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The right to disagree
Clichés are a junk food of language usage, bulk matter that provides calories to bad arguments, while filling no one’s need for worthwhile thinking. But just as with candy and chips, clichés are easy to consume and easy to offer to others. I imagine that this goes back to an ancient hominin who got a tingle out of repeating endlessly a particular grunt, though such things were blessedly not recorded. Today’s purveyors of the trite, however, have the amplification of social media to spread their verbal corn syrup.
The example I will discuss here is a remark that shows up in discussions that have not come to a mutually acceptable conclusion, the plea to agree to disagree. Those who ask for this are attempting to leave the conversation without having to admit that their argument failed to be persuasive. Acceding to this request is the path to sloppy thinking.
This goes beyond the ordinary emptiness of the cliché. To agree to disagree is to drop a blockage into the dialectic process that is the mechanism of intellectual discussion. This is not to say that the truth is always found in the middle or that compromise is a desired end. Instead, it is a recognition that opposing points of view have things to teach each other and that a complete answer is often something that we can only approach asymptotically. To agree to disagree is to stall that progress. Admittedly, time runs out, and…
