Annals of twitter hypocrisy: the case of "condescension from below"

This past Saturday morning, I woke up early and had some time to kill, and so when I checked twitter, instead of blocking the usual jerks and knuckleheads there, I actually engaged some of them.  Before I get into the delicious details of what ensued, a reminder about a long-standing meme here, the idea of "condescension from below."  I owe the brilliant phrase to Stephen Stich.  We were both attending a conference where a philosopher (who shall remain nameless, except to note that no one would consider him a major figure) delivered what he took to be a devastating critique of Quine.   But the paper was not simply critical--that would hardly make it notable, this being philosophy after all--it was remarkably condescending in tone and substance--hence Stich's quip to me, "Condescension from below":  this philosopher was feigning an air of superiority towards a philosopher he was plainly inferior to.

"Condescension from below" is a staple of twitter, and for the obvious reasons:  the lack of barriers, group polarization effects, and the limits of the medium are all conducive to it.   And now for Saturday morning's amusement:

A philosophy grad student directed me to a couple of the more irrational twitter responses to some of the essays about transgender women, including Robert Jensen's essay, that I linked to last week.  One that stood out was by Christa Peterson, also a philosophy grad student (I linked it here), which included the memorable line, directed at Jensen, that "𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒸𝒶𝓃'𝓉 𝒷𝑒 𝒶 𝒸𝒾𝓈 𝓂𝒶𝓃 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒶 𝓇𝒶𝒹𝒾𝒸𝒶𝓁 𝒻𝑒𝓂𝒾𝓃𝒾𝓈𝓉" [her font] and went on to suggest that Jensen, Dan Kaufman, and me were not even allowed to think or make arguments about these issues because we are "cis men."  (Jensen made clear why that description is nonsense.)  Perusing Ms. Peterson's twitter feed I came upon another tweet in which she apparently agreed with my criticism of Singer's take on Marx but had to append to it the condescending observation that "a very annoying feature of Brian Leiter is that he is sometimes right."  (Even more annoying, I suspect, is that I'm always right!)  This bit of condescension from below brought out an even better one from Joshua Stein, a grad student in philosophy at the University of Calgary (embarrassing behavior on twitter seems to be a thing there), which prompted my tweet that began the real amusement:

Brian Leiter‏ @BrianLeiter May 19

Brian Leiter Retweeted Joshua Stein

An example of "condescension from below," a staple of twitter:

Joshua Stein @thephilosotroll

Replying to @christapeterso

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. Though Singer writing about Marx isn't new; he's been doing Marx and Hegel (albeit not great, from my limited understanding) for a loooong time.

2 replies 0 retweets 6 likes

Comparing me to a lucky "blind squirrel' was obviously condescending, and unless Mr. Stein is, in fact, hiding his bona fides as a scholar of German philosophy (or downplaying them, per his parenthetical), I would venture that this is, indeed, a classic instance of "condescension from below" in the original Stich sense.

 

Several followers (well, six to be precise) found this as funny as I did, and that would have been the end of it except that someone named Elisabeth Picciuto (no idea who she is, but that's how twitter works) decided she needed to lecture me.   Her response to the preceding, tweeted at me:

Leiter importantly draws attention to the fact that criticism should only come from those in power, aimed at those below them. Twitter is such an unfortunate democratizer of criticism.

As I say, I have no idea who Ms. Picciuto is, but she's obviously sensitive about her status, so much so that she failed to notice that my tweet had nothing to do with who gets to criticize whom, but about condescension from people not in any position to condescend (to look down on someone you actually have to be above them in some relevant respect, that's the whole idea of condescension after all).  Ordinarily, I would have just blocked such a sanctimonious knucklehead, but, as I mentioned at the start, I had some time to kill Saturday morning, so I replied:  "It wasn't criticism, it was condescension. Try not to be stupid, you might enjoy the experience!"   I actually consider this to be good advice, but Ms. Picciuto has lots of twitter followers, who then pounced, and I had some entertaining back and forth with them as they flung their best insults and I responded in kind (not to Ms. Picciuto, who blocked me, alas).  Amusingly, Ms. Picciuto, who started it all with her confused attack on me from out of the blue, spent the rest of her twitter day feeling sorry for herself, and bringing lots of other cry-babies out of the woodworks, all of whom imagined themselves to be the victims of unprovoked criticism. 

 

How much all of this has to do with the very public attention I have given to work by Kathleen Stock and others on transgender issues this past week, I'm not sure, but as one reader pointed out, by elevating the topic and forcing other philosophy blogs to address the issues Professor Stock so cogently raised, I have no doubt angered a lot of those who prefer that only "correct" thoughts be debated in public.   Indeed, one grad student, in addition to smearing Professor Stock as a "TERF" and "fanatic," also wrote on social media (regarding me):   "Just this week he's been doing his best to help out academic TERFs and getting his minions to spam the APA blog, so it was only a matter of time before people had enough."   A telling admission by one representative of the "thought police" herd in cyberspace.