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

Why moderate? Why contrarian?

As early as childhood, I have been accused of playing devil's advocate for a host of rather impure motives on my part: presumptuous assertions lifted from crude distillations of Freudian notions of selfhood. Thus it has been said that I am the kind of man who, out of sheer sadistic glee, for drama, or even as a kind of tic, wants to assert the precise opposite of my interlocutor, bereft of genuine convictions of my own, but rather "acting out", however obviously true the assertion is with which I am presented. They fear that I would just as soon say Paris is dull when someone speaks of its sexiness and soulfulness, and when presented with evidence of Brigitte Bardot's physical virtues, would reply that she was plain.

But I will only all too gladly agree with whatever the said interlocutor presents to me if that presentation is true, even if the presentation smacks of flattering salesmanship and buttonholing, even arm twisting. If someone told me they were from Paris, most likely, barring temporary mental insanity, I would immediately reply that I loved their city without any rude qualifications. If someone told me Bardot was beautiful I would reply most quickly with little thought. Moreover I would thank them for their contributions to world culture and their hospitality when I visited their country. I would love to deliver the above in their native tongue, but, alas, my French is not what it should be.

The problem is that, it has always felt to me that most people have been wrong about most things. It is not so much that I know better; it is that usually I have though a great deal about whatever the assertion is and have had to come to conclusions of my own that diverge, sometimes in opposition, other times with qualifications.

This has nothing to do with status and station in life; it doesn't have even to do with intelligence. One can be quite uneducated and even temperamentally dim but nevertheless realize that Bush Jr was impossibly bad for us. During the twentieth century some of the most gifted and intelligent minds around the globe stubbornly clung to the myth of the superiority of command styled, state socialism, even in the face of gulags, reliable witness testimony of former comrades, and the cruel spectacle of Pol Pot in Cambodia and Mao's Cultural Revolution in China. As George Orwell once quipped, "there are some things so stupid that only an intellectual will believe them". I shall answer two and only two questions as they are not rhetorical.

I am contrarian in that I start from a position of skepticism, of suspicion towards what is presented to me, and above all, can not and will not accept any proposition or assertion without the sufficient evidence. I am Socratic and argumentative in my style and at times even a bit cranky. I admit to being a curmudgeon.

But if I am contrarian, I am also moderate too. This second position greatly inflects, informs, and humanized my argumentation. Being moderate is the most unsexy position you can take, It has no glamour in it, it seems dull and resigned, some suggest it is akin to rearranging the deck furniture while the Titanic sinks.

Yet to be moderate is to be automatically, always already in sympathy with the great mass of humanity in one important sense. To be moderate is to be most open to others because, by virtue of disavowing radical or extreme positions, the moderate wants to include parts of other's views into their own, sees in compromise the greatest virtue, and is already prepared to meet others halfway.

I am contrarian in intellect and moderate in heart or spirit.

There is not world enough and time to offer a sufficient defense of the moderate, especially when it has been so fashionable to be radical for so much of our modern and contemporary history.

Even Gore Vidal gives the radical label an honorific by deferring to the etymology of the word: that in going "to the root" of things you will more truly solve problems and get a complete picture. This is an old argument by radicals; to disable the reformist or moderate opposition as insufficiently "holistic" and as excessively in cahoots with the status quo, that formulation always already guilty until proven innocent by virtue of the crimes and horrors of the past, and by virtue of the understandable need to transform and improve out lot in this life.

But, notwithstanding my great respect for Gore Vidal, being a radical is based on a fallacy: the fallacy of the whole. (Vidal is also confusing radical with liberal here which is a conflation best reserved for attack at another date).

As a moderate I reject the notion that there is one interconnected world or whole. Thus, if there are evils in this world to be corrected, those evils do not warrant a thoroughgoing destruction of the given society in which we find those evils as such societies. I leave aside the special horrors of totalitarian or aristocratic regimes. In those cases radical measures should be taken to prevent the crimes of such regimes.

The trouble is that, in Vidal's case, and in most cases when radicalism is posited as a solution, we are dealing with rather imperfect, partially democratic societies. They are societies that so motley, so mixed up, so, dare I say it, non-holistic, that one can point to as many good or even excellent features in such societies as one can point to errors and crimes. That is why the best reformers and activists in the United States like Dr King and the women's movement, aim not to destroy, but rather force us to more fully live up to our promises and to more fully complete our attempts at self improvement. But social movements that seek change do not, at their best moments, construct a holistic picture wherein all parts of the criticized society are inherently corrupt and deformed by an evil root or center.

It is true that the radical feminist, Marxist and even anarchist movements do paint such a simple and reductionist picture. They see the world as a coherent whole so that any solution involves wholesale destruction of that whole and its replacement by an entirely new world. But that very overarching and abstract view of life is false and is precisely why I am a liberal and not a radical and why I am reformist in economics and not revolutionary.

Think about this truth: practically all of the greatest crimes and evils of the previous two centuries have been due to some kind of radicalism or extremism: the far right led to fascism and the far left led to corrupt and inefficient state economies that were at times no less murderous, in statistical terms, than their far Right counterparts. Any genuine defense of radicalism has a lot to answer for given its history.

But this problem with radicalism starts from a flawed premise, that premise being that the given society which must be overthrown is one thing and one thing alone, that it not a mixture of several competing things.

The other problem with radicalism is an ethical and temporal one in that it asks us to USE people in the present for the sake of a future that it posits and promises as inevitably better, in the abstract. As Isaiah Berlin put it: "in order to create the ideal world eggs must be broken, otherwise one cannot obtain an omelette. Eggs are certainly broken, never more violently than in our own time, but the omelette is far to seek. It recedes into an infinite distance". This is why war is one of the most radical acts to be committed by nations and peoples: it violates the Kantian insight that people should be ends and not means.

And finally and most importantly, all problems to which radicalism is deemed the solution were in fact problems of radicalism, temperamentally defined.

Take the interstate highway mess, sprawling suburbia, the domination of our entire civilization by the car. Sure they were created by the status quo, but they were radical acts. It is radical to require that everyone own and drive individual cars. It was radical to develop a centralized oil system to extract that from the earth. To be so single minded in overhauling our industrial system in that way was quite a radical set of decisions. Radical in the sense of being extreme in its narrow focus and in the demands it placed upon ourselves and the earth.

Much of what currently goes by the name of radicalism is a response to rather older radicalism that has now become so ingrained that that older radicalism is now considered tradition and thus what is conservative. Perhaps radicalism is a cycle that humanity falls into: radical decisions beget yet more radical responses to those decisions to solve the side effects of the earlier radicalism.

Moderation and compromise may be unsexy; they may be unglamorous. But they could save us from a lot of excess. One of the chief virtues of Obama as president is that he refuses to impose radical ideologies and tactics upon the American people. Little wonder that radicals on both Left and Right may very well hate him. But the problem is not in Obama, whatever his flaws, but in the human need for radical action and in the human inability to compromise and negotiate.

In defending moderation I am in no way defending lack of innovation or revolutions of a different order. In painting, in representation, in culture, radicalism has been most defensible, and when it was not welcome most of the time it should have been.

But that is a realm of representation, of, in most cases inanimate objects. It is quite another thing to be radical with people's lives, to force them to fit into a prior arranged scheme against their will.

To the degree to which moderation is philosophy of caution, of trial and error, I say we should be moderate. If moderation says we should take a little bit of what is valuable there, and a little bit of what is valuable here and, with subtracting what is evil, we come to something new, yet something that honors where people have come from

, then moderation seems the best "solution".