Two Sides to Every Coin

Good evening, friends and readers all,

Sorry that this post is going up later than expected - I've been trying to finish up a paper on Belarusian Politics (more fun than it sounds) before my birthday and it's taken up most of my afternoon. On the bright side, that time constraint should keep this post short and to the point.

Today, I wanted to talk about debates again. More importantly, that there's two sides to every debate. This conclusion may seem so obvious that it doesn't warrant even talking about, much less a whole blog post, but I've observed that it isn't as obvious in practice as it is in theory.

For example, over the past few days, I've been reading a book about the "work-family debate" and reforming the workplace to make it more family friendly. I support many if not all of the author's claims - specifically, that there isn't enough being done to help parents balance their work lives with their family lives. The author references a number of cases where the media either under- or misrepresents the realities of the issue, and then suggests a number of steps that could be taken to improve the situation. I, again, agreed that the steps all sounded positive, but what struck me was that the author posed the solutions as if they were so obvious that you'd have to be blindly ignorant or just completely against workplace equality to not support them. I found myself asking, "If these ideas are so obvious, and they're so clearly beneficial to everyone, why haven't they been implemented yet?" In other words, there had to be a reason why not everyone was on board with the author's plan.

I learned in tenth grade that if you're making an argument, no matter how strong it is, you should at least summarize what the other side's perspective on the issue is. Certainly, you can then show why that viewpoint is wrong, but you should mention it.

Although I try to avoid examples involving slavery, the history of slavery in the American South is another good example of where knowing both sides of the argument helped. All throughout my life, I wondered how the South and its people could support such an inhumane practice. Were they all just racist and wanted to see people different from them suffer? Surely this couldn't explain the issue. In American History, I finally learned that there were significant economic reasons to slavery - essentially, plantations required a sizable workforce, and slavery was a way to supply that labor. Did that make me support slavery in any way? Absolutely not. Still, by knowing both sides of the issue, I felt that I understood it more completely.

I've seen some other one-sided arguments in modern times: everyone should say no to NC Amendment 1 (which constitutionally defined marriage as one man, one woman), or no woman should ever support the Republican Party. Whether I agreed with these stances, I felt like there must be another side to the issue for there to be an issue at all, and I wanted to know what it was.

In sum, I think we often forget to consider, or even search for, both (or more) sides to every issue. The saying is there's two sides to the coin - two perspectives to the debate, and unless we at least know what they are, we lose both a greater understanding of the issue as a whole, as well as further reasons why our preferred stance is the better one.

TL;DR: Don't assume that there's only one side to an issue, or that the others aren't worth listening to. A one-sided debate doesn't do much good for anyone.