On the art of biting one's own tongue (series: notes to myself)

The art of biting one's own tongue consists in the ability not to engage when someone says something unpleasant, untrue, malicious, or abusive about you. Instead of answering a biased question, arguing against a ludicrous opinion, complaining about an abusive message, correcting a meaningless error, countering a fallacy, explaining a patent mistake, objecting to a groundless criticism, rectifying a willful misrepresentation, rejecting an insinuation, responding to a provocation, retorting to a nasty remark, replying to an offensive allegation, … in short, instead of engaging with your mindless interlocutors you simply ignore them and do absolutely nothing, not even acknowledging that you might have received their communication, not even sharing a “no comment”, just silence. As far as they know, you might have never got the email, read the tweet or the Facebook comment, seen the Instagram picture. If you bite your own tongue appropriately, for them their communication might have never reached you.

Despite being a case of doing nothing, the Art in question is not a case of failing to do something. It is an exercise of the will and a very difficult one at that. It involves restraint, to overcome your worst enemy, which is very often yourself, in the form of your pride (“how dare they?”), your egotism (“why are they so mean towards me?”) and above all, deep down, your belief that it is always worth engaging politely, informatively, and reasonably with everyone, even your abusive, mindless interlocutors (“how can they say that?)”. Young people likely hold such a belief. I certainly did. There was a time when I thought that no unpleasant communication was unworthy of my effort to put things right and straight, for the sake of information, truth, or justice. I have learnt that this is not the case. Indeed, I have realised that some discussions are best avoided.

The Art is hard to learn and never fully mastered. For it requires the exercise of three capacities to a high degree: sangfroid, to stop and think instead of reacting; judgement, to evaluate whether it might be fair and fruitful to engage with the interlocutor; and disdain, to realise that the sender of the message, whatever the medium, deserves only silence. The exercise of these capacities is rewarded by a subtle pleasure: the asymmetry of knowledge. If you exercise the Art well, your interlocutors will keep wondering whether you may be preparing a crushing reply, or might remain silent because offended, or perhaps never got the message in the first place and are simply unaware of what they said. By biting your tongue, you will feed the worm of doubt eating away at their mind. Thus, if the Art is exercised successfully, you know your interlocutors’ messages, but they do not know whether you received them, and you know that they do not know. It is this knowledge of their ignorance that is a pleasure not entirely virtuous and yet undeniable. If you are lucky, you will know that your Art is working when they offend again, desperate for a reaction. That is when the task becomes easier: they are struggling, and their struggle should help reinforce your determination not to engage. The pleasure of their ignorance reinforces the value of the Art, and your resolution in exercising it.

But enough about the requirements, demands and potential pleasure of this Art. The next question is when and how the Art may be exercised. Three general cases can be sketched to provide initial guidance: when people are nasty, when they are silly, and when they are both.

In the case of nasty people, who offend, harm, or abuse you, whether willfully or inadvertently, the Art recommends the application of “Shaw’s approach”, from a famous phrase attributed (probably mistakenly) to George Bernard Shaw: “never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty and the pig enjoys it”. Pseudo-intellectuals in search of some visibility, activists, zealots, and militant defenders of all sorts of causes who see you as an obvious target, people who cherish pointless diatribes, academics who need to sharpen their teeth on your bones, and all the other members of the troll family are cases of “piggy” interlocutors, who need your engagement like parasites need their hosts to prosper. If you bite your tongue it may be painful initially but, in the long run, you will cut off their source of sustenance and feel much better. 

In the case of silly people, the Art recommends the application of “Pauli’s approach”, this time from a famous phrase probably correctly attributed to Wolfgang Pauli. One day, having been shown an article by a young physicist, Pauli dismissed it by commenting “this is not merely not right; it is not even wrong!” (“Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!”). Antivax people, astrology people, Creationist people, flat-earth people, homoeopathy people, Singularity people, UFO people, people who believe in all sorts of conspiracies, the “I am not an expert but…” people, people who argue ad hominem, people who believe that “any opinion is as good as any other”, the politically-correct-at-any-cost people … these and many more interlocutors do not qualify to be taken seriously enough to have a debate. Answering them raises their nonsense to a worth-debating level that is undeserved. And if you have any remorse just remember that if a reply were useful, they would not have sent that message in the first place. 

As for the silly and nasty, a combined dose of Shaw and Pauli will do, but do not challenge them to a battle of wits, because they are unarmed, to adapt an apocryphal sentence wrongly attributed to Shakespeare.

A final comment to conclude. Engaging with interlocutors when they attack you is worse than useless, for it reinforces their believes and credibility. The only solution is to bite your tongue. However, the fight against ignorance, nonsense, falsity, superstition, mis- and disinformation, intolerance and aggression, and more generally all forms of human foolishness, obtusity, superstition, and obscurantism is crucial and can never stop. It must never end and be constantly renewed, for no victory is definitive, and it must be merciless because that Hydra keeps regenerating its empty heads. But it is a fight that must occur elsewhere, in the human effort to improve the world, its cultures, and its mentalities, not in your snappy replies. It is a matter of education, not a question that can be resolved by a tweet. This is why Proverbs 26:4-5 is not inconsistent but enlightening in both its suggestions: “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.” The first recommendation is the essence of the Art of biting one’s own tongue. The second is the foundation of education.

Postscript 

I write all this as an apprentice. I still engage too often with the wrong interlocutors, applying the Art too clumsily, and not often enough. Ars longa vita brevis, as they say.