To have written in controversy had been to cut off an hydra’s head.
The 17th century was a different time, to be sure, but like today and all of time it was full of people who consider themselves expert and must, by whatever means available, correct those they decide are in error. (One imagines the first cave painting being followed by the first cave criticism.)
Today these conflicts play out on the scale of seconds or minutes as controversies rage on social media and in the black pits of comment sections. Back then it would have been via both letters (which were often published publicly), pamphlets likewise printed and distributed, books, or articles in papers or periodicals.
This of course vastly increased the time it took for an argument to take place — one may not receive a response to one’s assertions for months or even years. For the expert (or one who perceives himself as such) may live abroad and receive one’s argument thirdhand and after such delays as were common in travel back then; the pamphlet, it may be, must travel by road, sea, horse, and man before it arrived the critic’s desk.
To take part in a debate often meant joining a literature years or decades in the making, and an argument written at length merely gave others more material to disagree with. The idea that someone might settle anything this way was as risible then as the idea now that you could do so in the comments section of a news site.
We think of earlier eras as having long-headed thinkers and rather formal disputes over various issues of policy, medicine, science, and so on. But it was as full of quibblers and disingenuous mudslingers as the web is today. As Burton points out, you are far more likely to blunder into an endless melee, cutting off one of the hydra’s heads only for two more to grow in its place — over and over until, like today, the original argument is likely entirely forgotten and all we can see is blood.
Blind fury, or error, or rashness, or what it is that eggs them, I know not.
It has always been impossible to truly gauge the mindset of someone entering into conflict with you. Now with the added anonymity or psuedonymity of the web, that problem is intensified.
The matter Burton refers to is more the decision to enter upon controversy in the first place — and who among us can say we have never been angry, wrong, or hasty in an argument, especially an online one?
So it was then as well. You don’t have to understand them, and you don’t have to forgive them, but you would do well not to assume.
Tempestate contentionis, serenitas charitatis obnubilatur, with this tempest of contention, the serenity of charity is overclouded.
Humans are emotional creatures, and it is difficult for us to maintain multiple states in parallel. Though you may be angry and sad, you are generally only one at a time moment by moment. And how often does the sadness eclipses the anger rather than vice versa?
In argument, then, we are a limited version of ourselves, and not the best. Even those of us who tend to give the benefit of the doubt are unlikely to do so in the heat of the moment.
Burton’s Latin quote, from Austin (i.e. St Augustine of Hippo), I think he has defanged with a passive voice. I would render it as “The tempest of contention overclouds the serenity of charity.” I like to think of looking inward and nothing but that tempest, obscuring one’s better self, the one who forgives friends and lets trivial errors and insults slide. The all-consuming opacity of anger is worth remembering.
As Fabius said, “It had been much better for some of them to have been born dumb, and altogether illiterate, than so far to dote to their own destruction.”
Fabius Planciades Fulgentius was a Latin writer in the 5th-6th c. AD.
At melius fuerat non scribere, namque tacere
Tutum semper erit,———
[But it would be better not to write,
for silence is the safer course.]
These two thoughts may to some suggest a passive stance that deserves no praise. But there is a difference between saying nothing, and choosing to say nothing.
I can only speak to my own experience, but I have been happier since I stopped engaging with others pursuing arguments online. As Burton, Fabius, and St Augustine all observe — which suggests it has been a truism for a millennium — it is almost always better not to yield to an impulse to speak in anger or perceived righteousness.
The choice to engage in argument is seldom made deliberately, because reasoned debates require mutual understanding and preparation. That is not possible almost anywhere online.
So really, the choice you make is not whether to correct someone or not, but whether to rashly engage in battle with a hydra. Even Heracles stood no chance going in swinging.
The solution, as with the hydra, is not to swing harder, but to wait and think, and maybe even ask for help. In the myth, Heracles is helped by someone who cauterizes the beast’s stumps before they grow back, and then buries the whole thing under a rock. I would not say this maps directly to modern online discourse, so let the lesson stop at the choice not to blindly engage with an unknowable and implacable adversary.
The alternative — battle — has a negligible chance of success but a tremendous cost to all involved. As others have said simply: “don’t post.” Yet if someone cannot resist the urge, it would, as Fabius points out, perhaps be better if they did not have the capability to begin with. A little silent reading might do us all good.