I Respectfully Disagree

In a recent Athens Banner-Herald column, which appeared here in a slightly revised version, I quoted from an open letter to the Athens-Clarke County mayor and commission. It’s author forcefully and eloquently urged on them an alternative to Selig Enterprises’ plan for its mixed-use development on the eastern edge of downtown Athens.

As a preface to my reservations about the letter, I expressed my admiration for it, saying it “was so superbly written that I’d sell my soul to anybody who could turn me into as good a writer.”

I was utterly astonished when an anonymous OnlineAthens commenter quoted my admiring characterization of the letter and then took me to task as follows:

“There's a pretty good point buried in there, but my advice is to leave the snarkiness to the online commenters. It's not very becoming for a columnist, and anyway we do a better job.”

If this were just another example of the silliness that’s the stock in trade of the anonymous online commentariat, it needn’t delay us for a nanosecond. But perversely, it prompted some reflection as did the letter I’m alleged to have dissed.

The only sense I can make of the mystery commenter’s “advice” is that he assumes no one can disagree with someone whom they nonetheless admire and respect. Since disagreement is, in his mind, necessarily the same as disparagement, no expressions of admiration and respect for someone with whom you disagree can possibly be sincere, but can only be “snarky.”

If anyone else thinks I agree with him or her in equating disagreement with disparagement, be advised that I don’t. I don’t feel any strain at all in disagreeing with people whom I also respect and admire.

I can’t claim any credit for that. It’s all comes down to the people I imprinted on when I was very young.

I grew up in an extended family of opinionated people with strong personalities. Family gatherings featured heated discussions of the Great Issues of the day. But my people could go at it hammer and tongs without violence to the bonds that held us all together. That was my earliest model of disagreement that’s compatible with respect and admiration, in fact, in that case, with love and devotion.

When I went to school, teachers weren’t yet tasked with inculcating “critical thinking” as they are now. Teachers talked, students listened, and that didn’t change until I got to the University of Georgia where, as a hardcore introvert, I gravitated toward the Philosophy Department.

Within the first five or so minutes of declaring a philosophy major, you’re going to make the acquaintance of philosophy’s patron “saint,” Socrates.

What’s most striking about Socrates are his exquisite courtesy and humility, confessing when on trial for his life that he knew only that he knew nothing. He’d been only a “midwife” for others, helping them realize the potential of their rational selves. Even as he exposed people’s pretensions to knowledge they didn’t have, he was never contemptuous of those on the business end of his probing questions.

The impact of Plato’s portrait of Socrates on me was incalculable, the most powerful imaginable model of how to engage with others unsparingly but respectfully for all that. In fact, to Socrates it was exactly the unsparing demands he made on people’s rational powers that reflected his profound respect for the common humanity he and they shared.

Recently in various news outlets, there’ve been discussions of the report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Humanities and the Social Sciences. The commission members could have saved themselves some trouble because with respect to at least the humanities I could have told them that the humanities are priceless as a rich repository of models, like Socrates, of how to be better than a jerk. They can’t magically make you better than a jerk. But if that’s your aspiration, they can point the way toward fulfilling it.

Here’s the thing, then, about people with whom I may disagree. Whatever value anyone finds in what I write, it pales next to what I find in writing it. When I disagree with somebody, I’m not on a search and destroy mission. On the contrary, I think of my foil as a treasured, if unwitting, collaborator in my ceaseless quest to enlarge my own understanding. So when I say the sorts of admiring things I said about the letter that shaped my column, I’m not being snarky. As my anonymous scold reminded me, he and his ilk have a lock on that.