Meta-Meta-Meta-Contrarian Woke

Iterated thesis → antithesis → synthesis ⚖️

Rainbow Obstacle (“Hindernis Regenbogen”) by Moriz Jung (1911)

Contrarianism is when you purposefully adopt or defend an opinion that goes against what the majority thinks. For example, most people used to think that smoking wasn’t particularly unhealthy. A contrarian might say, “hey, you know what, I think smoking is bad, actually.” Which is good because it’s the correct position, and has grown into the majority opinion today. Thus contrarianism is valuable: even though it’s probably more often wrong than not, and can definitely be super annoying when people make it a core part of their identity, it’s good that some people are willing to be contrarians and avoid herd mentality.

Meta-contrarianism is when you loop back to the original opinion, but after having seriously considered or even held the contrarian opinion, or while being part of a community that broadly accepts it. In the smoking example, a meta-contrarian might say “hey, actually, what if smoking was good because of the little-considered fact that it reduces obesity rates?” This is just plain contrarian today, but would have been meta-contrarian when “smoking is bad” was itself contrarian. It’s called meta because it’s contrarianism that applies to contrarianism.

Bringing back this drawing of mine from the most popular post of the early era of this blog, because the IQ bell curve meme (or the wisdom bell curve meme in this version) is a similar, though not exactly identical, way of expressing the idea of meta-contrarianism.

Contrarianism and meta-contrarianism are a useful lens to understand social discourse. But why stop there? There’s no reason you can’t be contrarian about a meta-contrarian opinion. Meta-meta-contrarian. (“I agree that smoking keeps people lean and that’s good, but it’s it’s definitely not sufficient to offset the terrible damage to lungs!”) Or meta-meta-meta-contrarian. (“The effect on lungs is certainly bad for older people, but young healthy people can repair lung damage easily and would benefit more from not becoming obese.”)¹ And so on.

Let’s call this general idea (meta-)*contrarianism, pronounced “meta-star-contrarianism,” where the asterisk means, in the fashion of computer regular expressions, some arbitrary number of repetitions of “meta-”.

If you’re someone who holds opinions lightly, you probably experience a personal version of (meta-)*contrarianism quite often. It’s basically the same as learning new facts and updating your views. Unless you have decided to be dogmatic about something, it’s totally normal to flip-flop between two positions repeatedly as new information comes in. In fact the bad reputation of flip-flopping is undeserved; I suspect it comes from the (often wrong) assumption that all relevant information is already known by the person you criticize for changing their mind.

In other words, if someone believes A and then B and then A again, that seems suspicious if there’s no sign that they learned anything: they might be flip-flopping only to score popularity points. But if the second A is actually A’, a slightly different version of A that is changed from having genuinely believed B for a while, then that’s good. An iterated process, i.e.

\(A → B → A’ → B’ → A’’ → B'' → …\)

is even better. Whichever of the two “sides” ends up being right, we can reasonably expect A’’ and B’’ to be higher quality positions than their A and B counterparts.

In fact, when the process is done well, A’’ and B’’ don’t even closely resemble A and B. To put it in Hegelian dialectic terms — thesis, antithesis, synthesis — A’’ and B’’ are syntheses of what came before, in addition to being one another’s antithesis. They remain distinct because, for complex questions, we can usually distinguish two sides. But the two sides evolve over time, the way that two political parties in 2024 may have very different positions and focus than the two same parties in 1974.

And speaking of political parties — let’s talk about (meta-)*contrarianism at the scale of societies. While it’s a common and normal process in individuals and small groups or subcultures, it is rather harder to see in politics. Information that is new for society as a whole comes in more rarely, driven by the relatively slow march of the sciences (including the social sciences like economics). At the same time, there are legions of political activists trying to change the beliefs of society in what often looks more like a tribal struggle than a scientific quest for truth.

Thus, when a society does undergo a political or cultural change, especially one that looks like going back to something — such as the orange party winning back power after 8 years of purple party rule, or the resurgence of a particular point in social discourse — it can feel more like a meaningless pendulum swing than the healthy learning process of (meta-)*contrarianism.

This is often a mistake. Social progress is real, and seldom fully reversed when an opposing political faction takes power. When policies and cultural norms do get reversed, the outcome is almost never that similar to the earlier version: it’s some sort of synthesis that differs from both the thesis and antithesis. And that’s good! The defining property of (meta-)*contrarianism is that there is important learning at every step. An imperfect reversal of previous policy means a better adjustment to what people truly want.

That’s almost always better than deciding that B is the correct position, never deviating from it, and just hoping that the pendulum swings back from the currently dominant A sometime soon. Or, worse, working to swing it back to B without acknowledging the good parts of A.

As a dangerous but illustrative example, this is how I feel about wokeness.

To the extent that it is a real and coherent thing, wokeness emerged as a movement to bring social justice to historically marginalized groups. Women, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities. (All of these followed different trajectories, but for the purpose of discussion it’s reasonable to compress all their histories into a general phenomenon called “wokeness.”) At some point it was contrarian to be in favor of equal rights for women/minorities/gays/trans/etc. Then that contrarian position became the majority opinion. Today, since everything is a slippery non-slope, wokeness is more and more perceived to have caused some excesses, and we’re witnessing the rise to the mainstream of what could be considered the meta-contrarian position: that wokeness is bad and should be fought against.

(The very existence of the term “wokeness,” which is typically used pejoratively, is part of this meta-contrarian reaction.)

In many ways, it’s healthy that there is a reaction against the worst of wokeness. I won’t get into the details, but it should be easy for most readers to think of certain excesses of social justice. Coming from a (classical) liberal standpoint, a lot of woke points have clearly veered into illiberalism: less freedom of opinion, less space for doubt and criticism in certain milieux than might be expected of a fully liberal environment. It’s good to react against that.

The problem is that in the brouhaha of culture war, it’s difficult to distinguish healthy meta-contrarianism from tribal struggle. If you spend time reading any of the anti-woke writers and influencers out there, it feels much less like thoughtful people trying to construct a useful synthesis of the past couple decades, and much more like political activists desperately trying to hurl the pendulum back to their side.

The truth is, a lot of wokeness is actually great. Much of it is about making society more liberal: it creates more freedom to women, ethnic and sexual minorities, etc. to live the lives they want to live. This is really good, and we should be meta-contrarian against that insofar as it’s about fighting the inevitable illiberal excesses that come from any social change. But most of the actual meta-contrarianism is bad, which means that the correct position is to be meta-meta-contrarian. Be against the cringe anti-woke people, because their criticisms of wokeness are simply not good enough. Which means being in favor of wokeness, but only sort of. It means being in favor of A’’ instead of the original A. Being for 95% of it, but consider it worth fighting the remaining 5%.

I’m voluntarily remaining vague and abstract to avoid burning myself off the flames of culture war,² but one can imagine that such a concrete meta-meta-contrarian position would have flaws, too. So it’s reasonable to be meta-meta-meta-contrarian. And so on to fully generalized (meta-)*contrarianism. Do this enough, and all your positions end up to be complex syntheses of existing political sides; you become an accidental moderate.

And if a society does this enough, it makes moral progress, without trying to illiberally entrench current trends, or equally illiberally prescribe returning to something past.

The Siuru Bird from Estonian National Epic ‘Kalevipoeg’ (design for a carpet), by Oskar Kallis (1915)

1. I read this argument somewhere once but I have no idea if it’s true.

2. This is the sort of topic I generally try to avoid, but I’ve been meaning to take a stand more often in my writing. I was toying with the idea of a paywall for the last part but decided against it. So instead you get this lukewarm take!