The Polemicist's Vice

Epistemic status: largely just an excuse to quote a bunch of polemical passages I’ve enjoyed.

By disposition, I love polemicism. There is little I enjoy more than a good literary smackdown. Even when I substantively disagree with the writer, I find there to be something awe-inspiring about good polemics. Even people whose arguments I am often unimpressed by, I enjoy a little too much so long as the polemicism is good. Though I generally do not find David Bentley Hart’s arguments good—in part because he rarely seems particularly interested in making them—I find him delightful to read for the disses. For example:

Did Gopnik bother to read what he was writing there? I ask only because it is so colossally silly. If my dog were to utter such words, I should be deeply disappointed in my dog’s powers of reasoning. If my salad at lunch were suddenly to deliver itself of such an opinion, my only thought would be “What a very stupid salad.” Before all else, there is the preposterous temerity of the proprietary claim; it is like some fugitive from a local asylum appearing at the door to tell you that “all this realm” is his inalienable feudal appanage and that you must evacuate the premises forthwith.

Or alternatively:

I know I have a predilection for writing prose rather than bullet-points, and this may have confused Feser; but his misstatements are so bizarre and extravagant that there are only two possibilities: either he did not actually read the book, but at most skimmed bits of it in his rush to write a review he had already concocted in his mind while doing something else (kicking a puppy, perhaps); or he is, when reading a complex text that has not been carefully explained to him several times in advance, damned near a functional illiterate. Of course, both things may be true at once, but I believe the former to be unarguably true in this case.

I even enjoyed Hart’s criticisms of me, which some might say is indicative of a darkened mind:

The second experience, which was slightly more irksome, involved someone sending me links to some Substack articles by a fellow going by the moniker ‘Bentham’s Bulldog’, proclaiming in a tone of bluffing bombast that, while ‘analytic’ philosophers make arguments and write clearly and are held to standards of logical solvency, ‘continental’ philosophers merely make

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