Let’s agree to disagree — but try to do it better

Author JK Rowling was infamously ‘cancelled’ over an essay she wrote about trans rights.

Rarely has public debate felt as adversarial as it does today. Express a nuanced opinion online and all too often you won’t be engaging in good-faith discussion, you’ll be abused, “called out” and “cancelled”. Have we forgotten how to simply disagree?

The new provost of University College London, Dr Michael Spence — an Australian Anglican minister and an expert in intellectual property law — said this month that we had reached the point where universities need to start teaching their students how to discuss controversial topics without shouting each other down.

“Practising the norms of disagreeing well, not making an enemy of other people, trying to work out where there is common ground — these are core intellectual skills,” he said.

In schools, handling disagreement does feature in the syllabus for personal social health and economic education (PHSE), alongside sex education, but it’s not compulsory.

It isn’t only students who would benefit from a class or two. Disagreement isn’t just natural, it is enjoyable and done well, it can be a valuable thing. Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, is so evangelical about creating an environment where people are free to disagree that employees are encouraged to “farm for dissent” by inviting colleagues to challenge ideas.

So why are we increasingly getting it wrong? That is the question that John Nerst, a Swedish blogger, has been asking himself for several years. Intrigued by the bad-faith arguments and slanging matches that have come to dominate public life, he believes unsuccessful disagreement —“an exchange where people are no closer to understanding each other at the end than they were at the beginning” — is so important that it deserves its own field of research.

He has coined a term for it: erisology, after Eris, the Greek goddess of discord. Not only are these failed interactions increasingly common but in their worst form, Nerst believes, they actively push people apart. There are many reasons why this is happening. The philosopher John Armstrong argues that we are looking for clarity in an ambiguous world. There has also been a breakdown of the rules.

Disagreement has traditionally been controlled by a shared code of values, whether in the debating chamber or the letters pages of a newspaper. Armstrong says The Iliad provides a good example of how disagreement once looked.

Melbourne comedian Dave Hughes felt the Twitterati’s wrath for daring to question Melbourne’s lengthy Covid lockdown.

“The Greeks and Trojans are clearly at odds, but they don’t hate one another,” he says. “They think something like: ‘My clan loyalties lead me to be attacking your city and your clan loyalties lead you to be defending it; we both operate from the same underlying values.’ ”

The internet has blown that apart. We now exist in a context where people can hide behind anonymous accounts and howl into the abyss. Add to that the conflation of ideas and identity, with a dash of linguistic sloppiness, and you have a recipe for disaster.

In recent years we have seen a migration of academic terms into common usage, where their meaning begins to blur. “White privilege”, for example, originated in US academia to describe the idea that white people, on average, enjoy certain benefits relative to other Americans. It does not mean all white people are privileged.

So who is to blame: those using terms that aren’t clearly understood or those shouting about it? Nerst believes the answer is both. “I would like to see us be much less accepting of loaded language, including both overly loaded terms and words that come with loaded assumptions.”

He also suggests “decoupling”, a concept derived from the work of the mathematician and blogger Sarah Constantin and the psychologist Keith Stanovich: removing extraneous context from a given claim and debating the specific argument on its own merit. Leave value judgments about the person putting forward an argument to one side. For example, because someone uses the nebulous word “decolonise”, don’t assume they are “woke”; if someone says they oppose “decolonisation”, don’t assume they are an apologist for empire. If you engage with an idea rather than an assumed belief system, you might find you are not as opposed as you think you are. It’s possible, for example, to believe that black lives matter and that all lives matter.

At the University of Sydney, where Spence used to work, simply introducing the concept of “disagreeing well” was enough to make an impact. “Would you call that disagreeing well?” became a common joke on campus. Laughing about our differences seems like progress to me.

The Sunday Times