People are always surprised when I tell them that I receive hate mail. When you write weekly opinions in a newspaper, it is bound to happen – the internet is a scary place.
To clarify: By hate mail, I do not mean respectful and well-thought-out responses contrary to the opinion I shared. I enjoy those. They push me to think and reconsider. I mean messages that attack me as a person, sometimes not even addressing the thoughts that I share in whatever article they respond to.
The sad thing is that it never really surprised me. I knew that putting my opinions into the world meant that this was not just possible but probable. That is just how the world works.
As a young person, I have not known a world that is good at disagreeing both on a large scale with a world that seems ideologically at war and on a smaller interpersonal level. In fact, I have always been bad at disagreeing with people. I am naturally an efficient arguer but not a kind one. My parents always told me to be a lawyer because “I know how to argue.” In reality, I had no clue. Arguing well is not just being able to verbally defeat the person opposing you and then write them off because you ‘won.’ Arguing well entails a lot more than that.
Authors Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse, in their book “Why We Argue (And How We Should),” discuss what arguing is in the first place. They say, “There is a sense in which argument is an expression of our respect and care for each other.” Immediately, this idea does not seem recognizable to our arguments today. Aikin and Talisse go on to say, “In arguing, you not only try to win agreement from your neighbor, but you also address her as a fellow rational agent, a person capable of following and being moved by reasons, and one who can be a source of reasons that can move you.”
I like that the Aikin and Talisse book uses the phrase “argument” because disagreement sometimes feels too mellow of a word. I don’t think that heated and passionate arguments are inherently a problem, so long as your passion is over the belief and not making the other person feel inadequate. Arguments do not have to turn into degrading or dehumanizing the other person. Recognizing the person disagreeing with us as a “fellow rational agent” seems like the bare minimum, but it is completely foreign to the vast majority of our world today.
The line between disagreement and dehumanization in the twenty-first century has become so blurred that it is practically unperceivable.
Not only that, but we tend to view arguments as just a battle to be won instead of a conversation to be had. The idea of an argument as a chance to grapple with your own ideas and new ones might be a theoretical thing that we talk about to sound well-rounded and intelligent, but in practice, we never see it.
Conviction for your belief is perfectly fine. In fact, if you don’t have conviction, maybe you shouldn’t hold that belief in the first place. But if we are not willing to be moved in disagreements or if we shut out anything contrary to the position that we already hold, what good is any of it? We are doing a great disservice not only to the person we are disagreeing with but to ourselves.
I had a realization a few years back that I did not have friends who disagreed with me – at least not on the major things. Like draws to like, and I was drawn to people similar to myself who could serve as echo chambers for the beliefs that I held comfortably. Then, after high school, I decided to take a gap year and do a Discipleship Training School with Youth with a Mission. It was a small base, meaning it was me and roughly six other students in tight quarters for six months. I had very different beliefs than the majority of my fellow students. But we were stuck with each other – working together, eating together, ministering and worshiping together.
It might just have been the best thing to ever happen to me.
These people become my friends and my support system – and we could not have been more different.
When you realize that the people who disagree with you are often good, even likable people, something starts to shift. When you can have an in-depth argument, then eat, take out, and watch your favorite stupid TV shows with no sense of resentment, it is hard to go back to dehumanizing them when contention arises.
Never is contention more obvious than in an election year. My time with YWAM was in the middle of the 2020 election. I was actually overseas sleeping in sleeping bags on a house church floor when the election results were announced. We had people all across the board in political stances, completely unable to escape from one another.
Now, almost four years later, I am attempting to grapple with this again. Disagreeing is a skill. It is like a muscle that needs exercise to become strong and remain strong. I have lost some of this ability in the last few years, slipping back into the ease of sameness.
But I want to relearn how to disagree well.
Maybe it is an unrealistic desire, but I wish we all would.