Why Disagreement Is Good

By Frank Filocomo

Ideas are meant to be challenged. 

I always say: when you enter into a dialectic - in good faith, presumably - you must be prepared for your paradigms to be shattered. In other words, you might very well be wrong on numerous fronts. 

Learning that you were in the wrong about whatever topic mustn't be seen as a defeat; it is, conversely, a sort of triumph. When I was a kid, my uncle, whenever I learned something new, would prompt me to say, "now I know." 

Too often, though, we enter debates with a defensive posture. Nothing is learned when we do this. What's absent here is humility. 

I recently read Norman Finkelstein's heterodox book, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It. Finkelstein, who starts this 500-page tome by quoting critics who lambasted this work as "incoherent" and "ineffective," argues against the idea of ideological purity, in favor of a Milliean view of Truth-seeking. That is, a process that involves engaging with those whose views you may find rebarbative. 

"If one aspires to dislodging falsehood and replacing it with truth," Finkelstein writes, "it requires openly confronting and persuasively responding to the falsehood."

Amen.

Finkelstein's frequent quoting of Mill throughout the book made me want to re-visit On Liberty.

Mill writes:

...for, being cognisant of all that can, at least obviously, be said against him, and having taken up his position against all gainsayers - knowing that he has sought for objections and difficulties, instead of avoiding them, and has shut out no light which can be thrown upon the subject from any quarter - he has a right to think his judgement better than that of any person, or any multitude, who have not gone through a similar process. 

This, though, is obviously an arduous process, and one, I might add, that most people won't bother perusing. For, to seek the truth in a Milliean fashion requires one to engage oratorically with others with opposing viewpoints. 

What's more: what if people are unable - or at least, unwilling - to articulate strong defenses of their opinions?

I encountered this a great deal in, of all places, college. 

As I've written before:

Some students... were pitifully reticent. I never could understand this. Why would you not at least want to try to stand out? I was easily the most loquacious of all my peers. But I always made sure that my contributions were relevant and substantive. Otherwise, your contribution isn't much of a contribution at all. 

The oratorical muscle atrophies when not rigorously exercised. 

When we are always comfortable, having our convictions routinely affirmed and repeated back at us, our ability to learn and grow as thinkers is stunted. 

Disagreement and polemical exercise - in good faith, of course - is how we become, as David Brooks often says, "more fully human."