"It seems natural to conclude that the social role of philosophers is to help people think things through by confronting them with counterarguments to their current views. But since there’s no way to do that in a non-philosophical context without coming off as an arsehole, there’s no way for a philosopher to be a good citizen without having the courage to look like a bad one. Which brings us, with inexorable familiarity, to the figure of Socrates, who injected philosophical reason into the Athenian body politic and got sentenced to death for his troubles. 'The modes of trolling are many,' writes Rachel Barney in her wonderful mock-Aristotelian treatise, 'On Trolling.' Characteristic techniques include treating small problems as if they were large ones, disputing what everyone knows to be true, criticizing what everyone knows to be admirable and masking hostility with claims of friendship. If that sounds like the kind of thing Socrates got up to, this is no accident—for like Socrates, the troll claims 'that he is a gadfly and beneficial, and without him to "stir up" the thread it would become dull and unintelligent.' The difference, says Barney, is that while Socrates may have annoyed people, that was never his goal; he simply wanted to convince his fellow Athenians that they lacked wisdom and needed to care for their souls. The troll, by contrast, intentionally aims to generate 'confusion and strife among a community who really agree,' whether for amusement or for profit or for partisan gain. Socrates was a philosopher, in other words; the troll is just an arsehole. Yet there is surely a sense in which Socrates was trying to generate confusion and strife among Athenians (and hence, from a certain perspective, to 'corrupt the youth')...."
From "On Being an Arsehole: A defense" by Jonny Thakkar (The Point).
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Only Socrates can be a gadfly, and all other trolls are just areseholes? I'd like to see the syllogism that proves that.
Trolls who drink the hemlock get upgraded to philosopher.
On some level, trolls are necessary part of communal discourse. They're a disruptive force that shake things up and allow novel ideas to permeate. Without them, a community may become too sterile. You could just get people agreeing with each other, or politely agreeing to disagree, which might not be interesting.
But trolls really need to be managed somewhat or they may completely destroy a community. Especially the ones that repeat the same things over and over and over without little thematic variation. Or just repeatedly attack the same person in uninteresting ways (especially if that person happens to be the head of the community).
I'm all but certain our Trumpit is a parody troll.
This essay appears in a special symposium on intellectuals, which is entirely composed of essays by the editors of The Point.
That essay reminded me of the following for some reason.
"Get outta here."
Or just repeatedly attack the same person in uninteresting ways
I'm all LLRed out. Too bad killfile doesn't work on the blogger page.
Socrates was a coward. Took the easy way out.
"while Socrates may have annoyed people, that was never his goal; he simply wanted to convince his fellow Athenians that they lacked wisdom and needed to care for their souls"
Prog thinkers, by contrast, just want to get rid of deplorables. From the Vendee to Lenin to Sarah Jeong, from tragedy to tragedy to farce.
@gbarto : Yes!
Although I occasionally have second thoughts about some issues and change my position once in a while, I am pretty confident in my conservative/libertarian views, becuase, like many I have been the other guy. I once held nearly the opposite view on many issues for many years as a younger person. The problem with youth is you just don't know what you don't know, and I think that is more a problem than ever before.
Since the sixties young people have been given and taken an unearned level of respect for their opinions. There is no substitute for life experience and the testing of ideas. There is thoughtless respect given to new untested things just because they are new. A young person feels they are smarter becuase they know about things that they believe older people just don't understand. Sometimes that is true, but usually the new thing has no record yet to be evaluated. Even worse is that many have a terrible record that simply is not known becuase it is not taught. Young people need to learn what they don't know. For older leftists, I think it's just stubbornness, and often an unreleased hatred for stereotypes of people they hated when they were young. Which is a way of saying they have not grown up politically.
Trolling can be used by someone who is correct or someone who is wrong, but it doesn't change minds either ways. The Socratic method is not trolling. It's just asking questions that you know the answer to or at least you believe need considered before you can get to the truth.
Trolling can be used by someone who is correct or someone who is wrong, but it doesn't change minds either ways
I agree that they rarely change minds, but they can help your own internal process of thinking things through. It can also encourage you to learn some new information. Even though I personally tend not to directly respond to trolls, if a troll presents some argument that I haven't seen before, it can force me to think about a counter argument for it.
"...while Socrates may have annoyed people, that was never his goal..... Socrates was a philosopher, ....Yet there is surely a sense in which Socrates was trying to generate confusion and strife...."
And surely there is a sense in which this overly clever talker simply talks in circles!
Socrates was killed because he supported murderous dictators, and didn't leave town when they were overthrown
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/socrates/ifstoneinterview.html
If so, why wasn’t the charge brought earlier? He had been teaching for a long time. A quarter century before the trial, Socrates had already been attacked in Aristophanes’s play "The Clouds" for running a "think thank" whose smart-alecky graduates beat their fathers. If they thought him the source of such subversive teaching, why did the Athenians wait until 399 B.C., when he was already an old man, before putting him on trial?
Because in 411 B.C. and again in 404 B.C. antidemocrats had staged bloody revolutions and established short-lived dictatorships. The Athenians were afraid this might happened again.
I haven’t found that in Plato.
Plato didn’t intend that you should. Those are the realities his "Apology" was calculated to hide. Plato was a genius, a dazzling prestidigitator, with all the gifts of a poet, a dramatist and a philosopher. His "Apology" is a masterpiece of world literature, a model of courtroom pleading; and the greatest single piece of Greek prose that has come down to us. It rises to a climax which never fails to touch one deeply, no matter how often it is reread. I read the "Apology" in the original for the first time last year, slowly and painfully, line by line. When I came to the noble farewell of Socrates to his judges, it gave me chest pains, it was so moving; I gladly offer up my angina in tribute to its mastery. "I go to die," Socrates says, "and you to live, but which of us goes to the better lot is known to none but God.’ Even Shakespeare never surpassed that! But these very qualities also make Plato’s "Apology" a masterpiece of evasion.
Is there any way to check Plato’s picture of the trial against the views of the average Athenian?
We do have one piece of evidence which shows that even 50 years after the event, when there had been ample time for reflection and remorse the Athenians still regarded the trial as political, and the verdict as justified.
Where did you find that?
In a speech by the famous orator Aeschines, the great rival of Demosthenes, in the year 345 B.C., just 54 years after the trial of Socrates. This bit is well known to scholars but its significance has never been fully appreciated. With the clue Aeschines provides, we may begin to reconstruct the Athenian political realities. Aeschines cited the case of Socrates as a praiseworthy precedent. "Men of Athens," he said to the jury court, "you executed Socrates, the sophist, because he was clearly responsible for the education of Critias, one of the thirty anti-democratic leaders."
Who was Critias?
He was the bloodiest dictator Athens had ever known, a pupil of Socrates at one time, and a cousin of Plato’s. Aeschines was saying in effect that the antidemocratic teachings of Socrates helped to make a dictator of Critias, who terrorized Athens in 404 B.C. during the regime of the Thirty Tyrants and just five years before the trial of Socrates. Critias seemed to have been the most powerful member of the Thirty.
Come on, you're all pretty smart people here that can see through the trolls & their trolling to know whether they are being contrarian and inciting to better understand an issue or just tossing grenades to annoy others and entertain themselves.
I'm all but certain our Trumpit is a parody troll
Trumpit is a poor attempt at performance art.
The best professors know trolling is teaching.
Plato and Socrates
http://engl606-mueller.wikispaces.umb.edu/Socrates+and+Plato
Notice that Plato has an erection.
There was an interesting piece about xenophon and how he painted a more complete view of socrates.
Come on, you're all pretty smart people here that can see through the trolls & their trolling to know whether they are being contrarian and inciting to better understand an issue or just tossing grenades to annoy others and entertain themselves.
That's the difference between the left wingers who comment here and Althouse. Obviously the latter is much rarer.
So why "arsehole"? Is this guy a Brit? Is he trolling in some obscure, pointless way by using that word? If he really believes in being an asshole, he needs to flash some buttock.
There's an interesting series by Gary corby about Socrates brother, think of it as 5th 3ntury hardy boys
Socrates, IIRR, also led his pupils into a Q&A that helped reveal the truth, or at least the contradictions in their arguments. That's not trolling.
When the word troll was first coined it had a very specific meaning. It meant someone that was trying to disrupt an online forum and discourage others from communicating.
The troll tactic is simple. You post lots and lots and lots of messages, and they are often, but not always, hateful. This discourages others from posting on the forum because when they try to read it they see a ton of messages from the troll and they have to look past them to what is worthwhile. But lots of people get discouraged by this. And so the online community shrinks.
Because posting lots and lots of messages is always part of the troll signature, the length of troll messages tends to be short. But not always -- I have seen trolls that copy and paste words from someone else in their many troll messages.
Rachel Barney claims that "disputing what everyone knows to be true" is part of what defines a troll, but ironically, it's my belief that trolls are often motivated, and feel justified in their actions, by people disputing the left-wing consensus.
We have a ton of words that mean we dislike or disagree with someone. But we have almost no words to succinctly identify the behavior that troll was originally meant to describe.
And now Althouse in the Gillette thread is explained.
;-)
Greg thanks for the link; IU have not read much of I.F. Stone's writing and insights for a long time.
I still love that old joke about Socrates' last words....."I drank what!?"
Sometimes an arsehole is just an arsehole.
Great article.
Interesting that he thinks raising constructive and relevant questions about someone's position makes one an "arsehole".
Truly, we're doomed.
Trolls are philosopers. Quite a stretch Althouse. I hope you didn't break anything.
Where's Gadfly, our Diogenes?
Dead White European Males have nothing of value to offer to us in the modern world---Every Leftist Everywhere
What we need is more "I Rigoberta".... and crystals.
Ralph L said...
I'm all but certain our Trumpit is a parody troll.
I agree. I'm always surprised when other readers snap at the ridiculous chum some of the trollers spew out.
Remember this: if you come across more than one arsehole in a day, it might just be you.
(eaglebeak)
Socrates didn't take the easy way out--the easy way was just to flee Athens, as other condemned philosophers had done and later did (Aristotle, for one).
Socrates explains in the Platonic dialogue The Crito that the Laws of Athens were his parents, as it were, who nourished and brought him up, and it would be unjust to flee them now--he lived under them, he agreed to them, he won't desert them.
Also, of course, he says before he drinks the hemlock: "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; pay it and don't forget.” In other words, sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the Greek god of health, to whom one sacrifices when one is cured.
What was Socrates cured of? Mortal life. He was on his way to live with the gods and the forms--the eide, where the true philosopher longs to be.
Yancey Ward, re Socrates’ last words: I remember that from Real Genius!
The Paper Chase did a great deal of harm to the teaching profession.
I've had not a few professors who fancied themselves Kingsfieldian. The talented ones were at their worst when they behaved this way, and the talentless ones were at their worst when they behaved this way. A great deal of lazy garbage flies under the flag of the socratic method.
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