The perils of punditry

There's a new writer that I've started following on the Internet — a man named John Michael Greer. I don't always agree with him, but he's interesting and intelligent. These days he blogs here and here (and has an earlier blog archived here). Also, he has a regular group of people who follow his posts, and who comment about them afterwards. The discussions that arise in the comments are wide-ranging, and add a lot of depth to the posts themselves. This is the kind of engagement that bloggers dream of and long for; and except for a few years in the very early history of this blog (when I was lucky enough to be part of a real — if much smaller — online community) it's something that I, for example, have never had. I try hard not to sound envious when I say this, but you probably know better.

But about a month ago, Greer published a post that made me see in an instant that there are real dangers to being an Internet pundit — to writing so much, so regularly, for so many people. The danger is this: part of what it takes to be a successful pundit is that you are usually right. You are either smarter or bolder than the other posters around you — or both, of course — and so the things you say are usually borne out by reality. This means as a corollary that when someone disagrees with you, usually it's for one of two reasons: either he is wrong, or he doesn't understand you correctly. 

What's bad about with this? you ask. Isn't this the position every Internet blogger wants to be in? Yes of course it is. But the danger is that, if you ever are wrong, you won't see it. And when someone calls you out, you'll assume — based on all that previous experience — that either he's the one that's wrong or else he just didn't understand you.

Greer's post — the one I'm thinking of — is here. The gist is that Greer took issue with another author, a man named Paul Kingsnorth, who had posted an article which (according to Greer) included a number of fundamental errors on a subject close to Greer's heart and expertise. What's more, Greer was sure that Kingsnorth actually knew better — that Kingsnorth's errors were made in bad faith, or that they were deliberate lies. So Greer wrote a post calling out Kingsnorth's false statements. So far this sounds like a hundred other Internet disagreements, and hardly one that would reveal any deeper truths.

Two facts emerged in the later discussion of the post which changed the story. First, it turned out that Kingsnorth himself is a regular reader of Greer's blog, so he joined in the comments to insist, "That's not what I said."  Second, it turned out that Kingsnorth's article in question had been hidden behind a paywall, so Greer never read the original article before writing his; what he'd read was a summary prepared by a third party (a man named Rod Dreher) who really wanted to make points of his own and just referenced Kingsnorth to support some of them. (Since that time, Kingsnorth took this article out from behind the paywall, so anyone can read it. But it is one of a series, and the other articles in the series are still behind the paywall.)

At that point, in light of the new information, the obvious thing for Greer to have done would have been to say, "Oops. Sorry about that. Guess I was wrong." And if he'd changed just a couple of sentences, he probably could have left the rest of the essay in place as-is: all he would have had to do would be to replace, "Paul Kingsnorth is wrong because" with "An unwary reader might walk away thinking that Paul Kingsnorth means XYZ; but this oversimplified opinion is wrong because." It would have been a purely cosmetic change, and would have left all the important points of Greer's post intact. After all, the important part isn't that this or that individual human being is wrong; the important part has to be about the facts of the matter at hand. A graceful apology, a little humor at his own expense, and a trivial rewrite of a couple of introductory sentences could have extricated Greer from this situation smoothly and cleanly.

And that is exactly what he did not do. Instead, Greer doubled down: either Kingsnorth didn't understand my article or else he's just wrong, because as I already explained …. Several times in the after-post discussion, Greer expressed some version of this; and each time, Kingsnorth replied, No, that's not what I said. Finally, Greer just stopped replying to him. He engaged with everyone else, but treated Kingsnorth as if the latter were no longer there.

It sounds like I'm criticizing Greer, and in one small, unimportant sense I suppose I am. But not really. I'm a new reader, but already I've read him enough to realize that most of the time — the vast majority of the time, in fact — if some commenter disagrees with Greer, the commenter is the one who's wrong. Greer really is very smart, and his approach to the world is individual enough that he sees things the rest of us don't see. That's why I enjoy reading him. The only problem is, if 99% of the disagreements you have with online commenters are caused by the commenter not understanding you or not understanding the phenomena you describe, it becomes really hard to shift gears for that 1% of cases where you are the one who's wrong … or even to recognize that one of those cases has snuck up on you. 

Maybe I should be grateful that I'm not famous, huh? Maybe it keeps me modest? Or maybe it means I have even less practice fielding disagreements. Anyway, there's a risk to being an Internet pundit.