Let’s All Keep Arguing… About Something Else

How to make the practice of discourse fun. No, seriously

In December 1914, Allied and German troops crossed no-man’s land and embraced each other in a now-famous show of humanity in the face of abject division.

Today, it’s easy to feel like our political discourse has placed us in a similar set of trenches. A 2019 Pew Research Study found that 85% of Americans believe that political discourse has become less respectful, fact-based, and substantive over the past several years.

We don’t often find ourselves changing our minds. There are a lot of modern sources of blame — social media echo-chambers and 24-hour newsmedia come to mind.

It seems that disagreeing is something that we’re less and less capable of doing peacefully. When it comes to honestly discussing an issue with an openness to facts, or changing ones’ mind, we’ve fallen out of practice.

While I’m tempted to say that we could just decide to get better at discourse in the areas upon which we’re so deeply divided, that sounds a bit like saying that the soldiers in the trenches need to settle their difference of opinion with regards to imperialism and the relative benefits of firing bullets at each other.

No, we need to find something less innately divisive to bring us together. We need our own Christmas detente.

Common knowledge. Let’s argue about subject matter that we’re all familiar with, so nobody comes armed with so much knowledge on the subject that they overpower the conversation.

Simple. Let’s not get bogged down with complex rhetoric or

Abject silliness. What if we could find a topic so silly that you couldn’t possibly hate someone simply for disagreeing with you.

We sometimes shy away from these conversations, because people don’t want to argue. I posit that this discomfort with disagreement is the precise reason that we need to broach these topics more…