How We Can Live Together in Disagreement
By David Porter
Ilana Redstone is nothing if not a realist, it seems. The sociologist and former Amherst resident freely admits she may be swimming upstream with her latest project, a book titled “The Certainty Trap” due out this fall that seeks to, well … we’ll let her describe it.
“I’m asking people to do something they don’t really want to do,” Redstone told an audience at the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences 2024 Freedman Lecture in the UMass Center for Integrative Learning on Monday, adding wryly that it was “really hard to find a publisher” for the book as a result.
The self-deprecation shouldn’t obscure the book’s important message: democracy is imperiled when we demonize those we disagree with and fail to challenge our own beliefs and assumptions.
It’s the latter point that Redstone focused on primarily during her talk Monday, to an engaged audience that ranged from students to senior citizens.
Redstone, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois who spent her teenage years in Amherst, was quick to caution that she isn’t in the “let’s-all-get-along” business.
“This is not a plea for everyone to hug it out,” she said, but rather a call to commit to questioning and clarifying our own thinking while refraining from characterizing those who disagree with us as “ignorant, hateful or willfully stupid” – a tendency that exists on both ends of the political spectrum.
*Agreement is fundamentally not the goal,” she added. “The necessary assumption is that we value living together but in disagreement.”
Can this be accomplished in an era when civil discourse is considered a quaint relic at best? Redstone understands the challenge but thinks there is a path. It starts, she said, with looking at our own knowledge and beliefs and accepting that they may contain uncertainties. It continues with viewing others as capable of reasonable thought even if they disagree with us. Rather than taking a person’s position on an issue and branding them negatively or putting the onus on them to prove they aren’t the ogre we’ve concluded they are, she said, it is incumbent on each of us to find a version of that position that we can get a better handle on..
“Most positions have versions that make sense to us, even if we don’t agree with them,” Redstone said. “You can’t use the fact of someone’s position to condemn their character.”
Assuming we know someone else’s intent and thinking that they’d have the same opinion as we do “if only they had the same information we do” are common traps that need to be avoided, she added. That isn’t to say all certainty must be jettisoned along with all definitions of right and wrong; but it shouldn’t be used to create contempt for those who disagree.
“We need to clarify our beliefs in ways others can understand, and recognize the downsides to our positions,” Redstone said.
Several of the commenters during a question-and-answer session following Monday’s talk seemed to agree in principle with Redstone’s thesis but offered reasons why it wouldn’t work for them, focusing on power imbalances and people who have historically been oppressed.
The comments “raise a whole lot more questions,” Redstone told The Current later. “How do you know who has power? Do you want to decide who has power just on race? What kind of power? What do you mean? It gets to more interesting questions about how we think of collective guilt and responsibility, and how our identity shapes how we move through the world. That’s the start of a whole new conversation.”
Redstone is already working on a new book, tentatively titled ““Racists, Transphobes and Other Deplorables: How the Politics of Shame Divided a Town and a Nation.”
The town referred to in the title is Amherst.
Stay tuned.
David Porter grew up in Amherst and spent many years as a sports and courts writer for the Associated Press. He returned to Amherst with his wife, son, and cat.
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