Why is it that some people, especially in the blogs and comment boxes, become so hostile on the internet? Is it the anonymity? The lack of self-censorship that arises when communication is instantaneous? The inability to un-post a spontaneous comment? The tiredness that comes with writing late into the night? Or is it simply that online communication is, in one sense, unmediated: you meet the real person sitting at their computer; you are plugged into their mind – and this is what our minds are like.
Alan Jacobs has a different answer. He thinks it is because we have an over-developed sense of justice, that is not balanced or tempered by the virtues of humility and charity. It’s too simplistic to say that people are just angry or rude or self-righteous. Maybe they are. But this doesn’t explain what drives their anger or rudeness or self-righteousness.
What energises them is a sense of justice: “I’ve seen something that you haven’t, something that matters, something that could be lost.” But this zeal for justice can drown out every other human virtue, especially the virtues that make it possible to communicate that sense of justice to others, or to question whether one’s judgements about this possible injustice are correct.
A now-famous cartoon on the xkcd “webcomics” site shows a stick figure typing away at his computer keyboard as a voice from outside the frame says, “Are you coming to bed?” The figure replies: “I can’t. This is important. . . . Someone is wrong on the Internet.” I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues.
Late modernity’s sense of itself is built upon achievements in justice. This is especially true of Americans. When we look back over the past century, what do we take pride in? Suffrage for women, the defeat of fascism, Brown vs. Board of Education, civil rights and especially voting rights for African-Americans. If you’re on one side of the political spectrum, you might add the demise of the Soviet empire; if you’re on the other side, you might add the expansion of rights for gays and lesbians. (Or you might add both.) The key point is that all of these are achievements in justice…
As we have come to focus our attention ever more on politics and the arts of public justice, we have increasingly defined our private, familial, and communal lives in similar terms. The pursuit of justice has come to define acts and experiences that once were governed largely by other virtues. It is this particular transformation that Wendell Berry was lamenting when he wrote, “Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.” That is, it has become a matter of justice rather than of love, an assertion of rights rather than a self-giving.
This same logic governs our responses to one another on the Internet. We clothe ourselves in the manifest justice of our favorite causes, and so clothed we cannot help being righteous (“Someone is wrong on the Internet”). In our online debates, we not only fail to cultivate charity and humility, we come to think of them as vices: forms of weakness that compromise our advocacy. And so we go forth to war with one another.
This comes close to what Thomas Hobbes, writing four centuries ago, famously called the “war of every man against every man.” As he pointed out, such a war may begin in the name of justice, but justice cannot long survive its depredations. In such an environment, “this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. . . . Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.”
Bridges and Tangents 
Wow, I have not noticed any of that behaviour when people have posted to your blog!
I agree online there is a certain amount of personal uncensorship when it comes to being able to fluidly express oneself, (even if it is in shorthand) because…..
In real life when in dialogue with others there is of course the added caveat of others changing the flow of thoughts. That the fluidness of anyone’s expression can frustratingly change direction and not entirely represent their inner feelings, depending on who one is in dialogue with. The perception of the wholesome person in person, with all their complex signals is almost not as pure and uncensored as just ones thoughts and mind or heart, without distraction 100% truly expressing itself in the written word, which is why books like St Augustine’s confessions, as well as many great poets works of art are so great and magnify their exact perfection of expression.
The problem online is, and I frequently have it, we know ourselves so well that we often passionately respond out of context, or rather in context with our personal experience of our personal lives, in relation to a subject brought to our attention in a public and often different context. We also exclude information on line in knowing the bigger picture about ourselves, forgetting that others dont personally know us. So there is a gap between the emotions we feel and the justification in feeling these emotions with other posters. Justice in symbolism is a set of scales which of course is supposed to signify balance and fairness. So I think to have an over inflated sense of justice is maybe not justice at all, but something else altogether.
Mercy, charity, justice and humility are virtues that in our learning we utilise all the time. At anyone point based on our experience one virtue is always going to be in more use than another. It all depends what you are focusing on! The simple answer I always believed is germination, Nurture one seed and get a whole crop back. Justice = Justice, mercy = mercy, humility= humility, Love = Love in abundance.
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Like Mags, I haven’t noticed that sort of behaviour on your blog. Maybe, just maybe this is because you have built up a readership who are respectful of the feelings and thoughts of others.
This is a great post. I enjoyed reading it. I think if modern civilization has any hope of a future, more people need to look at difference of opinion in these terms. That hope probably lies somewhere with the internet and mass communication, for the very fact that people are facing other perspectives in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in the past. In the old days, other points of view would have remained just a caricature (forged from propaganda and newspapers), and people would have fought wars with only that government and media shaped caricature of the other person in their mind. Now we, more and more, clash and are presented with the real ideas of conservatives, liberals, environmentalists, Christians, atheists, muslims, different nationalities, capitalists, socialists, anarchists, etc, etc. I think its a healthy thing, and hopefully people will learn to address difference in ideology in a healthy way and view other people, despite differences in thought, as just other humans.
mass communication :O)