How to Disagree: Three Rules to Make the Most of Our Divisiveness

There is a rule that you should never talk about politics or religion in polite company. I’ve never been a fan.

What else is worth talking about? And, really, is it even possible to talk about anything these days and not get into politics and religion?

Consider the go-to non-controversial topic—the weather. How far can you get in a conversation about the weather without stumbling upon climate change and thus politics? As Orwell pointed out, “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

The problem of course is that religion and politics cause disagreement, and nobody knows how to disagree. The SNL dinner party skit would be funny if it weren’t so awkwardly true. Disagreement has always been tricky, and even more so in the age of Internet trolls and SJW witch hunts. The wrong word and you could lose your job or worse you could be unfriended in social media. Nowadays, disagreement is a dangerous business.

This is a shame because it generates a chilling effect on conversation and hinders intellectual growth. For all its faults, disagreement can be constructive if done properly. We gain new insights, learn, and problem solve through good disagreement.

More importantly, however, disagreement can help us connect in a way that disingenuous superficial agreement never can. We can all agree that we live in fairly uncivilized times. But it’s not lack of community that has caused us to disagree so; it’s our lack of good disagreement that has broken up our community. Paradoxically, one could say that disagreeing could make us more not less civil.

So, instead of avoiding religion and politics at dinner parties, I propose we just learn how to disagree better. We don’t have time for any Monty Python Argument Clinic nonsense. We want good, solid argument. Realizing it’s a little optimistic, I hold out hope. Accordingly, here are three rules that will help get us there:

1. Don’t take it personally—just because I disagree with you doesn’t mean I hate you. It means I disagree with you.

Last year, the Boy Scouts announced they would allow girls into their ranks. After someone posted a story on it, I suggested that the Boy Scouts would have to change their name since it wasn’t just for boys anymore.

This might have been a reasonable statement in times past, but, in the twenty-teens, it is tantamount to genocide. The insults and cursing came out, all-caps were unleashed—it was social media war.

One person said that because of my statement I was denying his existence. By simply making a semantic distinction, I had been guilty of preventing him from existing.

Now, I can appreciate a powerful analogy. He had apparently aligned himself with an ideology that celebrated the gender fluidity of the Boy Scouts decision. By questioning the logic of the decision, I was questioning the guy’s ideology and perhaps his most cherished affiliations and constructs. To him it might have seemed as though I was trying to deny his existence.

But he wasn’t being figurative. To him, like so many in our modern world, his ideology had become his life, and so questioning it had in a very real sense become a kind of death.

This is the new normal. In a social age such as ours, we become our groups, affiliations, and identities. When someone questions or harms those groups, affiliations, or identities, it is as though they are doing harm to us personally. These days, disagreeing is an existential threat.

There is some validity to this thinking. One’s thoughts and beliefs can and do affect one’s actions, and actions in our political climate can affect the lives of others. A person says he’s conservative, and conservatives vote for Trump, who could very well thrust us into World War III. The conclusion is that the conservative’s beliefs could bring about the end of the world, and so he must be censured as if the world depended upon it.

While this mentality is sensibly laid out as such, we can easily see how it goes too far. The term ‘conservative’ has many meanings, not all conservatives voted for Trump, and we don’t know for sure that Trump is going to start World War III anyway. No matter. You’re either with us or against us, and, if you’re against us, you’re literally Hitler.

The disagreement might be on the tax rate or school vouchers, but, given the kind of existential angst we’re dealing with, we’re compelled to disavow the other and likely shout him down. We even might feel at liberty to punch him or steal from him because of course that’s the only way to deal with Nazis.

We have fallen into the trap of ‘concept creep’. One fault or flaw seamlessly blends into another more heinous offense. A sexist remark is rape; acknowledging differences between ethnicities is racism; disagreeing with someone is hate and hate is violence.

Mark Lilla pointed out how modern liberals found success making the fight for civil rights a moral issue, and ultimately winning on the moral high ground. As he put it, “It got liberals into the habit of treating every issue as one of inviolable right, leaving no room for negotiation, and inevitably cast opponents as immoral monsters rather than simply as fellow citizens with different views.”

And, certainly, taking this stance makes our case more emphatic, and grants us moral authority in some cases. But, after all, it is a logical fallacy, and ultimately prevents civil disagreement from taking place.

Don’t take it personally—just because I disagree with you doesn’t mean I hate you.

2. Come from curious—it is the wisest man who knows he knows nothing.

In her TED Talk On Being Wrong Kathryn Schultz outlines the typical thought process when one comes across someone with an opposing view.

First, we start with the Ignorance Assumption, where we think that the other is ignorant, and just unload all of the information that we have on the topic. Surely that will make them see the light.

When they don’t get it, we move onto the Idiocy Assumption, where we surmise that the other is incapable of making a sound judgment at all. This is where ridicule, insults, and all-caps come into play.

Then, when they still don’t get it, we move to the Evil Assumption, where it’s pretty clear the other is just malicious and out to destroy the world. This is where the claims of racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. come into play. Clearly, if after all of that, they still don’t agree, they must want to destroy the world.

Or it could be that they have a different perspective than we do, and might actually be right. We shudder to think.

There was once in conversation, long before we banished dialectic from the public sphere, a technique called the Socratic Method. The idea is that two could arrive at the truth by asking questions. Someone would make a claim and Socrates would follow with clarifying questions until they arrived at an agreement, usually quite different from the original statement.

These days, we don’t ask questions. And if we do ask questions we do so as a way to set up the other in a kind of trap. And so even when people ask questions no one answers them. Socrates would not be impressed.

The key is that we must be sincere about the questions we ask. Learn more about the other’s perspective, and be open to the possibility that we are wrong, or at least that the other is not wrong. They too have good insights and it’s quite possible we can learn from them.

Granted, they might be wrong after all. There is a reason why you disagree. But chances are sincere questions can help you see the matter from a new perspective and possibly help you find common ground.

Come from curious—it is the wisest man who knows he knows nothing.

3. Make steel men—it serves no one to defeat the straw man.

In Jordan Peterson’s now infamous showdown with the BBC’s Cathy Newman, the host was shown repeatedly badgering Peterson with false representations of his statements. Peterson would say something, then Newman would reply, “So you’re saying…” and then completely distort what he had said into something ridiculous or contemptible.

The tactic is familiar to anyone who engages in debates these days—it is the logical fallacy of the Straw Man. In short, the idea is to frame your opponent’s argument in a way that is exaggerated, implausible, or otherwise faulty so that you can then knock it over like a man made of straw.

It’s especially pernicious in a heated debate because the adept arguer can and often does lure their victim in with a somewhat reasonable claim—something that isn’t too far from what they really would say. But then, once he subscribes to it, they will point out the ridiculous part and tear down the whole thing. They are crowned victor and it’s almost impossible to recover.

It takes an ultra-conscientious thinker like Peterson to stop the Straw Man before it is propped up. Meanwhile, the technique persists nonetheless and continues to confound interlocutors and degrade dialogue everywhere.

But the Straw Man is cheap, and only divides. As Andrew Lang asserted, “No gentleman ever consciously misrepresents the ideas of an opponent.” It is a mark of our age that hardly anyone these days argues without misrepresenting the ideas of their opponents.

If we are to improve the quality of discussion and, dare I say, disagreement, we must replace the Straw Man with his noble cousin, the Steel Man. Instead of repeating your opponent’s argument to make it sound flimsy and silly, make it sound bold and powerful. Try to make it better than your opponent made it, and then try to defeat it. Only then will you know that you are on the side of truth.

It’s possible that you can’t defeat it after all, and that’d be a good thing because you have a more well-rounded view of the truth as a result.

Charlie Munger took it to the extreme: “I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition.”

If everyone used this policy to govern their interaction, we’d have a lot less conflict and a lot more productivity. Make steel men—it serves no one to defeat the straw man.

I submit these knowing well how unlikely it is that they will overcome the pressures of our social age and reinstate a kind of civility in our discourse. But, at the very least, it might help prove that it is possible to have a civil disagreement. And hopefully people won’t be so inclined to run away when politics and religion come up at the next dinner party.