A Place for Conflict in Civil Debate
A “depressing trend”at American universities, The Times columnist Bret Stephens said, is the cancellation of speakers deemed too controversial. The list of those bumped includes the former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, the human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the DNA co- discoverer James Watson and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India.
Mr. Stephens laments that we have lost our ability to disagree. “To say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong,” he said in a speech, “these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people.”
His teachers at the University of Chicago encouraged him to listen, understand and question. No idea was sacred and no objection was discouraged, unpopular ideas were entertained and an open mind cultivated. He learned that every great idea was just disagreement with some other great idea.
Mr. Stephens said he was raised to believe that “sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me.” The belief today is that stressful words are “a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.”
But according to Lisa Feldman Barrett’s report in The Times, it’s not that simple, scientifically. “Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system,” she wrote. “Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain — even kill neurons — and shorten your life.”
Ms. Barrett differentiates between speech that is abusive and that which is merely offensive. People who insult incessantly, or engage in bullying, create a culture of brutality that is toxic to the body. Provocateurs and hatemongers have no place on a campus, she argues, because they are uninterested in debate.
“When the political scientist Charles Murray argues that genetic factors help account for racial disparities in I.Q. scores, you might find his view to be repugnant and misguided, but it’s only offensive,” Ms. Barrett wrote. “There is a difference between permitting a culture of casual brutality and entertaining an opinion you strongly oppose. The former is a danger to a civil society (and to our health); the latter is the lifeblood of democracy.”
Part of the problem with our society is that few parents are teaching their children that it’s possible to have a good argument without it getting personal, Adam Grant wrote in The Times. With the charged atmosphere in politics and on college campuses, it’s more important than ever that children learn to disagree.
“We want to give kids a stable home, so we stop siblings from quarreling and we have our own arguments behind closed doors,” Mr. Grant writes. “If we rarely see a spat, we learn to shy away from the threat of conflict.”
He uses the example of Wilbur and Orville Wright, who said, after they finished their flight at Kitty Hawk, that they “thought together.”
But what they really meant is that they argued together. They fought for weeks over the design of a propeller. “After long arguments we often found ourselves in the ludicrous position of each having been converted to the other’s side,” Orville reflected, “with no more agreement than when the discussion began.”
They realized they were both wrong and needed not one but two propellers to spin in opposite directions to create a kind of rotating wing.
The Wright brothers learned at an early age how to argue. In their family, conflict was embraced, and resolved.
“I like scrapping with Orv,” Wilbur said.