The comment came up again the other day.
“It’s just my opinion,” this person said. “And everyone has their opinion. The thing is, you can’t argue with someone about their opinion, because it’s their opinion.”
Usually, I ignore this odd syllogism. But look at it. There’s a major and minor premise–sort of–and then the conclusion. I usually ignore it because I know I’m not going to persuade the person who says this. After all, their opinion, as they say, is not open to discussion or debate.
However, I tend to feel more temptation to debate when hearing this in an election year. It reminds me that many people I interact with today actually live in mentally sealed off communities and only listen to discourse that confirms their opinions.
New Definitions?
I sometimes wonder if the people saying this sort of thing are using a new definition of opinion. I wonder if they really mean “bias,” as in, “I am biased about this, and no amount of good reasons can change me.” As they haven’t said this, I am not sure. But this is the way it sounds when they use the word.
My unease comes from being a teacher of rhetoric. I have to ask, “But if we are not allowed to debate opinions, what can we argue about?”
In my old mindset, where opinions are not facts but open to change, I think that this is where good arguments happen.
But this is the difference between what we are seeing today and what ancient teachers of rhetoric saw as the “realm of rhetoric,” as Perlman has termed it. Probability, what we think is probably accurate but cannot know as certain, is the realm for our debate. By probability, I mean opinion.
It is not enough to have an ideological bent. If we have one, we need to defend and argue for it in light of other ideologies, other opinions.
This is the problem. Ancient rhetoricians, practicing and teaching in one of the earliest democracies, argued that opinions are areas for debate–for gaining consensus.
Today, when people claim that opinion is not to be argued, I fear this means that we’re in trouble. If we are not open to seeing what are the best opinions–even beyond our own–or what is actual evidence in support of the best opinions, we can only fight. That seems to be where we are.
“This is my opinion, and you can’t change my mind about it.”
I know, based on some experience, that many people have lost faith in the possibility that argumentation can be a means to persuasion. Currently, my wife and I are watching a Netfix series, Mrs. America, which follows the strangely parallel paths of Phyllis Shlafly, Gloria Steinem, Bela Abzug, and Shirley Chissom in the debate over the ERA Amendment in the 1970s. Their attempts to gain consensus from male politicians–on both sides–is always met with bias and prejudice. No matter how reasoned and evidence-based the women–on both sides–make their cases, they are met with the stony opposition of unreasoning male politics, where areas of common ground over economics, policy, and fairness are all undermined by assumptions about gender.
The series is well done but also deeply distressing. It reminds me of why people are cynical about politicians. I understand the reasons for some of our deep skepticism about honorable, democratic debate. We see good people making good cases, and nothing comes of it because the men in the room have already committed to another way to power.
This plays out in so many ways. For example, the other day, a friend on Facebook who is a Trump supporter posted a fake dialogue between his own view and an imagined Biden supporter. To his own lines of “Biden and his son are extremely corrupt,” or “The Mueller Report showed that Trump was completely exonerated, and in fact Obama and Biden were spying on Trump’s campaign,” his imagined Biden supporter gave no response, only basically hiccoughed.
I decided to fill in what an actual Biden supporter might say–that the Mueller report did show real problems for Trump but that it was spun by his DOJ to look like exoneration, and there was evidence of possible collusion. Oh, and there was no evidence of Obama/Biden spying on Trump’s 2016 campaign. Further, I asked him for evidence that Biden and his son were corrupt.
In other words, I tried to engage in real debate.
The response took most of twelve hours and consisted of this: “You’re not going to change anyone’s mind.”
I report this not to claim the upper hand for Biden or to undermine support for Trump. Rather, I wish to demonstrate the sad place we are in right now. Rhetoricians call it a place of incommensurability, where members of different discourse communities are unable to communicate with each other.
In other words, we are deeply divided. We can’t talk about our disagreements.
Again, this is different, at least in principle, from what the ancient teachers of rhetoric would have argued, that debate and argument are really the realm of argument, where speakers can gain consensus. Rhetoric is really the art we have to overcome our differences and find common ground.
The failure with this friend on Facebook was really mine–considering what I claim to preach. I might have approached this differently. After all, I know that Facebook is where division seems to be seeded and watered into full, flowering hatred. I know I could have ignored this person’s fake argument and instead talked to him about his own values, and then, maybe, something about what both politicians did and didn’t offer him.
Again, I excuse my failure to do this because I was busy, and I don’t typically spend much time doing social media. But if I had, he might have taken a step back from his deeply woven commitment to Trump.
Maybe. We might have been able to examine our opinions.
I think that in the next stage of what will be the rest of 2020, as late as it is, I will try to practice what I preach. I will look for areas of possible agreement before I look at attacks.
Please join me in doing what I say–and plan to do.
Happy voting!