course, whether or not you call someone a fuckface has no direct bearing on whether or not you’re correct about anything.
I am not even slightly sympathetic to the idea that there are people who are so traumatized and marginalized and put-upon that it doesn’t matter whether or not they’re right about what they have to say.
And if the point is that you’re right about what you have to say, well, there’s only one actual way to get people to agree with you about it –
