Contrarians in public life

What role, if any, should contrarians play in public life? This is the question posed by the appointment of Sir Roger Scruton as housing tsar despite (or perhaps because of) his unconventional opinions on eugenics, date rape and gay rights.

The issue here is not a left-right one. We could ask the same question of John McDonnell: does his support of the IRA disqualify him from office?

In fact, for me the analogy is a quite close. Both men have valuable ideas. McDonnell’s ideas on fiscal policy and worker ownership are good. And Sir Roger is a rare rightist who can (sometimes) think and write well and who is fascinating for being a conservative whose mind isn’t addled by Brexit or free market simplicities: I’d recommend his books Gentle Regrets and England: an elegy. (Perhaps there’s another parallel; both men’s most deplored utterances are the products of their class, age and environments.)

The case for excluding such men is that the expression of bad ideas itself betokens a lack of judgment. Just because you believe something does not mean it should be said. The ability to shut the fuck up is much to be prized.

But, but, but. Excluding such men doesn’t just risk depriving us of talent. If people know that heterodox ideas will carry heavy costs we’ll end up with men falsifying their preferences – using politically correct language to disguise racist or sexist behaviour: Harvey Weinstein, remember, has been a keen supporter of liberal causes.

What’s more, if we select people for having uniformly orthodox opinions we’ll end up not with office being held by those with phronesis, but by poker-up-the-arse careerists who are too dull or stupid to challenge our managerialist conventional wisdom. One McDonnell or Scruton is worth a dozen of them.

Everybody is irrational about some things. Scruton and McDonnell join the long list of people such as William Shockley, Richard Dawkins, Larry Summers, Vicky Pryce, Bobby Fischer, Glenn Hoddle and James Watson – people of brilliance who also have made some terrible decisions. If you’re looking for people of uniformly sound judgement, you’ll find nobody but crooks, dullards and disappointments. In this context, I'd rather judge people by their best rather than their worst.

And then, of course, there is Mill’s famous point – that we need contrarians, even if they are wrong, to sharpen our perception of the truth:

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Note that the silencing here need not be legal suppression; it could be via the tyranny of the majority, or simply self-censorship.

But again, there’s a but. Contrarians don’t always (or even often) provoke intelligent debate. They can be as tiresomely conformist as the dullest careerist: is there a more predictable writer than Brendan O’Neill?  And what looks like contrarianism is often no more than mindless tribalists whining about political correctness gone mad zzzzz: despite my analogy, how many defenders of Scruton would also defend McDonnell?

If all this sounds inconclusive, that’s because it is. My hunch is that Scruton should not be housing tsar not so much because of his regrettable ideas on some things, but simply because his merits do not extend to especial expertise on housing. This, though, does not solve the underlying questions: how tolerant should we be of otherwise useful people in public life who say things we hate? What is the proper place for those who question society’s flawed conventional wisdom? What, if anything, can we do to get a better and more diverse type of contrarian?

Comments

[ltr]

Roger Scruton, judged by his ideas, is despicable. Filled with despicable prejudice, and to praise and for any Conservative to support the thinking of such a person is shameful.

Yuck.

[D]

A perhaps salient difference between Scruton and McDonnel?

McDonnel is elected - officially as an MP and defacto as an ally of Corbyn. A majority of his constituents want him and a majority of Labour party members want him despite his views on the IRA.

We can't be ruling people out from elected office due to controversial views, but perhaps we might rule them out from being simply appointed?

(I suspect a majority of Tories might be happy with Scruton's various views, but he's not been put to the test and the people appointing him who have been elected wouldn't subscribe to his views publicly...)

[D]

Also, watched the video where he talks about date rape.... I came away with the impression that he doesn't actually know what it means?

[Ralph Musgrave]

The faux outrage on the political left about Scruton is hilarious: eugenics was popular in respectable Guardian reading circles in the 1930s and up to around the mid 1950s.

[Scratch]

"Note that the silencing here need not be legal suppression; it could be via the tyranny of the majority, or simply self-censorship."

Capital plus equally bourgeois and unaccountable bureaucracies appear to be the the preeminent censors de nos jours.

[Brian]

There seems to be a clamour to shut down public proclamations by rabid right wingers like Tommy Robinson, and in the past Nick Griffin. That same impulse has shut down Abu Hamza and earlier Gerry Adams. In a sense these people are all contrarians* when they offer up non-mainstream views. Some think it’s better to have all views on the table, and offence is trumped by the need for freedom of speech. But I suspect the no-platforming clamour arises from the emotions rather than the intellect: off-message views threaten the harmony of the group and therefore the group itself. There might also be an implicit awareness that the expression of contrarian views move the Overton window. Your instinct wouldn’t frame it like that, but it would still prefer that a group’s focus were not displaced. I think Jung might have said something about this: when we “no-platform” holders of opinions we view as bad or dark, we fail to integrate our shadow and therefore we fail to manage it: control your shadow before it controls you, he warned. Better to let the Robinsons, Abu Hamzas and Gerry Adams of this world talk - and manage and wrestle with these demons rather than letting them fester and explode in an uncontrollable Brexity sort of way.

* we often use the word contrarian to refer to people who are part of the establishment but hold views which are non-establishment. Roger Scruton is a contrarian, but we probably would never call Abu Hamza that. A parallel is eccentricity: if you’re rich you’re eccentric, if you’re poor you are mad!

[Dave Timoney]

I disagree that Roger Scruton is a contrarian. Within his own social milieu - shire Tories still resentful of the 60s & 70s - his views on Jews, gays, eugenics and women are pretty much par for the course. A real contrarian is one who seeks to oppose (or at least satirise) conventional wisdom and must therefore risk alienating his own tribe.

Scruton isn't interested in changing public opinion (that would be contrary to his own conservative philosophy), nor is he engaged in social engineering (his views on architecture will focus on elite buildings, not standards for new council houses). As such he is neither a contrarian-entertainer, a la Christopher Hitchens, nor a wind-up grifter targeting the media, a la Tommy Robinson.

I don't admire the man (I think his emotional resentment towards French philosophy betrays the empirical tradition he claims to cherish), but I don't think his opinions are egregious (they're ugly but all too typical). As you note, he is unlikely to bring anything of value to the role, though in his favour he probably wouldn't be as destructively stupid as Toby Young would have been had the latter secured his own government sinecure.

I think you're over-straining in making the parallel with McDonnell's (conditional) support for the IRA. McDonnell came to that position through a lot of thought and debate, rather than just ancestral loyalty, and has never been shy about justifying it. Scruton's habitual prejudices are the product of his milieu, not some lifelong project of philosophical enquiry.

[MJW]

McDonnell and Scruton may be selective, misguided, incorrect or sloppy in their rationale but they at least attempt to operate within a rational framework. The likes of Hamza have no such constraints as their basis is unfalsifiable and infallable faith, which overrides any empirical reality.

However, the palatability of an opinion is no guide to its soundness. The likes of Robinson, Griffin and Hamza exploit sound but unpalatable opinions to prop up the unsound ones and to make unwarranted leaps.

[Borospike]

Does Scruton's support foe eugenics make him a Keynesian?

[Miguel Madeira]

"The faux outrage on the political left about Scruton is hilarious: eugenics was popular in respectable Guardian reading circles in the 1930s and up to around the mid 1950s.

Posted by: Ralph Musgrave | November 09, 2018 at 04:59 PM"

Like it says in the footer of the coment, "November 09, 2018", not " November 09, 1948"

[Alato]

Doesn't the potential to harm matter? There is a difference between someone talking on the street corner and someone making policy for public housing- the later can make the objects of his 'controversial' opinions suffer, on a large scale. My tolerance for no-platforming goes up with the degree to which I expect pain and suffering to come out of the opinion expressed: I would have no problem with someone who did a prime-time national address saying that there IS a best color and it is blue, but I would do my utmost to prevent a Nazi from getting a position of prominence to speak from.