Here are two questions:
First, would you like to know my opinion?
Second, why?
On the basis of it being my opinion, my opinion isn`t worth much. Nor is yours or anybody else`s. But somebody`s opinion is always being expressed, backed up by little more than the fact that it is his or her opinion. Actually, it isn`t even that. It`s more often his or her prejudice.
Opinion is easy. It`s cheap, it`s frivolous, it`s often ill-informed and there`s far too much of it going around.
No, that`s not an opinion. That`s a judgment, which is far different.
According to the dictionary, opinion is ”belief or conclusion held with confidence, but not substantiated by positive knowledge or proof.” A judgment, on the other hand, is a decision made ”after deliberation,” as a result of ”sound and reasonable evaluation.”
Judgment, then, depends on an examination of the world. It follows observation and reflection. If it is intelligent judgment, it is based on those observations and reflections. If it is honestly expressed, it will include the observations and reflections as a demonstration that it is judgment, not mere opinion.
Opinion distorts one`s view of the world. There is these days, for instance, a debate about trash. The prevailing view is that there is too much of it, there isn`t enough room for it and its disposal has to be regulated. Comes now the Heritage Foundation with a study asserting that there is not too much of it and there is plenty of room to put it, a factual conclusion which fits nicely with Heritage`s conservative predisposition against government regulation of the environment.
Heritage`s reputation for intellectual honesty is better than that of many advocacy groups, and it may be right in this case. But the truth, as someone noted, ”will reveal herself not a whit to any but the disinterested seeker.” Whoever is opinionated is not a disinterested seeker.
Opinion is not just subjective; it is self-indulgent. It need not be based on anything but the proclivities, the passions or even the mood of the person expressing it.
But it is the basis of so much public discourse. ”What do you think of . . . ?” is the way many questions are addressed to officials, candidates, academics and others who discuss public issues, as though they and their thoughts, rather than the subject under discussion, were what was important.
Public affairs television programs seek popularity not by an intelligent discussion of ideas but by making sure that angry conservatives and angry liberals shout at each other. Some people make a decent living that way. But the rest of us don`t learn much from their shouting.
And speaking of shouting, there is talk radio, so much of which consists of an ignorant but arrogant host screaming either his disagreement or his concurrence with an equally ignorant but just as self-confident caller.
Opinion makes everything so predictable, and therefore so simple. Pontificating is easy; it`s pondering that`s hard. Armed with an inflexible ideology and ample bile, individuals and entire organizations free themselves of the need to think a single (much less an original) thought.
Thus there arrives in the mail a report entitled ”Bearing Fair Burdens,” from the Progresive Policy Institute, which, needless to say, assails the current tax system as regressive. Not to worry. One can always find another report, from the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute, to make the equally (meaning not very) persuasive case that the tax code is not regressive at all.
For years there was something called Accuracy in Media (AIM), a right-wing group which regularly assailed the press for not having a right-wing bias. Its target audience, the media, paid it exactly as much attention as it deserved, meaning none.
Still, it survived. So a few years ago there arose its counterpart, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR; do you suppose they paid someone American money to come up with these acronyms?), which regularly assails the press for not having a left-wing bias. It is exactly as influential as AIM, which is what it deserves to be, and either as obnoxious as AIM or slightly more so. But it comes out with a newsletter every so often. There must be some spare foundation money floating around.
Opinion, fundamentally, is egotistical. It proclaims the observer superior to what he observes, freeing him of the need to observe at all. If no one observes, no one will be able to describe. Opinion without observation and description leads only to obsessions, never to ideas.
”Every man,” John Keats wrote to a friend, ”has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage.”
At the cost of clear thinking, we are awash these days in speculations, brooding, peacocking and false coinage. That is not, alas, just my opinion.
