On the value of disagreement
According to ancient Jewish teachings, disagreements can fall into two categories: some disagreements are meant to search for truth, while others are driven by the desire for power. Moving across history, from rabbinic debates to censorship and social media, this essay shows how arguments can both strengthen and weaken societies. How we handle disagreements may define our future.
In the Mishnah, a late second-century compilation of Jewish rabbis’ teachings, there is a statement: “Every dispute that is for the sake of Heaven, will in the end be sustained; but one that is not for the sake of Heaven, will not be sustained”. An example of disputes “for the sake of heaven” was that of Hillel and Shammai, two rabbis who frequently disagreed on the interpretation of the Torah, but whose opinions were preserved in Jewish literature.
What about the disputes that are not “for the sake of heaven”? The Mishna gives the example of Korah’s rebellion, from the Book of Numbers. In this story, Korah, a Levite, and two hundred and fifty prominent Israelites, described as “princes of the congregation, the elect men of the assembly, men of renown,” rebelled against Moses. Moses instructed them to offer incense to God and promised that the next morning, God would “show who is His, and who is holy.” God then instructed Moses to tell Israelites to separate themselves from Korah and his followers. Once Korah and his followers were set apart, “the earth opened her mouth and swallowed them up, and their households, and all the men that belonged unto Korah, and all their goods.” They “went down alive into the pit; and the earth closed upon them, and they perished from among the assembly.”
Disagreements, then, can be both productive (like Hillel’s and Shammai’s, whose goal was to get closer to truth) and destructive, like Korah’s, motivated by his own ambition and, as later traditions saw it, his arrogance and desire for power.
Korah’s disagreement led to violence, and he also perished. The rabbis seemed to have understood this, especially after the two Jewish uprisings against Rome that led to the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and after the Bar Kochba revolt of 132-135 CE, when Jewish settlement was banned in Judea, Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina, and Judaea was renamed Syria-Palaestina. The rabbis seem to have thought that fostering debates for the sake of truth, not power, was a way to defuse tensions, to acknowledge difference, and to avoid dogmatism, which itself can lead to violence.
Obadiah ben Abraham of Bertinoro, a 15th-century rabbi and commentator on the Mishnah, lucidly explained the difference. In his view, “the purpose and aim that is sought from [the argument for the sake of heaven] is to arrive at the truth, and this lasts.” Because "from a dispute, the truth will be clarified." But since the “desired purpose” of “the argument which is not for the sake of Heaven” is “to achieve power and the love of contention,” “its end will not last”. He writes this about “the argument of Korach and his congregation”: “Their aim and ultimate intent was to achieve honor and power, and [yet] the opposite was [achieved].”
Some of those ideas resonate today, in our troubled times full of hateful rhetoric and violence being even glorified. These are times when it is difficult to hold conversations on challenging topics and to honestly face the past and the present; times when the level of social and political discourse has arguably plummeted to levels unseen for decades, with lies and propaganda embraced in the service of power. This is now a worldwide phenomenon, fueled by social media platforms that encourage us as users to retreat into bubbles. We find ideas and people with whom we agree, and who reinforce what we already believe. By contrast, when a disagreement occurs, we might remain silent, or argue in order to debunk, or, on social media, simply block the interlocutor.
All of this threatens the survival of liberal democracies, which rely on the protection of civil rights and guarantees of freedoms, such as freedom of religion, of speech, of assembly, and a free press. Equality before the law is impossible if these individual rights are not protected and if only those holding power are allowed to determine who should be heard and who can enjoy basic freedoms.
That freedom of expression and freedom to disagree are indispensable for a functioning democracy to exist was something already clearly understood by the framers of both the American (1789) and the French Constitutions (1791). Notably, this was not the case for the Constitutions of Poland (1791) and Haiti (1805). The French Constitution was the most explicit. It guaranteed the “liberty of every man to speak, write, print and publish his ideas without being subjected to any censorship or inspection”, and the right “to follow the religious worship to which he is attached.” This clause was an explicit rejection of what had been, for centuries, the norm across Europe: censorship, religious persecution, and the suppression of dissent.
To be sure, “debates” over points of disagreement had existed for centuries before the Revolutionary era. The difference is that these debates occurred not for the sake of knowledge but to assert power and affirm religious beliefs. For example, during the Middle Ages, scholastic debate and related literature, most famously Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, would set forth a question of debate, followed by a series of opposing arguments, from one side and then the other (sed contra). Only once the arguments from both sides had been discussed would a conclusive response be presented. In contrast to rabbinic debates, that conclusive response would typically state a specific doctrine.
In the premodern period, when a disagreement arose, it often happened that books deemed offensive were censored or burned, and so were people. The Catholic Church established an Index of Prohibited Books. Martin Luther suggested that Jewish books should be burned and their synagogues razed. In October 1553, Geneva witnessed the burning of Michael Servetus, whose work Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity), had been condemned by both the Catholic Church and John Calvin.
In his 27 August 1553 letter to religious leaders in Frankfurt, Calvin sketched a history of Servetus’s “prodigious blasphemies against God.” Twenty years earlier, Calvin charged, he had “corrupted your Germany with a virulent publication, filled with many pernicious errors.” Printed “secretly” in Vienne, a town near Lyon, many copies of the book had made their way to the famous book fair in Frankfurt. But “the printer's agent, (...) a pious and worthy man, on being informed that it contained nothing but a farrago of errors, suppressed” all the copies he had of it. “It would take long”, wrote Calvin, to list the book’s “many errors – yea, prodigious blasphemies against God”. Calvin wanted to make sure “this pestiferous poison [would] not spread farther,” and suggested that the bookseller “permit them to be burnt.” At the time this letter was written, Servetus was already imprisoned in Geneva. Two months later, on 27 October 1553, he would be executed at the stake.
In the 17th century, a growing number of intellectuals began to argue for the freedom of the press. And while some cities, such as Amsterdam and even Geneva, allowed for relative press freedom, other countries continued to ban books that ran counter to religious dogma or challenged regimes.
Voices advocating for freedom of expression became louder in the 18th century. In 1737, Benjamin Franklin, who would become one of the founding fathers of the United States, wrote a lengthy essay, On the Freedom of the Press. It began with a powerful statement: “Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.” In the essay, he traced the history of censorship and governmental tyranny – from the Roman “libeling laws” to early modern English laws.
In the 19th century, some countries eased censorship – notably the Ottoman empire during the Tanzimat reforms. But others doubled down. The Russian tsarist empire suppressed national languages, introduced forced Russification in the Polish and Ukrainian territories. In the Ottoman realm, the newly granted freedom of the press allowed for national-minded publications to emerge, which eventually led to the splintering of the empire itself. In the Russian imperial context, suppression did not eliminate the national ambitions of peoples living under tsarist control, but arguably strengthened them.
Disagreement can indeed be both productive and destructive. But today, it seems we are no longer able to disagree constructively, and are instead polarized. It’s as if we no longer shared a common vision about the political community we form. Today’s polarization might be caused by the fact that we experience the notion of disagreement as a radical power struggle and cast those we disagree with as enemies that need to be disqualified or pushed out of the picture, rather than as interlocutors to engage with.
Yet, managing disagreements is supposed to be part and parcel of any democratic society or process.
Can we still try to find constructive ways to address disagreements? And to work for a common good, rather than for separate, raw quests for power? This is the difficult task at hand now. As the ancient Mishnaic texts showed 1800 years ago, disagreements that come bound with questions of power usually lead to violence. Even the proponents of the French Revolution experienced that outcome themselves: the French Revolutionary writer and journalist Jean-Pierre Marat, who had argued for the execution of “counterrevolutionaries”, ended up murdered by a political enemy.
Finding ways to better manage disagreements than we currently do is not just a question of civility or finding more pleasant modes of discourse – it is a question of sheer democratic survival.
Illustration: Olha Lisovska
