The Courage of Conviction: When Having Opinions Was a Moral Obligation
Definitive positions as unwise?
The small Illinois town of Ottawa witnessed something remarkable on August 21, 1858. Three thousand people gathered in the public square, many having traveled for hours by wagon and on foot, to watch Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas argue about the expansion of slavery for three uninterrupted hours. No microphones amplified their voices.
No screens displayed their faces. The crowd stood in the summer heat, straining to catch every word of complex constitutional arguments about popular sovereignty and the Dred Scott decision. They came not for entertainment but for the serious business of democracy: watching two men stake their reputations on ideas they believed worth fighting for.
This scene feels almost incomprehensible today. We live in an era where the phrase “everyone is entitled to their opinion” has morphed from a defense of free speech into an excuse for intellectual laziness. The modern citizen scrolls through curated feeds, absorbing pre-digested positions that require no wrestling with contradictions or uncomfortable truths.
We mistake the ability to repeat clever phrases for the hard work of thinking. Where nineteenth century Americans understood opinion formation as a civic duty requiring preparation and courage, we treat it as a consumer choice, selecting viewpoints like items from a menu based on what feels comfortable or makes us appear virtuous to our chosen tribe.
Consider how the culture of the lyceum movement shaped American intellectual life before the Civil War. Towns across the frontier pooled resources to build lecture halls where traveling speakers would present arguments on everything from abolition to women’s suffrage to agricultural science.
These weren’t passive audiences. The expectation was that citizens would engage, challenge, and defend positions. A blacksmith in Springfield was expected to have thoughts on the National Bank.
A schoolteacher in Peoria would be asked her views on westward expansion, and she would be prepared to articulate them, having read the relevant pamphlets and newspaper essays. Having no opinion on matters of public concern was seen as a character flaw, evidence of either laziness or cowardice.
The prairie perspective that shaped this culture understood neutrality as a luxury the republic couldn’t afford. When your nearest neighbor lived miles away and town meetings happened monthly at best, every voice mattered. The farmer who refused to take a position on the railroad coming through wasn’t being tolerant or sophisticated; he was abandoning his neighbors to make decisions without his input.
This wasn’t about being argumentative or contrarian. It was about recognizing that democracy only functions when citizens do the work of citizenship, and that work included the labor of forming judgments based on evidence and principle rather than convenience or social pressure.
Today’s discourse operates on entirely different assumptions. We’ve replaced the ethics of conviction with the aesthetics of openness. A person who says “I can see both sides” is praised for nuance, even when one side might be demonstrably false or morally bankrupt. We’ve confused the genuine tolerance required for pluralistic democracy with an anything goes relativism that treats all positions as equally valid consumer preferences.
The result is a public square where the loudest voice wins not through superior argument but through superior amplification, where complex issues get reduced to binary choices designed for rapid consumption and immediate emotional response.
The Lincoln and Douglas who met seven times across Illinois that summer and fall understood something we’ve forgotten. They knew that having convictions meant accepting consequences. Douglas lost support from Southern Democrats for his position on popular sovereignty.
Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech cost him moderate votes. Both men paid prices for their positions, but they understood this as the cost of political participation. They would have been baffled by our current norm where public figures regularly “evolve” on fundamental issues based on polling data, or where stating definitive positions is seen as strategically unwise.
What we’ve lost in abandoning the expectation of conviction is not just the quality of our arguments but the very muscles required for democratic participation. When we treat all opinions as equally valid regardless of their foundation in evidence or reasoning, we create a marketplace where the cheapest goods drive out quality merchandise.
The citizen who spends months reading primary sources and testing arguments against evidence receives the same hearing as someone who skimmed a headline. Worse, we’ve made careful thinking seem pretentious, as if doing homework before forming an opinion is an act of showing off rather than showing up.
The recovery of conviction as a civic virtue doesn’t mean returning to a past that never fully existed. Those nineteenth century debates excluded women’s voices, silenced Black perspectives, and ignored Indigenous peoples entirely.
But we can learn from the underlying principle: that democracy requires citizens willing to do the difficult work of forming actual positions and defending them with evidence and logic rather than volume and virality.
This means accepting that some opinions are better informed than others, that expertise matters, and that the phrase “I don’t know enough to have an opinion” is sometimes the most honest and honorable position one can take, provided it’s followed by the effort to learn enough to form one.