You Get to Walk Away from the Argument: on Marriage and Facebook

I am working with a client whose book will come out next year. I was the ghostwriter, and other people are in charge of their publicity. Nonetheless, in a conversation today, I did offer the client some advice: “Always remember it’s okay to refuse to answer a question. Because you are willing to be interviewed, it doesn’t mean every subject is on the table. The interviewer is not in charge. You are.”

On Saturday, I posted three words on my Facebook: Am Yisrael Chai. (It means, “the people of Israel live!”) Some of my friends who take a pro-Palestinian view wished to argue with me. I did not block them, but I did not argue with them. One suggested that it was unfair of me to make a statement and not be prepared to defend it. I reminded this friend that this is the great fallacy of the social media age: the notion that we owe each other engagement.

You do not owe people answers. You do not owe people discussion. You do not need to choose between remaining silent or engaging in endless debate. You get to make a statement, and then, for whatever reason — exhaustion, child care, work, boredom, a football game on TV, exasperation — you get to walk away from the discussion. This is, I will admit, not great marriage advice! (Then again, consider your source.) It is, I think, very good advice for surviving in a perpetually online culture that is always boiling and bustling with outrage.

I have a PhD. In order to get that PhD, one of the things I had to do was spend vast swaths of my life that I will never get back, sitting in interminable graduate seminars listening to people argue. We were taught to be critical, we were taught to be witty, we were taught to be cruel, and we were taught that if someone challenges an aspect of your argument, you must defend your view until one of you concedes or faints from hunger.

We had the hubris to believe that this was the civilized way to be. Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I can assure you, the relentlessly examined life isn’t much worth living, either. The relentlessly examined argument leads less often to enlightenment and more often to pride, narcissism, and resentment. Endless debate is more luxury than virtue, and the people who thrive on it are rarely the sort with which you wish to spend your days. I am not sorry I got a PhD, mostly because I can’t imagine what else I would have become, but I do not remember those seminars with any pleasure. It was not the best use of my early twenties.

I remember, years ago, the second of my five wives yelling at me as I walked out the door after a two-hour argument. “You don’t get to go! You stay here and finish this!”

I hesitated at the transom — and then it hit me. I didn’t have to accept the way she’d framed the argument. Her need for me to stay so that she could continue to berate me did not, in fact, constitute my obligation to stand there and be berated. Even if she had good reason to wish to berate me! I could walk out the door, accept the consequences of doing so, and go on with my life. Other people’s need to communicate their anger at you may be intense, but their desperation does not create a moral requirement for you to stand there and engage with it. We might disagree about whether that rule applies to marriage, but we can all agree it should apply to Facebook.

When someone declares, “It is a time for choosing,” it does not mean it is, in fact, a time for choosing. When someone asks, “Which side are you on?”, a perfectly acceptable answer is “no.” You do not have to accept the cramped confines of the terms on which some other person has decided the great moral questions of the day need to be resolved. (When someone asks me which side I’m on, I like to say “I’m a thug for J.H. Blair,” which confuses everyone who doesn’t know the pedantic but wonderful Pete Seeger song.).

You wouldn’t expect me to answer a question about how many people I’ve slept with, or which of my two sisters is my favorite. You would recognize that those are unfair queries that do not merit a response. I would like to suggest that the number of unfair and unreasonable questions is probably greater than you think. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong for someone to ask. It just means you don’t have any obligation to provide them with what they regard as a satisfactory answer.

You do not owe the world complete transparency about your private life. You know that. There’s a corollary: you do not owe the world an explanation for why you feel as you do. The world is not, in fact, a graduate seminar where your grade hinges on how expertly you can defend your position while pointing out the logical flaws in everyone else’s. Critical thinking is a useful servant, but an insufferable and tiresome master. A willingness to wrestle with words and ideas and arguments is not the admission price for sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner or posting on Instagram. You get to be opaque, you get to be oblique, and you get to be mistaken. This is not because error and confusion are virtues. They aren’t. But they are human, and we could all use a little more tolerance of the human.

”I stand with Israel” is not just a complete sentence. It can be, if you wish, a complete argument. Just because cousin Susan in Shreveport demands to know “What does it mean to stand with Israel?” it does not follow that you owe her, or anyone else, a detailed explication of all of the convictions and beliefs that lie beneath those four words.

People have the right to be to be curious. They have the the right to be angry. They have the right to crave engagement and debate and connection and clarity. All of those rights, as pressing and legitimate as they are, do not come together to create for you a duty to respond to their urges, impulses, and demands. You can leave the comment unposted. You can change the subject. You can say, “no.” You can walk out the door.

You will be happier, I think, if you do.