Floating in mid-air:
Jr, David R Carlin
FLOATING IN MID-AIR ARE ALL OPINIONS CREATED EQUAL? My daughter, who is ten years old and in the fifth grade, re-cently explained to me the distinction between fact and opinion. I was pleased to...
...But it has diminished them...
...We inhabit a civilization built upon a number of nonempirical propositions...
...of late twentieth-century America...
...Or that both have a part of the truth...
...Given enough time, abstract principles, no matter how little complied with at a particular moment, have a telling effect...
...If the latter, it was neither true nor false...
...the right to think as one pleases and to do as one pleases (short of picking the other fellow's pocket or breaking her leg) is the supreme privilege...
...We abstain from persecution, not because our love of truth is so delicate and refined that we feel persecution to be a kind of sacrilege, but because we don't believe there is such a thing as truth beyond the realm of empirical facts...
...No, her epistemology comes from breathing the common intellectual air (or should I say, the common anti-intellectual air...
...The tolerance of the contemporary age is the tolerance of indifference...
...The kind we have today is little more than mush...
...How can we say that liberal democracy is preferable to totalitarianism...
...I was pleased to learn that she had a firm grasp of this vital distinction...
...Though Roger Williams did not approve of Quakerism, his tolerance had made Rhode Island a haven for early Quakers...
...It has made them fewer, smaller, less robust...
...it was simply a personal preference...
...It is not the tolerance of the person who takes truth seriously...
...Nothing is more usual, especially among the younger generations, than the view that we ought to be perfectly tolerant of other people's opinions, since opinions are neither true nor false but merely matters of personal preference...
...so she had better cling to her insight and not succumb to my merely tricky arguments...
...I suppose she didn't use those precise words, but she said something along those lines...
...And how can we even begin to discuss the morality of abortion or homosexuality...
...Further, we ought to be almost perfectly tolerant of the actions that flow from these opinions-almost but not quite, since we obviously have to draw the line at actions which directly and tangibly harm others...
...Under the amiable banner of "Live and Let Live" we are unconsciously sapping the very foundations of our civilization...
...Or was it an opinion...
...and I was therefore perfectly free to adopt a contrary personal preference...
...The discussion with my daughter bogged down when I bullied her by asking if her theory about fact and opinion was itself a fact...
...I was less pleased, however, when she went on to explain that in questions of fact there is a right answer and a wrong answer, while in matters of opinion there are no right and wrong answers...
...But this is small consolation...
...If the former, it must be demonstrable...
...Or that one has more truth than the other...
...hence, we should tolerate one another's opinions and confine our disputes to matters of fact, where truth and error can be demonstrated...
...That's heroic tolerance...
...She sensed, correctly enough, that the old man represents the views of an earlier age, an age that did not have the benefit of MTV and a modern education...
...He chided Massachusetts for its persecution of the new sect...
...but it didn't appear to be...
...I'm not worried about my daughter...
...I am not unmindful that many people who hold the skeptical-tolerant viewpoint as a matter of abstract principle often forget this principle when it comes down to cases...
...To date, the skeptical-tolerant principle may not have totally destroyed our standards in morality, art, etc...
...You and I may disagree in our opinions, but there is no way either one of us can prove the other to be mistaken...
...We agreed to postpone further discussion of this topic till another day...
...This tolerance, of course, has a very different tone from that championed by, say, John Locke or Roger Williams...
...Then he rowed home...
...My daughter did not arrive at her epis-temological views from volumes of David Hume that I carelessly leave lying around the house...
...who is prepared to battle for truth with weapons of persuasion while renouncing weapons of coercion...
...But I do worry about the world at large, where the skeptical-tolerant viewpoint, already widespread, grows more popular every day...
...whose respect for truth is so great that one would not make it prevail through the use of unworthy instruments...
...When we cease to believe in the very possibility of such propositions, I wonder just how long our house will be able to float in mid-air...
...Tolerance is the supreme virtue...
...So the lack of profundity in the prevailing view is likely to drive her away from it before long...
...If opinions are merely preferences, how can we say that this religion is true, that false...
...Her taste in books runs to Beverly Cleary and The Babysitters Club, not Hume or his twentieth-century heirs, the logical positivists...
...How can we say that this work of art is superior to that...
...This skepticism about all assertions that go beyond matters of empirical fact implies of course that we are debarred from passing judgments on matters of religion, morality, politics, and aesthetics...
...While I don't think our world is about to fall apart any day soon, the current attitude should nonetheless give us pause...
...Professing to be nonjudg-mental, they frequently rush to judgment, sometimes even quite sound judgments...
...Though she has too much pride to let herself be talked out of a position by her old father's arguments, she has a strong tendency to thoroughness, an urge to get to the bottom of things...
...That Bartok is better than Barry Manilow...
...but when George Fox, the English founder of Quakerism, came to visit his disciples in Newport, Williams did not shrug his shoulders and say, "Who cares...
...The dilemma I posed, which is essentially the same dilemma that has been posed to skeptics since antiquity, perplexed her, but it did not dislodge her from her position...
...Instead, though past seventy years of age, he got in a boat and rowed the length of Narragansett Bay, from Providence to Newport, where in a public debate he attempted to show the errors of Fox's ways...
...Why take the trouble to persecute on behalf of something in whose existence we don't even believe...
Vol. 115 • June 1988 • No. 11
