If you’ve been on Twitter long enough, you’ve seen it happen: one person makes a claim, probably a bold one, and a digital dogpile ensues. Most of the time this event is bitter, protracted, and counterproductive to actually engaging people who disagree in a genuine dialogue.
You might think that this kind of infighting is a uniquely modern event, only possible within the parameters of a micro-blogging platform that precludes the possibility of face-to-face interaction. But to any yeshiva student, Talmud scholar, or chavruta, the heated back-and-forth is overwhelmingly familiar; it is in fact what forms the bread and butter of most Jewish learning.
Rabbis and thinkers separated by several centuries and plenty of physical distance come together in the pages of the Talmud to endlessly disagree about even the most minor points of law and morality, somehow doing so in a way that moves the whole conversation forward. (Unlike the parallel conversations you see on Twitter, which often result in blocks and bans and a conversation abruptly shutting down).
While the two may have dramatic differences, I think that the successful model of the millennia-long conversations that make up Talmud can teach us a lot about how to argue – and understand each other – on Twitter.
Sacred Argument
There is a whole world of scholarly literature that discusses at length the type of discourse that takes place in the Talmud, and a fair amount that brings similar analysis to Twitter. Scholarship in discourse analysis studies texts and how they may relate to other texts in their physical forms and with various interlocutors.
For Talmud, these relationships are centered around the Mishnah, which is the code of oral Torah redacted by Yehuda haNasi two centuries into the common era. The scholars contributing to the Mishnah are called the Tannaim, and the scholars who contributed the vast commentaries on the Mishnah in the subsequent four centuries are called the Amoraim. Added to all those commentaries are the various medieval and ancient discussions that center around Jewish law (Halakhic Midrashim) and the vibrant stories crafted in part to keep the attention of those studying the text (Aggadic Midrashim).
One linguist researching the argumentative style of Talmud sums up its fascinating structure as follows:
“Talmudic texts commonly take the form of a written transcript of an ever lively, usually agonistic, and occasionally vituperative oral discussion. These disagreements and discussions are often between parties far removed in time and space; but they were made to appear by the Talmud’s sequence of editors as transcripts of oral debates taking place in a study hall—inevitably, a virtual one.”
The spatial and temporal distance between interlocutors that characterizes Talmudic discourse would seem to make it a nest of disagreements – and it is. But rather than these distances splintering the community that formed around it, argumentation in Talmud is what causes that community to thrive.
The same linguist elaborates that discourse in the Talmud is less like mud-slinging debate and more like the best way to clarify and solve the problem at hand. The process of arguing became sacralized in Judaism, and the debate-pair learning structure of chavruta that is unique to the tradition encourages just such disagreement for the sake of deepening everyone’s understanding. Sacred argument creates community in the models present in the Talmud, but what about Twitter?
Polarizing Argument
Twitter has a shorter history than Talmud by a few thousand years, but it has already surpassed the ancient text in volume of words since 2006. Within the parameters of 280 characters and a stream of paragraphs from whomever a user follows, the everyday life and thoughts of an astonishing diversity of people are shared. Users can reply to tweets and hold conversations, and no amount of physical distance or even time can separate the immediacy of their interaction. The permanent storage of tweets makes it possible to reach back in history and respond today to a tweet from 2009.
These parameters are quite close to those of Talmud, but what about the centralizing force of the Mishnah? While it’s certainly the case that Twitter holds every direction of comment and inquiry imaginable and does not center around the ancient oral code of a minority religion, there is a way in which the two have similar centers. Twitter, like most social media, is a platform for the sharing of everyday life experience with other people, so consequently anything important to anyone’s everyday life is the center.
The Mishnah is vast and bears on the everyday life of the observant Jew, commenting on what food should be eaten and how, what clothes should be worn and when, and how neighborly disputes ought best be resolved. In this way the Mishnah, and Talmud as a whole, are centered around a kind of everyday life that is mirrored by Twitter.
For all these similarities, Talmud and Twitter differ greatly in their ability to form and keep communities. Pragmatics researchers who have studied the Talmud to discover its sources of longevity argue that it was the text’s unique patterns of discourse that fostered the continuity of Jewish community despite political and geographic barriers.
In contrast, researchers analyzing Twitter find that the platform “abetted a culture of polarization, in which people primarily seek out points of view to which they already subscribe.” While the novelty and surprise of constant streams of quickly digestible information keep users hooked on a Twitter stream, there is no need to transcend disagreement for the sake of the whole community as there is in Talmud. This notable lack of need to maintain the whole community is what allows the divisive discourses of Twitter, in contrast to the Talmudic discourse united toward a singular purpose.
Instead of building community across disagreements, Twitter has so far overwhelmingly tended to promote fractionated discourse and polarized communities. The use of the blocking mechanism (which stops selected users from viewing or mentioning someone altogether) cuts off the possibility of further discourse and exacerbates the problem, and rather than stronger communities forming out of disagreement, many disintegrate over time.
Solving the problems inherent in Twitter discourse overnight isn’t realistic. However, importing the models in the Talmud that make it successful – such as sacralizing argument and realizing the harmful effects of baseless hatred – might make the social media platform a more productive place for people to come together.
Featured image credit: Pixabay.com/Free-Photos.
