by Ian Leslie
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In January 1636, Roger Williams put on a heavy coat, stuffed his pockets with as much dried corn paste as would fit, and stepped out of his house into a freezing New England night. Williams didn’t know where he was going, but he knew he had to go. Soldiers from Boston were on their way to arrest him. Their orders were to put him on a ship back to England, where he would be thrown in jail.
Carrying corn paste for sustenance was a trick Williams had learnt from the American Indian tribes he had got to know over the years. He would need every ounce of it. It was a violently cold winter – some thirty-five years later, Williams recalled ‘the snow wch I feel yet’ – and he had no place to go. For fourteen weeks, he did not know ‘what Bread or Bed did meane’. He would not have survived had local tribes not taken him in.
Williams was a man of exceptional energy, confidence and charm. He also had a ferocious appetite for argument. Born in London, the son of a tailor, Williams somehow came to the attention of Sir Edward Coke, an English barrister and judge famous for his defences of civil rights against the crown. Coke saw something in the young man and scooped him up, appointing him to his household as a secretary. Williams was vaulted into England’s elite, attending first Charterhouse School and then Cambridge University, where he became friends with the poet John Milton.
Like Milton, Williams was intensely curious about the world, and bursting with religious zeal. Both men were drawn to the rebellious, anti-establishment Protestant movement known as Puritanism. On graduation, Williams took holy orders and became a private chaplain to a Puritan aristocrat. But the English government under Charles I was cracking down on these troublesome non-conformists so, in 1631, Williams set sail for New England to join the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Even by the standards of Puritans, Williams was uncompromising. Almost as soon as he got off the boat in America, aged twenty-eight, he was invited to be theologian to the Boston church, a prestigious position that would afford him a leading role in the creation of this new society. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, yet Williams spurned it. He declared the local Puritans to be insufficiently pious, since they allowed their congregations to mix with worshippers from the Church of England. He also disagreed with the Bay’s leaders about the extent of their authority: Williams believed government should have nothing to do with religion. Scandalised, Boston’s leaders made it clear to Williams he was no longer welcome. Williams moved to Salem, where he hoped to find a purer Christian society. Unfortunately, he found faults everywhere in Salem as well and loudly declared them, much to the annoyance of his neighbours.
Around this time, Williams began visiting the Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes, making trading partners and friendships. He learnt their languages, partly so that he could debate religion with them and also because he was curious about how they lived. He wanted to know about how they hunted, how they raised children, how they governed themselves, how they worshipped. Remarkably for his time, Williams didn’t regard Indian civilisation to be inferior to that of Europeans. He thought the Indians were heathens who would burn in hell, but he treated them as equals, stating that, ‘Nature knows no difference between Europe and Americans in blood, birth, bodies, &c.’ Williams went so far as to publicly accuse the colonists of stealing the natives’ land, declaring the entire American project to be a fraud.
His fellow Puritans, who regarded the tribes as barbarians, were outraged. Fed up with this troublemaker who refused to hold his tongue, the Massachusetts authorities voted to banish Williams from the colony. He was ordered to leave within six weeks or face imprisonment, or worse. They sent soldiers: hence his escape in the middle of the night.
After wandering in the unforgiving wilderness, Williams was offered shelter and food by first the Wampanoag and then the Narragansett. He never forgot their hospitality. His friendships with them opened the door to his next and greatest act.
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In exile from societies he didn’t want to live in, Williams reflected on the kind of society in which he did. He knew that everyone would be free to worship how they wanted. This was not, to be clear, because he was open-minded in the way we would recognise today. Williams was a religious fundamentalist. As far as he was concerned, anyone who didn’t meet his exacting standards of worship – which was pretty much everyone – was damned. Teresa Bejan writes, ‘By the end of his life, he worshipped in a congregation of only two, him and his wife – and he may not have been entirely sure about her.’ But he had a fierce commitment to the integrity of everyone’s personal conscience, and believed people should be allowed to go to hell in their own way. His ideal society was one in which everyone was trying to convert each other but nobody could force anyone to do so.
The chief of the Narragansett effectively gifted Williams some land on a cove, where Williams started a settlement. He later wrote, ‘Having, of a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress, called the place PROVIDENCE, I desired it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.’ His family and those of a dozen or so followers from Salem joined him. Williams relinquished his rights to the land to the common ownership of the town. He drafted a constitution which, unlike the founding documents of Massachusetts, or of every other European settlement in the Americas, made no mention of religion. Williams, the most devout of men, believed that it was shamefully arrogant of humans to enlist God into the mundane business of government.
So it was that Providence, Rhode Island, became a magnet for all the radicals, heretics, troublemakers and contrarians in New England. Anyone who was ‘distressed for conscience’ – who wished to escape the enforced orthodoxy of neighbouring colonies – made their way there. They included Quakers, Jews and Catholics. Almost in spite of himself, Roger Williams, Puritan firebrand, founded the most tolerant society the world had ever seen.
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In 1643 Williams sailed back to England on a perilous mission to secure a patent for his fledgling colony. During his stay, he wrote a document that became his most important written legacy. In London, he reconnected with Milton, who put him in touch with a publisher. The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience was published in 1644, when England was at war with itself, and the state was clamping down on pamphlets and books spreading unorthodox opinions.
The Bloudy Tenent made a powerful case for extending toleration not only to all Protestant sects but to American Indians, Jews, Muslims and even to those he called ‘Antichristians’ – Catholics. This went well beyond what anyone had argued for before, and it made The Bloudy Tenent incendiary. On publication, the English parliament ordered it to be burned, and might have had Williams arrested were he not already on a boat back to America, patent in hand.
Williams’s version of toleration meant more than a grudging consent to let others live as they saw fit. While he was very clear that the only true religion was his brand of Christianity, he believed that unbelievers must be actively engaged in an effort of ‘civill converse and conversation’ in order to save their souls. He really did mean conversation – a back and forth. After he told the Indians the story of Adam and Eve, Williams would listen as they told him their creation story, if only to equip himself better for argument with them.
At the same time that Williams founded his colony, William Penn led another group of dissenters in Pennsylvania. The early Quakers were uncompromising social radicals who deliberately engaged in offensive behaviour, such as going naked in the streets, or walking into church services and shouting down the minister while banging pots. Williams hated this behaviour. It implied, he said, that ‘There are no Men to be respected in the World but themselves.’ A functioning, tolerant society, he said, depended on ‘the Bond of Civility’. By this he didn’t mean what we usually associate with that word: decorum, manners, tact – Williams, as you may have gathered, was not a very decorous man. He meant whatever it was that enabled everyone to speak their minds. Williams expected people to disagree with each other about the
things they cared about, passionately and unapologetically. To do otherwise, he thought, would be a betrayal of conscience. Toleration required freedom of speech so that people could compete for converts and try to persuade one another. The ‘war of words’ was evidence of an honest society.
For Williams, living with people who disagree with us about the most important things in life may be tense, unpleasant and infuriating, but it’s still better than living with people with whom we only pretend to agree. It was everyone’s duty, not to seek harmony or to stay silent, but to keep on disagreeing about the things that matter. In his sense, civility is not a code so much as a principle: the minimum standard of behaviour necessary to encourage your opponent to talk back.
Roger Williams helped Teresa Bejan to conceive of civility, not as etiquette or manners, but as whatever the participants in a tough conversation need to do to keep each other in the room, whether that room has four walls or constitutes a whole society. After all, even the fiercest critics of civility expect some minimal civility from those with whom they argue. The alternative is not arguing at all.
During the eighteenth century, religious divisions receded as commercial society brought more people into frequent contact with others from different backgrounds. English aristocrats bought supplies from Jewish merchants; Anglicans did business with Catholics. Politeness oiled the wheels of this complex cross-cultural dance. The Enlightenment philosopher Anthony Ashley-Cooper was the first to use the word ‘politeness’ in the modern sense. He took a term associated with jewellery – with polished stones – and elevated it to a social virtue: ‘We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides, by a sort of amicable collision.’ Unlike decorum, which was a sign of your class, politeness was democratic: the French novelist Mademoiselle de Scudéry described it as ‘wanting not to be the tyrant of conversation’.
Politeness is not merely superficial or decorative. Adhering to a shared set of rules is a way of liberating conversation among people who don’t know each other well, as Kal Turnbull’s experiment showed us. The linguist Robin Lakoff (once married to George Lakoff, quoted in the first chapter) boiled down polite behaviour to three guidelines: Don’t impose. Give options. Make your interlocutor feel good. I love the simplicity of this and, as you’ll note, Lakoff’s rules are echoed and elaborated on in this book. But ultimately all rules are a crutch, or a guiderail, that we can dispense with if the relationship is strong enough. We should be civil with those we don’t know, and aim to know them well enough that we can be uncivil.
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In recent years there has been a spate of books and articles on persuasion – on how to overcome people’s stubborn resistance to reasoned argument. The question these tracts really seem to be answering is, ‘How can we – the enlightened, the reasonable, the informed – win them – the bigoted, the backward, the tribal – over?’ It’s as if the authors and their implied readers somehow stand outside or above the messiness of human discourse, coolly assessing its flaws.
Online, people love to smash, destroy and cancel. The unspoken aim is an end to disagreement itself. The same impulse is buried in those treatises on persuasion. No wonder the people on the other end of this persuasion often turn out to be stubborn and resistant to the point of bloody-mindedness. I have been that person too, digging in unreasonably because I don’t want to be pushed over. You dig in because you sense that this is a power game, in which the persuader demands that you be open-minded while remaining resolutely closed-minded himself.
Disagreement should be a way of helping each other overcome the blindspots and refusals of reality that we all have. But if you’re focused only on persuasion, you won’t really hear the other person, because you’ve closed off the possibility that you might change your own mind. When listening becomes a mere tactic, it’s no longer listening. A better question than ‘How can I persuade?’ might be: ‘How can I make this disagreement fruitful?’
In his book, Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse made a profound distinction: ‘A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.’ A finite game – for example, a game of chess or football – has a precisely defined beginning and end. The game is over when someone has won and the other has lost, or when an agreed period of time runs out. An infinite game has no defined end and cannot be definitively won or lost. The players win or lose in the course of play but their wins and losses are just moments in an endless unfolding. A game of football is a finite game; the game of football is an infinite game.
In a finite game, the rules exist so that a winner can be agreed and the game can come to an end. In an infinite game, the rules are there to prevent anyone from winning definitively. The players in an infinite game are always looking for ways to extend it. When the game is threatened by the definitive victory of one party, the rules are changed to prevent that happening. The whole point is to keep the game going, and to bring as many people as possible into play. In ancient Athens, Socrates turned debate from a finite game into an infinite one.
Athens was the birthplace of democracy, which is itself an infinite game. Its rules are designed to maintain equilibrium; to balance competing interests and powers, containing but not abolishing conflict. That includes elections, which are finite games, with victors and losers. Elections are fiercely fought, but there is – or should be – a recognition by all the players that no party, no person, is bigger than the infinite game. The rules of a democracy change when the need arises, because they are designed so that no one party can dominate for ever. As more people feel free to take part in the game, more talents are unlocked, more new ideas are generated, more progress can be made. The aim of democracy is more democracy.
The same is true at every level of human collaboration. Meetings and marriages go better when the participants see their disagreements as part of an infinite game. The aim of a marital argument should be to reset the relationship in a way that makes it stronger; the aim of a workplace dispute should be a better future for the organisation. Sometimes we want to win so badly we forget that. Unscrupulous politicians bend or break the rules that make a democracy work; business executives put their self-interest before that of their team; couples say wounding things to each other that imperil the relationship. In an infinite game, even when you disagree fiercely with someone, you want to connect to and learn from them because you want the conversation to continue. The aim is to find new ways to disagree. It’s not like a game of tennis, when you’re trying to smash an unreturnable volley over the net. It’s more like a group of friends keeping a beach ball in the air.
Earlier on I referred to the custom of not discussing religion or politics at the dinner table. Like all customs, this one is not universal. When I mentioned it to the French writer Clementine Goldszal she was bemused. Why would you want to miss out on the best part of dinner? ‘It’s a French tradition to argue at the dinner table. We argue about politics. We argue about everything. It’s a tradition: the family dinner turns into a political fight.’ In the first few minutes of a meal, as Clementine described it to me, there is a sense of anticipation: who will be first to raise the controversy of the day? Finally, somebody tosses in a hand grenade, and boom. ‘Everyone goes, “OK! Let’s get into it!” It’s exciting.’
You and I might not live in an argumentative culture. But we can still aspire to this vision of good argument as something nourishing and mind-expanding rather than threatening and stressful. If you treat disagreement as one move in an infinite game, rather than as a finite game in which victors walk away triumphant and losers are humiliated, it’s much more fun.
What do the French do that we don’t? Clementine told me, ‘You have to be able to separate the person from the position they are taking.’ This stops you from getting too personal and ending up in a defence–attack spiral. ‘In the course of a conversation, your thought is moving. So you say things you don’t necessarily agree with, for the sake of taking the argument f
urther. I do it often.’ Sometimes the argument we’re making is intensely personal to us, rooted in our experience or deepest beliefs. But when there is a little distance between you and the position you’re taking, you can tease out better arguments from around the table.
It helps if everyone recognises that’s what you are doing; if there’s an unspoken acceptance around the table that sometimes people will offer opinions they aren’t fully sure of themselves yet, in order to further the discussion. But that means people need to trust each other not to say things only to upset or annoy. They need to see themselves as bound together in a shared adventure, even if it’s one that only lasts until coffee. In that context, being a disagreeable person is good. It means you’re taking part.
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‘As long as we think of difference as that which divides us, we shall dislike it; when we think of it as that which unites us we shall cherish it.’ Mary Parker Follett
In the first section, we looked at how disagreement is an engine of innovation and new ideas. But it’s also an act of creativity in itself, at least it is if it’s done right. A purposeful disagreement takes two and two and makes five. What defines a pointless disagreement? I think it’s a disagreement that isn’t interested in creating something new.
The thinker who made me see this most clearly is Mary Parker Follett, who, though admired by scholars of management, is relatively little known today. Follett made for an unlikely management guru. Born to a prominent Boston family at the end of the nineteenth century, she studied philosophy and psychology at Harvard and Cambridge, before throwing herself into social activism. For decades, Follett worked among the poorest communities in Boston, teaching social skills to young men and helping the unemployed find jobs.
While serving on the Minimum Wage Board of Massachusetts, Follett started thinking about the nature of conflict. This was an era of frequent clashes between bosses and workers. Some bosses believed the only option was to fight the unions and crush dissent. The more thoughtful ones were open to some kind of co-operation. In 1924 Follett set out her ideas on how to deal with conflicts in a series of lectures at a club for industrialists, which put her much in demand as a consultant.