"Everybody is entitled to their own opinion"

R and I often end up discussing the responsibilities and roles of a teacher. R has been a teacher now for a few years and we always have great discussions about her occupation. Based on her anecdotes and her worries, I've realized how much influence over the students one has as a teacher and, perhaps even more importantly, I've realized that some teachers take that influence very seriously, so that reflecting on it becomes important. R often talks about the way her teaching reflects her, as a person, as someone who has a particular picture of the world and particular ideas about how things should be. When voicing these concerns, I usually reassure her that her students most probably appreciate her critical stance towards her subject, that her teaching is characterized by a concern for what is essential in the occupations that her students will engage in later on, but that she also teaches them things that are important on a more general, political level. But of course, she says, she doesn't want her students to give her views the force of law. It's easy to understand her worries.

Yesterday, drinking our after-work beers, we mulled over the way people often end up saying: "everybody is entitled to their own opinion" when there is a situation, in which one is afraid that one easily persuades people to think like oneself. "Everybody is entitled to their own opinions" gives a comfortable liberal, soothing impression. But, as a matter of fact, opinions, if they are to be taken seriously, are not something that a person simply has. For the record, there are some opinions, about which one could simply say that disagreement doesn't matter. This, however, does not make discussions superfluous or stupid, these are simply the cases where disagreement cannot intelligibly cause agony (some discussions about art have this character, others do not). But this is not the standard case. We care about what others think because we care about them. Their thinking is not only to be seen in spoken opinions, but in everything else as well. Granted, of course, that she really means what she says. There are also many situations, in which we would ascribe to somebody a particular thought/opinion (etc.), even though she hasn't asserted it verbally. "Watching her frown, I realize she doesn't like the present at all." At the end of a heated debate, I may angrily exclaim: "Think whatever you want, I don't care."

Once we are aware of these various cases, "everyone is entitled to their own opinion" looses something of its status of Positive Slogan. The reason why opinions are sometimes shuffled into a sacred Personal Zone is probably simply that we are afraid that our influence over other people is of a problematic. But if the world is pictured as a state of two alternatives, these being either a state of thought-hegemony or that everyone has the right to think whatever she wants, then that would be a very sad world. A world where power relations are inescapable and without alternatives.