I’m a little confused, what purpose does this distinction serve? That people like to define their opinions as a rebellion against received opinion isn’t novel. What you seem to be saying is: defining yourself against an opinion which is seen as contrarian sends a reliably different social signal to defining yourself against an opinion which is mainstream, is that a fair assessment? Because this only works if there is a singular, visible mainstream, which is obviously available in fashion but rare in the realm of ideas.
Moreover, if order-of-contrariness doesn’t convey information, I can’t see any situation in which one it would be helpful to indicate a positions order, where it wouldn’t be just as easy and far more informative to point out the specific chain of it’s controversy.
In any case I take some issue with a bunch of your example.
Firstly on feminism the obvious mainstream controversy/metacontroversy dynamic for misogyny is between second and third wave feminism in academia, and between “all sex is rape” and “pole dancing is empowering/Madonna is a feminist icon” in the media. Picking an obscure internet phenomenon closer to the starting point is blatant cherry picking.
Similarly the Bad Samaritans/New Development argument has a lot more currency than the aid is the problem one, but again that’s further from both positions. For that matter the same applies to liberterianism and it’s real Laius, socialism.
The number of global warming skeptics who jumped straight from “it’s not happening” to “well we didn’t do it” to “well we can’t do anything about it without doing more harm than good” should also, combined with the overlap in arguments between self identified MRAs and younger misogynists of the “straight white christian men are the most oppressed minority” variety, give us a bit of pause. If there’s any use to identifying meta contrarian positions, it has to be in distinguishing between genuine attempts to correct falsehoods made in overeager argument with the old mainstream, and sophisticated apologetics for previously exploded positions.
On second thought, convincing as I find the Stern report, enough economists argued against reducing carbon emissions on cost-benefit grounds from the beginning that the meta position deserves honest consideration. I’d like to propose instead deism as the canonical example for bad faith apologia in meta-contrarianist drag, and third wave feminism for the honest position. Is this suitably uncontroversial?
I’m a little confused, what purpose does this distinction serve? That people like to define their opinions as a rebellion against received opinion isn’t novel. What you seem to be saying is: defining yourself against an opinion which is seen as contrarian sends a reliably different social signal to defining yourself against an opinion which is mainstream, is that a fair assessment? Because this only works if there is a singular, visible mainstream, which is obviously available in fashion but rare in the realm of ideas.
Moreover, if order-of-contrariness doesn’t convey information, I can’t see any situation in which one it would be helpful to indicate a positions order, where it wouldn’t be just as easy and far more informative to point out the specific chain of it’s controversy.
In any case I take some issue with a bunch of your example.
Firstly on feminism the obvious mainstream controversy/metacontroversy dynamic for misogyny is between second and third wave feminism in academia, and between “all sex is rape” and “pole dancing is empowering/Madonna is a feminist icon” in the media. Picking an obscure internet phenomenon closer to the starting point is blatant cherry picking.
Similarly the Bad Samaritans/New Development argument has a lot more currency than the aid is the problem one, but again that’s further from both positions. For that matter the same applies to liberterianism and it’s real Laius, socialism.
The number of global warming skeptics who jumped straight from “it’s not happening” to “well we didn’t do it” to “well we can’t do anything about it without doing more harm than good” should also, combined with the overlap in arguments between self identified MRAs and younger misogynists of the “straight white christian men are the most oppressed minority” variety, give us a bit of pause. If there’s any use to identifying meta contrarian positions, it has to be in distinguishing between genuine attempts to correct falsehoods made in overeager argument with the old mainstream, and sophisticated apologetics for previously exploded positions.
On second thought, convincing as I find the Stern report, enough economists argued against reducing carbon emissions on cost-benefit grounds from the beginning that the meta position deserves honest consideration. I’d like to propose instead deism as the canonical example for bad faith apologia in meta-contrarianist drag, and third wave feminism for the honest position. Is this suitably uncontroversial?