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By Lloyd Albritton

Columnist

“Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him;” (Matthew 5:25)

Agreeable people are generally well liked by everyone.  Disagreeable people, on the other hand, can be a pain in the hiney.  When you want to stay here; they want to go there.  When you want to move forward; they want to go back.  In fact, Research Psychologists have scientifically determined that some people inherently have disagreeable personalities.  Consequently, Disagreeableness is one of the Big Five Personality Traits used by psychologists to predict human behavior.

Because of the bad reputation that disagreeable people have given the principle of disagreement, many of us have come to look upon disagreement as a distasteful thing of little value or virtue.  Accordingly, for the sake of social harmony, and to escape the inevitable ill feelings of those with whom we disagree, we often tend to affect agreement with our friends and neighbors, especially on matters of trivial importance, even when we actually disagree with them.  This prevalent social practice can become habit-forming and may even cause the degeneration of one’s moral spinal column.

It is unfortunate that disagreement has such a bad reputation because without it there wouldn’t be much reason to examine and correct the defective beliefs that we sometimes develop in our thoughts and behavior.  We would just go right along stumbling and falling our way through life, or at the very least, making fools of ourselves, if no one dared to challenge our suppositions by disagreeing.

Disagreement makes most people uncomfortable, if not downright angry, especially if the disagreement is over a matter of importance.  Like, for example, religion and politics, two renowned topics, which can rarely be discussed without fist fights breaking out in the town square.  Money and property rights also rank high up as volatile disagreement issues.  Fortunately, in America we usually only punch one another in the nose, spread slanderous gossip, build fences, or poison our neighbor’s dog when we disagree with him or her on something.  In less civilized societies, disagreement often leads to murder and even genocide.

The rule of law and an equitable system of jurisprudence is intended to help resolve disagreements between individuals and groups.  The Law does indeed seem to keep the peace in most cases.   Still, it may be observed that the loser in most legal proceedings may be compelled to comply with the judge’s ruling, but rarely will he concede agreement with it.

I believe that a common thread in disagreements, which lead to anger and conflict is a lack of complete confidence on the part of one or both parties to the disagreement in the premise that they are putting forth.  For example, if I know of a certainty that my position in a matter is true and correct, I am less inclined to feel agitated toward those who disagree with me.  Even as Jesus uttered as he was crucified, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), absolute confidence in the knowledge that one possesses is a calming influence.  On the other hand, many people adopt intellectual positions and base their consequent behavior upon propositions which they have not put a great deal of effort into studying or experimenting upon.  We often build our entire lives on such defective foundations.  When another person challenges those weel-entrenched positions and actually lays out valid evidence that they are flawed, it is often not a simple matter of conceding an error and ripping out a few small stitches.  Conceding error may involve ripping out old misconceptions with deep roots and changing one’s entire infrastructure of beliefs.  It is this sudden realization that we might be wrong, and that corrective action would necessarily involve dramatic and uncomfortable change, which stirs a person to great anxiety and anger.

Many years ago my father assigned me to build a fence one day while he was away at work.  I spent the entire day in the hot summer sun digging postholes, carrying the fence posts to the holes, putting them down and tamping them in.  I stretched the wire and nailed it in.  When I was finished, I looked at the fence, and by golly, it was crooked as a snake.  Nevertheless, after pondering the matter for a few minutes, I concluded that my work was “good enough.”  In fact, the longer I looked at that crooked fence, and the hotter the day got, the straighter that fence got.  My father, however, took one look at my crooked fence that evening when he got home and immediately commanded me to fix it.  I spent the next two days tearing that dadburned fence down and rebuilding it to make it straight, like it should have been to start with.  I had to pull a lot of wire down and dig a bunch of new post holes.  I did not agree with my father’s decision and I argued with him some about it.  I was angry when he ordered me to fix my errors.  Still, I knew all along that my father was right.  I just didn’t want to rebuild that fence!

Sometimes a neighbor might ask our opinion about his fence, and after taking a good look at it we might see that, like the fence I built, it is as crooked as a snake, even as our neighbor grins proudly and declares that he is the best fence-builder in the land.

Well, what to do? We can agree with our good friend and neighbor and lie that this is just about one of the best fences we’ve ever seen; or, we can tell him the truth, in which case he will probably get angry with us, tell all our mutual friends that we are a disagreeable jerk, and the two of us will not be good neighbors anymore.  One thing’s for sure though, no matter what we say about that fence, our good neighbor is not likely to want to rip it all up and straighten it out.  He is much more likely to keep telling himself and all his other friends that he has built a fine fence for himself, but that he has a very disagreeable neighbor.  If he tells himself this for long enough, he will likely come to believe it to be true.

Unless, of course, his daddy comes along and sees the fence and makes him do it right.