Answer not a fool to his folly.....

A reflection that is at once comforting and depressing

By Theodore dalrymple

It astonishes me how many people take insult for refutation. They think that if they call someone a name – fool, for example, or dupe – they have successfully disposed of his arguments. For having decided that the person is, say, a fool, they go on to obey the Biblical injunction to 

‘Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.’ 

The internet seems to have reinforced the human tendency to resort to the ad hominem. I cannot claim never to have resorted to it myself, in fact it is one of my chief pleasures in life; but I hope that I never use it as my sole method of argument. I am still intellectually conscientious enough to believe that something must first be shown to be mistaken before one begins to speculate (oh so enjoyably) as to why anyone is so foolish at to believe it. 

The spread of education has done little to raise the tone of argument, or the internet to improve its temper. The power of immediate response that the internet confers upon readers encourages them to give vent to their first and usually violent emotions on reading something with which they disagree. People would never have committed to paper what they are willing to commit to cyberspace; and since the way in which one expresses oneself becomes habitual, the internet causes a decline in civility. One longs for the calmer, slower, more civil world of books and hand-written letters.

My complaints about humanity’s indifference to proper argument, however, are nothing new. I happened the other day to be reading Bishop Butler’s Sermons (edited, incidentally, by Gladstone after his retirement from politics – if only our modern politicians would confine themselves to such noble tasks after their disappearance from national life). I came across the following passage, written nearly 300 years ago:

 Arguments are often wanted for some accidental purpose: but proof as such is what [people] never want for themselves…

Not to mention the multitudes who read merely for the sake of talking, or to qualify themselves for the world, or some such kind of reasons…

Several have no sort of curiosity to see what is true…

The great number of books and papers of amusement…

Have in part occasioned…this idle way of reading and considering things.     

Man does not change very much, then, a reflection that is at once comforting and depressing.