“THE CONTRARIAN DOGMA IS SIMPLE AND easy to understand,” Christopher Hitchens once proclaimed. “Whatever is popular is wrong.” That lofty dismissal of common taste wasn’t his own — it was first said by Oscar Wilde in 1883 to art students during a lecture extolling aestheticism, or art for art’s sake. “Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art,” Wilde claimed.
Despite the pleasure Hitchens frequently took in verbal combat, he wasn’t endorsing contrarianism uncritically. As a conclusion Wilde’s statement was “questionable”, he said; “but as a mindset, it’s not bad”. This is a nice distinction between contrarianism as a principle and contrarianism as an attitude. The former risks degenerating into a niche form of tribalism. The latter can develop into something much more interesting:
