Disagreeability

On the vanishing benefit of the doubt

I’ve got something more detailed brewing behind the scenes, a piece that picks up a couple of recent reads and connects felicitously to Michael’s most recent post over at Convivial Society, but I’m not quite ready to dig into it yet. So I thought I’d work on something that’s been more peripheral, but has been slowly coming into focus for me.

It started with this tweet from Jamelle Bouie. It appeared on November 3rd, so before the election, and Bouie was responding to Harrison Ford’s endorsement of Harris:

Not only did I find myself agreeing with Bouie here, but I was struck by the fact of the observation itself. Whether it’s true or not is, I think, a matter of more debate and research than most of us have time for. But it raises an interesting perspective on democracy that I don’t think we tend to consider—in fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s a perspective that we’ve been actively discouraging in public discourse for a while now. Let me frame it for you as a hypothesis:

One of the most important elements of a democracy is the right to disagree.

I’m going to unpack this a little bit, because I have in mind a couple of different ideas that are related but not quite equivalent. The first piece connects with Bouie’s tweet above, and has to do with my professional commitment to rhetoric as well as my personal belief (however quaint it might be) in the virtues of a society where we can weigh various options and reach decisions.

If you share that commitment, then it means coming to terms with the fact that sometimes, your position will come up short. Sometimes, you may be outvoted on where to eat or what movie to see. Or your club, community, or organization will make a decision that you find ill-advised, short-sighted, or counter-intuitive. Or your elected leaders will adopt a policy that doesn’t align with your interests¹. Deep in your heart, you may believe that your choices are the proper ones, but all that a democracy can guarantee you is the right to exert whatever influence you have on those decisions. It doesn’t mean that things will always go your way.

There’s something fundamentally important, then, about the notion of “protecting your right to disagree.” Some decisions are low-stakes enough that disagreements don’t matter. Others are reversible, such that if we take a particular course of action and it fails, we can try something else. But the more consequential the decision, the more important it is to bring in multiple positions and perspectives. This makes it less likely that everyone will leave the discussion satisfied, I suppose, but I do believe that the decisions that result are ultimately stronger for it. And in order for that to happen, people have to feel comfortable disagreeing. They have to believe that their positions will be taken seriously, and the consequences of their disagreement can’t extend beyond the discussion itself.

It’s crucial in a democracy to engage in (good faith) disagreement², particularly when it comes to deliberative rhetoric, ie, discussions about what should be done. This sounds like a simple thing, almost beneath notice, but it’s become increasingly rare in our contemporary political climate. State governments across the country use their victories to justify gerrymandering and voter purges. Republican senators unwilling to violate the confirmation process for a slate of unqualified Cabinet appointments are, allegedly, “buying [themselves] a primary” opponent. And while we should all hope that this was overstated, we’re clearly in danger of a governmental overhaul whereby thousands of government employees will be discarded in favor of “party” loyalists. It’s easy to imagine, especially these days, that the right is primarily responsible for tactics to silence their opposition, but I think that’s a mistake. I don’t know that we’ve fully come to terms with the degree to which moderation for so-called misinformation was weaponized by Democrats, for instance. And the more I learn about that party’s efforts to silence third-party or alternative candidates, the more difficult it becomes for me to distinguish between parties³. I’m currently reading Steven Brill’s The Death of Truth, and the degree to which his project (NewsGuard) has come under attack from both sides of the spectrum is sobering.

Agree to Disagree

One of my favorite books this year was Robin Sloan’s latest novel Moonbound, and there’s a stretch partway through the narrative where the main character seeks help from a community of sentient beavers. Their approach to collective decision-making is distinctive: before any major decision is made, they hold something like a debate: representatives of each side are responsible for making a case, but they also collaborate on a three-dimensional construction that materializes the argument itself.

Beside each debater was a bundle of reeds, and, as they spoke, each plucked from their collection and wove the reeds into a form they were building together. It seemed at first a spectacle of collaborative art, the two beavers creating this intricate curving shape between them.

When each side has made its case, and the “form” is complete,

“Red states Black’s opinion; Black will do the same for Red. And they must both agree that the summary is fair. This is the assurance of an argument in good faith.”

The audience then tests the object that they’ve built, probing it for weak points and reshaping it, until it arrives at a final shape, which indicates the course of action that the community will take.

Given where we’re at with respect to public discourse, there’s something undeniably quaint about this account of how disputes might work. And yet, it’s not so far away from the way that I used to teach argument. I’d ask student to stake out a position that they wanted to assert, and then we’d spend a few weeks where they were required to locate sources that argued against their position, and practice articulating that opposition as fairly and generously as possible. The trickiest part of that is taking in one’s opposition not to pre-empt or refute it, but to incorporate it into one’s own thinking, by providing (at the very least) nuance to one’s own views.

When we “agree to disagree” these days, the phrase is used to signal an impasse: neither one of us is going to change our minds, so we’re just stuck. But Sloan’s speculative vision of debate gives the phrase a deeper layer. It hints at the notion that, in order to produce a good faith argument, we should hold ourselves accountable for understanding other positions in the process of suggesting our own⁴. So it’s something like “agree in order to disagree.” There’s a line from years ago that I remember (but have never been able to track down) about reading every text twice, and waiting to say “no” until your second time through it. Paradoxically, such an approach is both deeply impractical and aspirational (I remember my own visceral reaction at the prospect of trying to double my reading load in graduate school).

Even as I type this, I can imagine the objections, that this idea requires us to identify with our oppressors, that it encourages some sort of rhetorical Stockholm Syndrome, and/or that it requires us to hold ourselves to a standard that our opponents would not. And those are legitimate qualms, at least to a certain extent. But, and this was something I was trying to get at a while ago, the motivations behind objections like these are self-replicating. If we treat another’s concerns or motives as irrelevant, and believe that trying to understand them is a waste of our time, because we don’t trust that they’d treat us with that sort of charity, there’s certainly a logic in that. But it also justifies the same logic on their part.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, almost 25 years ago now, characterized this as “paranoid reading,” whereby the critical strategy of looking for hidden meanings or motives turns into a default assumption. Describing it as “contagious,” she explains that paranoia “seems to grow like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131). This paranoid style metastasizes into conspiracism, where even good faith argument (much less disagreement) is treated as strategic, evasive, or deceptive.

Thinking like this becomes tautological—we only ever find what we expect to find, and our interlocutors either mirror our views back to us or they are enemies who must be vanquished. And it makes it easier for all of us to hunker down into defensive stances, presuming that it insulates us from being fooled, or trolled. That becomes the one thing that we all “agree” on, that we’re none of us to be trusted.

The original source of the term “sea lioning,” from David Malki’s Wondermark

Questionable

As sometimes happens when I write, this episode didn’t begin with the idea that I was going to putter around with the idea of disagreement. It started instead with questions, and in particular, Derek Sivers’ recent piece, “To question is to consider, not refute.”

One of the things he writes there that really struck me was that “Some people hear questions as disinclinations.” Sivers mentions this in the context of making plans, and implies that, for the more passive aggressive among us, questions like “Do you still want to go?” are sometimes used to express disinterest, disinclination, or perhaps even cancellation.

And then there’s sea lioning, which is a common enough trolling tactic on social media, where folks will ask really basic questions as an attempt to derail a conversation, suck energy from someone, and/or shift discursive responsibility onto an opponent. Rather than engaging someone where they’re at, it’s a tactic where, under the guise of a “civil conversation,” the sea lion implicitly calls basic assumptions into question, and tasks the other person with rebuilding their argument from scratch, to the sea lion’s own satisfaction.

There are any number of ways to weaponize a question, then, and I’ve seen plenty of examples online of pre-emptive defenses, most of which show the same exasperation as the folk in the Wondermark comic above. They tend to fall into Sedgwick’s paranoid style; the very act of asking questions becomes evidence of disagreement rather than, as Sivers puts it, “just part of considering.”

The idiom that I’m dancing around here is the idea of offering someone the benefit of the doubt, and I think it applies in a couple of different ways. The first is common enough. One of the things that we’ve largely lost by shifting so much of our culture and public discourse online is the benefit of the doubt, both in the ways that we treat other people and the way that we ourselves experience the world⁵. Not only do we tend to interpret even hesitation on the part of others as disinclination, but we shape our own behaviors accordingly. The second thing I’d mention is that while the benefit of the doubt comes to us from legal discourse (“innocent until proven guilty” is quite literally a benefit of the doubt, e.g.), doubt has an epistemological value as well. Sivers explains that questioning is vital for the exploration of ideas:

We question to consider why things are the way they are. We see if old reasons apply to a new situation. Maybe they do. But maybe there’s a better way.

I mentioned above that I used to require my students to take opposing opinions seriously when they wrote argument essays, and the reason for that was simple. We strengthen our own beliefs by testing them across a range of contexts, by taking those who disagree with us as seriously as we can, and by remaining open to the possibility that our own positions might be more nuanced or complicated than they first appear.

As I’ve been working on this, Alan Jacobs published a fortuitous blog post about the “reasons to practice tolerance of ideas that differ from, or conflict with, your own,” and the first that he mentions is remarkably similar to my previous paragraph, epistemic humility. He explains that “you extend tolerance not only for the sake of your opponents but also for your own intellectual good.” But the other reason he offer is political pragmatism. It is “virtually impossible in [our current] climate to make an appeal to epistemic humility,” but political pragmatism requires us to think of others as open to persuasion, as something other than a “repugnant cultural other⁶.”

Or, to put it in terms I mentioned above, it requires us to venture outside of that paranoid mode of reading and reasoning. This isn’t to say that everyone everywhere deserves the benefit of the doubt, but that’s not the only option available to us beyond our current tendency to imagine that no one, anywhere, deserves it. Sedgwick emphasizes the willful dimension of paranoid knowing, writing

To be other than paranoid, to practice other than paranoid forms of knowing does not, in itself, entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression (127).

Paranoia, Sedgwick explains, is not the only response that’s available to us, tempting as it may be as we enter another Presidential term where disagreement is likely to be riskier than it has been recently.

I don’t have a great answer as to what those other responses might look like, but I do feel like that picture emerges a bit after surveying some of the work that I’ve cited for this episode. Protecting the right to disagree, and accepting that others may disagree with us, feels crucial, as does Sedgwick’s point that we need better theoretical vocabularies to describe the “reparative motive[s]” that are necessary to fix what’s broken.

That’s all I’ve got for the moment. The semester’s winding down around these parts, so I hope to have a little more time for reading and writing. More soon.

1. I don’t want it to seem like policy decisions are all the same here. We all know that some decisions can have catastrophic, lethal consequences, and those shouldn’t be treated unseriously. Obviously, some choices are more significant than others.

2. It’s cheating a bit to qualify disagreement as “good faith,” I know, but (and I can’t believe I have to say this) some sort of consensus on evidentiary standards has to undergird principled disagreement. Disagreement can’t actually be principled without it.

3. In addition to the Semafor piece linked above, this analysis from Racket News is worth reading. The extent to which a number of high-profile Democratic organizations and operatives went, in order to block ballot access for 3rd party candidates, all the while describing themselves as “pro-democracy,” is pretty Orwellian. Some of the tactics may differ (clowns?!), but the overall strategy is indistinguishable from the Right’s assault on Critical Race Theory (except, of course, that the ends used to justify these means didn’t come to pass).

4. After I wrote this, I came across the classic articulation of this idea, from Mill’s On Liberty: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”

5. I don’t want to spend the time that I’d need to in order to unpack this here, but I came across Dan Williams’ work on signaling, and it feels like it fits here. We spend more and more time online, representing ourselves to others as partially as we do, and those people don’t have access to any sort of context by which to understand us. As a consequence, more of our discourse relies on signaling. And in a milieu where folks are simply signaling rather than communicating with one another, then questions, even those asked in good faith, are going to be taken as signals of disagreement by virtue of the fact that they don’t instantly signal acceptance. This is paranoia, but it doesn’t not make sense, given the platform.

6. Jacobs borrows this phrase from Susan Friend Harding, and goes into more detail in a talk he gave at Duke several years ago.