As a teenager, I remember a friend commenting to me that he’d never met anyone who liked to argue as much as my dad did. He was sure, in fact, that if you put a rock down in front of my dad, he’d find something to argue with it about.
I’d never thought about it. I never really thought of the discussions my dad liked to have as “argumentsâ€. We were taught from an early age that understanding was important, and that one of the most important tools in understanding was discussion. Real discussion – none of this “polite company†stuff. A discussion meant getting deep into the meat of an issue, and tearing it apart, and coming up with real understanding.
It wasn’t arguing really. It was exploration. Those who weren’t around my dad a lot didn’t realize that when a discussion opened up, he’d argue either side of the issue. If someone seemed to be taking “side a†in a discussion, my dad would strongly represent “side bâ€. If you were only around him occasionally, it was easy to think he was opinionated, and that you understood his positions. But when you knew him well, you knew that he could defend many different sides of an issue equally well.
In fact, that was an early lesson to me. Dad was insistent that hard discussion was critical to good and deep understanding, and that you should only enter into hard discussion if you could argue both sides of an issue equally well. If you could only argue one side, it only meant that you didn’t understand the other side, and only a fool argues against something he doesn’t understand.
There was great love and camaraderie in those heated discussions that we’d have as I was growing up. What felt at the time like stubborn resistance to ideas that seemed perfectly logical to me was actually relentless nudging toward the center of an issue – the only place that real truth and understanding could happen.
There were folks who would get frustrated with Dad, as he rarely let snide political comments pass unchallenged. Regardless of whether he agreed with the sentiment or not, (and you rarely knew if he did), he couldn’t abide the dishonesty that pervaded when you only presented one side of something.
The art of discussion is something I fear we’ve lost today. Few people are willing to invest the energy necessary to really understand an issue – they’d rather be told what to think by some idiot on the television screen. In an argument, folks have a set position, and victory means making a fool out of the other position, or talking over them, or bullying them. In Dad’s eyes, victory only happened when both people came away better able to argue the other side of the issue.
A good and dear friend got mad at me not long ago. His ideas seem strongly aligned with the extreme right or the extreme left politically – for this article it doesn’t really matter which it is. He’d gotten into the habit of including me in the never-ending emails produced by propaganda masters in the places where the extremes live, and forwarded to the party faithful for endless subsequent forwarding. This isn’t one side or the other – both extremes do the same thing.
The emails are generally mostly blather, with maybe the tiniest dose of the shadow of a true fact in there someplace. They’re targeted directly at the “party faithfulâ€, to try and whip up the anti-whatever-they’re-against sentiment. They cater to those who don’t want to think for themselves.
Most of the time when I get these, I just push ‘em off to the trash can without even reading them. Now and again, I might read enough to rest assured that it’s just more blather. On one occasion, I read the blather, and was shocked at the complete lack of any fact or truth in what was being said. I shouldn’t be shocked, I know, because this is business as usual for the extremists – make stuff up and say it enough, and it no longer matters that it’s a lie.
On this occasion, though, I felt compelled to write back to my good friend, and correct some portion of the complete fiction that was in the email. My hope was to engage him in an actual discussion – really digging down into a particular issue. The result, however, was that I raised his anger at me – why couldn’t I just enjoy a little “humorâ€? He’s just sending this along to me in fun for crying out loud!
After a couple emails, I think we agreed that if he sent the political tripe to me, he should expect that I’d respond as-if he were looking for dialogue. (Sending an email is, after all, a form of opening a dialogue in my estimation…) I haven’t gotten any more emails…
I guess I’m glad to have less tripe in my inbox, but I’m sad that there’s now more distance between me and a friend of many years. If people have true affection and respect for one another, one of the most powerful demonstrations of that affection and respect is their ability to disagree with one another, and to explore the disagreement, and to learn from the position the other person is defending.
Or at least that’s what Dad taught us. Maybe that’s an ethic for a bygone era. Maybe today our culture teaches us we only want to engage with people who see things exactly as we see them. Maybe today, our hearts aren’t big enough for those who aren’t clones of us.Have our minds really shriveled and closed up to the point where they can only accept opinions and points of view that are already in there?
In the olden days of my father, “character†meant having the strength of ego to be wrong, the intelligence and understanding to defend many sides of an issue, and the heart to care more for friends than their opinions.
I fear our egos have become fragile and weak, our minds have become slaves to idiots on TV screens, and our hearts have shriveled to the point where we sometimes can’t see the difference between our opinions and our friends.
And I miss my friend…
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