Relevant but uninteresting personal information: I’m back from a short holiday trip in Rome where I have caught a bad cold. I also have a lot of work pending with an international conference to organize, papers to write (some for this very conference), tasks of associate editor and referee to fulfill, and a couple of other important/urgent things. In a nutshell, I don’t have a lot of time and my usual energy to allocate to this newsletter now. Still, I can’t refrain from the urge to briefly comment on two completely unrelated topics.
The topics I want to briefly address concern on the one hand Alex Garland’s movie Civil War and the many comments that have been made about the fact that the movie doesn’t disclose enough information about the backstory of an American civil war; and, on the other hand, the social value and function of contrarianism, as a follow-up to Matthew Adelstein’s (a.k.a. Bentham’s Bulldog) today essay about losing faith in contrarianism.
So, let’s start with Civil War (warning: some spoilers may follow). It’s probably not worth repeating the general story given the publicity the movie has received but in case you’ve been locked in a Faraday cage for the past two weeks, here are some elements. The movie tells the story of a group of journalists trying to reach Washington to cover an imminent attack of the “Western Forces” (a military coalition between the states of California and Texas) on what is left of the official federal government in the context of a civil war opposing the Western Forces to the military forces of a fascist government whose president has disbanded the FBI and remained in office for a third term. Strictly speaking, Civil War is a (good) road movie taking place within a civil war. But this is not any civil war – it is a U.S. civil war that seems to happen in a country fairly similar to the actual United States of America.
Many commentators have criticized the fact that the movie hardly gives more contextual elements than the ones I have sketched in the previous paragraph. For instance, Ross Douthat observes:
“Some people who dislike the movie — I am one of them — think that the underexplanation is a total cop-out, making civil strife seem like a natural disaster or a zombie apocalypse, when in reality it usually represents the extension of politics by awful but reasonable-seeming means. If you refuse to give those reasons, to explain how exactly the politics of today’s America could yield our own version of 1990s Yugoslavia, you haven’t actually made a movie about an American civil war; you just have war as a generic signifier that happens to have strip malls and subdivisions in the background.”
I think this kind of comment betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the movie is really about. Let’s put it straight: the movie is not about an American civil war. The movie is about journalism and human relationships in the morbid context of some civil war that happens to take place in a fictional U.S.A. To be fair, the way the movie has been sold, including by the actors and the director, put an emphasis on the fact that the story was taking place in America. But this is mostly a marketing trick. I would be willing to bet that the coverage of the movie and its score at the box office would not have been the same had the movie taken place in the context of a civil war in (say) an African country at most one Westerner out of ten is able to place on a map. Whatever we may think of this marketing strategy, the artistic value of the movie lies elsewhere – in its crude and shocking representation of violence (thanks especially to the sound effects), its depiction of the relationship between an experienced photojournalist and a young and initially naïve aspiring journalist, its general take on the ethics of journalism, and so on.
Now, reactions such as Douthat’s to the movie are nonetheless interesting in that they say a lot about us. In his article, Douthat says that he believes that a second American civil war is highly unlikely and, in the current political state of affairs, genuinely fictional. He may be right about this. Still, the fact that he would like to know more about the political context in which the movie is taking place and that it does not rule it out as plain nonsense indicates that something has changed. 20 years ago, a movie like Civil War would have been staged elsewhere because most of us would have otherwise regarded it so implausible that it would not have attracted much attention. Today, this is different. What is true of our relation to history is also true of our relation to fiction: it displays what is captured by the Weberian notion of value relevance. What makes a story interesting and worth telling, is that it displays some values that literally “speak” to the author and the readers. Even in the case of fiction (so a story about a world that is not ours), the story can only have meaning to us if it refers to values that we understand and care about. Hence, we write (and read) fiction in the same way that we write history: by wondering what matters to us as human beings endowed with the ability to value things our world is made of. As it appears, many of us are currently concerned by social stability in the Western world, something that we value even more as we realize that we should not take it for granted.
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Let’s switch now to something completely different. In an interesting essay, Matthew Adelstein explains why he has been losing faith in contrarian writers who like to entertain views that go against mainstream views:
“I could run through more examples but the point should be clear. Whenever I look more into contrarian theories, my credence in them drops dramatically and the case for them falls apart completely. They spread extremely rapidly as long as they have even a few smart, articulate proponents who are willing to write things in support of them. The obsessive autists who have spent 10,000 hours researching the topic and writing boring articles in support of the mainstream position are left ignored.”
Let me make a couple of observations. First, as a matter of probabilistic logic, anytime you read about some genuine contrarian view, you should be skeptical. By definition, contrarians entertain minority views. Without any more information about the particular skills of a specific contrarian or about the issue at stake, the only reasonable prior should be that the contrarian is more likely to be wrong than right. Of course, most of the time we do have more information than that and this may justify that we give a higher credence to contrarian views than we should otherwise. But even in this case, as Matthew rightly notes, we should realize that there is in many contexts (especially in what we were used to call the “blogosphere”) by default a bias for producing and believing in contrarian views, we probably rationally have to discount our credence. Second, I think that Matthew puts too much emphasis on the fact that “extremely intelligent,” “obsessive autistic” persons support the mainstream position. At the cost of looking trivial, what makes a mainstream view more likely to be true is the fact… that it is mainstream. To be fair, this is obviously not true in every circumstance. This is true when we have solid reasons to think that the institutional scaffolding that supports the aggregation of judgments and the deliberation between truth-seekers is such that something like the “wisdom of the crowds” applies. It is indeed very fashionable (largely because it is a contrarian view of its own) to claim that academics are wrong on many things because of misplaced conformism, because of fraud, because of stupidity, or because they don’t “have skin in the game” (to borrow the expression of one of those famous contrarians). Well, as far as the history of science suggests, this is mostly bullshit. The academic mainstream views are rarely completely erroneous. Sure, since the logic of science is to proceed by “conjectures and refutations” (another famous expression from a serious philosopher of science), scientists are always wrong at some point. But episodes of collective blindness are fairly rare and exceptional.
Now, as I’ve argued in an essay written more than a year ago, contrarianism definitely has a social value:
“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.”
As I wrote then, this is a very Millian point that applies even in the case of what I called “deceiving contrarians,” i.e., contrarians who dishonestly entertain contrarian views just for the sake of contradicting the mainstream. Contrarians force those who adhere to mainstream views to reflect on the origins of their beliefs. While most of our beliefs are grounded on nothing but the fact that the majority and/or those who consider the epistemic authorities on a specific issue hold these beliefs, what we absolutely want to avoid is that everybody adheres to some view just by sheer conformism. Mill was clear that to realize personal autonomy it is not enough “to know” what are the orthodox beliefs in a specific issue. The autonomous person” 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.”
Hence, that contrarians are most of the time wrong is neither surprising nor really relevant from the social viewpoint. They perform a healthy function in the open society by forcing us to reflect on the foundations of our beliefs. This is however true only up to a point. Contrarians should remain a small minority and epistemic institutions should be such that their influence remains under control. The last requirement is more and more difficult to fulfill as ways of channeling information and views are multiplying and the credibility and legitimacy of traditional epistemic authorities (the academia, mainstream newspapers) are eroding.
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