How to Disagree
Negotiate difference in a divided world
Adam Ferner and Darren Chetty
Having read it
★★★☆☆
Interesting read but wasn’t sure about its presentation. Clearly part of a series that is all following the same, slightly over-designed, approach but could certainly have benefited from bigger text for the main copy!
A good passage
When you declare solidarity you position yourself as a part of a whole – and you’re all the stronger for doing so.
[...]
Solidarity is a powerful political force.
A second good passage
The worry, articulated by Shannon Vallor in ‘Social Networking and Ethics’ (2015), is that this emphasis on quantity rather than quality and this silencing of opposing voices damages the way to talk to one another. It frames conversations in ways that hamper ‘deliberative public reason’. It allows us to converse, but not to foster understanding.
A third good passage
Not everyone has the resources to engage in these online discussions, which is unfair and indicative of broader social ills, but those who do will benefit from interacting more thoughtfully. This doesn’t have to mean years of careful study. It can be a matter of having a night to think something over, or a few extra minutes to read a blogpost. You’ll get a better sense of an idea – and doing so may also make you less likely to leave a rash comment and be defensive. You may not have time to pull ‘dead petals from a rose’ [taken from Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, as noted a few paragraphs earlier], but letting the proverbial dust settle, and resisting the allure of quick-fire responses, may indeed help you converse more productively.