The Dying Art of Disagreement
The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.
But to say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong; etiam si omnes — ego non — 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 everywhere.
Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think
that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person — or even allowing someone else to listen.
Thirty years ago, in 1987, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago named Allan Bloom — at the time best known for his graceful translations of Plato’s “Republic”
and Rousseau’s “Emile” — published a learned polemic about the state of higher education in the United States.
Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning,
and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.
People who might otherwise join a conversation to see where it might lead them choose instead to shrink from it, lest they say the “wrong” thing
and be accused of some kind of political -ism or -phobia.
If you want to make a winning argument for same-sex marriage, particularly against conservative opponents, make it on a conservative foundation: As a matter of individual freedom,
and as an avenue toward moral responsibility and social respectability.