Tolstoy On Disagreement

What We're Really Arguing About When We Argue About Politics

Domhnall Gleeson as Konstantin Levin in Joe Wright’s 2012 adaptation of Anna Karenina

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I don’t read novels for life lessons, I read them for life, but the best novelists are able to put life on the page in a way that imparts wisdom. Nobody does so better than Leo Tolstoy. I’m currently reading Anna Karenina, and while I’m absorbed in the story and its world there are some passages that I want to clip and pin to the fridge, or at least to this Substack. Here’s one, on a theme that’s close to my heart: the nature of disagreement.

Levin had often noticed in arguments between the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, and endless logical subtleties and talk, the arguers would finally come to the awareness that what they had been at such pains to prove to one another had long ago, from the beginning of the argument, been known to both, but that they loved different things, and therefore did not want to name what they loved, for fear of it being attacked. He had often had the experience of suddenly in the middle of a discussion grasping what it was the other loved and at once loving it too it too, and agreeing all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as useless. Sometimes the reverse happened: he at last expressed what he loved himself, for the sake of which he had been inventing reasonings, and, chancing to express it well and genuinely, had found the person he was disputing with suddenly agree and stop arguing.

This is so perceptive; it gets right to the heart of how many arguments work, particularly arguments over politics. To grasp what Tolstoy, via Levin, is saying here, is to acquire a valuable skill - one which saves a lot of fruitless argument.

Here’s what I mean by that.