Opinion is a burden. If I have an opinion about something, whether a Presidential candidate, or when is the right time to reopen the economy, or whether the protesters in the street are correct even though looting is going on under the cover of protest, then I am responsible for saying why that is plausible to me or even just feel the emotion that goes along with the opinion and so attest to the validity of that insight even if I cannot explain it. Time can tell whether my opinion was correct or not and so an opinion is a forecast, as when one says bad people receive their just deserts, even if proof or refutation is never unambiguous. I am rooting for the future to be one way or another, to support or negate my opinion, and so I am always, as an opinionator, making a gamble on the future and that can render me tense, because I could be wrong about the future, while to be liberated from opinion means that I do not have to worry about the future. I can just watch it play out, proceed as it will, me a bystander rather than a participant. Being without opinions is therefore to no longer carry everywhere Kant’s burden of responsibility, life one set of obligations after another, even if there are also judgments of taste that people also make, but those have no cost, in that whether you prefer Schiller to Lessing makes no difference unless you mix with a set of people who think taste has a moral gravity. Rather, to be without opinion is to leave to history and, more directly, the knowledge of experts, how to proceed from here. They will know when to open up the economy if anyone knows because it is a technical matter rather than a moral one or open to everyday reason, and the unfolding statistics will tell if they are wrong or right. As a citizen, I am entitled to my opinions, but they are relevant only at election time or when a profound change of group opinion takes place, as happens when people may, now, at this moment, come to think that occasional instances of police brutality are not to be swept aside but are perhaps part of the continued subjugation of black people.
This was not always my view about opinion. My view of opinion was that it was, as Plato suggested, attempts at truth that were unreflective and so misguided and so subject to whatever voice was loudest in the public arena, that view very different from the one of such sociologists as Paul Lazarsfeld who thought public opinion was anchored not in its salesmen but in the vested interests of the people holding the opinion, whether they could explain them or not. Recent politics shows that opinion is not moored to interests but is, as I thought up until this week, like the weather, always changing and not easily predictable. People change their minds especially about things about which they have little direct information, because all they know is what they see on television, or because they do have a narrow perspective into things, when they notice police brutality in their neighborhoods while just accepting that other fact drug dealers are heroes in the neighborhood. So to be engaged in opinion is to be a slave to opinion rather than the master of it.
It must be said that opinion has always been my stock in trade. A critic ventures his opinions. I like this work of art and not that one for this reason or another even though I do not have a general theory of aesthetics that tells me which works I should like and which ones I shouldn’t. My standing with my fellow academics rested on the acuity of my opinions, whether about literature or social structure. Mark Van Doren got this point very clearly when he once remarked that going into retirement allowed him to read for pleasure rather than to take notes so that he could decide on an opinion about a piece of fiction or poetry. When I became a sociologist it meant that I had to learn enough so that I could have informed opinions about race relations or the nature of criminality or how social class worked in American society, and it took me a while to work those opinions up so that students would not come up with questions out of the blue that I could not answer with a distinction or a research study or an acknowledgement that the student was making a good point. A young sociologist had to know more than not only his students; he had to know more than the opinion mongers in the news and editorial pages of the NY Times knew, or at least that was my standard.
What changed my view on opinion from regarding opinion as like the weather and so the opposite of truth to regarding it as a burden to be as truthful as possible, were the current circumstances. Why were the current protesters not responsible for their opinions? “Responsible” is not a term usually thought applicable to opinion. Yet I came to surmise that I was indeed responsible for my opinions, that association arising from the fact that it was so clearly not apparent in the groups that I viewed through my television set. The President has opinions and never explains them, as was clear in his photo op a block from the White House. The same is true of the politicians and commentators on television who can elaborate their opinions but never have to explain or justify them, Martha Raddatz of ABC pointing to stills of policemen roughing up demonstrators while the Secretary of Homeland Security cites instances of violence against the police. They are talking past one another, thus leaving both sides frustrated in that they cannot get through to one another in that they are not engaged in trying to come to a position that encompasses both their points of view rather than just shout out what are their points of view. It is very frustrating to watch and, as the body language of the people on television indicates, very frustrating for those people who are engaged in something short of dialogue, and yet it is just very difficult for people to overcome their tendencies to engage in posturing. People have to “open themselves up” for that, whatever it is that the metaphor for some unspecified mental process might be alluding to.
So a distinction needs to be made between informed and not well informed opinion, given that everyone has a responsibility for the opinions that they hold. People may cling to their legal right to have an opinion, informed or not, but people can also have a narrower or broader focus on things, that sanctioned by public opinion itself rather than the Constitution,and so be noticed to more or less cling to the cliches they have sanctified rather than to a broad perspective on the matter. That is perhaps why I wanted to be a sociologist, who took the long view on things, the encompassing view, which subordinated one or another opinion or insight into the recurrent patterns of social structure that could be regarded as the reality of social life and so made a science of the idea of being comprehensive in noting all the different forces that were at work at once.
That is why so much of what the protesters are doing, in my opinion, seems like whining and special pleading rather than addressing the real problems of Black people in America, which is not the police. The protesters give away that they are merely peddling opinions in the bad sense of sloganeering and being self righteous around a narrowly defined issue where there is no consideration of context except in an allusive fashion as when they suggest that police budgets be cut so that more money can be spent on schools. The truth of the matter, in my opinion, is that police violence is the consequence rather than the cause of problems in the black community and is certainly not the most significant aspect of the social situation of African Americans. Rather, the cause lies in problems in Black family structure that reach back to slavery days and are documented in innumerable qualitative community studies of the Black community as well as in statistical studies of the disparities between Blacks and whites in health care and other matters. However much the progress of Black families into the middle class over the past few generations, and that is not sufficiently celebrated by either Black activists or white onlookers, there remains a hard core of black people living in largely urban ghettos, these people very difficult to move out of poverty and a lifestyle dominated by minor crime and irregular relationships. (The same may be true of white Appalachian communities, but this is not the time for comparative ethnic histories.)
Children in Black or white ghettoes grow up in families where they are physically and psychologically abused, where people roam into their apartments and shacks, where there are no regular meals and no regular bed to sleep in. That, plus faulty nutrition and a lack of prenatal care lead to underweight and mentally undeveloped infants and toddlers who enter school ill prepared for its rigors in even the earliest grades. That may be the result of a culture of poverty, as the anthropologists would say to indicate the associated set of factors that lead to this situation, or the result, as William Julius Wilson would say, of not enough marriageable males available to the young women so the young women have to take what they can in the way of fathers for their children, and because extreme housing segregation results in no grocery stores and no movie theaters and no mixture with anyone but themselves and so a replication over the generations of the same social pathologies.
The question then is how to address those problems rather than to be self-righteous about police injustices. This is not to blame the victims but to try to get at what causes people to be victims. Yes, there is still racial prejudice in America, but police brutality is not just the result of that. Police respond to the threats or the atmoshere of threat that surrounds them. Police violence is an irritant rather than a significant force in creating conditions in the ghetto, however much the threat of police violence hangs over the Black community, whether a Black community is part of the ghetto or has moved on from it, a threat that does not exist for people like me who are adorned with their skin, their badge of white privilege. The problems of the Black community are, rather, the resuit of what has been called “institutional racism”, which means nothing more than that the social structure works against people of color. As a friend of mine said to me when the War on Poverty was not having the results we wanted because it did not change the social structure and so end urban and rural poverty, the question was not to despair but to think of what might be tried next that might work, I would propose a number of old remedies. Construct many more settlement houses in ghetto neighborhoods. Provide training in trades rather than the empty academic educations to which many students unsuited to that line of development are subjected. And, most of all, make the federal government the employer of last resort, so that anyone who wants a job can get one. Then, in a generation or so, there will be less police brutality because there will be fewer marginal people to inspire it.