Hurry Slowly: Erasmus on the Age of Outrage

You write to me, friend, about the glowing tablets in your pockets and the quarrels that pour out of them all day. You say everyone has taken a side, that every side calls the other wicked, and that a reasonable person can no longer speak without being shouted down by two crowds at once. You ask what I would make of it.

I will tell you plainly. I have seen this before. It is the same fever I watched sweep across Europe in my own lifetime, and the cure has not changed, though the patients have.

A Flood of Pages

Not long before I was born, a goldsmith in Mainz found a way to print with movable type. For all the centuries before that, a book was a rare and costly thing, copied by hand and often chained to a desk. By the time I was a grown scholar, presses stood in every great city. I worked beside printers in Venice and in Basel, and I loved them for it. Because of them, a schoolboy in England could own the same Greek grammar as a scholar in Italy. Because of them, my New Testament, corrected from the Greek, could travel farther in a year than a manuscript could in a century. I thought learning would spread like light through a window.

It did spread. But so did everything else. Within a few years the same presses that gave us the ancients were turning out pamphlets by the cartload: slanders, cartoons of popes as beasts and reformers as devils, sermons written in a rage and read in a hurry. I had seen the danger coming. Even before the great quarrels began, I complained in my book of proverbs that some printers were filling the world with books that were foolish, ignorant, slanderous and mad, so many and so fast that the good books were buried under them.

Your feeds are my printing houses with the brakes removed. A man who once needed a printer, paper and a week can now publish his anger in the time it takes to feel it. I never blamed the press. I blamed the haste.

Hurry Slowly

Among the proverbs I collected, the one I wrote about at greatest length was the old Roman saying festina lente: make haste slowly. The emperor Augustus was said to love it. My friend the printer Aldus Manutius made it his printer's mark: a dolphin wrapped around an anchor. The dolphin is speed. The anchor is restraint. Wisdom needs both.

Your age has the dolphin and has thrown away the anchor. You are asked to react before you have read, to share before you have weighed, and to judge a stranger by a single sentence torn from the middle of his life. Then, because everyone around you is doing the same, you begin to believe that speed is a kind of courage and that pausing is cowardice.

It is the reverse. The person who answers at once is usually answering his own temper. The person who waits a day has a chance to answer the question. If I could give your generation one habit, it would be this: before you speak on any matter that stirs you, sleep on it once. Most of what seemed urgent at night will look smaller in the morning, and the rest you will say better.

Why I Would Not Join a Side

I know what it is to be pressed into a camp. When Luther began to write, the defenders of Rome demanded that I attack him at once, and his followers demanded that I join him. Both were certain I was a coward for refusing. Some of my critics said I had laid the egg that Luther hatched. Others said I had betrayed the reform I myself had preached for twenty years.

I agreed with Luther that the church was sick. I had mocked its greedy clergy and its quarrelsome theologians in The Praise of Folly long before he nailed anything to a door. But I could not follow him into a war, because I did not believe the truth needs a war to win, and I saw that once men begin to fight, they stop listening and start counting enemies. In the end I did write against him on one question, the freedom of the human will, and I wrote as carefully as I could. I said that I take so little pleasure in firm assertions that, where Scripture and the church leave a matter open, I would rather lean toward doubt than plant a flag.

That sentence earned me contempt from both sides. Yet I would write it again. On many questions that you fight about today, the honest answer is that good people are still working it out. Saying so takes more nerve than shouting, and it has the advantage of being true.

The Folly of Certainty

In The Praise of Folly I let Folly herself give the speech, and she boasts that she rules the world. She governs the merchant who cheats, the scholar who splits hairs, the theologian who would rather win an argument than love his neighbor. Her best trick is to make each fool certain that the folly belongs to someone else.

If I were writing that book for you, I would give Folly a new chapter. She would boast of the crowds who gather each morning to be angry together, each convinced that their anger is virtue and the other crowd's anger is madness. She would laugh at how little they read of what they condemn. She would point out that the people who shout loudest about truth are often the least curious about it.

I do not say this to excuse anyone. Some causes are just and some claims are false, and a person should say so. But there is a difference between holding a conviction and making a weapon of it. The first makes you steady. The second makes you cruel, and cruelty has never yet persuaded anybody of anything.

What I Would Ask of You

My whole life I believed that learning, rightly used, makes people gentler. That is why I wrote books on how to teach children, on manners, and on how a prince should rule in peace. I believed that good letters would soften the habits of war. I was not always right. But I have not changed my mind about the remedy, only about how long it takes.

So here is what I would ask of you, and none of it requires a new law or a new machine.

Read the whole thing before you answer it. Go to the sources, as I went back to the Greek, instead of trusting what someone said about them. When you disagree with a person, write to him as if he might one day be your friend, because he might. Keep company with a few people who will tell you when you are wrong. Mock folly, by all means, but laugh at your own first. And when you are asked to choose between two angry crowds, remember that you are allowed to choose neither and keep thinking.

Peace was the cause I cared about most. I wrote that war is sweet only to those who have never tried it, and I think the same is true of the wars you fight with words. They look glorious from far away. Up close they are mostly wasted days, broken friendships and people who never learn anything from each other.

Make haste slowly, friend. The world will still be arguing tomorrow. You will argue better for having waited.