It’s the biggest and most prevalent lie told on the internet (or anywhere else). I’m not talking about slobs in their mothers’ basements telling MySpace that they’re really teenage beauty queens that drive Ferraris. The letters “IMHO” at the end of a blog post, email or chatroom entry is what I speak of. And it constitutes more than a ubiquitous untruth; those four letters tell the story of a deeper, underlying truth about our society and especially the culture of the web.There’s nothing humble about expressing an opinion. Any opinion truly-held and honestly-expressed bears at its core a kernel of conceit: that *you* think it’s valid. If you didn’t you wouldn’t have bothered writing it down or speaking it aloud, which makes 'humble opinion' an oxymoron of the first order. Because stating any opinion, putting it out where people can read it and respond to it, is an honest expression of your belief in our own critical faculties, in your own intellect. That verbalization is a display of your confidence in the underlying structure of that belief and a ‘bring it on’ to any who would stand in opposition to it. And more power to you.
In law, an opinion is the considered judgment of a judge or panel of judges and has the force of law. The legal model for the term is hardly the most widely-held for by those outside of the legal profession, but even Webster defines an opinion as “a view, judgment, or appraisal formed in the mind about a particular matter” though it notes that it is a belief “(that is) less strong than positive knowledge”. Whatever definition you’re using, having an opinion – or worse *expressing* one – in our current culture is also apparently tantamount to heresy. This is manifest in the tendency to append the phrase “In my humble opinion” (or “IMHO” for short) to the end of every blog entry or chatroom post, especially those which are provocative.
On the internet, this rhetorical fig leaf is used with curious abandon to hide our tender egos from critique and ridicule. Google logs 2.1 million incidences of the phrase in their database alone. A further 30.5 million (30,500,000) hits are accrued by the abbreviation “IMHO”. No sooner is an opinion expressed than the author has immediately disavowed the validity of their argument by appending “IMHO” at the end. And the purity of public discourse suffers because no one owns up to their actual beliefs; that wasn’t their opinion, just a trial balloon held aloft by false humility.
The underlying implication here isn’t that there’s something wrong with being humble, I adore humility, applaud it even (or would if it wouldn't embarrass the truly humble souls out there). The implication is that there’s something wrong with having an opinion in the first place. The ubiquity of the phrase in popular discourse seems to imply that there is something immoral to be found in belief, belief that you are right, belief that you know something someone else doesn’t or that others could learn from you.
Perhaps this is the price we pay for removing the teaching of rhetoric from education; people simply are no longer taught to take a position and hold it. The public political debates we are exposed to generally underline this risk-aversion as candidates struggle to avoid taking sides or standing behind an opinion in the interest of appearing to remain open to opposing viewpoints.
That your opinions are of value to the ongoing debate and worthy of being heard is a conceit of the highest order, not a humble supposition. It’s a fallacy to say that this conceit is an arrogance; that would imply that the originator of the opinion is unwilling or unable to accept a counter-argument so we hide our conceits in a veil of false-humility and pray that no one notices. Equivocation is now encoded in our culture... to our loss.
But that’s just my (allegedly) humble opinion.
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3 comments:
I posit that people reduce their opinions in this way because so much of our current social indoctrination teaches us that we cannot have opinions that have not been handed to us by some "higher power". As a society, we vest so much in the opinions of people who have cameras or microphones shoved in their faces while simultaneously telling everyone else to be "politically correct" that many people no longer think they are safe expressing themselves without caveat.
All of that being said, I wonder if IMHO is a subtle form of rebellion against a world that would have most of us have no opinion at all?
-=DLH=-
OTOH, perhaps the use of "imho" comes from an over-subjectification of everything from movie choices to theologies -- none of which can ever hold the force of "truth" -- which leaves many people, right though they may be, powerless to assert such in the face of postmodernist deconstructivist blah blah blah.
Although I've used the acronymn, IMHO is not something I usually say non-sarcastically. Because, as I tell my students:
"Humility is not one of my many virtues."
If everyone's opinion is valid, then no one's ever wrong... then again no one is ever right either and I find that to be an ultimately untenable system.
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