Originally published in print September 2022
In a world where opinions are more plentiful than virtually anything else, do we have and share so many of them because we love to have them, or because human nature simply wouldn’t allow us not to?
I’m not exactly talking about your dad telling you he has no comment on your outfit, even though he absolutely does, he would just rather not have that argument right now. I’m also not explicitly talking about extreme incel forums full of strong, unwavering, and offensive opinions that leave you under no illusion where they stand on certain takes. Whether you believe an opinion is worth expressing is one thing, or worth dealing with the response of the opinion rather, but what are we meant to think when someone claims to not have an opinion at all? Levels of investment aside, is it actually possible to be truly impartial on a topic that you’ve heard of?
At first, I thought yes, perhaps it is possible. Acknowledging that I am someone with opinions who is surrounded by people with opinions came with having to appreciate that having thoughtful opinions was a luxury that I was lucky enough to partake in. College students have a lot of opinions. We are constantly forced to think, after all, about the why behind a lot of what we are learning. And arts students are notoriously the worst (or best) for it, with politics and beliefs from now and the past not only part of everything we do, but typically act as the underlying subject matter of everything we study, even arguably what we aim to study at all. Maybe my initial thinking that everyone must surely have an opinion on everything comes from my own academic training (or honestly perhaps a deeper personality flaw that led me to my course). With more consideration it becomes apparent that the majority of opinions that are the most intense and deep-rooted actually take no real degree-qualifying education . A lot of the most extreme offensive beliefs that we hear nowadays, beliefs rooted in racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia and homophobia, to name a few, require not much education at all. In fact, all of these opinions are likely to change as a result of education on the topics. Opinions on topics are not only formed and considered but passed down like heirlooms through generations of mindless judgement. Judgements are not something that we need to be academically entitled to hold at all, as we seem to be qualified to hold them simply on the basis that we are thinking creatures.
Frustration arises from apathy, rather than purely the opposition of a point. Naturally this can range from mild annoyance to more serious exasperation the closer the topic is to your heart. These situations occur whenever someone with a considered opinion comes face-to-face with someone who has not fully thought-through the topic at hand, but rather than engage in conversation, or put forward that it is not something that they have much knowledge on to contribute, they use a convenient cop-out line of saying that they simply have no opinion on the matter at all. However, my biggest gripe with this type of claim of impartiality, is that in these cases, this line is typically used after the person has already expressed their views and were met with disagreement. The ever-infuriating abstract argument when a woman is asked why she is pro-choice when abortion is the murder of a baby, only for the initial instigator of the sensitive conversation topic to claim that they have no strong beliefs- they were only wondering! Or the conversation I had with an elderly relative when they told me they have nothing against “the gays”, no judgement either side of same-sex marriage, but that they’d just rather it stayed away from them.
More and more as I consider what it means to have no opinion I figure that claiming to have no opinion is just a safer way of expressing the opinion you think the other person doesn’t want to hear. As I said at the start, your dad absolutely has an opinion on that outfit, he’s just not up for an argument. And that brave devil’s advocate in your tutorials is not so much brave as he is testing the waters of the limits that everyone there has. I have come to believe that having “no opinion” is a shield. While it may not matter for the little things, when it comes to beliefs that sway biases and have hold over how people are treated, it is certainly not as harmless a play as it might sound at first.
