It's OK Not To Have an Opinion on Everything

Good, even.

(Audio version here)

Recently, I was accused of only ever criticising right-wing authoritarianism and not caring about any that comes from the left of me. Given that I have spent the last decade engaged full-time in addressing the Critical Social Justice (woke) movement including participating in an 18-month full-time project to demonstrate the problem within academia, writing a book explaining the nature of the problem and co-founding an organisation helping people address the problem in practice, this came as something of a surprise to me.

On further inquiry, it was revealed that I was being accused of this because I have never criticised

Claire Lehmann

’s stance on Covid responses by governments throughout the world. Aside from the fact that I’m pretty sure that Claire, whom I admire, is to the right of me, having an opinion on her stance on international governmental responses to Covid would require me to both know what her stance on that is and also have one of my own. I don’t. This appeared, to my critic (whose account is now private), to be some kind of moral failing on my part and to indicate that I believe government responses to Covid to be a “non-issue”.

This is false. When I say that I don't have a view on Covid responses by governments throughout the world. I'm not saying this is not a thing liberals could or should have relevant views on. The importance of a government that operates by the consent of the governed is very much a liberal principle, and evaluating whether any government policy is upholding that principle or imposing one view on everybody in an authoritarian manner is very much the domain of liberals. I'm saying that I don't have an opinion on this, because in order to have one that I considered worth anything, I'd need to spend a great deal of time researching Covid responses by governments around the world. This would require researching Covid itself and gaining a competent grasp of virology, epidemiology and international governmental policy so that I could evaluate the issue in an evidence-based way. Once I'd formulated an opinion on this, I'd have to discuss it with people and defend my stance using empirical data and citing international policy. I don't want to do any of that.

I am a liberal who has spent 15 years studying and writing about the evolution of postmodern thought into Critical Social Justice scholarship and activism, the threat this presents to evidence-based epistemology and consistently liberal principles and the importance of upholding those two concepts within law, institutions and popular discourse on politics and culture more broadly. Anybody who wants a liberal stance on any of that could come to me, and I am delighted and honoured when they do. Anybody who wants a liberal stance on international governmental responses to Covid should go to a liberal thinker who is informed about and interested in international governmental responses to Covid instead.

This seems like a fairly sensible position to me, but increasingly often, we see people accused of maintaining a suspicious silence on various key issues of public interest and their motivations for doing so assumed to be both political and nefarious. These are typically the issues which produce the most heat and polarisation. This increases pressure on individuals to have an opinion on everything and to do so less because they are confident that that opinion is correct and supported by evidence and more because it conforms to that considered virtuous by their moral tribe.

In reality, having a well-informed and considered opinion on everything is simply not possible. I have written about this before when I found that, by being an outspoken critic of the Critical Social Justice movement, I was assumed to have particular stances on Brexit, Covid and climate change and invited to talk about them, including on national TV and radio. This is utterly bizarre. There is no reason to think that my years of critical analysis of scholars and activists ranging from Michel Foucault to Judith Butler to Robin DiAngelo indicate that I will have valuable expertise on the European Union, epidemiology or climate science. I might have and many people without professional qualifications in the fields do, but this could be discerned from my having written knowledgeably on those specific topics, not from me being ‘anti-woke.’ The belief that, because I take one stance on one issue, you can know what stance I will take on entirely unconnected issues is a problem, not least because we so often can.

The two issues on which I have been most frequently accused of maintaining a suspicious silence over the last 18 months have been the Israel/Hamas war and gender identity. I have condemned the 7/10 atrocity and deplored the loss of life, particularly that of children, in the region as a humanist. I have addressed antisemitic and anti-Muslim sentiment inspired by the conflict as part of my opposition to illiberal collectivist mentalities found on the left and the right. I have limited knowledge of the region and its history or of military ethics and international relations more broadly. I prefer to allow people who have researched this in depth make arguments about this and support their right to do so without being penalised and silenced. This is often regarded with suspicion.

I have certainly criticised queer theory and authoritarian trans activism as part of my opposition to the Critical Social Justice movement. I have also supported gender critical feminists with defending women’s spaces and sports, researchers and clinicians in the field of gender medicine with defending evidence-based research and gender non-conforming people’s right to present as they wish, however they identify. I am not a gender critical feminist myself nor an evidence-based researcher or clinician in gender medicine and I have no wish to become either. I wish to help make sure that people who are either are not prevented from speaking or doing empirical research by ideological authoritarianism. This is frequently considered lacklustre and morally dubious.

It is clear that very many people mistake their own interests and research focus for the thing that all virtuous people should be interested in and if they are not, their silence is, at best, morally dubious, and, at worst, violence. I think there are two main reasons for this - single-mindedness and a rejection of the expectation that we should gain some knowledge of a topic before having an opinion on it.

The first I am sympathetic to because I am, myself, a particularly single-minded person who likes to research a single topic in depth, learn every single thing I can about it, break it down into its component parts, make models of it and present them to people with ethical arguments for or against them. There is, in my observation, a spectrum of mindsets held by the intellectually curious with those who are interested in having an basic overview of a broad range of topics at one end and those who are interested in knowing as much as possible about one or a small handful of things at the other. This variation in how we direct our intellectual curiosity is probably very useful because the world surely needs people who are wide-ranging in their intellectual pursuits and those who are narrowly laser-focused. Nevertheless, a problem can arise when some among the single-minded simply cannot understand why anybody would be interested in anything other than the issue that absorbs them and also attribute moral failings to their alternative focuses. This way lies zealotry.

In my town, there is a man who dedicates his life to the preservation of hedgehogs. I needed to call upon him once after coming across a hypothermic hedgehog walking in circles in the middle of a field. After entering my house to take possession of the befuddled creature, he then insisted on inspecting my garden and instructing me on how to make it a hedgehog haven by putting holes in my fences, constructing shelters and leaving food out. He was most indignant when I said I could not do this because of my dogs and inclined to suspect me of having a malfunctioning moral compass for not prioritising the interests of hedgehogs. He is frequently spotted in the neighbourhood interrogating people about whether they behave in hedgehog-friendly ways and testing them on their knowledge of hedgehog welfare. Hedgehog Man is almost certainly autistic and generally regarded warmly in the community as a benign eccentric and a force for good. (Our hedgehog population is thriving).

I am frequently reminded of Hedgehog Man when I encounter intensely single-minded activists, but they can be much less benign. My neighbour’s belief that one can either be pro-hedgehog or anti-hedghog and there is no such thing as ‘neutral on hedgehogs’ is endearing, but the belief that one can only be racist or anti-racist and that there is no such thing as ‘non-racist’ has been much more harmful. People can, in fact, be non-racist and apply their social consciences to other issues than race, and they should be allowed to be so without being judged as terrible people who lack any social conscience. Those of us with a tendency to be single-minded must try to recognise that other people may not choose to focus on our own particular concern or interest whether it be Critical Social Justice activism, Covid policies, membership of the European Union, climate change, international relations, the ethics of warfare, immigration policy, race relations, the concept of gender or anything else. We should especially try to be glad when other people who share our principles - in my case, liberalism - apply them to issues that we ourselves do not focus on. Single-issue purity testing is seldom helpful.

I am far less sympathetic to attitudes that hold that one must take specific stances on a wide range of unconnected issues because those are the approved views of one’s political group, without any requirement to have actually informed oneself on the topic. Unlike the single-minded person’s error - “If you are a good person, you will care about precisely the social issue I do” the political partisan’s error is “If you are a good person, you will take a whole range of particular stances on particular issues that the good people (my political tribe) do.” This is what produces the “clustering” of seemingly disparate beliefs and an expectation that people will take a set stance on all of them and that knowing just one of them will be predictive of all the rest. Critical of the woke? You must also believe the UK is better off outside the European Union, be critical of Covid lockdowns and sceptical of climate change. Concerned about climate change? Well, then obviously you believe that trans women can be accepted as women in every situation and that concerns about immigration and cultural compatibility are best understood as racist dog-whistles. This too, then, is typically a purity test, or a way to write off everybody who disagrees with you about one thing as a universal wrongthinker.

The idea that what we believe politically should determine what we accept or reject as true gets things precisely backwards. While it is almost certainly true that we humans tend to form our opinions based on our moral intuitions and then rationalise them after the fact, it is good to be self-aware about this and try to mitigate it. To embrace it is to take an inherently ‘socially constructivist” approach to knowledge and seek to make an ‘ought’ into an “is”. This is most explicitly stated in postmodern theory which is radically sceptical about the obtainability of objective truth and holds that what we consider to be knowledge is ultimately a construct of power that has been legitimised by the ways of speaking about things propagated by the “privileged” or “elites.” It then becomes an act of resistance and political activism to be sceptical of anything claimed to be true by whichever group you consider to hold that position or even to take the opposing position on principle. With this, comes the pleasure of believing oneself or one’s own group to be uniquely awakened – woke, red-pilled etc. – while everybody else is still asleep. This can also incentivise a kind of contest within the in-group in which members compete to find new things to ‘problematise’ or be radically sceptical of and thus signal oneself to be more awakened to the group’s theorised oppressive systems of power than everybody else. This way lies escalating polarisation based on ideological narratives that become more and more detached from reality.

This way of thinking was not created by postmodernists. It is a very human failing rooted in our tribal instincts that Enlightenment empiricists and rationalists (often naively) tried to overcome in their pursuit of truth. Humans strongly dislike being told what to think and when we are told that we must believe something, we become motivated to try to find reasons not to believe it. We are particularly likely to be oppositional on tribal grounds and think that if people we disagree with on one thing of importance to us and consequently consider to be ‘bad people’ are inclined to believe in patterns of other things, those must be wrong and bad too. In this way, we produce sets of positions that ‘they’ hold and sets of positions that ‘we’ hold and this has a strong moral component. When people press me to say what I really think on issues upon which I do not consider myself to have a respect-worthy opinion, seem baffled that I could give that as a response and insist that I must have one really, I think they are actually asking “Which side are you on?” They will typically say something like, “This isn’t complicated” and I think that is because when one’s ideological beliefs are the basis for what one determines to be true, finding the ‘right’ answer often is not complicated. The reality, however, often is.

The result of taking this socially constructivist approach to knowledge is acting as though we believe that if we say that something is true often enough and loudly enough and from a position of power, it will become true. But, of course, it won’t. Especially not on issues like whether sex differences exist, the effectiveness of vaccines and the causes of climate change. Objective realities on those will continue to exist and continue to impact human lives, even if we ignore them and replace them with the narratives that are ‘politically correct’ for our particular group. Even when the issue really is social and attitudinal and so can be changed by the way we think and speak about things - immigration policy, racist or anti-racist beliefs, how we understand gender dysphoria - we still need to make or call upon arguments based on what is true before taking a stance on it rather than letting our stance on it decide what is true. When there is significant doubt or disagreement about what is true, the way to resolve this is to be more willing to compare our own assumptions with reality as presented to us in good faith discussion with those with whom we disagree and remain open to being shown to be wrong.

One important way to keep ourselves intellectually honest and open to being wrong is by not feeling that we have to have an opinion on everything in the first place. The term ‘virtue signalling’ is often used disparagingly, but it is a very natural human impulse, because we are social mammals and thrive on the approval of our tribe. In wanting to be respected by the people whom we ourselves respect, we can pick the people we respect wisely, however. Do you find yourself respecting people who say, “I don’t know enough about that to have a worthwhile opinion” or “I’m not sure what I think about that yet” or “I’m torn on this issue” or “This is not something I’ve looked into closely but I hear that <somebody else> has been addressing it well” or simply “I don’t know?” I do. Assuming they don’t give this response to every question, it inclines me to give more credence to their views on the issues they have dedicated time and energy to thinking about and gives me more confidence that they are exercising independent thought in the way they go about that. It may be disappointing to find that somebody whose thinking you generally admire has not addressed an issue of concern to you, but this can be remedied by seeking out more people whose thinking you admire across a range of issues and from a variety of perspectives.

I think we could do with a little less certainty and a lot more humility in our public discourse at the moment. We should resist the pressure to have an opinion on absolutely everything and especially the pressure to make that opinion conform to that of any political tribe and be based on what the tribe wants to be true or wants to refute because an enemy tribe holds it to be true. We should certainly regard with deep scepticism anybody who claims to have a deep knowledge of every issue that arises, but is unable or unwilling to demonstrate this, and instead casts aspersions on the moral character of anybody who does not share their stance completely. Above all, we should have respect for people who feel able to say, “I don’t know” when that is, in fact, the case. A little more of this would make the world, and particularly the online world, a better place.