By DOUG SHAVER
July 10, 2020
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is typically credited with saying, "Everyone has a right to his own opinion, but not his own facts." And he apparently did say it, but he didn't originate it. Some writers just get lucky that way.
But really, rights have nothing to do with either facts or opinions. Whether you believe an opinion to be a fact, or vice versa, the law cannot change your mind. The law itself often needs to make the distinction, and it may sometimes compel you to act in conformity with its conclusion, but it cannot compel your mental assent.
Of course Moynihan, and the people he got the idea from, understood this. They weren't talking about anybody's legal rights. Their point seems to have been rather something like: I am obliged to show you some respect when your opinions differ from mine, but if you deny a fact or assert a falsehood to be a fact, then your obstinacy is entitled to no respect.
It's a reasonable-sounding sentiment, but not much help in promoting civil discourse in a society that has a hard time distinguishing fact from opinion. This has been a challenge throughout human history, and philosophers have spent a lot of effort looking for ways to tell the difference. What's making it worse now is the notion gaining acceptance in certain intellectual circles that there is no important difference. The reasoning, apparently, is that opinions are judgments, but any assertion of the form "X is a fact" expresses somebody's judgment, and so any statement of fact is really just another statement of opinion.
One consequence is that all attempts at persuasion have become appeals to our feelings. We're told that X is true if we want it to be true, and good people want it to be true, so if you don't believe X you must be a bad person. And since nobody wants to think they're a bad person, nobody's mind gets changed. Debates over public policy then reduce to PR campaigns and battles for political power. Election campaigns are just exercises in salesmanship, and the nation's most skillful salesman becomes president.
I don't know how we can change this, but a handful of people with more influence than I have ever had are trying to find a way. They need all the support they can get from anybody else who has seen the disaster that awaits us if we don't substantially change our politcal, academic, and journalistic institutions. Some—by no means all—of them belong to an unofficial group of thinkers called the Intellectual Dark Web. They're on YouTube. They're not called "dark" because they can't be seen. The name was chosen facetiously, but many of their adversaries didn't get the joke.
The IDW is a politically diverse bunch. I don't respect all of them, and I doubt that any of them respects all of the others. They are more in agreement about what is wrong with our nation than about how it should be fixed. I'm old enough to remember when you can say that about both major political parties. Now it's become a heresy to say you agree with your adversaries about anything at all.
So what do they agree is wrong? You need to listen to them if you really want to understand them. What I hear most of them saying, though, reminds me of an expression I often heard when I was going to 12-step meetings: "self-will run riot." American has always been big on individualism, or at least on giving lip service to it, but intellectuals during the mid-20th century took it to a ridiculous extreme. The journalist and novelist Kurt Anderson, among others, documented this in his 2017 book Fantasyland: How American Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. How this morphed into the groupthink insanity of identity politics makes for some complicated sociology, but it has much to do with the national rejection of the Englightenment. Neither reason nor science is affected by anyone's personal preferences, and humanism focuses on people in general without privileging any group—not for their history, not for their accomplishments, not for anything.
The line between facts and opinions can be hard to draw, and maybe it's fuzzy in some instances, but the Enlightenment thinkers knew there was a difference, and that the difference was not just a indication of who had power over other people. Our nation's founders understood this, and their understanding informed their commitment to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." When any people cannot resolve their disputes by reasoned argument, they will have no alternative but to resolve them by force of arms. Might will make right when dialogue cannot.
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(This page last updated on July 10, 2020.)