My friend—I’ll call him Adam—is very smart, very kind, and very self-aware. When you see him angry on his own behalf, you almost expect a voiceover from David Attenborough to roll, explaining how rare is this display of wrath in the North American mensch.

If you knew Adam, and if you had been present for an academic talk he gave a couple of years ago, you would not have been expecting him to be thrown into a (literal) blind rage during the Q&A. But he was. As another academic questioned him about his research, he was so overcome by some roiling cocktail of adrenaline, testosterone, and dudgeon that later he couldn’t remember exactly what he had said or done in response (a friend had to fill him in). He just knew he’d won.

Adam had defended plenty of papers, and knew that disputation was a normal part of academic life. I asked why he reacted so strongly to this particular incident.

Two surprising realizations came out of this experience. The first was that having his “academic life threatened” was as pleasurable as it was harrowing: “The thing to not underestimate about this kind of activity,” he recalls, “is how enjoyable it is. It’s very fun, very thrilling.” Adam got an undeniable rush from having stared the academic reaper in the face and lived.

The second surprise was that the terror and anger this encounter induced in him seemed to actually improve his performance. We might expect that a surge of adrenaline would make a person better at fighting a bear—some survival instinct surely hardens our fists and quickens our movements—but can a sense of terror make us better at fighting a philosopher? Adam says it is so:

As he considered the role of ritualized conflict in scholarly life, Adam searched the world of sport for metaphors, as is his wont:

If a sense of real threat—not just to one’s ideas, but to one’s job—causes valuable bursts of insight, what can we make of the enchanted armour that is tenure? Adam acknowledges that he knows a woman for whom tenure changed everything about the way she related to other scholars:

Adam was, in the end, reluctant to conclude that visceral hostility between academics actually improves the quality of scholarly discourse. “But in my experience,” he said, “I guess that seems to be the case.”

“William Buckley would argue about anything with anybody.” — Irv Kupcinet

“For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” — James 1:20, quoted by William F. Buckley in his essay “On Experiencing Gore Vidal”

At the end of his life, William F. Buckley was widely seen as the father of contemporary conservatism in America. When he began his career, however, Buckley was an ideological misfit (albeit a rich, handsome, popular one). It is not an exaggeration to say that during 59 years of firehose rhetorical output, he helped argue U.S. politics as we know it into being.

Buckley loved to argue. He argued in writing and he argued in speech. He estimated that he made 70 public speeches a year for 40 years. He hosted the television debate show “Firing Line” from 1966 to 1999: over 1400 episodes. The New York Times obituary estimated that his collected newspaper columns would fill 45 books. This in addition to his 55 actual books. [1] That Buckley died at his desk did not surprise his own National Review, which figured he went as he would have chosen to go: “At home, still devoted to the war of ideas.”

Thinking of the moment when Buckley set out, at age 29, to reshape his country’s political discourse, you do not imagine a dogged figure throwing his weight against a mountain in the faith that it might one day move. You imagine, rather, a puppy bounding into the biggest pile of leaves in the world, a pile raked carefully into place by generations of earnest groundskeepers.

Buckley’s love of argument was driven by both ego and ideology. Deploying his Yale debating skills was, like entertaining on his yacht or zipping up Park Avenue on his scooter, an opportunity to impress people. Which is not to say that Buckley’s public image was merely an act: he was nothing if not serious about coaxing America’s political mainstream to the right. The two loves that propelled his disputatious zeal—the love of conservatism and the love of winning—operated as two wheels of a high-performance bicycle, perfectly aligned and ready to race.

In live debate, Buckley was famously cool. But it was not always thus. As a young man Buckley was sharply aware of his ideological isolation and wanted to impress upon opponents and audiences alike just how indifferent he was to their misguided opinions. “It was very important for me in those days [at Yale] publicly to disdain the judgment of the audience,” Buckley recalled. “That is, I knew they would find me wrong, but that made little difference to me given the fact that I knew I was correct.” The Yale debating coach of the period recalls that Buckley was fond of pissy diversionary tactics, like pretending to play the violin during his opponents’ speeches.

Obnoxious as these stylings may have been, they were rooted in a passionate sincerity. Biographer John B. Judis quotes Buckley’s debating coach as saying “he wasn’t particularly effective” when he had to defend a position more liberal than the one he actually held. Buckley’s true convictions were close to the surface, and they were dear to him; many of them he had adopted from his father, whom he revered. Perhaps this is why a friend recalls that while Buckley welcomed the chance to be an outspoken advocate for his ideas, the project was “not without pain.” “He got wounded when people went after him.” Buckley himself said, as an adult, that the scorn he showed his audience in his early debating days acted as a kind of “protective covering.”

Later in life, Buckley adopted what Judis calls a “facade of indignation,” but the petulance he displayed at Yale was nowhere in sight. The mature Buckley remained a formidable debater, but he had come to realize that dignity and self-possession could be devastating weapons in verbal combat. The Guardian’s obituary observed, “He loved to shock those he regarded as wimpish liberals, but it was important to him to present himself as a gentleman.” To come away from an argument looking calm and clever was victory. Even better was to leave behind a bewildered opponent whose mouth was still opening and closing, like that of a fish recently tossed on the floor of a boat.

Publisher Andre Schiffrin (one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society) remembers debating Buckley at a New York college in the early 1960s. Writing in 2007, Schiffrin still sounds baffled. “All my notes were in vain, since Buckley was quick to abandon his positions whenever necessary. I tried to point out these tactics to the audience….” (Open, close. Open, close.)

The feminist Mary Daly remembers being frustrated at Buckley’s ability, on “Firing Line,” to get a zinger in just before every commercial break, leaving her to play catch-up at the beginning of each new segment. “After the show,” Daly writes, “friends seated in the studio audience told me that they saw him pushing a button under his seat whenever he decided it was the opportune time for a ‘break.’ Although I could not see this, it did not seem improbable, since the commercial seemed invariably to immediately follow his punch lines.”

Whether the Gotcha Button existed or not, Buckley demonstrated an awareness that in live debate—especially on television—looking good was everything. He wrote, “In network situations, an elementary sense of theater (which if you don’t have it, you won’t ever face the problem of what to do in network situations) disciplines you in the knowledge that you simply don’t have the time it takes for detailed confutation.”

While the strict definition of winning a debate may be that you make stable arguments and defend them successfully, Buckley knew that panache was at least as important as content—and that this was especially true in his particular case. The mature Buckley saw what the petulant Yalie had not: that public sparring over politics was an advertisement—not the thing itself. This awareness changed everything.

Now Buckley’s dearest beliefs could still enjoy the protective covering of a persona, but this persona would not rankle; it would woo. He became the winsome contrarian, the velvet provocateur. To the extent that Buckley’s persona advertised his magazine, his books, and his point of view, he was like any public intellectual. But Buckley’s persona was special because it did not merely advertise a perspective, it advertised a cultural possibility: a cultivated sophisticate who was also an ardent American conservative. If on television Buckley could convince people that he was not a stereotypical right-winger—a twitchy survivalist, a sputtering bigot—but a gracious, learned person, that in itself would be a greater victory for his politics than the rigorous defence of any given idea.

The fight for one’s ideas and the (more secret) fight for victory are entangled in the hearts of most arguers. For Buckley, though, the fight to be personally admired and respected may have been the more urgent fight. This was not mere vanity: Buckley was fighting against what he saw as an entrenched liberal consensus while at the same time distancing himself from anti-Semitism and various strains of backwardness that claimed conservatism as their own. “You know,” Christopher Buckley recalls his father saying, “I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Buckley became the figure of his own politics: his manner and person were the referees that vouched for the quality of his ideas.

The importance of Buckley’s gentlemanly persona to his political project gives a hint as to why he was able to be so sanguine in debate. While some flew into spasms of frustration when their most cherished beliefs were attacked, Buckley remained placid, knowing that placidness, not dudgeon, was the best way to advance his ideals. By showing Americans what a suave and intelligent person he was, Buckley could back them away, step by step, from their dismissal of his beliefs. Charm before doctrine.

If scoring points gracefully was victory, revealing visceral anger was defeat. Buckley’s most famous debate occurred on ABC television in 1968 amid the tumultuous Democratic convention in Chicago. His opponent was Gore Vidal. The two men objected to each other profoundly and in every regard. The chase: Vidal called Buckley a crypto-Nazi and Buckley threatened to sock the insouciant “queer” “in [his] goddamn face.” Buckley was later ashamed of his outburst and published a post-mortem of the debate in Esquire in 1969. As Vidal put it, “having indicated that he lost the debates to me by ‘losing his cool,’ Buckley now hopes to regain by writing what he lost through performing.” As Buckley himself put it, it was “an emotional explosion which, it is said, rocked television. Certainly it rocked me, and I am impelled to write about it.”

In 15,000 words, Buckley exhaustively details everything Vidal had ever done to irk or offend him. See how many provocations he endured with a mother’s patience! See how he remained silent in the face of Vidal’s queenly green-room preening! See how he tried in vain to elevate the discussion while Vidal pulled it down down down until it wallowed in the most odious puddle of insult and indignity! After many pages, we arrive at the ABC studio that fateful night to behold our hero quivering under the weight of Vidal’s lies and itching terribly from the ambient fairy dust. And then it comes. The spark. The word. [1] Nazi. And Buckley freaks.

The famous cracking of the Buckley persona came not because Vidal had gone too far in attacking Republicans or capitalism or America. Not even because he had told Buckley to shut up or called him “the enemy of the people.” Many frustrated opponents had gotten lippy with Buckley and caused no ripple. But in calling Buckley a crypto-Nazi, Vidal made the one accusation Buckley could not abide: that under his fine jacket and his neatly combed hair, he was one of the kooks after all.

Indeed, Vidal affirmed that the exposure of Buckley as a kook (more accurately, a cuckoo) had been a long-caressed dream. In his response to Buckley’s Esquire piece (for which Buckley sued him and won), Vidal recounted Buckley’s explosion thus: “on Wednesday, August 28, at nine-thirty o’clock, in full view of ten million people, the little door in William F. Buckley Jr.’s forehead suddenly opened and out sprang that wild cuckoo which I had always known was there but had wanted so much for others, preferably millions of others, to get a good look at. I think those few seconds of madness, to use his word, were well worth a great deal of patient effort on my part.”

Ego & Argument contends that our arguments are proxies for ourselves—that when people attack our ideas they indirectly attack our credibility, intelligence, morality, and worth, and so cause us emotional pain. William F. Buckley embodied a strange inversion of this general rule; he had invested so much in his gentlemanly persona—and implicitly positioned this persona as evidence of the sanity and reasonableness of his political ideals—that an attack on him personally became the most violent assault possible on the principles he held dear. To impugn Buckley’s human decency and political sanity—not just call him an ass, but to call him a Nazi [2]—was not an ad hominem irrelevance. It was to say that the person Buckley claimed to embody, the civilized intellectual who was also a passionate conservative, was not only a fiction, but an impossibility. “If it can be said about me that I’m a crypto-Nazi,” Buckley wrote to his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, who urged him not to sue Vidal, “then it can be said of every vigorous American conservative.” After years of fighting his way into the mainstream with a broad vocabulary and a dandy touch, beating back the likes of George Wallace with his free hand all the while, Buckley was being cast into the moral wilderness. By a queer, no less.

The Vidal episode was traumatic for Buckley—years of enmity and legal action followed—but there is no question that he recovered himself. He became the happy warrior again and waged his stylish brand of war for another forty years, years which saw his beliefs increasingly triumphant. He was a welcome guest in the Reagan White House, and lived to hear President George W. Bush refer to his own generation of conservatives as “Bill’s children.”

Much of Buckley’s success as a rhetorician and public figure can be attributed to his rare ability to open up an emotional gulf between his debating persona and the core of passionate belief he so surely possessed. The instantaneous disappearance of this gulf during the Vidal debate was so much discussed not only because Buckley had deployed an epithet against Vidal, but because watching Bill Buckley lose it on TV was like watching Roger Federer slip on a banana peel. There was the sudden, slow-motion spectacle of an identity collapsing. The identity can be reconstructed, but in such a moment a paragraph of one’s obituary becomes fixed. That paragraph sits, whole, waiting to see which episodes will compete for the remaining column-inches.

The radical feminist Andrea Dworkin once recalled watching a debate between William F. Buckley and James Baldwin on “Firing Line” during the 1960s (Dworkin was about 20). The men were discussing segregation. Dworkin was unsettled not only by Buckley’s position on the issue, but also by his cool. “Buckley was elegant and brilliant and wrong,” Dworkin wrote. “Baldwin was passionate and brilliant and wore his heart on his sleeve—he was also right. But Buckley won the debate; Baldwin lost it. I’ll never forget how much I learned from the confrontation: be Baldwin, not Buckley.”

When Buckley died at the age of 82, tapping out a column at his desk, Dworkin had been dead for nearly three years. She lived to be 58. Her persona consisted in an utter refusal to ingratiate herself with her audience: she was enraged, obese, explicit. It is a cliche of feminism that the personal is political, but Dworkin’s personal experiences of rape were the DNA of her politics; her literary criticism, political analysis, cultural commentary all seemed to flow from the most private regions of her mind. She exposed them so forcefully because she renounced the terms of the privacy. Her final writings were seen even by friends as desperate, unmoored accusations. She seemed, finally, to be physically consumed by her fight, having always refused the protective envelope of performance that served Buckley so well (in every fight but one). Her life and work were so indigestible to the culture that she was mocked even in obituaries. She described her youthful aversion to Buckley’s rhetorical style in her memoir. It’s called Heartbreak.

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[1] The last few pages of Buckley’s essay are by far the most compelling. He describes his frustration at the protesters’ heedless use of words like “Fascist” and “Nazi” and cries out, “Can it be that the rhetorical totalism of the present day has etiolated every epithet?” (He hadn’t seen nothing yet.) He asks, too, about those whose use of language is so debased, “Can such men understand the causes of anger in others?  Understand the special reverence we must feel for that which is hateful?”

[2] Anti-Semitism was a site of special sensitivity for Buckley. His father had been nakedly anti-Semitic and although Buckley took pride in carrying forward many of his father’s ideas (when a professor suggested that he take a metaphysics course at Yale, Buckley replied “I have God and my father and that’s all I need”) he was explicit about renouncing this one.

When we perform Step Two, the thumb of the ego presses hard on the scales of judgment, producing what those in the field call “egocentric contrast effects.” Garden-variety contrast effects occur when we perceive something differently because we are comparing it to something else that is fresh in our minds or senses. A toaster feels very light if you have just lifted an anvil. Compared to a bag of rice cakes, the same toaster seems to weigh more.

Egocentric contrast effects occur because our judgments of others are skewed by our own characteristics and expectations. We are the anvil. We are the rice cakes. Because it is standard cognitive procedure to situate ourselves at the centre of the universe and assess others according to how like or unlike us they are, we often overestimate the extent to which other people differ from us. [1] Moreover, we are prone to seeing these differences not as blooms in the blessed garden of humanity but as—what else?—evidence of other people’s inferiority.

Suppose, for instance, that you are an extreme racist. At a garden party, you meet someone who is more racist than average but less racist than you. The likelihood is remote that you will think, “This person is really quite racist and I am even more racist. What a frothing loon I must be.” Much more probable is a reaction like: “I have many wise opinions about the supremacy of my race. My new acquaintance rejects a few of these. He must be some sort of egalitarian extremist.”

If you are Jerry Falwell, Gloria Steinem seems like Andrea Dworkin—and Andrea Dworkin is the devil in dungarees. If you are Andrea Dworkin, Gloria Steinem starts to look like Phyllis Schlafly. And so on and so on, unto a hell of baffled alienation for Jerry, Andrea, Gloria, Phyllis, you, and me (although of course you are very different from me—and by different I mean worse).

A live question about egocentric contrast effects is what we use them for. One idea is that they are merely computational aids: our brains need some yardstick by which to understand other people and, as the hippies sing, let it begin with me. Another idea is that egocentric contrast effects are driven at least in part by our unremitting thirst for affirmation. According to this account, we are in a constant struggle to feel good about ourselves, so viewing others as different from and, wherever possible, inferior to us is really the only way to travel.

Keith Beauregard and David Dunning (the latter semi-famous for his half of the Dunning-Kruger Effect) set out to test the idea that contrast effects are best understood not as a defective yardstick but as a sturdy crutch. [2] They reasoned that if people’s judgments of others had something to do with shoring up their own confidence, then people would tend to judge others more harshly after having their confidence shaken.

Enter “ego threat.” Ego threat is a bit like handcuffs. It is widely used by non-professionals but it is the privilege of a small group of experts to use it as an officially sanctioned part of their job. Ego threat is exactly as it sounds. It is when they slash your emotional tires. A common scenario: a social psychologist tells you she is going to give you an intelligence test. You complete the test. She corrects it, looks at your score, double-checks, frowns, and says, “That’s strange. We thought you’d do much better.” Now—now that your lip is trembling and your little heart has retreated to its bedroom to listen to The Cure—now is when the real experiment begins. They want to see how you will take the corners now that your tires are hissing their last.

Beauregard and Dunning devised an experiment in which they asked their subjects, undergraduates at Cornell, to assess the intelligence of a hypothetical Cornell student named Chris based on a short paragraph describing Chris’s SAT scores and his/her routine at the college. Prior to reflecting on the life and learning of Chris, some of the participants were subjected to ego threat (in the form of a vicious little test-taking operation not unlike the one describe above). Sure enough, those whose cheeks were still flushed from their failed tests were eager to diss Chris. Those whose egos had gone unmolested thought Chris was quite bright. [2]

The possible implications of all this for the world of ego and argument are stark.

1. If our self-centredness causes us to see others as more different from us than they really are, under conditions of disagreement we are probably at risk of overstating the gulf between our own positions and those of our opponents (and even to infer more than we should about what the disagreement implies about our opponents’ values, character, etc.). And our opponents, barring cognitive exceptionalism, probably run the same risk.

2. Our urge to self-stroke causes us to judge these (exaggerated) differences in ways that let us think of ourselves as better and others as worse. If this is so, and we cast others as not only much different from us but much inferior, it is little wonder that the journey from disagreement to scorn is so often rapid and effortless.

3. Beauregard and Dunning conclude that ego threat is as lighter fluid to tendencies 1 and 2. So, when we argue—and our authority, reasoning, intelligence or other forms of power and competence are being questioned—we may become even more scornful and querrulous than we would be if we could consider the substance of the disagreement from a safe emotional remove.

It’s quite a picture. Ego and Argument, still wet from its own birthing, might almost leave it at that.

But will we give up so early, fellow calves? Should we not reflect further on our predicament: a life in which we see others refracted and dimmed by the lens of our own cheating consciousness, and imagine that we see them clearly—imagine that the flaws are theirs?

*                         *                         *                         *

[1] Unless it casts us in a favourable light to see ourselves as similar to others. For instance, people tend to see their shortcomings as common and their positive attributes as unusual.

[2] Beauregard, Keith S. & Dunning, David (1998). Turning Up the Contrast: Self-Enhancement Motives Prompt Egocentric Contrast Effects in Social Judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 606-621.

[3] There are some variations on this phenomenon, notably a softening of judgment among people with low self-esteem. Popular wisdom has it that people are nasty when they feel bad about themselves; as it turns out, research suggests that people who feel good about themselves are much nastier.

[4] There is more to say about this experiment, which has some nuances glibly ignored here. There is a Part 2 to this post, forthcoming at an undisclosed date.