This time of year in Sacaca, Bolivia, men from all over get together, get drunk, and then proceed to beat each other to a pulp as crowds cheer them on. There are so many ways of being human, I suppose.

But then this folkway is not as unfamiliar to us urbane moderns as it seems. The same spirit informs the tone that so much of our blogocracy has taken on.

The most prominent at this writing is that of Melissa McEwan and Amanda Marcotte, hired as bloggers for the John Edwards campaign. The easy back-reference that the Internet allows has caught them with their pants down, revealing the acrid anti-Catholic potshots in their own previous blogs.

“What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky holy spirit?” she gave us in one post. This is, quite simply, swill — which I believe despite being neither Catholic nor religious. Innocent people raised in and living by a faith don’t deserve this.

Then when called on this, Ms. Marcotte’s response included smug toss-offs along the lines of “I’m anti-theocracy, for those who were keeping track.”

But then many of her critics resort to the same, “Who’s got the bigger one?” routines. Dale Franks, calling Ms. Marcotte “Mandy,” sneers, “Maybe people don’t dislike her because she’s a woman; maybe people dislike her because she’s a jerk.”

Is this necessary?

Hardly not, given that most of this is, at the end of the day, a kind of play-acting.

Ms. Marcotte’s blog, for example, reveals someone much more thoughtful than those college-town snorts about Catholics would imply, complete with entrancing photos of cats. Theocracy indeed — Ms. Marcotte knows damned well that no one in America is trying to turn this country into a Christian version of Iran. In general, no human being could stay sane who was driven to passionately sneering disgust by some public figure’s statement every other day. The blogocracy, these days, is shot through with recreational hostility.

Yes, political dialogue got down and dirty long before today. Thomas Jefferson was outed for his jumps over the fence by someone who today would have announced it in a blog. Or, consider Maureen Dowd’s mean probing of Barack Obama in the Times the other day, studiously indulging in blithe, useless probing of his character as if that alone were a duty of some kind.

But, as so often, the issue is degree, degree, degree. When the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, no one piped up that early colonists had been known to dump occasional bags of refuse into the river too. The difference between then and now is technology — the Internet allows legions of writers in their pajamas to give ongoing vent to a strain of pure, heedless meanness that is an unfortunate part of human nature.

In Sacaca, it is vented through a barbarous yearly brawl; in our world it is vented 24/7 by people determinedly neglecting that the human beings they so gleefully rip to pieces have mothers and are parents of children.

It is irrelevant that athletic nastiness is hardly the exclusive preserve of bloggers. The point is that whichever print columnist is your favorite to pick on, the bloggers now imitate that tone. Which is especially rich when they so typically consider themselves enlightened alternatives to “shrill” mainstream writers whom they often see as undeserving of their prominence.

You can say that it’s all about attracting readers, and thus ad revenue, but there are other ways to attract attention than being mean. Such ways are not as visceral, and thus maybe not as immediate. In fact, straying beyond back-yard name calling means, for most, putting in a little more effort. Snarky blogging is, in that sense, lazy. It recalls Anna Nicole Smith once telling her mother, “If my name is out there in the news, good or bad it doesn’t matter … I’m going to do whatever it takes.”

I am not, incidentally, writing out of injury that I myself come in for drubbings by just these kinds of writers. They are the kinds of things to expect and get used to for anyone who writes in the “controversial” vein like me. It is illogical to assume that anyone who gets written about in blogs can only, in the logical sense, disapprove of the tone of blog culture because of whiny, self-centered reasons.

What sickens me is the smug nastiness of writers like Ms. McEwan and Ms. Marcotte, or Lee Siegel adopting a secret online alias to lob back insults at people criticizing his work at the New Republic.

This kind of “writing” is not necessary. It passes no more as evidence of a “dynamic” public conversation than do the brawls in Sacaca. This endemic “gotcha” tone in the blogosphere gives off a whiff of testosterone, locker-room sweat, and — talk about white and sticky — Clearasil. It’s crass and idle. At least in Sacaca they only indulge in it once a year.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.