How to Engage a Fanatic

How to Engage a Fanatic
As Benjamin DeMott put it in a famous 1996 essay for the Nation, “When you’re in
an argument with a thug, there are things much more important than civility.”
And yet the more I think about it, the more I agree with the argument Yale Law professor Stephen L.
Carter made in his 1998 book “Civility.” The only way to confront fanaticism is with love, he said.
If, on the other hand, you fight your natural fight instinct, your natural tendency to use the rhetoric of silencing,
and instead regard this person as one who is, in his twisted way, bringing you gifts, then you’ll defeat a dark passion and replace it with a better passion.
Over the course of these experiences I’ve been rehearsing all the reasons to think
that it’s useless to try to have a civil conversation with a zealot, that you’ve just got to exile them, or confront them with equal and opposite force.
As Carter points out, the best abolitionists restrained their natural hatred of slaveholders because they thought the reform of manners
and the abolition of slavery were part of the same cause — to restore the dignity of every human being.
If you succumb to the natural temptation to greet this anger with your own anger, you’ll just spend your days consumed by bitterness and revenge.
For example, you can’t have a civil conversation with people who are intent on destroying the rules that govern conversation itself.
I’ve had a series of experiences over the past two weeks
that leave the impression that everybody on earth is having the same conversation: How do you engage with fanatics?