The Place of the Contrarian

It is not always a bad idea to be against things. A certain critical spirit, a skeptical spirit is needed in every time, especially in a time of social pressure to conform. (Though my use of "skeptic" is not to be confused with the way the so-called New Atheists and some humanists use the word Skeptic-as a kind of code for the privileging of their form of natural scientific inquiry over other kinds of inquiry). Since this blog continues to be titled "the moderate contrarian" I had thought it timely, considering my absence here of about three months, to revisit and rethink what it means to be in opposition or against something.

There are (relatively) few things in life that admit of requisite assent and conformity. That Hitler is evil and Shakespeare is good are verdicts with which only the ethically insane or aesthetically blind would wish or dare to argue against. Then there are scientific facts and laws which have an approximate correspondence with physical reality is something that anybody in air travel with a modicum of faith should be expected to hold, even if not entirely understand (as the pilot does).

In truth, such matters of universal consensus are far fewer than we would like or expect. One does not wish to oppose as a game or philosophic tic. This is not what is meant by contrarian. Being contrarian is not a spirit of wanting to lord it over one's fellows or to be in opposition for the psychological thrill of it. Rather, being contrarian has something to do with the fact that most matters of great and small importance are unsettled, inspire intractable and continual argument and the majority of people in any given time or place, once they reach a consensus. are usually wrong about the matters in question.

Being contrarian also has something to do with liberty and independence. It is simply part of being a human being of integrity. The highest figure in  modern history for speaking of the spirit I have in mind is, of course, Immanuel Kant, especially in his What Is Enlightenment.

He could not have put it more plainly. Dare to use your own reason (understanding). This has consequences that do not sit well in our current epoch. In our current epoch there is a love and preference for group identitiy. Community and neighborhood are seen as superior virtues or at least catchy buzzwords. Conversely, the individual is usually seen as vice: a sign of egotism or selfishness. This is a mere fashion, perhaps born of an overpopulated world where each individual is force to count for so little, or where humans are inculcated early on, vis a vis the complex ties of family obligation and loyalty, into the preference for the group.

But it is a fashion nevertheless and it is a fashion against which we should be armed. Though I use the word fashion it is a remnant of the very oldest human societies - traditional societies that are much more collective in spirit. Nevertheless I use the word fashion because our longing for some kind of return to such a state of affairs, an uncritical return, is a fashion masked as the normative. It is even more problematic and confusing that when the individual makes its appearance on the current stage it is in pathological and indeed sinister forms: the Ayn Rand cult of capitalist domination, to name but one example. When I praise the individual as golden I am thinking not of these deformed and quite contemporary examples. It is important to recognize that contemporary Libertarians, however much lip service they pay to individual liberty end up, however inadvertently, creating a bondage and slavish devotion to "great men and women" to heroic business entrepreneurs, for example, even to the point where society as a whole is forced to give over huge amounts of wealth and attention to such exalted figures, even if the result means poverty for a great many people.

 When I speak of the individual I mean the conscience and inner life of an individual, which is priceless and sacred: the individual as understood by the the Enlightenment Philosophers, by the early political theorists of Democracy and literary artists of Democracy such as Whitman and Emerson, and by the great Romantic thinkers such as Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche and by an attitude exhibited in Kant's great essay.

When Kant enjoins us to use our own reason who is the person in question? What can and does he mean? It is the individual human being. He is speaking to a single reader of his essay; he is not speaking, as would Marx a century later, to a group identity to be mobilized in the name of some progressivist cause. It is not the nation, or tribe/blood, or precious identity. It is not even one's own family, and, most controversially for traditional religionists, it is not even one's own experience with the the commandments of a personal God. The process of interiority for Kant must be so independent as to  ignore even that obligation to the highest authority, if that highest authority is in violation of moral law or aesthetic preference, if such authority  doesn't feel right or violates one's sense of autonomy in reasoning. If the vibes are bad. Daring to use your own reason is quite simply living out the fullest potential of being a self, in its independence. The independence to make up one's own mind. Yes, we live embedded in society and we come in a context, but Kant urges to be as free as is possible from such influences.

The question of how to honor both self and community is far from settled and George Kateb stands practically alone among contemporary philosophers is critiquing group conceptions.

An important caveat about freedom: freedom is really only one good among many. It is never the sole nor even primary good. Liberty must be tempered by many other social matters, especially safety; safety being a value that is under theorized and ill considered outside of criminological circles. Yes freedom is a necessity and a precondition but far from sufficient. Much of the evil in the world has been committed because someone had the freedom or was enabled to have the freedom to commit the evil. This is why, protestations of certain anti-government Anarchists notwithstanding, we need things like courts and police forces. This does not make freedom the problem as authoritarian conservatives might argue. Freedom as I use it here merely means the absence of forces preventing any person from acting. The problem here is an infantile or juvenile conception of freedom whereby freedom is the only value that matters. Lots of things matter, not any single thing.  We need freedom but we also need security and safety, for example, to name two often contrasting and conflicting value claims. And in large part, I think the debate between political Left and political Right is not a debate between good guys and bad guys but between those that perhaps overemphasize freedom (the economic Libertarians) versus those that overemphasize equality (the Marxists and Anarchists). Too much freedom, and you get the rapacity and savagery of our economic inequality of the U.S. over the past thirty years. Too little freedom and forced (though imperfect) equality, and you get the Soviet Union for its entire duration. I call my blog the moderate contrarian for a reason. I don't think that you can or should be a moderate in all things but moderation is a safe and good starting assumption with which to begin and, as Hegel remarked, we must after all eventually begin and start somewhere. Moderation is a better starting point than the alternatives. If needed we can rise in our passions and even become excessive, but in special cases and on rare occasions. I take moderation to be the antidote to and antonym of fanaticism.

Karl Popper noted that Kant, though a fan of revolutionary political activity, was concerned about fanaticism:

"It was Robespierre's rule of terror that taught Kant, who had welcomed the French Revolution, that the most heinous crimes can be committed in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity: crimes just as heinous as those committed in the name of Christianity during the Crusades, in various epochs of witch hunting, and during the Thirty Years' War. And with Kant we may learn a lesson from the terror of the French Revolution, a lesson that cannot be repeated too often: that fanaticism is always evil and incompatible with the aim of a pluralist society, and that it is our duty to oppose it in any form-even when its aims, though fanatically pursued, are themselves ethically unobjectionable, and still more so when its aims coincide with our personal aims".

Current social media makes independence of thought and spirit more endangered than it ever was in the conformist nineteen-fifties. One of the major reasons is that the internet is a project of the group mind or the hive: it is all group identity all the way down. Liberals talk to only other liberals and conservatives talk to only other conservatives. Groups of people ride waves of instantly felt and instantly shared enthusiasms as well as shared hates. Current social media is like mirror neurons on steroids. One of the results, if it is not already happening, is that all sorts of new politically correct consensuses will form on a variety of hot button and moral issues. The problem is, what if the consensus is actually wrong? Or what if an individual human being cannot feel or see his or herself in the new shared norm? Or what if the consensus is hysterically overwrought? Or reductionist? And last but not least, what if the facts are hard to find and without definitive authority?  In a sense and in short, without the contrarians, without those that dare to challenge  beloved and agreed upon norms and mores, we will be in great trouble.

Being a contrarian in my personal behavior might mean refusing current fashions in areas of speech as well. I refuse the current vernacular. For example you will never hear me say awesome about anything. I might call things good and bad or say I love something instead. Neither will I say "no worries" in an awkward moment. I want to resurrect the seventeenth century use of the word disinterestedness, not in its current (and, interestingly, original) form as a synonym for uninterested.

It is important to be suspicious of anything that is greatly popular however entertaining it may feel. Why? Well it is one way of maintaining individuality and independence; it is also a way of taking the longer and larger view. Yes Breaking Bad is perhaps well acted and written but to read people's responses to it you'd think it was as good as or better than a Chekhov play! Larry David (who does deserve the praise he has been given) called his show Curb Your Enthusiasm for a reason. It was his way, I think, of asking us all to be less credulous and more, well, contrarian.

That is all I have to say after my long absence, I revisited a larger theme and now it will be time to discuss what really matters: 1970s music and films, Jazz, jazz, and more jazz, funky music, European classical music, and Chantal Akerman's News From Home, and many other delights. For, my oppositional tendencies notwithstanding, I always prefer to praise than to blame and to celebrate and understand than to merely critique.

Still from Chantal Akerman, News From Home

A Note on Freedom

The act and art of improvisation consists chiefly in the exertion of one's power and will - I should say profoundly caused and overdetermined power and will - towards a creative object, by which a certain expression is given a mediated and representational form. In improvisations proper, the gust of spirit results in an object in which the process of creation is not revised or altered outside of the flow of time, say, in acts of spelling and grammar correction, or in acts of editing ostensibly unnecessary parts.

Freedom, or liberty in John Stuart Mill's meaning of the latter, is precisely such an act of improvisation. It is important to say in what this improvisation consists.

By Freedom I actually do mean license. I mean the ability to do something, not the "right thing". I don't mean the ability to accomplish or will the good. Still less do I mean the ability to flourish. All too many of us confuse freedom with social justice or with the Good in an Aristotelian or fundamentalist sense. Freedom never means the freedom to eat healthily or the ability to be kind, or at least the freedom from being coerced to be unkind. Freedom could just as easily mean the freedom to shoot heroin or devour Big Macs. The important thing about Freedom is that it is an act that emanates from the sense of an I that experiences the world, and, in turn, wants to express outwardly what has been experienced internally. If part of that Freedom resides in unhealthy and unwise conformity, that is the risk each of us takes if we are to be in any meaningful and substantive sense Free.

What is most important about any of us is that we have experiences. By experience I do not mean the ability to feel pain or pleasure or to experience aversion or attraction. Our humanity makes us more than those basic reflexes. By experience I mean the totality of all of our sensations and thoughts such that we have a sense of being an I, of being a self. Some of us will make a narrative out of a sense of an I; we will make story and myth out of all of our sensations. Others will not find the need to make a story; the sense of a coherent unity is sufficient.

When we express ourselves in the flow of time we are improvising rather than planning. Humans need to do both, but none of us can say in what proportion in what measure. Those that are the planners and those that are the spontaneous shall forever be at war. And that is as it should be. It is in the act of improvisation that the essence of Freedom is most palpable. The most calculating creature among us has to eventually act in the moment and in that moment will, in spite of all wishes and desires to the contrary, be freely expressing something of the self.

Looked at in this way Freedom will always be the most unpopular and inconvenient of things. It has such great risk to it; it almost insures a certain measure of false starts, of wasted time. Freedom might mean destruction of self and others!

We have only to consider the alternative which is a mechanistic or unfree life. Such a life can be an unqualified success. It could be very smooth and convenient. Yet it would not honor the most unique part of our humanity which is the improvised sense of being experiencing and creating beings.

If there ever comes a time when, in the interest of the overall Good, or survival itself, we have to surrender Freedom in the sense I have identified it, I suggest that we be honest about such surrender. I suggest we go through a grieving period for Freedom. I suggest we honestly say we are giving  up a great good, one of the greatest goods, but that, for reasons of emergency or human disaster, we must become more administered so that we may survive. But I should pray we don't lie about such an unfortunate situation and redefine such an extreme abandoment of democracy as Freedom itself. It would not be Freedom but rather some other value like survival or even the greater welfare.

Freedom is truly its own value and is so often at odds with other values with which it is confused and misidentified.

I have no idea if we will have to sacrifice some of our Freedom in the sense of a "long emergency".

If we do give up this sense of Freedom, in daily life, then, as a compensatory move, we will be forced to give over even ever more reign to artistic creation.

We will have to, in a sense, find the space and time to improvise some jazz choruses. We would do well to have some good raw material. Johnny Green's Body and Soul would be a better starting point than most of the songs written in the past forty years. Yet if we lost all of the information from the pre-1960s era and had only Lady Gaga's Bad Romance as an artifact of the past, we would have to nevertheless try and play an improvised solo on Bad Romance the way The Bad Plus or Keith Jarrett would, with that kind of artistic commitment and integrity. And it would have to be improvised and in the fullness and stream of our time and experience as it is lived.

For we can never go back to a thoroughly unfree life: a life dictated by church, or king, and now, alas, market. Not even family is immune from criticism. For we humans have experienced the development of Freedom and it is unlikely we will want to relinquish what is so integral a part of our humanity.

A Personal Declaration of Independence

On this long weekend of the July fourth, I hereby declare my own independence. I hold to an independence from all that is systematized in our daily lives, to all narrowing of possibility and stunting of imagination.

Through an act of will, however unfree that will may in actuality be, I wish an independence from any creed, doctrine or guru that would have us be in any way finished, finalized, understood and explained. I recognize that such explanation explains away.

There are many facts to be said about us, and our structures and institutions might hold necessity, in much the same way as a flower needs soil in which to grow and flourish. But this necessity does not give any of us the justification to forget our inner conscience or real nature. At every moment of life we must take an inventory of these structures and ask if they are good for us, or just so much convenience and habit. This sense of being that resides in all of us, from the most abject to the most elevated among us, always holds great promises and powers. One has only to listen, but what if it were only that easy! What will be heard is different for every human being yet nevertheless is the only way to know how or where to turn, and most importantly, why. Any compromise of the truths to be found in that place of being ends in some kind of ruination. If we coast along in ignorance of the truth in question we may be happy half of the time, and we may even find a degree of comfort, but we will be only half alive to this world.

And we must ask ourselves if an alleged necessity is right by our nature. It will be very different and vary from one to the next. A scholar who tends to their garden knows it is not right for their constitution to be in an after hours club in town. But someone whose heart is in the bustle of that club and is invigorated and fortified by the electricity of the human connections to be found there does not belong on the farm or even in the study holding the world’s greatest wisdom. What would be noisome and empty to the scholar, is, for the partygoer, a living human comedy with vibrancy, with all of its glories and all of its flaws. Somehow, by each following their nature, in the apparent chaos that ensues, some measure of harmony will be achieved.

I remember some time back in the early nineties when I was discussing with an anarchist friend the dissolution of the old Soviet empire and its replacement by independent and sovereign states based on tradition and group identities with shared history. Although nobody in their right mind would have been sorry to see that awful empire fall I was suspicious and confused about the prospect of all of these new nations and histories to take into account. It seemed like a great deal of trouble to me. Moreover I wasn’t sure independence wouldn’t form new tensions and excessive tribal pride. My anarchist friend was only happy about the turn of events. As he succinctly put it: “I think everybody should get out of everything.”

Everybody should get out of everything. John was surely unto something. It is not merely that as a nation we are entangled in a barbaric war as wasteful of spirit and body as much as purse. It is not only that each of us, as a result of having made a bargain for temporary security, is mired in a complex interdependent system whose success threatens our very survival.

The problem lies rather in the province of ontology. As never before in human history, with the likely exception of the medieval period in the West, we are constantly told, by way of mass communications of all kinds, who we are, what we are, and what we are meant to do about it.

We are told of how every gesture we make and every though we think is incredibly important, of what evolutionary purpose all of our vanity has served. The lowest habit of the most abject, pitiful creature and the highest reach of the most elevated Samaritan are flattened onto the same plane and analyzed and explained to us in the most banal of terms: perhaps as positive and negative sides of a single coin.

One time, not so very long ago, we were told who we were on the recommendation of arcane, incongruous, and improbable texts believed to be penned by a god. Now we are told who we are in the form of brute facts, with which nobody dares to argue on risk of being though delusional or worse. That what we are told now is demonstrable or true is scarcely an improvement. The net effect serves only to limit human possibility, all the more so, since today’s map of the human has that blunt force of fact in its favor. Never before have we been so systematized and. It is little wonder, then, that leading research neuroscientists seriously consider the possibility that robots or machines that resemble us in every way from the outside would ipso facto be indistinguishable from us on the inside, since the private experience inside of our skulls that each of us lives all of our lifelong days is thought to be unreliable at best or literally an illusion at worst.

Doubtless, we can all appreciate the pleasures of certain knowledge. Much like that which can be gleamed from a PBS science special or the daily act of reading the morning paper, there are things about us which can be understood and quantified. There is more to us than that, however. That this something more, has been the cause of much religious nonsense and fanaticism is most unfortunate, as it is no cause for denying the obvious.

But that sense of our own existence - call it consciousness if you will - is the one thing of whose existence we can be sure. Ironically, the very thing thought in certain respectable quarters to be utterly unreal - because they are out of reach of the third person, objective view - turns out to be all that, in the end, we have. Descartes had a real sense of this insight in his “I think; therefore, I am” quote. One might reverse this formulation. At first we are. There is being. There is something prior to thought, whether that thought be discursive or transcendental in nature. That something has no proper name, brooks no easy explanation and is slippery when one attempts to grasp it. Yet each of us knows it and knows further that “it” is the only thing to which we can turn to remedy any problem. It is intensely personal and unique yet has universal import. In my more elegiac moments I might call it love. Fear has no place here; indeed, it is stronger than any clumsy caution we might feel to be necessary. That is why we can escape any systems laid out for us. We can surprise ourselves and others. We are but works in progress and it is work never done.