Unfortunately for the sake of dialogue at Wesleyan, the vast majority of our student body is unaware of what holding an opinion entails. Schooled in the new orthodoxy of relativism, and often blithely armed with a pleasant nihilism beneath the thin veneer of their soupy tolerance, the prevailing attitude is that saying someone else is wrong and you are right is an unforgivably presumptuous and morally reprobate behavior, not to be engaged in by nice or respectable people.
Forgive me for jumping the gun, but I am just itching to say it: people who have this attitude are wrong.
By all means, let me explain myself. If you don’t actually think that the thing in which you believe is right, while opinions espousing opposite or conflicting viewpoints are wrong, then you don’t really believe in it at all. In fact, it isn’t even your opinion. It is just a viewpoint that you choose to bandy about, because you find it prettier or more acceptable or more accepted, or generally more easily adapted to bandying.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with using viewpoints in such a way. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that. I myself do this quite a bit, for purposes ranging from a desire to satisfy my own contrariness to a simple pursuit of conversation for its own sake. These causes are certainly worthy, as I would be the last to deny.
But I know well enough to distinguish such uses of language from those of genuine, sober dialogue, in which I espouse my own opinions and try to convince others that I am in fact correct in my viewpoints, and that, inasmuch as their viewpoints contradict my own, they are wrong. Again, let me be crystal clear, for this is the point at which I fear so many of my colleagues are incapable of following my reasoning. The end I have in mind is not mutual understanding, that utopian state of conversation in which we will both come to see each other’s point and then go frolic in a grassy meadow together. No, no, no. Chances are, it is not that hard for me to figure out why someone might have found their way into error and come to contradict me. Certainly, there are many occasions on which my conversational adversary might bring some new piece of information to light, a service for which I would no doubt have only gratitude. But on those issues, the facts of which are clear to me, and which I have thought over on my own, I am uninterested in gaining an understanding of adverse viewpoints, because I already understand and have rejected them.
Most of you may like sociology better than I do (for indeed, I do not like it very much at all!), but it is I, and not you, who have understood Max Weber when he explained what it is to adopt a Weltanschauung, and follow that demon where you must, finally saying, “Here I stand; I can do no other” (Politics as a Vocation). I am intolerant when tolerance means meekly saying, in a spirit of emasculating compromise, that you might be right and I might be wrong. Of course, the world is not black and white; but if you aren’t willing to put your shade of gray on your battle standard and defend it, then, please, I invite you to lay it down in advance, and wave the white flag instead.
Please don’t misunderstand, you who have persevered to the end of this brief tirade. I don’t mean to say that everyone must agree with my opinions. You will find fewer more resolute advocates of free speech on this campus, and surely we can all remember what Voltaire said. I only mean to say that everyone should agree with all my opinions, and come to hold the same beliefs as me. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t hold my opinions, and they wouldn’t be my beliefs. I do recognize that it is unlikely that everyone will come to see the light of my own opinions, at least not all at once. But if you will at least act like you believe in your own judgments, you can probably earn my respect. And if you earn that, well then, who knows! Perhaps you will be able to convince me o—ut no, I dare not say it, so here I end, with a haiku for good form:
Postmodernism makes
Beliefs seem equally right
But it is just wrong
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