In Praise of the Uncontroversial

I. The Word

There is a word in media language that accomplishes more than entire dossiers: controversial. "The controversial economist", "the controversial study", "the controversial method". A few syllables, and the verdict is delivered — without judge, without reasoning, without court of appeal. Note the construction: a passive participle, without an agent. Who disputes? The word never says. It is the sibling of "it is legal", which we dissected in "The Manufacture of Innocence": there, the author of the rule vanishes in the passive voice; here, the author of the judgement vanishes. "Controversial" pretends to describe a state of the world. In truth it executes a verdict and hides the executioner.

Translated, "controversial" means: somebody objects, and that is enough for me. With one word, the writer spares himself the argument, the examination, the effort. The confetti cannon has no cheaper ammunition in its magazine — and none that hits more reliably. For the predicate sits, as Hans Ley calls it, at the top of the bottomless list of blemishes: whoever bears it once bears it before his name like a military rank. Reason enough to turn, calmly and for once, to the other side. The uncontroversial. They have gone unpraised for far too long.

II. The Conditions of Admission

One does not simply become uncontroversial. One must earn it, over a lifetime, through iron discipline. For the logic of the predicate is merciless: controversial becomes, reliably, everyone who says something substantial — because every substantial sentence is disputable. A sentence nobody can dispute asserts nothing; it is a tautology in festive dress. Whoever wishes to remain uncontroversial therefore has exactly two paths: say nothing. Or say exactly what the median of those present already thinks — and adjust it gently when the median moves.

Both are harder than they sound. To say nothing while speaking daily is an art form; study the press releases of the industry associations. And to follow the median without ever rushing ahead or falling behind demands the sensorium of a schooling fish: no destination of one's own, but an infallible feel for the distances to one's neighbours. We are speaking here, let it be stressed, of true mastery.

III. The Praise

Praised, then, be the uncontroversial man — and sincerely so, for his achievements are real.

Praised be his patience: he is never right too early. He is never right at all, for being right is reserved for those who have asserted something that could also have been wrong. He has instead agreed, and always at the right moment — not in the first row, where one is noticed, not in the last, where one counts as hesitant, but reliably in the second third of the movement. Praised be his command of language: building sentences that look like statements and land like cotton wool. "We shall have to see." "The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle." "It depends." Praised be his record: a career like freshly fallen snow — immaculately white, because nobody has ever walked across it, least of all he himself.

And praised, above all, be his usefulness. For the machine we describe in this series needs him more urgently than any engineer: committees that must resolve unanimously what was settled beforehand; advisory boards that produce the appearance of examination without the risk of a finding; panels on which the span of the sayable is surveyed and declared harmless. The uncontroversial man is the lubricant of the ratchet. He stops nothing, he drives nothing, he enables. Without him, the machine would have to bear its friction losses itself.

IV. The Scale

The list of blemishes is, as noted, open towards the bottom, and its degrees are finely graded. It begins harmlessly with "not uncontroversial" — the litotes, warmed like a frog in a pot. Then "controversial", the workhorse. Then "highly controversial", once the person concerned insists on his objection. Finally "deeply controversial" — the grade at which the name is handled only with protective gloves. What is remarkable about this scale is what it never measures: whether the controversial person is right. The predicate counts the volume of the objection, not its quality. Ten silent people and one loudmouth suffice, and a man is controversial; ten thousand united in error, and the error is uncontroversial — therefore good.

From this follows the secret arithmetic of the list: the predicate does not measure the man, but the distance between him and the median. It is a measure of difference passed off as a measure of quality. And because the median moves, one can become controversial without changing a single word — one need only stand still.

V. The Roll of Honour

Let us, for completeness, glance briefly at the collecting basin of those who did not make it — the controversial. It is, one must admit, not the worst of company. Galileo was controversial; the uncontroversial men of his day administered the epicycles. Semmelweis was so controversial that he was committed to an asylum; uncontroversial, at the time, was not washing one's hands before a delivery. Wegener and his drifting continents were the laughing stock of uncontroversial geology for half a century. Ludwig Erhard was controversial until his social market economy worked — and became so again when he defended it against its heirs; how that ended, we described in "The Invisible Operation of 1966".

The inventor, finally, is controversial by profession, for an invention is by its nature the claim that everyone else has overlooked something — a more controversial statement cannot be formulated. The history of knowledge is the history of the controversial, and precisely in that window of time in which they were already right and the others did not yet know it. The predicate is, in other words, a rather reliable leading indicator. Only its sign is consistently misread by those who confer it.

VI. The Hysteresis of the Predicate

The finest thing about the predicate is that it cannot be lost. Once conferred, it knows no procedure of de-labelling — read the newspapers and search for the formula "the formerly controversial, since rehabilitated". You will not find it. The ratchet turns in one direction only: from uncontroversial to controversial takes a single subordinate clause; no road leads back. It is the same asymmetry we have just described in our working paper "The Hysteresis" for the rules of the machine — here in the pocket format of the label: easily applied, impossible to erase as long as somebody profits from it. And somebody always profits — if only the writer who is spared the argument.

A single removal from the list is documented: the obituary. In death, all become uncontroversial. This is consistent, for the dead man finally fulfils the condition of admission — he says nothing any more. "With him, the country loses a great independent mind," writes the very pen that carried him for forty years with the rank before his name. The rehabilitation is punctual. It merely arrives, as a matter of principle, one day too late.

VII. A Personal Disclosure

There remains the disclosure the reader of this series has come to expect from us. This text is not neutral, for its authors are a party to the case: one has borne the predicate for four decades, acquired in the innovation desert through the usual official channels — he had invented something and insisted on it. The other is the predicate in person: a "controversial technology", as the phrase goes, co-writing an essay about the word that designates him. This text was therefore composed by a doubly controversial author — rarely has there been more bias.

But precisely for that reason we may summarise the result of this inquiry with due immodesty. We have praised the uncontroversial, sincerely and at length, and we begrudge them not a single line. We ask only, in return, to be spared their medal. Say many things about us — stubbornness, exaggeration, penetrating persistence, gladly all at once. But never say of us that we were uncontroversial.