Delphic Maxim 125: Do not oppose someone absent
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
125. Do not oppose someone absent
In an earlier maxim, we encountered a demand to ‘not accuse someone who was absent’ — or something along those lines. When you have 15 minutes to respond to these things, you tend not to go looking up previous posts to verify your accuracy (at least, unless you know exactly where to look). I tend to think of this maxim along the same lines — that there’s a sense of fairness and decency and credibility about opposing people when they are present — but I think there’s a more interesting, strategic read for this maxim as well.
It’s to do with straw men — which has become a bit of a problem with rhetoric in the age of social media and renewed dumb populism. The ‘someone’ that people are opposing in this reading are arguments or points of view that don’t actually exist.
This is a problem for both ‘sides’ of the incessant cultural and political wars that are being waged in the world today. The classic generalisation is people sledging ‘the left’ for having a particular point of view. On Twitter, there’s an obscure right-wing commentator called Daisy Cousens who spends most of her days praising Trump (despite being a very young Australian woman, so there’s no real reason to give a shit about Trump), and taking on her enemies on ‘the left’.
To engage in an argument with Daisy Cousens is essentially opposing someone absent — at least so absent from relevance that you’re fighting a straw man (or woman). Cousens rails against a particular brand of identity politics that doesn’t get practised in a meaningful way (“feminists say all men should die” or “Marxists are taking over the parliament” or “the tolerant left are saying rude things”). Cousens ascribes a universal and totalised point of view to a ‘tolerant left’, as though everyone on ‘the left’ thought the same way. They don’t, believe me, otherwise we probably would be better organised and would be running the joint.
The same thing happens on ‘the left’ though, where people of a progressive persuasion read nefarious intent or intentional callousness into lazy or unthinking processes. Calling Israel Folau’s inane religious tweets actively ‘homophobic’ gives them more credit than they deserve — they’re silly religious points of view, not particularly ‘hateful’. Likewise, reducing very complex social problems to single instances of totemic issues with simple solutions (marriage, Trump, Adani, Israel-Palestine) is also a way of stepping around the presence of real complexity. ‘The left’ has a tendency to oppose problems that are very different to the ones actually present (not in all instances, of course, because the other side has a tendency to ignore problems that are very real).
Once again, we’re looking at a maxim that reminds us to keep things in perspective. Fighting a battle against someone — or something — that isn’t actually present is a waste of time and energy. It is strategically ineffective, just like fighting a battle against a pointless person like Daisy Cousens (who is intellectually bankrupt and whose primary audience are incels and Sky After Dark die-hards). There are times to engage, and times to ignore.
But when you do choose to engage, make sure it is against something meaningful and present. And if you do choose to oppose someone absent, make sure you do it ironically.
