If they are indeed honest and reasonable and acting in goodwill, they must agree to disagree, or pursue deeper understanding of each other’s arguments. Unfortunately, in the real world or even in the Orange Bubble, people rarely show a deep commitment to understanding the other’s arguments or even agree to disagree.
Failures to engage in actual honest debate frequently occur on campus. Look at the predictable exchanges that take place on this page every year surrounding the Anscombe Society’s agenda. Normally events develop like this: Someone will write a column on Anscombe’s behalf, claiming to argue in secular, reasonable and honest terms why Anscombe’s sexual mores are correct. Someone else will then respond, claiming to counter Anscombe’s points, and then all hell will break loose with 40,000 anonymous commentators heckling one other. Note that in both instances I have used the word “claim,” because ultimately neither side usually does a very good job of actually addressing their opponent’s arguments, instead tacking straw man versions of the issues at hand; instead of a debate, you get two fundamentally opposed sides talking at each other, rather than engaging each other in discourse. This form of argumentation isn’t reasonable and it isn’t honest, and I have the feeling that it can’t really be in goodwill either.
The problem goes far beyond the pages of the ‘Prince,’ however. Too often we see people ignore the arguments of their intellectual opponents, setting up straw men versions of their opponent’s arguments, ridiculing their opponent’s opinions out of hand, and in the worst instance, being downright duplicitous: that is, being neither reasonable nor honest.
Take for instance the “Gathering Storm” ad, sponsored by the locally based National Organization for Marriage, which willingly takes situations entirely out of context and inappropriately co-opts language. This week’s Nassau Weekly ran two dissections of the ad’s intellectual failures. In modern day politics, such tactics, akin to the slanderous campaigns headed against many recent candidates for elected office, are certainly ugly but sadly expected because politicians are assumed to be dishonest in the first place. One expects better, however, from members of the academy, be they professors or students.
The problem of intellectual dishonesty masquerading as academic debate on campus is an endemic one, and it is not exclusive to one particular side or one particular subject. We all do it, but the academy should be dedicated to an honest pursuit of knowledge and a reasonable love of wisdom. Miguel de Unamuno once stated that “Vencer no es convencer.” (To vanquish is not to convince.) Too often we try to vanquish our intellectual opponents without trying to convince them and end by doing neither.
Raising the volume of our voices in an attempt to drown out those who disagree with us serves only to reaffirm the status quo of intellectual divisions on campus while destroying the possibility for honest and intelligent academic debate. Take for instance last fall’s debate on whether morality can exist without God between professor Peter Singer and political commentator Dinesh D’Souza earlier this year. The scheduled debate soon devolved into a personal contest between Singer’s atheistic utilitarianism and D’Souza’s take on Christianity, disappointingly evading the actual topic of whether morality can exist without God. I went expecting to watch a rigorous academic debate, but what I got was a long argument between two men who weren’t listening to each other and were instead touting their preconceived political notions largely independent of what the other was saying.
So please, the next time you disagree with someone on a matter of principle, listen to them and try to understand them. You may not finish by agreeing, but hopefully, you will finish by understanding, and ultimately, that is the key to convincing.
Martha Vega-Gonzalez is a history major from New York City. She can be reached at mvega@princeton.edu.
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