On Pushing for Controversial Ideas, Even If You Don’t (Fully) Believe in Them
A Millian Rationale
I consider myself a contrarian. I generally like to take unpopular stances and defend viewpoints that go against the received view. More significantly, like many contrarians, the views I’m prone to defending may vary depending on who are my interlocutors. While I will tend to point out that equality should not be seen as an overarching value and that the rise of economic inequalities is not per se a problem when addressing people with strong egalitarian commitments, I may easily switch to a more egalitarian mode when interacting with conservatives or libertarians. This is true for many topics – with nonetheless significant exceptions.
There is nothing exceptional in the fact of going against the current. The institutions of open societies tolerate and even facilitate the diversity of viewpoints. Even if on any given issue there is a dominant view, the chances are great that there exist one or several significant minority opinions. Mechanically, each person has a non-negligible probability of being on the minority side for a relatively large range of issues. Contrarians happen to be more often on the minority side than what should statistically be expected not only because they have developed (or have an innate) a “sense of contradiction”. It’s also probably related to the fact that they are taking more time to learn things on many topics, and so are more able to discern weaknesses in the standard arguments supporting the received view.
Contrarians have an obvious and natural function in “open societies”. They largely contribute to fueling the market of ideas with new “products”. While they may be wrong most of the time, they sustain the social and evolutionary dynamic through which the “best” ideas are selected by introducing the needed variety. An analogy can be made here with the role of speculative traders in financial markets. The latter are often accused, because of their speculating behavior, of creating instability and causing financial crises. But things are more complicated. In normal times – i.e., when a financial bubble is not underway – speculative traders contribute to the stabilization of the market prices by ensuring that all expectations are not converging. Speculative behavior in financial markets maintains the required diversity of expectations to avoid the kind of convergence that is precisely constitutive of any financial bubble. Contrarians play a similar role in the market of ideas. They go against the dominant views, while not necessarily agreeing between them. They make sure that human societies do not get caught in some “epistemic trap” where everyone happens to converge toward the same false beliefs.[1]
An objection can be made against the claim that contrarians generate a social value, at least regarding the subspecies of contrarians who are prone to defend slightly or even sometimes significantly different views on the same topic depending with who they interact – let’s call them deceiving contrarians. These contrarians can be accused of hypocrisy and of disturbing the social dynamic through which ideas are selected. They create some kind of noise that makes it more difficult to assert what is true from what is false. The point is that contrarians in general, and these “deceiving contrarians” in particular, can let themselves to this kind of behavior only because they don’t pay any cost for that. They are like the voter at a democratic election whose vote has no marginal effect. They have no incentive to defend what they truly believe to be true. Like the “rationally irrational” voter who ends up casting ballots based on prejudices or emotions, the deceiving contrarian promulgates ideas they don’t believe in just for the sake of bringing the contradiction. The effect is even more adverse in the deliberative context of the market of ideas than in the purely aggregative context of democratic elections. At least for public discussions, we may require that some sort of “principle of sincerity” applies: if you want to publicly justify some proposition P to someone else, you should not appeal to a reason that you don’t sincerely think is valid.[2]
Whether or not you accept this sincerity principle, I want to sketch a brief rejoinder for the deceiving contrarian. It is John Stuart Mill who may help us to understand why even this kind of contrarians generates social value. In his essay On Liberty, Mill argues for a very demanding conception of knowledge and understanding. According to this conception, to know and to understand something require “learning the grounds of one’s opinions”.[3] In particular, to understand an idea is to be able to defend it against the most common objections. Mill writes
“He who knows only of his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know as they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough to hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost of them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.”[4]
For Mill, to know is to have a deep understanding of ideas that makes one able to “encounter and dispose of” the difficulties that even a true view has to face. This quote makes it clear why in Mill’s view, we need contrarians… but not deceiving contrarians as Mill seems to appeal to the same sincerity principle as above. But as far as the contribution of contrarians in terms of social utility is concerned, it’s unclear why this requirement is needed. What matters is that the deceiving contrarian is able to trigger in others the sentiment that they need to dig deeper into their understanding of what they take for granted. Beyond that, deceiving contrarians help us to realize the limits of our knowledge, making it transparent that sometimes our beliefs are not properly grounded. Somehow counterintuitively, deceiving contrarians foster epistemic humility in a population.
Obviously, a society only made of deceiving contrarians, or even contrarians in general, could not function. It is also true that a principle of minimal sincerity must apply, as otherwise ideas themselves would become meaningless – the perversion of contrarianism is Frankfurt’s bullshiter who has no concern for truth. But I think there is a case for acknowledging the social usefulness of pushing for controversial ideas – as for instance epistocracy, longtermism… or deceiving contrarianism – even when one does not fully believe in them.
[1] Another parallel can be made with the idea of “value plasticity that William McAskill largely discusses in his book What We Owe the Future. As I said in my review of the book, this is one of the most interesting points it makes, even though its use in the context of longtermism probably leads to insurmountable difficulties.
[2] This is suggested for instance by Gerald Gaus in his epistemological theory of liberal justification, see Justificatory Liberalism (OUP, 1996), pp. 139-41. Gaus then argues that this sincerity principle is actually too strong.
[3] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and Other Essays (OUP, 2013), p. 36).
[4] Ibid., p. 37.