Sure, we will disagree, but let’s do it better

Waleed Aly interviews Scott Morrison on The Project. Picture: TEN

A week after the Christchurch terrorist attacks, the grief continues.

New Zealand politicians are attend­ing to stricter gun laws and security agencies are widening their nets.

That leaves one matter for us. It is entirely within our power to have a lasting impact on our community, our politics, our education system. If we disagree better, we would immediately improve the health of our democracy.

On Monday, Scott Morrison spoke about mutual respect in a civil society. The Prime Minister drew on US author Arthur Brooks, who recently said: “What we need is not to disagree less but to disagree better.”

Not disagree less, Morrison emphasised, but disagree better. “When we disagree better, we engage with respect, rather than questioning each other’s integrity and morality,” he told the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce.

If you think disagreeing better is a silly cliche, check the source of your cynicism. Polarised politics has created an outrage industry that tears people down rather than debates ideas. When outrage is the first, second and last response to what another person says, it points to an addiction as damaging as a dependence on alcohol or drugs.

The mantra used to break other addictions might be useful: accept the things we cannot change, have the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. In other words, identify the problem, break the pattern and rebuild relationships.

The polarisation of politics is weakening our muscle matter, hindering us from thinking better and independently. If we disagree better, our politics would be better at finding solutions.

Take immigration. Those who raise concerns about immigration, or question the annual intake of migrants, or discuss the need to integrate new Australians or consider the clash of cultures, are accused of being racists, of engaging in Islamophobia or dog whistling by the other side of politics.

Using mindless labels just because you disagree strips words of their meaning and dilutes their condemnatory power. It is also a failure to engage with legitimate arguments.

If we disagree better, we can explore thorny issues, like human ­nature that may, for some, cause a discomfort about strangers. It means identifying political tribalism that leads others to label as “racist” people with different views. Identify the issues, break the patterns that sow division, and rebuild relationships. That is the power of disagreeing better.

Morrison said he has never questioned the compassionate motives of those who have different views about managing Australia’s borders. And yet, as he said: “I have rarely had this courtesy extended by those who hold contrary views to my own.”

A commitment to disagree better will lead social activists back to issues, rather than succumbing to personal polemic. When GetUp director Sara Saleh said on the ABC’s The Drum this week that Tony Abbott’s “existence altogether is, I’ll say, offensive”, she symbolised what Morrison identified as the hypocritical nature of some public discourse. Imagine if Abbott said he found the existence of a political adversary offensive. The ABC would be in uproar. Instead, the ABC tweeted Saleh’s remark for added oomph.

When such a claim about someone’s very existence passes as acceptable ABC discourse, it is worth asking whether those in less respectable circles will more freely express their problem with the existence of other people, too.

If disagreeing better is to have any longevity, we must be principled enough to consider ill-conceived responses beyond the easy stuff of admonishing statements of someone such as Fraser Anning.

In that vein, disagreeing better will vastly improve our media. On Wednesday, ABC radio political editor Alison Carabine repeated the words of Morrison that we should avoid “lazy groupthink that distorts our public debate”. Yet Carabine chose lazy groupthink when she interviewed One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.

Carabine asked: “Now he (the terrorist) alone pulled the trigger but do you accept any responsibility for contributing to the toxic atmosphere in this country about Muslim immigration, which may have helped set the scene for what happened in Christchurch?”

If ABC journalists step down from their blinkered, three-legged moral high horse, they might consider whether it is just as likely that those who advocate for entirely open borders might have played some role in infuriating a white supremacist obsessed with Europe’s open borders.

Imagine if an ABC journalist engaged their intellectual muscle mass to ask whether the emergence of a toxic form of identity politics might have helped set the scene for a white supremacist to kill innocent Muslims. Or whether claims of collective guilt that have infiltrated our discourse might have fed similar ideas to a murderer who invested all Muslims with collective guilt to justify his killing spree of innocent people peacefully praying in a mosque. Or whether the virus of playing the victim and blaming an imaginary oppressor class may have led this white supremacist to imagine himself a victim as a rationale to kill.

When we disagree better, we can explore more possible reasons for terrorist attacks. That way, each of us, whatever our politics, might break past patterns by thinking carefully about the power of words and ideas that divide us.

If we disagree better, more intelligent debate will thrive on campus, too. Students will be encouraged to think for themselves, and the politics of academics will be confined to dinner parties and ballot boxes. It will mean we won’t see another senior University of Sydney lecturer, such as Nick Riemer, blame the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation for terrorist attacks by a white supremacist. Riemer said this week the Ramsay curriculum, where Shakespeare is taught alongside Plato, Virgil and other great figures of Western civilisation, “validates the world view behind Friday’s massacre”.

Disagreeing better means academics will make considered arguments rather than grab hold of a terrorist’s crazed manifesto about Muslim immigration in Europe to claim we must stop teaching European texts alongside texts written by other Europeans.

Sadly, Riemer epitomises the addiction of the modern outrage industry to tear down people with different views. To taint the Ramsay Centre, he tried to denigrate invited speakers by deliberately taking words out of context.

Riemer could simply disagree with Rod Dreher, a conservative thinker and author who writes about religion and Western ideas. Instead, Riemer tried to smear Dreher by taking one line from his recent blogs to suggest the US conservative legitimised last week’s terrorist attacks. A perusal of Dreher’s work exposes Riemer’s claim as utter nonsense.

Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, Riemer tried to besmirch Ramsay by also sullying the reputation of Rachel Fulton Brown, another academic invited by Ramsay to speak on the role of Christianity from the late antiquity in elevating the rights and status of women.

Disagree with her. Go your hardest, make opposing arguments. But Riemer simply described Fulton Brown as “a Milo Yiannopoulos groupie notorious for her celebration of ‘white’ ­culture”.

In a letter written last year to defend Fulton Brown against similar attacks, members of the National Association of Scholars in the US took aim at the trend to make reputational attacks by labelling innocent people as racist or white supremacist to avoid an opponent’s arguments. It “debases the currency of scholarship and must be answered with strong affirmations of principle and attention to the facts”.

This week, a reader wrote to tell me her father had fought in World War II and, looking at Australia today, he worried aloud that his efforts had been for nothing.

No. Not for nothing. As a young man, he fought so we could disagree better, not disagree less, free from the yoke of extremism that hates difference.