Respecting Other People’s Valid Wrong Opinions
The art of arguing with love.
I stopped using social media for a while in 2016 because the election of President Trump sparked toxic online conversations. I was exposed to opinions, often expressed by people I love and care about, that I found offensive and wrong. A friend of mine, noted social scientist Dr. Jeffrianne Wilder, reminded me that in the study of sociology, all opinions are considered valid. In daily, non-academic life, when someone’s beliefs conflict with my own, it can be frustrating to concede their point of view is also “valid.” I have to remember that a person’s opinion is often based on their subjective personal experience—it reflects who they are and where they come from. Arguing with someone while challenging the validity of their lived experience may not only fail to change their mind; it could foster resentment.
Abraham Lincoln understood this. Famously free of vice, Lincoln joined the temperance movement as a young lawyer. Doris Kearns Goodwin notes in her Lincoln biography Team of Rivals that in the 1850s, when the temperance movement had reached a fever pitch, Lincoln addressed The Springfield Temperance Society. Speaking about addiction, he said, “Such of us as have never fallen victims have been spared more from the absence of appetite, than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.” Goodwin writes, “He counseled temperance advocates that if they continued to denounce the dram seller and the drinker in ‘thundering tones of anathema and denunciation’ nothing would be accomplished. Far better to employ the approach of ‘erring man to an erring brother.’” By embracing opponents with brotherly love, Lincoln honors the life experience of his ideological foils, which is necessary to begin a constructive dialogue.
Of course, just because someone’s opinion is sociologically “valid” does not make it objectively “correct.” More famous than Lincoln’s support for the temperance movement was his opposition to slavery. Slavery is morally incorrect, but the absurd notion of owning people as property in the American 19th century was “valid,” and tacitly enshrined in the Constitution by the Three-Fifths Compromise. While most of the North had (only relatively recently) abolished slavery, in the South, the “institution” was not just lawful but also a way of life for millions. Legally and culturally “valid,” slavery was part of many Southerners’ lived experience.
The slavery debate proved irreconcilable short of the violence of the Civil War, but even within the anti-slavery coalition, rancor festered between abolitionists who called for a national prohibition and those who merely campaigned to limit the expansion of slavery into the Western Territories. In the 1850s, Lincoln recognized the political impracticality of complete abolition, but even in this heated debate, as Goodwin points out, Lincoln found language that helped frame his argument with humanity and respect for his ideological rivals—in the North and in the South.
Lincoln asked his audience to imagine slavery as a venomous snake that had slithered its way into a bed where children were sleeping. If he were to attack the snake with a stick, he said, he “might hurt the children more than the snake and it might bite them. … But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide!” In the analogy, the sharp language is reserved for the institution of slavery, while those who coexist with slavery are generously represented as children. Moreover, the entire metaphor captures the universal shared experience of parents protecting their children, which appeals to the humanity of his adversaries.
Compare Lincoln’s approach to his contemporary, Senator Charles Sumner, who laced his anti-slavery address in the Senate with “vituperative” personal attacks against his opponents. Days after the speech, Preston Brooks, the congressman nephew of one of Sumner’s maligned adversaries, took revenge. Goodwin writes, “Brooks entered the Senate chamber, armed with a heavy cane … walking up to Sumner,” and, “…reportedly said, ‘You have libeled South Carolina, and I have come to punish you.’” The savage beating that followed left Sumner unconscious and permanently impaired. The entire affair inflamed passions in both the North and South, setting people further at odds and hastening the violence that was to come.
In the end, it took the Civil War to end slavery. Lincoln had to beat the snake with a stick after all—despite the harm it caused the children. However, if ever in history there was an instance of the right person occupying the right station at the right time, it was Lincoln’s presidency during the Civil War, and Lincoln never would have ascended to the presidency were it not for his ability to see the humanity in his rivals by recognizing the validity of their life experiences. Had there been more Lincolns and fewer Sumners and Brookses, perhaps the war would have been less calamitous. Arguably, had Lincoln survived to serve his full second term, his paternal and fraternal approach to leadership would have helped heal the nation more fully during Reconstruction, as he was willing to honor and acknowledge the validity of the experience associated with the South’s complete and humiliating defeat.
I would like to imagine that, had I lived in the American South in the early 19th century, I would have had the moral conviction to stand against slavery. But I would have had a different lived experience, and I just can’t know how I would have acted as a white man in the South. Perhaps I would have slept with snakes.
In today’s politically charged climate, maybe I have friends and family who think, because of my views, I sleep with snakes now. As long as they think of my opinions as the snakes—and not me personally—then I think we can find our way to a constructive conversation. If I admit that I would have different opinions had I been born in a different time and place, then I might be more inclined to engage others with respect for their personal experiences, and I might be able to acknowledge the validity of their point of view—even when I challenge it because I believe it is wrong, wrong, wrong.