For most of us, one is never enough, right? Cars, houses, adoring admirers, flowers, beaches in Costa Rica, sets of silver, Olympic gold medals...I mean, you could always accept another one, right? And not complain?
But opinions? No, not opinions! When it comes to opinions, we want only one, and that's the right one. Which is ours. The rest we go on the hunt for and destroy, like old one-legged Ahab and the white whale. Gotta get it. I'll take the whole ship down if necessary, drown every sailor of kind intention and cabin boy of sympathy, but that wrong opinion's got to go.
But why DON'T we want to be rich in opinions? Why should we NOT want to be of many minds? I myself say that certainty is boring. Insistence generally ugly. It's a mono-cropping of the intellectual life. A one-party totalitarianism of the heart. Away with it! Remind me of the earth, and its myriad geologic and animal forms, and make my mind a mirror of its multiplicity. Give me Shakespeare with his rebels and kings. Give me opinions galore. Stuff me with opinion. Not just to inform me, mind you, but to feed me. In order that I might digest it all, and turn it all to fuel for the natural impulses of my mind. Sure, there's going to be stuff that's bitter to me. Or over-sweet. Sure there will be material that does not nourish me. But even that gristle and fiber is necessary to the process. Right? Left?
I meet weekly with a friend, whose opinions are so far to the right, you might confuse him for a gutterball that missed Alabama. Or a really late release on a Frisbee throw. He believes that socialists hate children. That all rapists should be executed. That pedophile priests were, nearly without exception, communist infiltrators. And most interestingly, that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a superbly subversive Catholic saint of sorts, writing in a perpetual allegorical code to fellow underground believers, all aching for sermons on the stage. Shylock is not a Jew; he's Henry VIII. And Cassio in Othello is really blessed John Cassian. And Othello in general is a theatrical analysis of Aquinas's theology of the will. (I keep telling him to start a blog, because people might be interested.)
But the point is, when I meet with him, do I agree with him? Um no, not generally. Do I listen? I certainly do. These days, I jump at any chance to interact with another well-read human mind. Well-read minds are getting rare. Then too even his opinions, as opinions, interest me. Sure, sometimes they seem like curiosities of crankiness. More often though, if you dig, you find some genuinely stable metaphysical stance that underlies it, which gives it all consistency and sense, at least to him. Here is man who believes in the Holy Sefiroth. The sands of purgatory. Limbo for unbaptized infants. Why wouldn't he perceive Dante's Inferno in parts of Chicago?
Now. Should I avoid him, and instead have a long discussion with someone whose views I generally agree with? I suppose it depends. Solidarity has uses of its own. Still, I find that when I simply agree with those around me, I lose much of my own sense of the value of my argument. I forget why that view is meaningful to me. I am not moved even to speak articulately about it. I'm like a man between facing mirrors, getting littler and littler the more he repeats himself. When, however, I'm with someone intelligent whose cast of thought and habit of mind truly differs from my own, well then...
How about a metaphor to describe what happens?
I wash the laundry here at Sunnyside, using a plunger and a utility tub. All the clothes of all Sunnysiders go into the tub at once. One motley mix. One slapdash sartorial salad. This is like a healthy mix of opinions in a room. Now there are clothes in the tub that do not fit me and never will. Clothes that feel way too rough, or maybe ridiculously soft for me. They'll never be mine. Nevertheless I throw mine in with the clothes that are not mine and agitate the whole population together in the tub. Each piece rubs against the other, and voila they ALL come out cleaner for the rubbing.
Just so: I'm saying that the process of jostling opinions together in discussion and conversation provides us all with what might usefully be called the cleanliness of communal sanity. It's not that we'll all start wearing one another's clothes. It's just that the clothes are better for the agitation. The togetherness in spin.
The metaphor is not perfect. It makes sense only if, in the discussion we're comparing the washing to, everyone actively participates; and we have to remember that such participation always, always demands active, sympathetic listening. Good listening is hard to come by in this culture. I think we could all use more practice, listening with the heart. Almost stethoscopically.
Beat beat.
HB
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