On Doing the Reading

Do I ever know what I'm talking about?

Robert Robinson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

One thing I have realized through years of online arguing is that I rarely know what I’m talking about.

It’s not that I don’t know anything. I hope that through a combined 20+ years of formal education I’ve picked up a thing or two, and there are at least one or two topics that I have spent years specifically studying. If I don’t know something about those at this point, I’m toast. What I mean is that when I engage in arguments on the internet, they rarely, if ever, cover ground where my knowledge of the topic is deep enough to make the conversation as productive as it could or should be.

I’ve been arguing on the internet for fun for most of my life that I can remember. It probably started back in high school, when I would engage in debates with real-life friends on Facebook on political and theological topics, or with strangers on internet forums about any topic that seemed interesting. It then moved to Twitter, where I once got into a fruitless hours-long argument with a prominent Anonymous hacktivist collective account about the meaning of “arms” in the Second Amendment.

Thinking back on many of these arguments, it’s hard not to cringe deeply. I can recall specific claims I made that I now know to be factually wrong, or specific arguments I advanced that I now consider unconvincing. While I like to think that I’ve learned something along the way from those times I’ve been wrong, I have rarely taken time to reflect before entering into another argument: “Am I doing it again? Am I stepping out beyond my knowledge and competence?”

I was prompted to reflect on this a bit by an excellent blog post today at

Bentham's Newsletter

. The post is a fairly convincing takedown of the idea of “debate tactics,” that is, that someone can win an argument (online or in person) through clever techniques rather than knowledge. As a long-time appreciator of Plato’s Gorgias, a dialogue quite skeptical of the practice of powerful rhetoric, I am primed to agree. The conclusion: “If you want to be a master debater on some subject, don’t read about debate tactics. Learn about the subject. So long as you’re an expert on some topic, you’ll probably be able to win debates about it.”

But of course, if your desire is to seek the truth and not just win debates, winning debates is a kind of accidental byproduct of advancing your knowledge. Ultimately, while the thrill of debating is something I don’t think I’ll ever escape, I would like to think that what I’m actually aiming at is knowledge of the truth, not W’s in some artificial, hypothetical spreadsheet of my debate record. But if the key to winning debates is knowledge, as Bentham’s Bulldog suggests above, I have to remind myself that I ought to be slow to speak, slow to enter into debates around topics on which I lack the requisite expertise. I would like to brag and say that I do this well, but the truth is I often find myself back in teenager-mode, arguing topics on which I have limited knowledge, with some dim awareness that in the future I might retrospectively cringe at the claims I’m making even as I make them.

All of this to say, though I do often fail at this, I have through the years made it an active practice to attempt to pursue deep reading on a topic on which I find some sincere disagreement with other smart people who appear well-intentioned. In part, this was inspired by admiration for a friend of mine in my undergraduate education, someone with whom I have many deep and painful disagreements but someone who modeled “doing the reading” as an intellectual virtue. A lively debater, he would often find himself embroiled in arguments , armed with strong intuitions and powerful rhetoric, and yet realize he lacked the requisite knowledge to confirm or deny those intuitions. Those who argued with him in the campus dining hall one day would often encounter him days later in a daze and learn that he had sacrificed sleep and sanity in order to learn more about their position than they could have ever dreamed, and thus was ready to resume the conversation armed with knowledge he previously lacked.

Obviously I wouldn’t recommend sacrificing your health and sanity for the sake of internet debates, but at root, the principle that you should seek deep knowledge before (or at least alongside) engaging in casual debates is a good one. As an example, I have recently had a sincere disagreement with a friend over the nature and power of the Supreme Court of the United States. He is an advocate of what I would consider fairly sweeping Court reform, I am less optimistic about the supposed positive effects of the reforms proposed. But, while I have some working knowledge of Constitutional law and history, I don’t have a deep knowledge of the Court from an institutional perspective, the arguments of its critics, or all of the solutions those critics have proposed. In an effort to remedy that, I’ve picked up about eight books on the Court, some scholarly, some popular, and hope to work through them in the coming months and emerge with some deeper knowledge of the Court and its detractors and defenders alike.

Again, this isn’t to hold myself up as some sort of bastion of intellectual virtue, or to suggest I’m making some great sacrificial effort. I am blessed to be in a professional position where researching the Court is a part of my job. Any reading I do on American politics and institutions helps me prepare for the courses I teach on both. It is to suggest, though, that I would be better off to make similar efforts for a broader variety of topics. At the very least, I hope always to make an intentional effort to refuse to engage in surface-level debates when I am not willing or able to invest the time to study the topic deeply. The world and my soul will be better for it.