In defense of sneering
My recent post about "rationalist" bloggers got a substantial amount of attention on Twitter and Hacker News. One concept that came up, which I have heard used many times by this community, is that of "sneering." I have learned that this is a common rebuttal that rationalists direct towards insufficiently rigorous dismissal of their writing and ideas. An anti-rationalist Reddit calls itself SneerClub. One comment on Hacker News described my blog post itself as "sneering."
What is sneering? Literally, "to speak or write in a scornfully jeering manner." My post certainly didn't involve more than the lightest scorn or jeering, but members of this community do not use the word "sneering" that way. Rather, they use it to mean "dismissing out of hand, with derision and without argument." Scott Alexander calls this sneer culture, listing a number of insulting terms people use to identify someone as part of an intellectual "out-group" and thus, not worth taking seriously.
On the one hand, I am a big fan of good-faith discourse. I read widely across the ideological spectrum and do my best to try to characterize people's positions accurately. I don't generally like insulting people or basing my politics on some sort of subcultural in-group identification.
On the other hand, there are still cases in which "sneering," in the sense of "dismissing/rejecting out of hand" is not only acceptable, but a sign of a healthy ethical culture.
Slavoj Žižek discusses one example of this: that of torture. He praises a certain "moral dogmatism" whereby certain things are simply not up for debate. The horror, in his view, of the Bush administration's practice of torture was not just that it was an abomination, but also that it revitalized torture as a matter of "debate." Žižek points to, for example, Alan Dershowitz's defense of torture as being justified under certain circumstances, within limits, and so on. For Žižek, the fact that torture, which should be universally considered absolutely unacceptable, became a matter of debate and discussion, with "arguments" for and against, "nuance" about when exactly it may or may not be acceptable, was an indication of moral regress.
In other words, a healthy moral society should not just have rational moral arguments in favor of its values, but strong moral taboos—ideas and practices which are simply universally regarded as unacceptable without argument.
This concept is considered unacceptable by rationalist discourse norms. Every taboo, every widely-held belief is subject to question: nothing should be held merely by moral convention or social exclusion. However, a healthy ethical cultural requires not just that we have good arguments, but also good moral intuitions that allow us to safely and strongly reject certain manners of thinking out of hand. In other words, a little bit of "sneering."