Why Disagreement Is Good
By Frank Filocomo Ideas are meant to be challenged. I always say: when you enter into a dialectic - in good faith, presumably - you must be prepared for your paradigms to be shattered. In other words, you might very well be wrong on numerous fronts. Learning that you were in the wrong about whatever topic mustn't be seen as a defeat; it is, conversely, a sort of triumph. When I was a kid, my uncle, whenever I learned something new, would prompt me to say, "now I know." Too often, though, we enter debates with a defensive posture. Nothing is learned when we do this. What's absent here is humility . I recently read Norman Finkelstein's heterodox book, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It . Finkelstein, who starts this 500-page tome by quoting critics who lambasted this work as "incoherent" and "ineffective," argues against the idea of ideological purity, in favor of a Milliean view of Truth-seeking. That is, a process that involves enga...
