The danger with purity.

You can never win against a fanatic. It is quite useless to try when the fanatic is intelligent, well-read, erudite and completely without doubt as to the superiority of their ideas and the place of those ideas in the intellectual discourses of the day. It is foolhardy to attempt to engage with them when they have determined that you are beneath them. Yet, to admit this is to admit that discourse, reasonable or not, is quite dead.

With the fanatic there is only one way: theirs. Alternatives are for the unsure, the idiots. When the choice is between their solution and a compromise of lesser rigidity or certainty, there is no choice. This makes for a one-sided conversation, between you and a wall. Walls don't hear. Walls keep things out and keep things in, simultaneously. The impermeability of walls is what calls for doors and windows.

Take yesterday's Twitter hashtag, #NoBraDay. Annually, 13 October is dedicated to breast cancer awareness. On Twitter, this is memorialized by #NoBraDay. It being Twitter, of course, idiots will attempt to hijack the hashtag for licentious and salacious satisfaction, but the objective still remains true: to highlight, for those on Twitter, that breast cancer is a crisis and that, especially though not exclusively, women should get tested for breast cancer. Infantile it might seem to the fanatic, but #NoBraDay has a place in the panoply of campaigns to sensitise everyone on a crucial health matter. After all, many young people today spend a substantial amount of their time online on Twitter and other social media platforms and it would be foolish not to try and reach them in a form that they understand and appreciate.

But to the purists, those who live for the traditional ivory tower discourse, Twitter, Instagram and the other social media platforms are the signs of the collapse of civilisation and civilised discourse. Hashtags and similar devices are proof that we are no longer critical thinkers but mindless drones pre-programmed to only think of ourselves and our bubbles. Rarely will the anti-hashtag brigade supply data to prove their hypothesis; instead they will point to the limited intellectual content of the hashtag by pointing out that it fails to take into account other social problems, like how there are still many adolescent girls without access to underwear or sanitary pads. Perhaps there is a link between breast cancer, underwear and sanitary pads, but the fanatic refuses to find it - or even look for it.

Traditional forms of problem-solving have not solved all our problems. In some cases, tradition has compounded our problems. Trying out non-traditional means of civic education is not an admission that tradition is an unmitigated failure, but that tradition must evolve and may benefit from being complemented by other things. The focus of a hashtag-for-a-day on a particular subject is not because the other problems do not matter but because, for one day, a large number of peoples' minds will be focussed on a single problem in the hopes that possible solutions will be considered.

No one can focus on all social problems all of the time. That is a futile act. In fact, that is one of the ways that all those problems will not find solutions. It might be low-brow, but the hashtag campaign is not necessarily a bad idea; it is just one other tool in the toolbox. Use it or ignore it, but don't live in the bubble of purity when purity ahsn't solved al our problems yet and might not.