Refusing The Quantifiable Reality - Or -The Consequences Of Post Truth Mendacity For Fun & Profit PT. 2
of factual evidence by ideologically motivated groups or individuals.
Whether it's science denial, election denial, reality denial, or history denial
The world is confusing enough without the pollution of disinformation.
Let me clarify in part 2 that we are not talking just about cognitive biases here.
This isn’t a question of the human tendency to pay more attention
to evidence supporting one’s view while attempting to ignore contrary evidence.
Intelligent human beings have the ability to rationalize the discrepancy
between what we want to believe and what the world is like.
These type of issues effect all human beings, and can be accounted for and at the least partially dealt with in the course of normal discussions about whatever it is we disagree about.
Rather, the Oxford dictionary defines a denialist as “a person who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence,”
which represents a whole different level of cognitive bias or bogus rationalizations.
Think of it as bias the size of King Kong on steroids.
What can be done about this civilization ending phenomena?
Sadly, facts may have counterproductive effects, leading the denialist to double down on his belief.
This, of course, should not be taken to mean that the facts don’t matter.
If I want to push the idea that climate change is real, or that evolution is a valid scientific theory, or that the Armenian genocide was indeed a genocide, I better get my facts as straight as possible.
It’s a pure and simple matter of intellectual integrity.
But if I think that simply explaining the facts to the other side is going to change their mind,
then I’m in for a disappointing rude awakening.
In a debate I can make a case against creationism for example,
which can rally my troops (People who already agree with me).
And you may even grab the attention of fence sitters
and others who knew little about the subject matter.
But my reasoned fact based argument will not convince an opponent or any of his/her committed supporters. The only way to do well is to show how the creationists are consciously lying to their audience. No one likes being treated like a fool.
Not even creationists.
What may be even more disturbing than realizing facts don't seem to change the denialist's commitment to their denial is that critical thinking also plays no role.
Teaching about logical fallacies isn’t going to do any better than teaching about scientific facts.
So after suffering defeats for a long time at the hands of a critical thinker,
denialists have learned to use the vocabulary of their critical thinking opponents.
They think of themselves as “skeptics,”
this is an attempt to appropriate a word with a venerable philosophical pedigree
and which is supposed to indicate a cautiously rational approach to a given problem.
A proper skeptic proportions beliefs to the evidence.
There is none of that sort of attitude in people who are “skeptical” of evolution, climate change, vaccines, spherical Earth, and so forth.
So how do you fight denialism?
Denialism offers a dystopian vision of a world unmoored,
in which nothing can be taken for granted and no one can be trusted.
If you believe that you are being constantly lied to,
paradoxically you may be in danger of accepting the untruths of others.
Denialism is a mixture of corrosive doubt and corrosive credulity.
It’s perfectly understandable that denialism sparks anger and outrage,
particularly in those who are directly challenged by it.
If you are a Holocaust survivor, a historian, a climate scientist,
a resident of a flood-plain, a geologist, an Aids researcher
or someone whose child caught a preventable disease from an unvaccinated child, denialism can feel like a personal assault on your life’s work,
your core beliefs or even your life itself.
Such people do fight back.
This can include, in some countries, supporting laws against denialism, as in France’s prohibition of Holocaust denial. Attempts to teach “creation science” alongside evolution in US schools are fought with tenacity. Denialists are routinely excluded from scholarly journals and academic conferences.
Today, denialists produce a large and ever-growing body of books, articles, websites, lectures and videos. It's exhausting to debunk them all (only because of the sheer number of them) and even when they've been rigorously debunked, the denialists do not change their beliefs.
So debunking them may prevent someone undecided from falling for the bullshit,
But no one's mind is changed.
How about those countries that have laws regarding denialism?
The Holocaust denier David Irving brought a libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt in 1996.
Irving claimed that accusing him of being a Holocaust denier
and a falsifier of history was libelous.
His claims were forensically demolished by Richard Evans and other eminent historians.
The judgment was devastating to Irving’s reputation
and conclusive in its rejection of his claim to be a legitimate historian.
The judgment bankrupted him, he was thoroughly repudiated
by the few remaining genuine historians who had supported him,
and in 2006 he was imprisoned in Austria for Holocaust denial.
Guess what though. Irving today?
He is still writing and lecturing, in a slightly more covert fashion.
He still makes similar claims
and his defenders see him as a heroic figure
Nothing really changed.
Holocaust denial is still around,
and its proponents find new followers.
In legal and scholarly terms,
Lipstadt won an absolute victory,
but she didn’t beat Holocaust denial
or even Irving in the long term.
denialism cannot be beaten legally,
or through debunking,
or through attempts to discredit its proponents.
That’s because, for denialists, the existence of denialism
is itself a triumph.
Central to denialism is an argument that “the truth”
has been suppressed by its enemies.
To continue to exist is a heroic act,
a victory for the forces of truth.
Denialists might yearn for a more complete victory
– when theories of anthropogenic climate change
will be marginalized in academia and politics,
when their tale of how the Jews hoaxed the world
would be in every history book.
but, for now, every day that denialism persists is a good day in their view.
In fact, for the denialist, every day barrels of oil continue to be burned is a good day,
every day a parent doesn’t vaccinate their child is a good day,
every day a teenager Googles planet Earth and sees a pancake.
Or Googles WWII & finds out that some people think it never happened is a good day.
We, denialism’s opponents do not have time on our side.
As climate change rushes towards a point of no return,
as Holocaust survivors die and can no longer give testimony,
as once-vanquished diseases threaten pandemics,
as the notion that there is “doubt” on settled scholarship becomes unremarkable,
The task facing refuters of bullshit becomes both more urgent and more difficult.
why did we fail?
Why have those of us who abhor denialism
not succeeded in halting its onward march?
And why have we as a species managed to turn our everyday capacity
to deny into an organized movement to undermine our collective ability to understand the world
and change it for the better?
There are lots of different kinds of denialists:
Some are skeptical of all established knowledge,
Some challenge one type of knowledge.
Some actively contribute to the creation of denialist pseudo-scholarship,
and there's those who quietly consume it.
There's those who burn with certainty,
and they repost every IQ lowering meme & disinformation rhetoric they can get their hands on.
And there's those who are privately skeptical about their skepticism.
What they all have in common, I would argue, is a particular type of desire.
This desire – for something not to be true – is the driver of denialism.
Empathy with denialists is not easy, but it may be essential.
Denialism is not stupidity, or ignorance, or mendacity, or psychological pathology.
Nor is it the same as lying.
Of course, denialists can be stupid, ignorant liars, but so can any of us.
But denialists are people in a desperate predicament.
It is a modern predicament.
Denialism is a post‑enlightenment phenomenon, a reaction to the "annoyance”
of the findings of modern scholarship.
The discovery of evolution, for example,
is regrettable to those committed to a literalist biblical account of creation.
Denialism is also a reaction
to the nuisance of the moral consensus that emerged in the post-enlightenment world.
In the ancient world,
one could erect a monument proudly proclaiming some genocide committed to the world.
In the modern world, mass killing, mass starvation, etc, can no longer be publicly celebrated.
Yet many humans still want to do the same things humans always did.
Many are still desiring beings. Wanting to murder, to steal, to destroy and to despoil.
They want to preserve ignorance and unquestioned faith.
So when these desires are rendered unspeakable in the modern world,
Denialists are forced to pretend that they do not yearn for those things.
So denial acts as an attempt to draw awareness and attention away from something unpalatable.
Denialism is, in part, a response to the vulnerability of denial.
To be in denial is to know on some level.
To be a denialist is to never have to know at all.
Denialism is a systematic attempt to prevent challenge and acknowledgment;
to suggest that there is nothing to acknowledge.
Whereas denial is at least subject to the possibility of confrontation with reality,
denialism can rarely be undermined by appeals to face the truth.
It involves suppressing the expression of one’s hidden primitive desires.
Denialists are “trapped” into byzantine modes of argument because they have no better options.
The bottom line is Denialism and other forms of pseudo-scholarship are the part of the iceberg that is visible. What lies underneath is outrage at being inconvenienced by the modern world and it's scholarship.
It's hard to find the will to be charitable to folks like this.
Knowing the denialist is unhappy about not being able to run amok
like the old days with Mongol Hordes and such,
hardly elicits empathy. But that is where we are, isn't it?
"My disappointment in what modern man has learned trumps your altruism."
"The entire human race must suffer because of my mild vexation regarding modern scholarship"
"I hate science because it's discoveries are irritating to my beliefs" .
It's what lies beneath.
That's the key to stopping denialism.
It's the magic theater if you will, the stuff of the Id that must be hidden.
It's all an exercise in hiding uncomfortable desires.
Denialism, and the multitude of other ways that modern humans have obfuscated their desires,
prevent a true reckoning with the unsettling fact
that some of us might desire things that most of us regard as morally reprehensible.
I say “might” because while denialism is an attempt to covertly legitimize an unspeakable desire, the nature of the denialist’s understanding of the consequences of enacting that desire is usually unknowable.
Can you tell whether global warming denialists are secretly longing
for the chaos and pain that global warming will bring, or are they simply indifferent to it,
or maybe they would desperately like it not to be the case
but are overwhelmed with the desire to keep things as they are.
It is hard to tell.
It's hard to tell whether Holocaust deniers are preparing the ground for another genocide,
or want to keep a sick pristine image of the Nazis as good guys.
It is hard to tell whether an Aids denialist who works to prevent Africans
from having access to anti-retrovirals is getting a kick out of their power over life and death,
or is on a mission to save them from the evils of the west.
So here we are.
Where indeed do we go from here?
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