We all ought to be humble about our arguments, given how many smart people disagree with us completely, but a man whose claims are always tentative will (a) never make any progress against, toward, or with his opponents, and (b) bore everyone. Rather than offer the commonsense advice that an off-the-cuff medium like blogging should be handled with humility, I’ll read that advice against the grain and say that, the more humble a blogger is, the less tentative he will be.
Having a realistic estimation of one’s talents is a virtue, and having enough self-respect to be willing to suffer humiliation is, too. These two virtues yield utterly opposite styles of argumentation and I can’t imagine why they are both called "humility." I am more interested in the latter kind. In the same way that every man will eventually die, every man will eventually be wrong. The dogmatist never accepts this; the pragmatist accepts this before he begins; the humble blogger knows his humiliation is coming, but argues assertively until it arrives, secure in his confidence that, when it does, it won’t be that bad. This illogical confidence is an important rule of engagement
Monday, January 19, 2009
the art of blogging?
http://culture11.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2009/01/14/dazz-dazz-discourse-jazz/
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I believe you are absolutely right. Whenever one does anything worth doing the result cannot be a sure thing, or else it would have been done before by everyone and their sister and there would be a bus tour. Since it is not a sure thing, it's a gamble. So one has to take that chance on humiliation, even though one first prepares one's self to the utmost. And obviously, the very definition of "humble" has something to do with humiliation.
ReplyDelete