{"id":7047,"date":"2017-05-12T03:56:36","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T03:56:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=7047"},"modified":"2017-05-12T03:57:48","modified_gmt":"2017-05-12T03:57:48","slug":"bad-reason-to-unfriend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2017\/05\/bad-reason-to-unfriend\/","title":{"rendered":"Disagreement Is a Bad Reason to Unfriend – Article by Sarah Skwire"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"The<\/a>Sarah Skwire<\/span>
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
******************************<\/div>\n
\n

I have an interesting meeting next week. A young woman in my community is working very hard on a set of policy suggestions for environmental measures, and she wants a libertarian perspective on the ideas she has drawn up. So we\u2019re going to get together over coffee and talk about her plan and about what I think libertarians might think of it.<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t want to write about her plan today.<\/p>\n

I want to write about her invitation to talk about it.<\/p>\n

I want to write about it because I think it\u2019s an enormously important counterpoint to something that I see more of every day on my Facebook feed, in the media, and in the small daily interactions of people around me.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the obstinate insistence that people who disagree cannot be friends or colleagues\u2014that they cannot even be reasonably expected to communicate with one another.<\/p>\n

Some disagreements, we are told, are just so profound, so deeply seated, so indicative of the other person\u2019s moral turpitude that no reaching over the division is possible.<\/p>\n

Shunning? Really?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That may be true, in some cases. Cultures all over the world have long had methods for shunning those whose behavior was so counter to cultural norms that they were viewed as potentially destructive threats to the culture\u2019s continuation. I\u2019m not saying that such threats don\u2019t ever exist.<\/p>\n

But in the last little while, I\u2019ve seen claims that anyone who voted for Trump should be \u201ccut off\u201d from communication with \u201ccivilized society.\u201d I\u2019ve heard people argue that voting against the continuation of the ACA reveals people to be morally bereft and outside the bonds of normal human interaction. I\u2019ve heard college students and faculty argue not that they should not have to attend or listen to speakers with whom they disagree, but that no one else should be allowed to do so.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a lot of people to vote off the island.<\/p>\n

Excluding Others Isn’t Brave<\/strong><\/p>\n

Worse than the sheer numbers involved, though, and even worse than the ever-expanding list of offenses that are considered dire enough to excise whole swathes of people from civil discourse, is the insistence that all of this exclusion is being done because the excluders are brave.<\/p>\n

The rhetoric is familiar. \u201cStand up\u201d against this offense. \u201cSpeak out\u201d against that one. \u201cRefuse to tolerate\u201d X. \u201cGive no quarter and make no compromises\u201d with Y. \u201cShut down\u201d the language of the other side. \u201cRefuse to even entertain\u201d opposing views. \u201cGive no platform\u201d to this person.<\/p>\n

I think there\u2019s bravery in resistance to wrongs. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything brave about shutting down speech and debate and refusing to interact with people with opposing views.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s much braver, and much harder, to look for ways to cross those barriers, to find the humanity in the people with whom you disagree most strongly, and to work to solve the problems that plague us rather than retreating to separate camps.<\/p>\n

I think it is a brave thing to contact someone with whom you disagree politically and say \u201cLet\u2019s have coffee and talk about stuff. I want to understand how you see this problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

And I think we all ought to do it more often.<\/p>\n

Sarah Skwire<\/a> is the poetry editor of the Freeman<\/em> and a senior fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis<\/em><\/a>. She is a member of the FEE Faculty Network<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education <\/a>and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License<\/a>, which requires that credit be given to the author.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Skwire ****************************** I have an interesting meeting next week. A young woman in my community is working very hard on a set of policy suggestions for environmental measures, and she wants a libertarian perspective on the ideas she has drawn up. So we\u2019re going to get together over coffee and talk about her plan and about what I think libertarians might think of it. But I don\u2019t want to write about her plan today. I want to write about…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87,5],"tags":[441,2363,2886,4846,170,362,5145,2207,2376,3172],"class_list":["post-7047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-politics","tag-censorship","tag-civility","tag-courage","tag-disagreement","tag-facebook","tag-free-speech","tag-ostracism","tag-sarah-skwire","tag-social-media","tag-tribalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7047"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7049,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7047\/revisions\/7049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}