By Stephen L. Hall
Probably the most irksome of the many unwarranted condescensions frequently exhibited by liberals, and one that particularly irritates myself, is the dismissal of other people’s statements and positions as merely their opinion.
They express many phrases designed to mean essentially the same condescension: “You’re entitled to your opinion.”, “That’s your opinion.”, “Let’s agree to disagree.”, along with other phrases including one vulgar phrase comparing other people’s opinions to a certain posterior orifice.
The problem with this is not the condescension; after all most of them are not even aware that their behavior is condescending. Liberals I find are very socially oblivious in their unearned smugness. The real problem is the irrationality which underlies the ready employment of such phrases without thought or understanding.
Leftist are generally under the misconception that what really matters in life is the collective social acceptance of society at large and not the rectitude of their beliefs, expressions, and perceptions. In simpler terms, these phrases arise out of their shallow blasé indifference to the world in general.
When one makes a political statement, is it an “opinion”?
To answer that question, let us define opinion. According to Merriam-Webster, an opinion is “a view, judgment, or appraisal formed in the mind about a particular matter”. This is a very broad definition which carries little meaning because it makes very little distinction, painting with too broad a brush. But under this definition, yes it would be an opinion; any view is an opinion, informed, reasoned or not.
I would make a different distinction based upon how I define the word “opinion” and differentiate it from the other ideas that populist definitions would toss into the mix. Random House defines opinion as “a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce certainty.” I like that definition better, but it is still lacking, or rather it would be a great definition if that was what people actually meant when they used the word.
Opinion ought to be distinguished from judgment based upon the employment of reason. There is that which is an expression of taste or preference, our simple likes and dislikes which we also call our “opinions”. Therein lies the problem, both of the formal definitions of “opinion” seem to imply an element of thought and reason where in common parlance when someone asks for another’s “opinion” they are usually asking merely for an expression of preference, e.g. “What is your ‘opinion’ on painting the kitchen a light blue?”
However, courts often begin their legal “opinions” with phrases such as, “It is the courts considered opinion, that . . . .” The then proceed to lay out grounds for why they came to the conclusion to which they arrived so that hopefully the reader will think that their decision was not merely arbitrary, the product of simply their personal preferences.
In fact, the word opinion has gotten so degraded over the years that virtually everyone who employs the word to describe their conclusions goes out of their way to qualify that their opinion as “considered”, “reasoned”, “derived”, or some other word or phrase to assure the audience that they employed judgement not just preference.
That is the very distinction that leftist refuse to admit of those who express differences with themselves. They refuse to believe that people who come to different conclusions than they hold themselves might have actually thought about the issues. Liberals refuse to believe that those who disagree with them even think or reason at all. That is the source of their condescension about other people’s opinions, they view such opinions as mere preferences or perceptions.
Personally, my statements are more often that not the result of considerable thought in exacting detail which I often do not wish to bore people. Okay, occasionally, I do go into great detail and precision with much elaboration as to how I derived the particular statement just to keep other people from asking me too many questions or bothering me too frequently. Okay, more than occasionally, I do that on a virtually constant basis.
So the idea that “opinions” are merely statements of preferences and likes, such as, “It is my opinion that a red car would be better.” is really just another way of saying that “I like red.” (I don’t, black is my favorite colour, or rather non-colour.) And when people say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, they are really saying that tastes and preferences differ, and nobody can tell you what to like, who to like, or why. Preferences are sacrosanct.
However, when one is discussing a public policy, or really any opinion beyond tastes and preferences, then they are discussion a reasoned conclusion. Once upon a definition, that reasoned conclusion was called an opinion, but people wanted to make their tastes and preferences more important so they started calling their feelings, “opinions”.
An argument, as we learn in elementary logic, is comprised of two principle parts, the assumptions and the reasoning. When a person states their derived conclusions as what they often also call an “opinion”, for the sake of brevity and convenience they do not repeat the process but merely state their conclusions derived therefrom. The reasoned conclusion is never sacrosanct. It is never settled science.
In mathematics, of course, such assumptions are termed “axioms”, “premises”, or “postulates”. I prefer the word “axiom”, but I don’t want to have to explain my words every time I use them as I have a bad tendency of assuming people already know what I mean with the words I employ.
If a conclusion is wrong, there are only two possibilities: either the assumptions are incorrect or the reasoning is invalid. All intellectual discussion really comes down to simply an objective examination of those two possibilities. If a person’s reasoning is sound, but their conclusion is false, then one or more of their assumptions is false. If their premises are true, and the conclusion false, then their logic must be erroneous.
Think of the many political discussions conservatives like to have with liberals. Take for an example the debate over gun control. Liberals often have a belief about guns or people which is based upon a false premise, such as guns are inherently dangerous; or they will have faulty logic such as criminals will take away the owner’s guns and use it against them.
The issue is not important, it is the ability to spot the fallacy of the argument, whether the fault is in the assumptions or in the reasoning. Once spotted, a man of reason will examine their own opinion to find the source of any discrepancy; a man of emotion will throw their hands up in exasperation and declare that they just have differing opinions, that is, feelings on the matter.
“To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.” – Thomas Paine.
So we have two very different meanings of the word “opinion”, which is the source of much frustration and, frankly, insult. It is from this that I implore society to develop different and distinct words for the reasoned conclusion and the emotional feelings, and not to label them both “opinion”.
Unfortunately, this corruption of the word “opinion” as an emotive expression rather than a reasoned conclusion is too far ingrained in our culture to easily extirpate it from our lexicon. Until society can articulate a single word for a reasoned conclusion rather than qualifying the word “opinion”, I am of the opinion that we will continue to not communicate with each other in any reasoned fashion.
