Agree to Disagree

NOTE: this was originally written for my personal site on May 18, 2018. I then deleted it, and thought about re-publishing. This should give you an idea of how long it takes me to get over my discomfort with sharing my thoughts.

​The titular phrase is a part of our workaday lexicon, and I confess that it has always struck me as odd. It is odd because it seems to mean one thing to most people, but whenever I hear it, it sounds like it should mean just the opposite. This strikes me as a microcosm of the collapse of intelligent conversation in the world today. I will also suggest an alternative to this understanding that may be the last great hope for preserving such discourse.

I am accustomed to hearing the cliche uttered by people I know outside of Academe. From the time I began teaching undergraduates, they have been using it. Lately, to my horror, I have noticed it among my friends. The overwhelming majority of this latter group are graduate-educated, which is part of what continues to shock me every time I hear one of them use the phrase.

 it's clear what it means.

It means that the conversation is over. I am perfectly willing to believe that I am an obnoxious partner in conversation and that the people with whom I'm talking would rather speak to anyone else about anything else. But this is a horrible way of expressing the point. 

Ron Burgundy with alternative facts about the meaning of San Diego.

NB: if it is ever the case, I believe that you have a duty to tell me so.

Detail from The School of Athens (Raphael).

This scene depicts Plato (house left) and Aristotle (house right) disagreeing. Note the absence of cudgels, fireworks, or posters with accusations of fascism.
(This last fact is funny in light of certain tendencies in The Republic.)

The problem is that we already have a word for agreeing to disagree: that's called an argument. Not a fight. Not a shouting match. An argument.

​​N.B.: According to my favorite source for candidate facts, one of the first written attestations of "Agree to disagree" comes from John Wesley. As a former Methodist, I feel the obligation to defend him on this point by noting that he used scare-quotes to attribute the expression to George Whitefield, in whose eulogy Wesley used the phrase. ​

If there is a point to this, I would like it to make an injunction to the reader, and to do so explicitly. Let us agree to stop using this phrase. Instead, I propose the following alternatives as possibilities:

1.) I disagree, and am not open to changing my mind about this. You shouldn't waste your time talking to me about this any more.

2.) I disagree, but we don't have enough time to go over all of our reasons now. We can continue to return to it later.

There are surely other possibilities, and I encourage the reader to explore them instead.