Mia Lasic-Ellis

“You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.”

By the time John Adams penned this line to Thomas Jefferson in 1813, the two men had been at odds for over a decade following the notoriously turbulent Election of 1800. In 1812, after 12 years of silence, Adams and Jefferson’s mutual friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, bade them begin a correspondence.

Adams was a Federalist, in many respects fundamentally opposed to Democratic-Republican Jefferson. And yet they used these 158 letters not to hurl insults or assert superiority, but to attempt to understand. They discussed politics, philosophy, human nature, religion, their own mistakes and those of ancient republics until their deaths, both on July 4, 1826.

Adams and Jefferson’s model of conflict, one made possible by enduring mutual respect and genuine curiosity, seems increasingly difficult to find modern examples of. We seem less interested in explaining ourselves to each other than in being right. It’s easy to describe the present moment as one of lost civility, as though the thing we miss is politeness itself. But much of what we like to call incivility is not the absence of manners but the presence of something else: a kind of reactionary defensiveness, a sense that disagreement is not about ideas but about us.

The distinction between people and their opinions was clearer when engaging with a person required knowing the person in their entirety. Jefferson and Adams had been allies and rivals and co-executive heads. By the time they began their famous correspondence in 1812, they were quite familiar with each other’s thoughts, as well as why the other held them. Now, it’s far more common to get snippets. A passing comment or a tweet is more than enough to inspire immediate, belligerent outrage. We assume that if we don’t agree with a comment, we must oppose the person as a whole. This idea is what has made arguing so personal, so prone to ad hominem commentary and reflexive hostility.

In his First Inaugural Address, Jefferson held that “every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.” His and Adams’s letters are not personal attacks because they had little interest in attacking the person. They understood that there was common ground: they debated American democracy and governmental power because they both cared so deeply about the country they had helped to create. To respond to any argument is to admit that another’s ideas have enough substance to meet your own.

It is not unreasonable to have moral qualms about the ideas of others, nor to believe that some ideas have real, potentially harmful implications. The shift occurs when these ideas become indistinguishable from the person who holds them, when disagreement is no longer a judgment of thought but of character. In such a model, to be considered wrong is not simply to be mistaken but to be condemned.

And if to be wrong is to be condemned, there seems to be little point in engaging at all. What we get instead is a kind of performance in which arguments are made not for the sake of understanding or even persuading but to defend or dismiss. Disagreement no longer refines or adjusts thought; it simply hardens it.

This is not to say that we should remain in conversation with every opposing view. But it has become increasingly easy to disengage altogether—to block, to ignore, to end the conversation before it has even begun. We protect ourselves in doing so, but we forfeit the possibility of learning from each other.

Scroll or listen to the news long enough, and this pattern becomes familiar. A sentence taken out of context. A reply sharper than necessary. A thread of responses, each less interested in the idea than in the person who expressed it. What might have been a conversation becomes something else. Something faster, louder, less precise and less productive. In exchange, our view of our own correctness goes unchallenged, reinforced each time we retreat behind it and fortify it against attack. Perhaps we might ask what exactly it is we are retreating from.

Disagreement is not the issue at hand. Humanity has argued constantly, voraciously, extensively, for better or worse, for the building of nations or the falling of empires. We should hold beliefs; we should have convictions. If anything, the present moment demands more of us: more voices, more perspectives, more to contend with. Listening has become difficult and exceedingly necessary. There is more worth understanding and more at stake in failing to do so. It may be that the disagreement we are now missing is the kind that didn’t cost us one another.