A Disagreement

Disagreements are significant moments in the relationship of two consciousnesses.

Disagreements are times where it is revealed that on certain subjects or issues two consciousnesses are so asynchronous that the two disparate attitudes seem irreconcilable. We might think that such moments are exact opposites of moments of love – moments of disconnection, a creation or discovery of barriers, blockages of shared consciousness and a sharp reminder of the distinction between two autonomous minds. To some extent they are; Often disagreements can result in a kind of ‘moment of un-love’ whereby at the moment of disagreement we feel completely detached and alienated from our loved one to the point where they can seem as a stranger to us. Having said that, how both parties react to the expression of an opposing view, along with the nature of the disagreement, defines what feelings arise from it. Remember, while we can disagree with strangers or people we dislike – we usually just do this internally. We disagree with friends, family and lovers far more frequently and more memorably because it is with these people that we are comfortable in expressing and asserting our disagreement. These times do not always result in love lost, indeed, a disagreement can even cause a moment of love as the end result can be a greater sense of closeness and achievement at having had to work towards understanding.

There are three basic ‘moves’ in a disagreement: 1) the expression of the difference of opinion, 2) the joint exploration of the extent of the difference and 3) the reconciliation of these views or the ‘acceptance’ of the difference. Disagreements can be considered either ‘productive’ or ‘destructive’. A productive disagreement is one that results in the promotion of a better understanding and/or synchronicity with the other person. A destructive one will create a distance or separation between the two parties. Whether a disagreement is productive or destructive will, to some extent, depend on how many ‘moves’ into the process both parties are willing to travel. Naturally, it will also depend on the importance of the issue to both people as well. If I was to air a disagreement but we were unwilling to explore that disagreement, there is a good chance we would both leave the encounter feeling a greater sense of ‘otherness’ and disconnection.

The expression of a disagreement is essentially an assertion of self. If you disagree with a statement someone makes and don’t speak up to air your views, then you are implicitly agreeing with what they have said. They are leading the conversation and in some ways the thoughts of listeners; to disagree is to inject your own autonomous thought, your individual viewpoint into the thoughts of the other listeners. They must consider you in a far more active way than if you were merely agreeing. To do so, we must feel confident that our opposing view will be given the consideration it demands. Depending on our own personal confidence and confidence of the strength of our position we may often only express disagreement in the company of those that we expect to give our view consideration, to those we expect to understand, to those that we love and love us. If I hear strangers on the bus saying stupid things, I won’t usually interrupt to disagree because I don’t care about trying to make them think a little more like I do as it does not affect me or my relationship to them. I also don’t necessarily have faith they will understand or try to understand my viewpoint. In this way, we could view the expression of a disagreement (assertion of self) as a sort of test of love. We are testing whether or not the person who’s mind we do care about will listen, be willing to rethink but more fundamentally still want to hear our views in the future in spite of this disagreement.

I am not saying that we are always consciously ‘testing’ our friends when we disagree. We often just disagree for practical reasons that have nothing to do with trying to make an impact on the overall relationship. However, disagreements do ‘add up’ just as moments of love do when it comes down to trying to pin down and define our feelings for others –

‘I like Fred because he’s easy going when it comes to deciding where we go out’,

‘Robert is very agreeable when we talk about football but infuriating when we talk about women’,

‘Jill is prone to very contrary moods, when she is like that I tend to avoid her’

– Such observations shape the where, the when and the way that we interact with everyone that we actively choose to spend time with, everyone that we in some way ‘know’.

Consider the adolescent’s relationship with their parents and family. At a stage when they are becoming fully conscious, fully self-aware they disagree more and more. This is an effort to assert themselves and can certainly be viewed as a means of testing the love they have received unconditionally so far. A similar, less intellectual form of this phenomenon occurs at an earlier stage of the development consciousness – ‘the terrible twos’ - a child is disagreeable and assertive; they are testing the boundaries of the parent/child relationship. Sadly, some parent/child relationships do irrevocably break down at the adolescent stage. Series’ of disagreements create a barrier between the consciousnesses, knocking them out of synch, replacing the understanding of love with confusion and miscommunication, which leads to distance or hatred. This chain of events can occur because parent, child or both is unwilling or incapable of taking the next step towards reconciliation – exploration of the disagreement. The disagreement ‘ends’ with the simple assertion: ‘because I said so’. That answer creates a barrier to understanding, preventing both parties from understanding the other’s minds and views and causing more seemingly inexplicable disagreements in the future.

As we develop more conceptual tools, a greater capacity to think and express complex thoughts and lines of reasoning, as well as more emotional maturity, we tend to probe into the causes of differences of opinions when they occur – we argue and discuss. When we disagree about something within a given medium (‘I disliked x film’, ‘That goal should never have been disallowed’ etc.), we are able to discuss the disagreement within the conceptual framework of that medium. As long as our disagreement is with a person whom we have already recognised as having sufficient expertise in communicating about that medium we can expect the exploration of the disagreement to be civil and productive. Broader disagreements regarding things like values and politics can get messier because everyone feels qualified to express their views but our starting assumptions and experiences vary much more wildly when they relate to life in general. Broad life topics like these follow no shared or fixed logic and tend to contain a good many more internal contradictions, making them far more prone to get personal and spawn further disagreements. These topics, however, are more rewarding to debate intelligently because they reveal far more about the core of the person. The exploration of a disagreement gives us an opportunity to reveal ourselves to the other and to learn more about them. We will learn why they think x idea, how they arrived at x idea and what other things they must think to support it. Disagreements provide a good opportunity to ‘lift the hood’ and get a closer look at the not just what a person thinks, but how a person thinks. And since most of our ideas are not in fact character traits or set in stone (although we often feel tempted to present them as such), by arguing with someone who listens and challenges us we can actual discover a lot about ourselves, develop ours own minds and perhaps change the interlocutor’s as well.

The process of talking through differences is usually a process of exploration and reduction. We are trying to reduce a relatively complex point into a set of shared assumptions and a set of unique ones. When people disagree and attempt to rigorously explore the cause of their disagreement they usually end up clarifying their points until they reach one that both parties can agree on. Once this point is reached, both parties will attempt to reconstruct their original thought in an attempt to pinpoint the exact cause of the disagreement. Obviously disagreements do not tend to unfold as methodically as that, but usually arguments do first consist in trying to be understood, which involves finding the common ground and then finding the specific cause of the difference. Sometimes the ‘difference’ is illusory – there appears to be a difference due to nothing more than an original miscommunication, making two very similar views appear at odds with one another when in fact they are complementary. There is certainly shared satisfaction in the discovery that out of difference there is, in truth, one shared view. Any exploration that involves touching on common ground is conducive to ‘moments of love’ arising.

Sometimes the difference, though, is fundamental and very real. If two friends discussing the merits of a certain tax plan they may debate based on economic theory, the issues facing the world right now, they would refer to personal anecdotes and struggles, they would consult bystander’s for their views or to fact check, they would inevitably get quite off-topic a few times but they may well end up faced with a disagreement that looks like this: – “The fundamental difference between our socio-eco-political views is that I believe man is inherently cooperative and you believe man is inherently selfish”. (Leaving aside the position that man might be inherently nothing,) the two friends would at that point be faced with a choice. They can carry on the argument in an attempt to explore and perhaps force a reconsideration of this point. Doing so would be difficult because positions like that seem to be more about the raw processing of experience; it is very difficult for me to persuade you that man is not selfish if all your experience has led you to believe that he is. And while it may be possible and even important to explore further into this difference without the argument getting heated or hurtful, the hour is probably late and the rest of the company is quite bored so it may be time to agree to disagree.

You may walk away at this point either content that at least you got to the heart of the problem or frustrated that you got so close to agreement and then hit this brick wall. You may even rethink your relationship with the other as you realise perhaps you did not know them as well as you thought. You had assumed that you had shared principles and now faced with the truth you may wonder what other areas of life the two of you may differ on, that you just didn’t know because it hadn’t come up yet. Disagreements particularly pertaining to real, lived actions both past and present, do tend to cause at least a temporary realignment of the relationship.

A lot of how we react to the outcome of an argument and how we explore a disagreement is determined by attitude. The attitudes that we bring to arguments shape their outcome but, at the risk of sounding like a ever-lovin’ hippy, the only way to achieve a productive end to a disagreement is through a sincere desire to understand as well as be understood – argue with love. Due to the nature of a disagreement it is very tempting to argue ‘to win’, whatever that means. Some people refuse to reach a point of acceptance of difference but keep on arguing for as long as a person is willing to stay in the room – having the last word constitutes the win, to others, only persuasion will do. For very few people the end goal is simply ‘understanding’, although understanding can be achieved in the attempt to aggressively win an argument (as if by chance). To some extent these attitudes are part of our characters, but we are all guilty of taking a disagreement too far because we felt we could, or should win – the cause was too important to let lie. When it relates directly to how we treat each other within a friendship or relationship, it usually is too important to let lie. Often, disagreements carry on until one or both sides are worn out or until a ‘winner’ can be declared. When the exploration of difference takes this ‘winner/loser’ form, ceases to be cooperative work towards a solution to a problem, the outcome is almost invariably destructive. The ‘problem’ of disagreement, should not be formulated ‘how can I stop you from being so wrong?’ but ‘we are both intelligent people who’s faculties of reason are good – if it is not ‘bad’ reasoning that causes disagreement – what could it be? (Perhaps I will learn something that I had missed before)’.

Disagreements stick with us. We are prone to dwell on what we have said and heard. At the very least a vocal disagreement sharpens our wits and helps us formulate our ideas for ourselves or in future disagreements. At best, we will change and be better for them. Changes in the way our mind works do not often happen instantly, often they require reflection and contemplation – My mind is not often changed on the spot (I am too stubborn for that), but my mind does change some time after a disagreement. At the point that I realise I now hold a view that I was arguing against with a friend only a few weeks before, I am filled with a newfound respect for my friend, a closeness in consciousness.

Even after savage arguments, disagreements that left us shaking our heads wondering of our friends or lovers ‘who are you anymore?’ there is room for a moment of love. We are all familiar with this moment if we have quarrelled with family, fallen out with a friend or broken up with a lover. We distance ourselves from the other; we build up in our minds the idea that they are an alien, that if we disagreed about x then we don’t have anything in common. Then, after a period of silence or time apart we see them again. Just as I described in 'Moments of Love’, we will notice a phrase, a gesture, a way of being that we recognise. That recognition reminds us that one disagreement does no discard all that we do share – that recognition and understanding of our loved ones’ is second nature. The familiarity on more familiar terms reminds us that we love them in spite of disagreement. We may never be fully synchronous consciousnesses but we are a lot closer than most. More significantly, and a topic for another time: would we want to agree on everything anyway?