Not All Opinions Must be Principles

On any given Tuesday, a collection of students occupies every seat in a long office at the end of a narrow hall. Office chairs wheel across slate floors as keyboards click, Remi Wolf plays and murmurs about the week’s happenings fill the room. It is a room unseen to the vast majority of the Colgate community where a campus dialogue collects and a commitment to giving voice to this campus is woven into the walls. Plastered across those walls, black and white images reminiscent of a different time serve as a reminder to me that finding truth on this campus might just require a mindset as old school as the photos.

Our campus – and our world – is dichotomized. We exist in a culture that pushes beliefs to the fray where we must unwaveringly take up a side on topics big and small, and where one’s outlook is indisputably correct and the other inevitably wrong. It is hardly a novel idea to say our world is more polarized than ever, but four years in a third-floor office above the Hall of Presidents has provided me with an important reminder: not all beliefs need to be principles, and the need for the bigger picture is perhaps direr than ever.

If my over 800 hours in that narrow third-floor office have taught me anything, it is this: there is always more to the story, and we do a great disservice to ourselves, those around us and our campus discourse when we take a stance on issues that we are unwilling to revise. When stances on issues become principles, negotiation and conversation can become either merely symbolic or completely impossible.

Ideas become principles when they become concrete, unchangeable ideas that are woven into the character of our moral being. Principles calibrate our moral compasses and — different from beliefs — they are, by definition, immune to changing circumstances. Principles are necessary to meaningful human existence, but when the threshold for principled status is lowered to allow nearly every momentary belief to become concrete and unwavering, we can become unwilling to grow intellectually and challenge our own outlooks.

A 1938 John Herman Randall essay entitled “On the Importance of Being Unprincipled” offers a wise point that remains timeless. Rather than advocate for the principle of compromise, Herman Randall suggests that we must reevaluate what we classify as principles, for once they become principles, they become unchangeable views dangerous for communal existence and forward progress. Reevaluating our threshold of opinion versus principle presents a point of reflection for how we can better coexist on this campus.

To be clear, this is not a call for the abolition of principles entirely or a statement that there are none worth upholding. It’s quite the opposite; have guiding principles, but it is okay for ideas and beliefs to be just ideas or beliefs, open to change and seen within the larger context in which they almost always exist. I’m arguing, too, that circumstances matter and that we are dangerously averse to understanding context.

The Colgate student body is markedly passionate, and we are privileged to exist on a campus that rewards passion with opportunity and voice. We take up important stances on essential causes in the hopes of pushing our campus forward, but on a campus that uplifts passion comes the possibility of a culture that pushes our passions to binary poles that we are unwilling to move from. We take a side, our side becomes principle and our principle becomes right and anyone with differing outlooks is thus inherently and irreparably wrong – and potentially immoral.

Often, we take up the principles of others as our own without question or reservation. In a world in which information is near-limitless and widely available, how we don’t take time to confirm if the opinion we are about to decide is ours is a concerning and counterintuitive trend. The everlasting and irreversible presence of our words in today’s digital age should prompt thought about the permanence of what we publicly make principle. And to take an idea from someone else as gospel without confirming its validity in your internal belief system by seeing it in a larger, informed picture is, well, dangerous for our coexistence and communal push for progress.

We’ve been taught in this age of polarization that we must hold onto our beliefs with an unrelenting grasp, to be firm in our convictions and to take an opinion and stick with it. In a world that exists in the frays of black and white, we’ve resented the gray area. Our world is nuanced and a weaker grasp on some of our beliefs and opinions may allow us to safely tread into a gray area where the reality of our circumstances might actually exist. We live in that gray, and it’s time we start realizing that is not necessarily a terrible thing for every daily conflict we face. In this gray area, perhaps, is where we find our way forward together.

“It is preachers, teachers, writers and literary men who can get down to the roots of things and really understand them,” Herman Randall wrote in that 1938 essay. “The only action such men ever have to engage in is to protest, in the name of their principles, at what other men are doing. Principles are great things for protesting. That is in fact about the only kind of action you can really accomplish with them… such intellectuals are never faced by the problem of getting something done, of cooperating with other men.”

Our overly principled outlook on campus issues has disrupted, rather than constructed, community. At the core of a liberal arts education is learning to value the plurality of perspectives that make our world interesting. Liberal arts pushes us to evaluate the bigger picture, and few modern issues exist outside of the context of one.

There is always a bigger picture, and we must find a greater commitment to understanding it before we dig our feet in our principles and turn away from each other.

On campus, when issues arise, our discussions often focus more on talking than listening. When beliefs become principles, there is no listening, because there is no changing. But what would happen if we listened to each other and attempted to understand the bigger picture that lies in that gray area?

For it is in this gray area between the poles of our ideological spectrums that we find the capability to accomplish something meaningful and grow together.

Student journalism exists in the gray and for good reason. It synthesizes sides of issues to find the reality and facts of situations and the decisions behind them. And, from my experience, reality is always more complicated than we predict. We must begin to accept that the issues that activate our campus discourse are more complicated than we know and that there are often more than just two sides to the story.

Student journalism has taught me that we must learn to include a multitude of perspectives on issues to understand them. But, we must also be willing to answer questions and change our opinions when we get more information. We must move away from seeing contradicting viewpoints as unprincipled, wrong or offensive to our humanity.

800 hours in that narrow office has taught me that what I think about one thing one day could be different the next day when new information becomes available. That space has taught me to accept nuance and to search for the reality of our circumstances within it. Our lives exist in the gray area, and if we have any hope of meeting there and making progress, we must become more weakly principled.

All this is not to encourage you to be unopinionated and neutral in your existence on this campus. Passion, after all, is woven into the landscape of this hill, and passionate community members will be those who push us forward.

Relinquish your grasp on some of your principled ideas, and raise the threshold by which opinions become gospel. When every idea becomes principle, negotiation becomes impossible, and compromise becomes a relic of a different time. When every idea becomes principle, we find ourselves amidst a conflict that will never result in progress. But if we can learn to understand the bigger picture, we find that our opinions will often, and rightfully, change. Opinions are flexible and opinions drive productive passion that results in agreeable progress. Principles, by their definition, are unchangeable, and when we have more principles than opinions, we prevent ourselves from meeting in the gray area where we might just more happily coexist.

On the third floor of James C. Colgate Hall, amidst the gray area, will be a continued search for the bigger picture. Our office is home to a culture of valuable intellectual flexibility that has become a relic of a seemingly ancient time. But what is old could be new again – and it will remain the job of this newspaper, just as it has been for the last 154 years – to help you visualize the bigger picture. It is perhaps necessary now more than ever before.