Contrarianism

I was listening this morning to Ethan Strauss defend himself against the charge of being merely a contrarian. "I believe a lot of things that other people believe.  I believe the sky is blue.  I think that people love their children.  I just don't see why anyone would spend money to hear me talk about that."  GK Chesterton was accused of being a contrarian, and to a certain extent this was fair, as he was ever alert for things that were commonly believed but the reverse of the truth. Yet even more, he was alert for ideas that were once widely believed but were now abandoned. He wondered whether the reasoning for the abandonment was any good, and often noted that it is usually easier to trace how an idea came to be discarded - usually recent - as opposed to tracking down how it ever came to be believed - often very remote and obscure.

CS Lewis followed this tendency of GKC's and I took to it immediately when I read him so thoroughly in the 70s and 80s. Lewis had also picked up the similar idea of "chronological snobbery" from Owen Barfield. We are still very much in a culture that believes a new idea is clearly more moral and an old one not only obsolete but regressive.

It was not always so. Three of the four founding British cultures in the American colonies include in their literature explicit rejection of "novel" interpretations of Scripture. Only the Quakers accepted such a possibility, and even they certainly did not extend this openness to all new ideas.