how to preserve your friendships during an information crisis

and why it's really important to try (if you can, and they're committed to it too)

My first ever non-fiction book Don’t Burn Anyone At The Stake Today is published later this week. If you’re planning to buy a copy (I deliberately made it fairly short and sweet, as we’re all living through an information crisis here) it really really helps if you pre-order, there are lots of options of places to do that from here.

I’m sharing another extract from the book here. Of all the thoughts and ideas in the book, maybe this is the one that I think is most important. Because I have really seen people start to treat one another as not-quite-human during the past few years - even people who used to be good friends seem to often be losing the skills of disagreeing without insults, anger and hatred. And I think that the more we share stories of how we’ve actually managed to hold relationships together in a sane way, the more tools we’ll all have.

It doesn’t have to mean agreeing. It means not allowing disagreement to become a reason to end a relationship.

Extract starts after these women having a conversation:

The Conversation, Marcellin Gilbert Desboutin, 1875-79. source: http://artic.edu/artworks/21165/the-conversation

I have a good friend who disagrees with me on a hot-button culture-war topic. It doesn’t really matter which one, although you’re welcome to amuse yourself guessing. Just think of a culture-war-style subject on which you’ve disagreed with a friend and felt upset. And let’s call my friend Lorna, because that’s not her name.

Lorna and I have been through about eight years now of talking and arguing about this hard topic. It has sometimes been very heated and we’ve both got quite distressed at points.

I believe that she holds her view sincerely and she believes the same about me; so at least we’ve avoided one of the easiest traps to fall into, that of accusing the other person of not thinking what they say they think, of just ‘virtue-signalling’ or some other words for ‘I just don’t believe you’. If giving advice I’d probably start there: don’t tell a Catholic or a Protestant that they don’t really believe what they say they believe about transubstantiation. Accusations of ‘You don’t really think that, you’re just saying it to get attention’ or whatever will get you nowhere good. Just a few steps closer to the flaming pyre.

I have seen other people have deep and important friendships torn apart over this topic. I think it’s important – if you can – not to let that happen to your friendships. The information crisis will already drive us to rely on media rather than on each other, to become increasingly lonely, isolated, depressed and paranoid. It will drive us to believe more and more extreme things, and to begin to believe that ‘the other side’ to us on any argument isn’t really quite human at all. Trying to preserve friendships across culture-war topics is a way we avoid doing those destructive, cruel things that demean and erode us as human beings.

It doesn’t have to mean agreeing. It means not allowing disagreement to become a reason to end a relationship.

I don’t say that anyone has to maintain a relationship. You must judge for yourself whether your own relationships are worth preserving. I don’t know your friends or family and if any relationship feels that it’s damaging you then you must step away. But if both of you are fundamentally decent people who just happen to disagree, if neither of you has in fact burned anyone at the stake yet, it’s probably worth trying.

Not having yet burned anyone at the stake – or other related behaviours – is quite a good test too. I said to Lorna quite early on in these conversations that if she became someone who harassed people online that she disagreed with, that would be a red line for me. There’s a difference between disagreeing with a dear friend in private conversation and turning into someone who shouts at strangers about it, or worse. Lorna pointed out very reasonably that she’d never harassed anyone about anything. Which was a good lesson for me too: I had already started to think of people who were more aligned with her viewpoint as ‘those people’, the kind who harass others online.

This is an important point. If you don’t manage to maintain friendships ‘across the line’ of any cultural divide, you will end up only hearing from the most extreme people on the other side of the line. Because those are the people who are willing to shout about their views in public – and the more extreme they are the more frequently they’re shouting about them. So your view of people who disagree with you – my view of them – would have got worse and worse.

Lorna and I have I think gained a great deal from being able to remain friends. The world feels less frightening, violently angry and disgraceful to us. Because we can check in with each other and say, ‘I heard someone “on your side” say this hateful thing, do you agree with that?’ and basically, we never do agree with the hateful stuff. We’re just here, holding our views, not thinking insane, distressing or revolting thoughts. It makes the information crisis less of an existential ‘I never really knew half my friends’ crisis.

What have Lorna and I done that’s worked? Neither of us are experts on this particular topic, we don’t have degrees in related fields, we don’t work in it. I think it helps that we can both recognize that what we come up with is ‘reckons’. This is what I reckon. We’re not forming public policy in that area, and we’re both able to say the critical words ‘I might be wrong about this’. The most we’re doing is saying: ‘This is what I reckon.’

I think it also helps that I have in my life already figured out how to be friends across a divide. I grew up an Orthodox Jew. I’m not an Orthodox Jew any more, not because I hate it or think it’s a bad way to live – it’s in many ways a very good way to live: community-focused, interested in education and in raising children with strong values of charity, tolerance, generosity. Orthodox Judaism tells people to do mitzvot – an untranslatable word somewhere between a good deed and a commandment – like visiting the sick, caring for the elderly, spending time with mourners, even teaching your children to swim is a mitzvah. Orthodox Jews observe a weekly Sabbath with no screens allowed – given everything I write about in the book, this is a genuinely excellent idea! – and there are strict rules around kosher food, and other things. I don’t hate it, I have my disagreements with some parts of it which I’ve written about elsewhere, and the life of strict rules isn’t for me. I stopped being an Orthodox Jew in my early thirties but I never stopped respecting many of its ideas and I’ve maintained very dear friendships and strong relationships with my Orthodox Jewish family.

Lorna and I talked early on about what happens between me and my Orthodox friends – in a system where things are clearly ‘working’. The answer is, to some extent, I don’t talk about religious observance with my Orthodox friends and family. There’s no need, there are plenty of other things to talk about, they have understood what I do and don’t do. When I’m in their homes I’m respectful of their way of living. When they visit me, I would never feed my friends or their children food that didn’t meet their kosher-food standards. We could sit and have endless arguments about our small areas of disagreement but what would be the point? What, actually, is the point supposed to be of these endless culture-war arguments, other than keeping us glued to our screens and devices?

Religious communities have been working out how to live relatively peacefully together for hundreds of years – since the last information crisis, during the Reformation, in fact – and they have a lot of wisdom for us about how to do it. I’m far from the first person to leave Orthodox Judaism but retain close ties with friends and family. The social structure within the Jewish world is built to make space for that possibility. There’s a famous Jewish aphorism: “two Jews, three opinions”. Disagreement is expected, even disagreeing with yourself by the time you reach the end of a sentence.

From a friend who works in interfaith dialogues I’ve learned that one of the key elements is: start with what you agree on. Don’t start in on the very hardest questions. Start with anything where you can build connection and find shared values. If the debate is fierce, that’s almost certainly because there are things you really agree on, and it feels particularly shocking to disagree on this one subject.

So Lorna and I have done that – kept talking, sometimes haltingly, sometimes having to really force ourselves to do it, about the things we do agree on. And we’ve been careful to allow each other to tap out of the conversation. To say: ‘Actually I really can’t talk about this now.’ These days, we ask permission. ‘I want to talk about the hard topic, how is that for you?’ Sometimes the answer is ‘Not today’ and respecting that is how everyone feels safe, how conversations don’t become overheated, frightening and final.

Something else we’ve done is to try to have most of our hard conversations in person, or at least over the phone. Writing technologies are incredibly useful but also each new development abstracts us more from Walter Ong’s ‘primary orality’, the warm, flexible human-scale world of talk where we can see each other’s distress, respond to it, feel empathy with one another. It does not feel a coincidence to me that so many culture wars erupted into uncontrollable anger during the pandemic, when people could not speak to each other face to face.

I asked Lorna what she thinks has gone right for us and she specifically said: ‘My decision to leave social media at the start of the pandemic helped me stay relatively sane on the topic. Or at least regain my sanity.’ I think the same about having had a locked account on Twitter for all of the years I was on that platform. This stopped me from getting into bad arguments with strangers and saying things in public that I might then have felt I had to stand by in order to be consistent with my former self. I didn’t experience random strangers coming to have an argument with me about something I’d said eight years before, which leads to a feeling of defensiveness and then lashing out. These days on Bluesky, which upsettingly has no ‘locked account’ mode, I have the words ‘not getting into pointless arguments on the internet is an act of revolution’ in my profile. It keeps me honest. Sometimes I feel tempted to get into a pointless argument. Sometimes someone else has to say, ‘I thought you didn’t believe in doing this.’ And I stand back and go, ‘Oh yes, arse, I haven’t lived according to my own values here.’

Here’s a rule I have developed for myself:

Never talk about a culture-war topic with anyone who only wants to talk to you about that topic.

Believe me, this will stand you in good stead. These conversations can only be helpful if they happen as part of a relationship. If you’re going in cold on a very hard topic, you will not be able to experience each other as people, only as opinions or symbols.

I can in general strongly recommend ceasing to expect everyone around you to agree with you. In this sense, what I’m recommending is a bit of a dose of the Jewish idea that action is more important than beliefs. Or maybe it’s simply the idea Elizabeth I got to after seeing her actual family destroy each other – not to mention put the country through years of bloodshed – in the English Reformation. No ‘windows into men’s souls’. The thing is that in these culture wars it’s likely that neither viewpoint will actually be eradicated. And we can’t, and don’t, demand that people all believe the things we think are correct. There is no ‘thoughtcrime’. People can believe whatever they like, inside their own heads, as long as they treat others well.

I know that can feel hard. Our view seems so obvious. Why can’t they see it? The dress is white/black/blue/gold. It’s unbearable that they might be thinking that stupid offensive thought in their mind. If we’re nice to each other despite these differences, aren’t we just pretending? Mustn’t we just be honest with each other all the time?

Here is a thought. If someone disagrees with you and still wants to speak to you respectfully and treat you well, perhaps consider that the name for that is love.

Lorna says that the most important thing for her is: ‘I feel we have and have always had a shared understanding of what constitutes decent behaviour. It’s when you can’t accept that your friend believes fundamentally different things from you that the trouble starts. Because there’s always going to be that one, really important topic where they do.’

The longer this information crisis goes on, the fewer friends I have with whom I agree on everything. Managing that disagreement, agreeing to treat people well even when we disagree with them, is how we stop ourselves from becoming lonely, isolated and afraid. It’s how we continue to give love, and allow ourselves to be loved.