A typically gentle but incisive observation from Francois Matarasso:

The irony about the so-called ‘culture wars’ is that they so rarely have anything to do with actual culture. It would be more accurate to call them belief wars but that might be too near the knuckle. It would at least underline that they are not so different from many other wars we have suffered.

I do not think I have ever said or written anything provocative; certainly I have not intended to provoke. Without a reason of the first importance and urgency, it seems to me ill-mannered to seek to provoke others. Life is hard enough without strangers making it harder. Someone may have heard me speak or read something I’ve written and been incensed by my ideas: perhaps they have even accused me of provocation. If so, I reject the charge. Unless a speaker has deliberately sought to anger or shock their listeners – in short, to manipulate their emotions – it seems to me they should be assumed to be expressing their views in good faith. Provocation is generally in the mind of the provoked.

I have said before that the accusation of bad faith argument is itself a bad faith argument. I’m increasingly taken with an extension to that claim, along the lines of “yes, even—or perhaps especially—when when it’s howlingly obvious that your opponent is arguing in bad faith”.

Note the difference, too, between this claim and the Michelle Obama thing about “when they go low, we go high”: the latter bakes in the same assumption of moral superiority that is the essence of the accusation of bad faith, the assumption that your opponent secretly knows you’re right, but wants you to engage in a bit of figurative pig-wrestling.

To be clear, there are times when that’s exactly what your opponent is trying to do! So how, then, to respond to the bad faith argument? First, perhaps ask yourself whether it needs engaging with at all. If you decide that yes, it does, then treat it as if it were in good faith.

If you cannot defeat an argument you believe to be in bad faith with your own good faith counterargument, that shortcoming is entirely your own—or, at the very least, it’s entirely that of your argument.

That’s not an comfortable thing to admit, or to act upon. At any rate, I have found it extremely uncomfortable, because it has obliged me to confront a vast succession of moments in my life when I was being a massive asshole, and justifying it by telling myself that I was on the side of the angels.

But growth and comfort are not compatible. Pretending otherwise will just leave you stuck as what you are.