Why friendship is the best foundation of healthy disagreement
Why friendship is the best foundation of healthy disagreement
The forgotten friendship of Albert Einstein and & Niels Bohr shows us why disagreement doesn't have to end friendship—and how it can even strengthen it
Gracious Reader,
In this issue of Civic Renaissance, we explore:
A note from Lexi—and a giveaway!
I am delighted to welcome Spencer Klavan who will unpack why friendship is the best foundation of healthy disagreement—and a book giveaway! Spencer has also generously offered to give away a copy of his new book. I hope you enjoy reading it!
The Soul of Civility in the News
From the Civic Renaissance archives: It's time to "unbundle" people
Would you review The Soul of Civility?
Civic Renaissance Retreat: Would You Join Us?
A note from Lexi—and a giveaway!
Spencer and I met several years ago while serving on the board of the Classical Learning Test—an alternative to the SAT and ACT grounded in great books from across time and place, and texts from The Great Conversation. We became fast friends, and have since enjoyed supporting one another in our creative projects since.
Spencer’s new book, “Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith”—exploring the intersection of faith and reason—is being published Oct 15th, and the story below is drawn from his research for that book.
He’s also giving away five copies of his book to the Civic Renaissance community.
To be entered to win:
Share this post on social media
And/ or, if you don’t have social media, share this post with someone who might enjoy it
Email ahudsonassist@gmail.com with the subject line HISTORY
Science & healthy disagreement
by Spencer Klavan
Spencer A. Klavan is a scholar, writer, and podcaster. A graduate of Yale, he earned his doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Oxford University. He is the author of the acclaimed book How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises and the editor of Gateway to the Stoics. The host of the Young Heretics podcast and associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books, he has written for many outlets, including The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, City Journal, Newsweek, The Federalist, the American Mind, and the Daily Wire. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Spencer’s new book, Light of the Mind, of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith, comes out on October 15th. Through stories like the one he tells here, Spencer reveals the animating spirit driving scientific exploration and shows that religious belief has often shaped and informed scientific discovery rather than holding it back. Today, when many people assume that science has eclipsed religion and possibly even human nature, Spencer argues that the latest discoveries in physics can in fact align beautifully with scripture and its picture of humanity’s central role in the cosmos.
Science & healthy disagreement
by Spencer Klavan
One summer day in 1923, regular commuters on the Copenhagen tramway might have noticed two unusual new passengers going nowhere in particular. Those who stepped off to run errands could feasibly have met with these same traveling companions on the return journey, once again engrossed in conversation and showing every sign of missing their stop a second time. “We took the streetcar and talked so animatedly that we went much too far,” one of the pair remembered later. “We got off and traveled back, but again rode too far.” They must have made an amusing spectacle, volleying back and forth across the neighborhood, oblivious to the city as it bustled past them.
Perceptive onlookers might have recognized one of them as Albert Einstein. He was in his 30s, distinctive even then for his elfin eyes and shock of unruly hair. Einstein was coming off the train from Gothenburg, in Sweden, where he had just delivered his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. His companion, also a new-minted laureate, was Niels Bohr. This probably explains why their journey was less than logistically airtight. It was part of what everyone immediately loved about Bohr that he was always endearingly rapt in far-off speculations, like a sweet and ungainly visitor from another world. Not that Einstein would have minded the delay: he had more important things to think about than getting places. “We rode to and fro,” Bohr recalled, “and I can well imagine what the people thought about us.”
Their subject was nothing less than the foundations of the world. Physics between the wars was in an exhilarating sort of free-fall, its most fundamental assumptions up for questioning in a way they had not been since the days when the scientific revolution unsettled the premises of Medieval philosophy. The hard-won product of that revolution was a glorious new picture of the universe, first sketched out by Copernicus and Galileo and then drawn into pristine focus by master draftsmen like Kepler and Newton. In the glittering landscape described by Newtonian mechanics, objects as various as comets and dewdrops went arcing through space along perfectly rational trajectories. Few people alive were in a position to appreciate the power and loveliness of this system like Einstein and Bohr.
Which meant they could also see its blemishes. Newton’s picture of the world, for all its marvelous intricacies, was not the whole picture. Einstein himself had made that clear at the turn of the century with his discovery that the contours of spacetime must dilate and bend to accommodate the immutable speed of light in a vacuum. Alongside his colleague Max Planck, he had come to realize that light itself defied the laws set for it by classical physics, seeming at some times to shoot through the air like a stream of tiny pellets and at other times to pulse through space like a wave of energy. By the 1920s these observations were impossible to refute or ignore, but equally impossible to understand. Einstein in particular was horrified at the thought of what they might mean. That is what he and Bohr were arguing about.
Quantum physics, which both men were engaged in building, describes a set of physical phenomena that simply refuse to fit neatly into the human mind. The material world as we experience it daily is full of objects that occupy one place at a time and move smoothly to new locations along unbroken lines of motion. That is the world Newton mapped out with his mathematics—the intuitive world within the reaches of our natural vision. But outside the edges of what we can see, different rules apply. The tiny particles Bohr and Einstein were studying showed signs of flitting from one place to another without crossing any of the space between; they seemed able to hover in a range of possible locations without definitely settling into any of them. The after-effects of these unthinkable feats can be measured and detected in a lab, but by definition the logic-defying activities of microscopic particles cannot be observed directly themselves. They cannot even be pictured: they don’t fit into the structures our minds use to organize space and time.
To Bohr, wrapped in his misty reflections, all of this made perfect sense. Of course the categories of space and time fail to capture the whole of things, he thought: they are human categories, applied to reality like a filter to winnow down and organize the information we perceive. The bursting fullness of existence is more than could be captured in our limited physical imagery; philosophers since Plato have known well that the eyes and ears are like funnels for contracting pure truth into a smaller and more manageable compass. “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” wrote Bohr’s contemporary T.S. Eliot: this idea, lately given new purchase in philosophy by Immanuel Kant, found its scientific analogue in Bohr’s understanding of quantum physics. “However far the phenomena transcend the scope of classical physical explanation,” Bohr later wrote, “the account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms.” It would become known as the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum physics.
To Einstein, it was an abomination. “If all this is true,” he said of Bohr’s perspective, “then it means the end of physics.” Einstein’s great knack was for picturing things, building out scenarios and thought experiments in his mind: a light beam darting past a passenger on a train, a man in a room tugged through space by a rope. If it couldn’t be envisioned in concrete terms like these, it hadn’t yet been truly understood. The end goal of science is, Einstein insisted, “a theory which describes exhaustively physical reality” in mathematical terms. And this is why he found quantum effects maddening. In his Nobel speech he referred to “the quantum problems, which all theory so far has been incapable of really solving.” To him, “really solving” the problems would have meant coming up with a physical description of the terrain mapped out by the quantum equations, translating the abstractions of formulae into a description of tangible objects. But that is just what Bohr insisted he could never do.
Every time they met together, Bohr and Einstein would pick up this argument almost exactly where they left off. It absorbed them late into the night at conferences. They missed their stop on the tram, then missed it again; when they parted they kept the discussion going, practically uninterrupted, in the pages of books and journals. It was no mere academic parlor game: the facts they were uncovering had more than hypothetical significance. When war broke out again, atomic physics would be put to use in a weapon of such apocalyptic power that it racked Einstein, ever the pacifist, with enduring sorrow. But the hydrogen bomb was not the only product of the quantum revolution to reshape the world: there would also come nuclear power and fiberoptic internet connections, wild new possibilities in astrophysics and computing. And behind it all there pulsed a cosmic mystery, ancient as it was impenetrable, the mystery that obsessed Einstein and Bohr alike: how much reality can the human mind bear?
But for all that they were locked in dispute over dire questions in a deadly century, Einstein and Bohr were neither somber nor spiteful with each other. Just the opposite: “a most humorous spirit animated the discussions,” wrote Bohr. It almost seemed as if they were never happier than when their differences sharpened to their hardest points, their contrasting visions of the world standing out against one another in the starkest possible relief. Theirs was one of history’s great bipartisan friendships, like that of Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Today, when we make the mistake of assuming that love means seeing eye to eye, it can be almost baffling to watch two people grow closer together without ever coming closer to agreement. It feels a little like those passengers on the streetcar must have felt, watching Bohr and Einstein lose all track of their destination: Don’t they need to get somewhere?
But they were already right where they belonged. Bohr, looking back on years of arguing with Einstein, would talk about what he called “deep truths”—truths too vast for any one philosophy to capture or any one statement to exhaust. The kind of truths that need to be held up to the light at many angles, or given expression in the meeting of two minds. To be human is to have one foot in the practical world of decisions and definite answers, of yes or no and not both. But the other foot is always in eternity, in the realm of deep truths. And “it is not least in the intermediate stage where deep truth prevails,” wrote Bohr, “that the work is really exciting and inspires the imagination to search for a firmer hold.” Outside the streetcar window goes the world of tragedy and danger, the markets and the office buildings whipping by. But inside two men sit talking, fixated on each other and their longing to know. They could go on that way forever.
Connect with Spencer and find out more about his work:
Invitation:
Civic Renaissance Retreat: Would You Join Us?
Would you be interested in joining us for a Civic Renaissance retreat and conference on civility in 2025 in Indianapolis?
This retreat and conference is envisioned as a unique opportunity to gather and discuss how we can all flourish despite our differences. We’ll explore ways to bring these ideas back to our own communities to help them thrive amidst division.
During the event, we will:
Gain a deeper understanding of the roots of our current challenges and explore solutions that promote civility.
Develop emotional intelligence and relational skills to enhance conversations and relationships in all areas of life.
Learn practical strategies for creating and sustaining a civility community.
Write to me with your interest and ideas at ahudsonassist@gmail.com
Looking ahead:
October 30- Whithworth University, virtual talk, find out more here!
November 12- Greater Muncie Chamber of Commerce, Muncie, IN
November 14- Berry College, Mt. Berry, GA
November 19- Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MI
January 23, 2025- I am thrilled to announce that I will be speaking at Yale Law School this coming January, invited by the Crossing Divides Program, part of the Tsai Leadership Program, which is dedicated to building strong bridges across our differences.
In the news:
So thankful to hear how my book, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves, continues to empower local leaders to cultivate civility in their communities. Discover how the small Colorado ski town of Estes Park is prioritizing civility this fall.
Why Freedom Needs Manners- Thank you, Greg Collins, for this eminently thoughtful review of my book!
Blue Sky Podcast- Author Alexandra Hudson on Her Book, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves
Interintellect- Watch an inspiring conversation between Lexi and Sean Hughes on the urgent issue of civility in our modern world
TIME Magazine— What Emily Post and Daniel of Beccles Can Teach Us About Civility Today
Civility is our eternal project- review of the soul of civility by the George W. Bush Center
Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!
A Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:
It's time to "unbundle" people
And behind it all there pulsed a cosmic mystery, ancient as it was impenetrable, the mystery that obsessed Einstein and Bohr alike: how much reality can the human mind bear?
Of who's mind are they alluding? My guess is their own through conscious and unconscious recognition of reality in one's own space and time.