It’s an aggravating phrase — “you are entitled to your opinion” — often used to damper meaningful dialogue. President Bush used the phrase recently while being interviewed in the Middle East. The interviewer premised his question by asserting that the situation in Iraq, overall, looks bleak. President Bush took exception and dismissed the premise of the question by stating, “You are entitled to your opinion.”
Michael Strong in his book, “The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice,” points out that many children actually think that most everything is a matter of opinion. Strong’s reading teaching technique is to work with students in a small circle group and together with them read a short reading selection. Strong says that the best reading selection is a selection where all of the words are easily recognizable but that deals with concepts that are challenging and thoughtful. The reading group together decodes the meaning of the text phrase by phrase, discussing together each participant’s understand of what the author is saying. This process requires some reflective thinking that is foreign to many children, because many children have never been held accountable for understanding or evaluating their own thought, let alone the thought of another. Strong says that a child’s defense for lazy or unexamined thinking often is to say: “You have your opinion, I have my opinion. It (the reading) can mean anything you want it to mean.” And the teacher keeps bringing the group back to: but our task it to understand what the author is actually saying, and neither my opinion nor your opinion can change the words on the page.
In this post, I wrote about that the Kettering Foundation and about the National Issues Forum. The NIF sounds like an interesting organization. The purpose of the NIF is to bring people together, “to reason and talk — to deliberate common problems.” “Deliberation” is a great term, but, if the point of deliberation is to increase understanding, deliberation, by itself is of very limited value — if, people are basically just sharing “opinions.” More important than opinions are the words on the page: the facts, the history and reality of the situation. I’d like to know how a NIF forum actually works.
“You’re entitled to your opinion” is a defense for lazy thinking, and, sometimes it is a phrase used to stop dialogue rather than encourage dialogue, as illustrated in the Bush reference above. But more than that, it is a phrase that perpetuates a huge error, because, in fact, you really don’t have a right to believe anything you want to believe — not, that is, if you expect to be considered a member of rational humanity — and it is wrong to think that you do. You’re not entitled to believe that the Holocaust never happened; you’re not entitled to believe that Barack Obama is a Moslem; you’re not entitled to believe that government revenues increase when taxes are cut; you’re not entitled to believe the moon is made of cheese. You’re not entitled to believe an author means X, when the words on the page are communicating that he means Not X.
Our constitution tells us that we are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But no one is entitled to act like a lunatic and we have laws whereby lunatic behavior is punished. But no one is entitled to think like a lunatic either, to assert “opinions” that, in fact, refute reality. Of course plenty of people think like lunatics and are guaranteed by our constitution freedom of speech and freedom of thought. But I think it is good to think of entitlement, not in a narrow legal sense, but, as the endowment given to us as humans. In that sense, our entitlement is to be right, not to be wrong, to think clearly, not to think erroneously. Our entitlement is to survive and flourish, not to be exterminated. Our millions of years of evolution has endowed us, entitled us, to be equipped for survival and the key to this survival has proven to be our capacity to think clearly. It is increasingly obvious that without the effective use of clear thinking humanity is doomed. We humans have advanced this far because of our capacity to reason and to discern the truth.
Even so, humanity continually embraces all types of lunacy and lunacy, throughout history, has brought untold misery to the world. Even now, it is lunacy that is the biggest threat to the world’s future. History shows a lot of examples of what havoc erroneous thinking and crazy theories can bring when given the upper hand.
For our very survival, we need to bring more clear thinking to bear on all that challenges us. As a democracy, it is every citizen’s responsibility to do his or her part to think clearly. We too often emphasize that it is our right to hold opinions contrary to reality — I’m entitled to my opinion — but what needs to be emphasized is our responsibility as good citizens to know what reality actually is so that we can, in fact, make sound judgments. No one is entitled to destroy our democracy through anarchy and terror, but no one is entitled to destroy our democracy through ignorance and slothful thinking either.
No one is “entitled” to hold an opinion that something is true when patently it is false.
