Disagreeing, With Humility

Christopher Shea ’91’s article on free speech (feature, Nov. 11) is an interesting summary of the issues, even if at the end the questions remain unresolved.

However, there is an unfortunate sentence at the end which states that students should learn to debate their ideological adversaries. So they should, of course; but even more important, they should learn enough humility to understand that just because you disagree with me, you are not necessarily my “ideological adversary.” After all, we may both be partly right and partly wrong. Unfortunately, both you and I live in a neo-Manichaean culture that grows out of our American winner-take-all blindness, and bears little relation to real life and the ways in which real people must interact with one another.