My dad had a firm view that when he wanted my opinion he would give it to me! Discussing difficult issues with him was, well, difficult. In a recent piece by Simon Longstaff (from The Ethics Centre), which you can read here, he ponders why it is that we now find it so hard to discuss difficult issues. Longstaff notes that we are in a time where we are happy “hurling opinions at each other”, and have reduced life to ‘a binary choice between ‘champions or villains’.”
A decided downside of this high degree of certainty is that we are less able to engage with people who have a difference to us. All connection with people is reduced to interactions with either ‘friend or foe’. This is incredibly unproductive and we end up either confirming our view or getting the other person into a defensive posture from which there is no return.
In the article, Longstaff proposes a few ideas that can help us move away from this ‘either or’ perspective into one of mutual respect that enable “a respectful disagreement so that ‘we might discover there are far more bad ideas than there are bad people.”