No opinion

 

I believe that if you gave a pollster a gun, and that pollster shot the polled in the leg and asked them if they approved or did not approve of being shot in the leg, a good fifteen percent would have no opinion.

In poll after poll, this year, when asked about various sick things Trump has done, a redoubt of “no opinion” or “don’t know” shows up at 10 to 15 percent every time. The 10 or 15 percent don’t know what they think about tariffs. They don’t know what they think about legal or illegal immigration. Inflation? They don’t know. Support for Palestine? They have no opinion. And so on through the litany of hot button issues. Or even soft button ones: for instance, do you like Taylor Swift?

Me, I am made for opinion, body and soul. Alas. If you shoot me in the leg, I would immediately register a strong against. But I dream of the don’t knows, the no opinions. I see them as a heavenly choir, a throng of Zen like illuminati, going through massacre and storm with the detachment of veteran boddhisatvis.

I have not checked the Amazon rankings, but I suspect this category in the polls are avid readers of Sextus Empiricus. And return, daily, to the Chrysippus section of Diogenes Laertes.

“And in the second book of his On the Means of Livelihood, where he professes to be considering a priori how the wise man is to get his living, occur the words : " And yet what reason is there that he should provide a living ? For if it be to support life, life itself is after all a thing indifferent. If it be for pleasure, pleasure too is a thing indifferent. While if it be for virtue, virtue in itself is sufficient to constitute happiness. The modes of getting a livelihood arc also ludicrous, as e.g. maintenance by a king ; for he will have to be humoured : or by friends ; for friendship will then be purchasable for money : or living by wisdom ; for so wisdom will become mercenary.''

I want to have this serenity – the serenity of air on a nice spring day, in the countryside. Air, not bothering anything, air, which if it comes at the picnicker as a breeze is the pleasantest and most inoffensive of breezes.  That at least 15 percent of the American population can remain in Pyrrhonic contemplation of being and nothingness I find astonishing – and heartening. This is what Diogenes Laertes said about our man Pyrrho:

“And so, universally, he held that there is nothing really existent, but custom and convention govern human action; for no single thing is in itself any more this than that. He led a life consistent with this doctrine, going out of his way for nothing, taking no precaution, but fa­cing all risks as they came, whether carts, precipices, dogs or what not, and, generally, leaving nothing to the arbitrament of the senses; but he was kept out of harm's way by his friends who, as Antigonus of Carystus tells us, used to follow close after him. But Aenesidemus says that it was only his philosophy that was based upon suspension of judgement, and that he did not lack foresight in his everyday acts. He lived to be nearly ninety.”

It is certainly in Pyrrho’s spirit that the facts of his life are construed in this account one way by one and in a completely opposite way by another. Diogenes Laertes himself gives no opinion. My opinion, which wraps around me the way a smelly neckerchief wraps around the neck of a homeless man out on his night rounds, is that Pyrrho was right – ignore dogs, precipices and speeding cars and go on your way. Just go. But I can’t follow the better, Pyrrhonic angels of my nature. I just can’t.