Short Version: We need to hear them or risk their inevitable proliferation.
Slightly Longer Version: There have been a couple high-profile skirmishes recently concerning what one party claims is another party’s vile opinion. President Obama gave the commencement address at Notre Dame this weekend, and faced head-on some of the Catholic university’s students and faculty who denounced his invitation based on his pro-choice stance. He rightly pointed out that the greater the stakes of passion and argument, the higher the demand for thoughtful and “fair-minded” exposition: “At some level, the views of the two [abortion] camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature.”
And here’s another to-do, this one as journalistic as it is governmental, having to do with a Philadelphia newspaper putting an alleged “war criminal” on the payroll.
For all the merits of the written word, its capacity to deal with the vile opinion ranks among the highest. Nothing crystallizes the bigotry, bias, vitriol, condescension, or just plain wrongness — or, alternatively, the bravery, intelligence, thoughtfulness, passion, and just plain rightness — of an allegedly vile opinion like the charge of putting it down on paper or pixel. As a teacher once told my class, “Thinking doesn’t happen inside the brain. It happens on the page.”
In this mission, literature is singularly equipped. In the space where eloquence and erudition meet, we find our best antidote to ignorance and blindness.