What an odd dream I had last night! 

It is a sultry July day in Philadelphia, the kind of day one would wish to spend outdoors in the shade, with a book and a tall glass of something cooling and consoling. But despite the weather, a diverse collection of men, many of them from faraway places, is gathered in a closed room to consider a momentous undertaking. They have been thinking about it for months, some of them approvingly and others disapprovingly, but now their scattered thoughts and debating points have been brought together and given form in a document. The principal author of this document, chosen for the task because his literary gifts outweighed misgivings about his sometimes radical views, is a tall, red-haired planter from a southern region. He is reading aloud from what some in the chamber can see is a much-emended sheet of foolscap.

“… are, and of right ought to be, free…”

There it is. The nub of the matter. The issue that, however tacitly, brought these men together so many months ago, and the one that has now to be discussed openly and—ultimately, if they are to be true to their destiny—carried into action. 

But while that disarmingly simple clause is the political crux of the document, the emotional climax comes in the concluding sentence, for the tall red-haired planter is a master of psychology as much as of rhetoric. 

“…we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

If it be possible for a hush to fall over an already hushed audience, it does so now. The man pauses for just a moment, then lays the sheet down on a table next to him. He scans his audience man by man, engaging the eyes of each in turn, as if to instill some of his own eagerness to get on with what must be. 

Each hearer, even those who before today have been loud for the proposed step, wrestles internally with what is now called for. For make no mistake: This is revolution. The debating points are matters for mere discussion no longer. What has transpired in this closed room must now be opened to the public. Now they must stand and declare themselves to their fellow citizens and to the world. 

Little wonder that there is hesitation. Yet there is resolve, too. 

Finally the man who has for the last year presided over the group’s deliberations stands, looks about him, and walks briskly to the table. He picks up a quill, dips it, and bends over the document. In the silence the scratching of the quill seems preternaturally loud, almost ominous. The scratching is interrupted briefly once or twice as the man dips the quill again into the inkpot, and then it stops completely. He straightens, lays down the quill, and turns to the others. A hint of a smile plays about his features. He picks up the document and considers it, then displays it to the room. 

“There,” he announces ironically, “I guess King George will be able to read that.” 

And there, in a few bold strokes from the hand of a man who has enjoyed the best education afforded by wealth and station, is this signature:

204.449.37.10

The tense silence is broken by sounds of approval, which give way to applause and a few shouts of “Hear, hear!” 

It will be well. First one man, then another, and then another, come up to subscribe the declaration. Some familiar names, some hitherto little known, soon adorn the document:

benf
geo111
tj@uva.edu
samthesham
button
macholee

And 40 more like them. The thing is done! No man can know what lies ahead. War, almost certainly, and with it the possibility of defeat and, for the signers, ignominy and perhaps even death. But these men, these patriots, have committed themselves before all the world to see it through. Their courage will ring down the ages, and their children shall bless them for it. 

It wasn’t really a dream, of course, just an idle reverie brought on by thoughts of the Fourth of July and by too much browsing online among the blogs and vlogs and clogs that offer political commentary, which is pretty much all of them. If anyone is seeking a prime example of cultural speciation by adaptation to environmental change, I offer Homo commentator, Commenting Man. With a rapidity that would have astonished Charles Darwin, Commenting Man has multiplied—no, logarithmed—out of hand to quite overwhelm much of our daily discourse. 

Similarly, the hallowed American idea that “everyone is entitled to his opinion” has mutated, under the influence of information technology, into the rather different notion that “everyone is entitled to publish his opinion, frequently and, if he likes, offensively.”

Whether in the guise of “Richie from Melrose Park” on talk radio or of “bakunin27” on Iamrightyoulie.com, Commenting Man is everywhere, and everywhere he is he has something to say. Sometimes what he has to say is apt, pointed, cogent; often it is irrelevant, inane, illiterate. But these categories are largely meaningless to Commenting Man. What counts is being there. What counts is having had one’s say. 

What, I began wondering, is the mechanism behind these startling evolutionary leaps? What specific adaptation to altered conditions, what minute change in behavior, can have triggered this overrunning of the dialectical landscape by a new species? And the answer came to me: Anonymity. 

I have attended New England town meetings. They are as advertised: Citizens who have a point to make, be it a complaint about the cleanliness of the town dump or a proposal for a nuclear-free zone, have a claim to the moderator’s attention and thereby to the floor. Once recognized, they stand up, identify themselves, and make what case they can. I have written letters to the editor, and I have received back requests that I verify my identity before publication. Nearly all our public transactions begin with a declaration of identity, which is a declaration of responsibility. 

Deviations from this standard are usually furtive ones. The men’s room wall springs to mind. You know: “For a good time call [followed by the telephone number of the scribbler’s ex-girlfriend or English teacher]”; anatomical diagrams; sundry exhortations unlikely or impossible to be heeded. One learns eventually to ignore them. 

(There are exceptions to the exceptions, as always: When I was in college, the walls of the restroom in the all-night joint I frequented featured, among the usual offal, a lengthy extract from Sein und Zeit and this odd remark: 

Samuel Flagg Bemis is a very ugly man. 

I later learned that Bemis was a very distinguished diplomatic historian. No power on Earth could induce me to read any more of Heidegger.) 

Then there are the graffiti that have brought such grace to public spaces and transit vehicles in the last four or five decades. You’ll recall that the New York intelligentsia were at one time quite taken with this form of self-expression; it was right after they got over “Deep Throat,” I believe, and before they moved on to Robert Mapplethorpe. 

And, of course, poison-pen letters, along with their felonious cousins, the blackmail and ransom notes. 

It’s important to note another class of exception that is not a failure: the signing of political tracts with a pseudonym, often a name associated with Roman history. Thus the Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, were all signed “Publius.” It is not hard to guess that the practice originated in a time and place where there was real peril in publishing radical ideas, but at the time of the American Revolution it was more a matter of convention to adopt such a nom de plume. 

“Publius” and his brethren aside, then, as I say, anonymous writings have been regarded chiefly as evasions of the rule that one takes responsibility for what one says or writes in public spaces. Comes then the Internet with its vast new virtual spaces, and suddenly, instead of a bloom of previously mute inglorious Miltons, we are beset by a red tide of all-too-voluble impertinent McGonagalls. Except that William McGonagall was quite happy to sign his name to his compositions, awful as they were. 

And if committing slander, illogic, falsehood, scurrility, and stupidity under cloak of anonymity were not offense enough, there are those who would have us believe—who to all appearances themselves believe—that a collection of such folk, linked not by shared values or shared goals or shared enterprise but only by the fact that each is unknown to everyone else, constitutes a “community.” It is, in the sense that a handful of gravel is a community of rocks. 

It may be that Commenting Man will one day mutate into some more benign, possibly even useful, form of life. Or some further change in the technological environment in which he now thrives may relegate him to an obscure niche. In the meanwhile, the rest of us are in a constant quandary, best expressed by the above-mentioned benf: “It is ill-manners to silence a fool, and cruelty to let him go on.” 

Robert McHenry is an editor and author who was vice president and editor in chief of Encyclopædia Britannica.

Illustration by Edwin Fotheringham.