Sometimes the comments people append to articles tell us more about the commenters than about anything else. Trolling betrays the antinomian spirit of the trolls.
Proverbs 18:2, NRSV:
“A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing personal opinion.”
NIV:
“Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions.”
NASB:
“A fool does not delight in understanding, But only in revealing his own mind.”
Comments on Comments
Comments sections are good for free speech and good to invite readers to engage ideas. Unfortunately, sometimes the engagement is at a level of intellectual discourse that requires very little cerebral capacity.
For laughs, on the few occasions when I used to have some spare time, I sometimes would read comments sections. Such sections often reveal more about the commenters than the articles on which they comment, since the articles may be labeled either too conservative or too liberal depending on the commentator.
Some have been surprisingly well-reasoned (including some with whom I disagreed), and in these cases I often learned to consider angles I had not thought about. Those who offer thoughtful comments should by no means be discouraged from doing so. Some comments, however, reflect astonishing immaturity. I would complain how many appear to be written by adolescents, but I don’t want to offend my daughter or other positive representatives of that age group.
On one YouTube video, where a young woman was simply trying to share a song, a comment below said something like, “You’re ugly. You should kill yourself.” If an adolescent mind gets away with such a comment because it is anonymous, one still is left to wonder what kind of person thinks and speaks this way. For those of us with kids in high school, it is scary to think that some such people may lurk their halls.
Civil Discourse
Candy Gunther Brown, a leading expert on prayer studies, wrote a balanced, concise article for a major outlet. Some suggested that she was ignorant because such-and-such a study had demonstrated the opposite of her conclusion. In a book published by Harvard University Press, she had shown the error of the study that this person cited, but apparently it was the only study with which her critic was familiar, so he assumed that he knew more than she did. Meanwhile, she was concisely synthesizing material from hundreds or thousands of sources, as I also often do.
Academic discourse at its best allows a range of interpretations on the table and then uses evidence to seek to find the interpretation(s) that best fit the data. At least in its ideal form (often observed in the breach), academic discourse refuses dismiss others’ positions without consideration; it also refuses to denounce its interlocutors with ad hominem labeling or with guilt by association. It explores evidence, weighs various options, and (again, ideally) respectfully engages those with whom the author disagrees.
Partisan political discourse, however, has seeped into everything else. Even in academia, discourse is often coarsened today, and every discipline has its share of rude and arrogant voices. But the ideal gives us something to strive for, even if some circles (say, British academia, minus, say, Richard Dawkins) tend to do it better than some others.
Free speech provides the right to say (almost) anything (explicit exceptions include yelling, “Fire!” in a crowded theater). But one can exercise rights responsibly and intelligently, or not. Just because one is allowed to say (almost) anything does not mean that it reflects well on one’s intellectual character. (I do not have in mind here comments that are simply playful or humorous, but those that are dismissive.) Just because one can speak anonymously, without fear of personal consequences, does not mean that one is making a helpful contribution. We live in a society, and if we contribute to the coarsening of public discourse, we ultimately share in the larger consequences.
Proverbs 18:2 remains all too relevant today.
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