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The long read
Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth
From vaccines to climate change to genocide, a new age of
denialism is upon us. Why have we failed to understand it? By Keith Kahn-Harris
Fri 3 Aug 2018 06.00 BST Last modified on Fri 3 Aug 2018
10.58 BST
We are all in denial, some of the time at least. Part of
being human, and living in a society with other humans, is finding clever ways
to express – and conceal – our feelings. From the most sophisticated diplomatic
language to the baldest lie, humans find ways to deceive. Deceptions are not
necessarily malign; at some level they are vital if humans are to live together
with civility. As Richard Sennett has argued: “In practising social civility,
you keep silent about things you know clearly but which you should not and do
not say.”
Just as we can suppress some aspects of ourselves in our
self-presentation to others, so we can do the same to ourselves in
acknowledging or not acknowledging what we desire. Most of the time, we spare
ourselves from the torture of recognising our baser yearnings. But when does
this necessary private self-deception become harmful? When it becomes public
dogma. In other words: when it becomes denialism.
Denialism is an expansion, an intensification, of denial. At
root, denial and denialism are simply a subset of the many ways humans have
developed to use language to deceive others and themselves. Denial can be as
simple as refusing to accept that someone else is speaking truthfully. Denial
can be as unfathomable as the multiple ways we avoid acknowledging our
weaknesses and secret desires.
Denialism is more than just another manifestation of the
humdrum intricacies of our deceptions and self-deceptions. It represents the
transformation of the everyday practice of denial into a whole new way of
seeing the world and – most important – a collective accomplishment. Denial is
furtive and routine; denialism is combative and extraordinary. Denial hides
from the truth, denialism builds a new and better truth.
In recent years, the term has been used to describe a number
of fields of “scholarship”, whose scholars engage in audacious projects to hold
back, against seemingly insurmountable odds, the findings of an avalanche of
research. They argue that the Holocaust (and other genocides) never happened,
that anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is a myth, that Aids either
does not exist or is unrelated to HIV, that evolution is a scientific
impossibility, and that all manner of other scientific and historical
orthodoxies must be rejected.
In some ways, denialism is a terrible term. No one calls
themselves a “denialist”, and no one signs up to all forms of denialism. In
fact, denialism is founded on the assertion that it is not denialism. In the
wake of Freud (or at least the vulgarisation of Freud), no one wants to be
accused of being “in denial”, and labelling people denialists seems to compound
the insult by implying that they have taken the private sickness of denial and
turned it into public dogma.
But denial and denialism are closely linked; what humans do
on a large scale is rooted in what we do on a small scale. While everyday
denial can be harmful, it is also just a mundane way for humans to respond to the
incredibly difficult challenge of living in a social world in which people lie,
make mistakes and have desires that cannot be openly acknowledged. Denialism is
rooted in human tendencies that are neither freakish nor pathological.
All that said, there is no doubt that denialism is
dangerous. In some cases, we can point to concrete examples of denialism
causing actual harm. In South Africa, President Thabo Mbeki, in office between
1999 and 2008, was influenced by Aids denialists such as Peter Duesberg, who
deny the link between HIV and Aids (or even HIV’s existence) and cast doubt on
the effectiveness of anti-retroviral drugs. Mbeki’s reluctance to implement
national treatment programmes using anti-retrovirals has been estimated to have
cost the lives of 330,000 people. On a smaller scale, in early 2017 the
Somali-American community in Minnesota was struck by a childhood measles
outbreak, as a direct result of proponents of the discredited theory that the
MMR vaccine causes autism, persuading parents not to vaccinate their children.
More commonly though, denialism’s effects are less direct
but more insidious. Climate change denialists have not managed to overturn the
general scientific consensus that it is occurring and caused by human activity.
What they have managed to do is provide subtle and not-so-subtle support for
those opposed to taking radical action to address this urgent problem.
Achieving a global agreement that could underpin a transition to a post-carbon
economy, and that would be capable of slowing the temperature increase, was
always going to be an enormous challenge. Climate change denialism has helped
to make the challenge even harder.
Denialism can also create an environment of hate and
suspicion. Forms of genocide denialism are not just attempts to overthrow
irrefutable historical facts; they are an assault on those who survive
genocide, and their descendants. The implacable denialism that has led the
Turkish state to refuse to admit that the 1917 Armenian genocide occurred is
also an attack on today’s Armenians, and on any other minority that would dare
to raise troubling questions about the status of minorities in Turkey.
Similarly, those who deny the Holocaust are not trying to disinterestedly
“correct” the historical record; they are, with varying degrees of subtlety,
trying to show that Jews are pathological liars and fundamentally dangerous, as
well as to rehabilitate the reputation of the Nazis.
The dangers that other forms of denialism pose may be less
concrete, but they are no less serious. Denial of evolution, for example, does
not have an immediately hateful payoff; rather it works to foster a distrust in
science and research that feeds into other denialisms and undermines
evidence-based policymaking. Even lunatic-fringe denialisms, such as flat Earth
theories, while hard to take seriously, help to create an environment in which
real scholarship and political attempts to engage with reality, break down in
favour of an all-encompassing suspicion that nothing is what it seems.
Denialism has moved from the fringes to the centre of public
discourse, helped in part by new technology. As information becomes freer to
access online, as “research” has been opened to anyone with a web browser, as
previously marginal voices climb on to the online soapbox, so the opportunities
for countering accepted truths multiply. No one can be entirely ostracised,
marginalised and dismissed as a crank anymore.
The sheer profusion of voices, the plurality of opinions,
the cacophony of the controversy, are enough to make anyone doubt what they
should believe.
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 mix 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 an 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.
The most common response to denialism, though, is debunking.
Just as denialists produce a large and ever-growing body of books, articles,
websites, lectures and videos, so their detractors respond with a literature of
their own. Denialist claims are refuted point by point, in a spiralling contest
in which no argument – however ludicrous – is ever left unchallenged. Some
debunkings are endlessly patient and civil, treating denialists and their
claims seriously and even respectfully; others are angry and contemptuous.
Yet none of these strategies work, at least not completely.
Take the libel case that the Holocaust denier David Irving brought against
Deborah Lipstadt in 1996. Irving’s claim that accusing him of being a Holocaust
denier and a falsifier of history was libellous were forensically demolished by
Richard Evans and other eminent historians. The judgment was devastating to
Irving’s reputation and unambiguous in its rejection of his claim to be a
legitimate historian. The judgment bankrupted him, he was repudiated by the few
remaining mainstream historians who had supported him, and in 2006 he was
imprisoned in Austria for Holocaust denial.
But Irving today? He is still writing and lecturing, albeit
in a more covert fashion. He still makes similar claims and his defenders see
him as a heroic figure who survived the attempts of the Jewish-led
establishment to silence him. 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.
There is a salutary lesson here: in democratic societies at
least, 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.
Of course, denialists might yearn for a more complete
victory – when theories of anthropogenic climate change will be marginalised in
academia and politics, when the story of how the Jews hoaxed the world will be
in every history book – but, for now, every day that denialism persists is a
good day. In fact, denialism can achieve more modest triumphs even without total
victory. For the denialist, every day barrels of oil continue to be extracted
and burned is a good day, every day a parent doesn’t vaccinate their child is a
good day, every day a teenager Googling the Holocaust finds out that some
people think it never happened is a good day.
Conversely, denialism’s opponents rarely have time on their
side. As climate change rushes towards the 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, so the task facing the debunkers becomes both more urgent
and more difficult. It’s understandable that panic can set in and that anger
overwhelms some of those who battle against denialism.
A better approach to denialism is one of self-criticism. The
starting point is a frank question: 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 organised attempt
to undermine our collective ability to understand the world and change it for
the better?
These questions are beginning to be asked in some circles.
They are often the result of a kind of despair. Campaigners against
anthropogenic global warming often lament that, as the task becomes ever more
urgent, so denialism continues to run rampant (along with apathy and “softer”
forms of denial). It appears that nothing works in the campaign to make humanity
aware of the threat it faces.
The obstinacy with which people can stick to disproved
notions is attested to in the social sciences and in neuroscientific research.
Humans are not only reasoning beings who disinterestedly weigh evidence and
arguments. But there is a difference between the pre-conscious search for
confirmation of existing views – we all engage in that to some extent – and the
deliberate attempt to dress this search up as a quest for truth, as denialists
do. Denialism adds extra layers of reinforcement and defence around widely
shared psychological practices with the (never articulated) aim of preventing
their exposure. This certainly makes changing the minds of denialists even more
difficult than changing the minds of the rest of stubborn humanity.
There are multiple kinds of denialists: from those who are
sceptical of all established knowledge, to those who challenge one type of
knowledge; from those who actively contribute to the creation of denialist
scholarship, to those who quietly consume it; from those who burn with
certainty, to those who are privately sceptical about their scepticism. 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 is 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 very modern predicament. Denialism is a post‑enlightenment
phenomenon, a reaction to the “inconvenience” of many of the findings of modern scholarship. The discovery
of evolution, for example, is inconvenient to those committed to a literalist
biblical account of creation. Denialism is also a reaction to the inconvenience
of the moral consensus that emerged in the post-enlightenment world. In the
ancient world, you could erect a monument proudly proclaiming the genocide you
committed to the world. In the modern world, mass killing, mass starvation,
mass environmental catastrophe can no longer be publicly legitimated.
Yet many humans still want to do the same things humans
always did. We are still desiring beings. We want to murder, to steal, to
destroy and to despoil. We want to preserve our ignorance and unquestioned
faith. So when our desires are rendered unspeakable in the modern world, we are
forced to pretend that we do not yearn for things we desire.
Denial is not enough here. As an attempt to draw awareness
and attention away from something unpalatable, it is always vulnerable to
challenge. Denial is a kind of high-wire act that can be unbalanced by forceful
attempts to draw attention to what is being denied.
Denialism is, in part, a response to the vulnerability of
denial. To be in denial is to know at 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.
The tragedy for denialists is that they concede the argument
in advance. Holocaust deniers’ attempts to deny that the Holocaust took place
imply that it would not have been a good thing if it had. Climate change
denialism is predicated on a similarly hidden acknowledgment that, if
anthropogenic climate change were actually occurring, we would have to do
something about it.
Denialism is therefore not just hard work – finding ways to
discredit mountains of evidence is a tremendous labour – but also involves
suppressing the expression of one’s desires. Denialists are “trapped” into
byzantine modes of argument because they have few other options in pursuing
their goals.
Denialism, and related phenomena, are often portrayed as a
“war on science”. This is an understandable but profound misunderstanding.
Certainly, denialism and other forms of pseudo-scholarship do not follow
mainstream scientific methodologies. Denialism does indeed represent a
perversion of the scholarly method, and the science it produces rests on
profoundly erroneous assumptions, but denialism does all this in the name of
science and scholarship. Denialism aims to replace one kind of science with
another – it does not aim to replace science itself. In fact, denialism
constitutes a tribute to the prestige of science and scholarship in the modern
world. Denialists are desperate for the public validation that science affords.
While denialism has sometimes been seen as part of a
post-modern assault on truth, the denialist is just as invested in notions of
scientific objectivity as the most unreconstructed positivist. Even those who
are genuinely committed to alternatives to western rationality and science can
wield denialist rhetoric that apes precisely the kind of scientism they
despise. Anti-vaxxers, for example, sometimes seem to want to have their cake and
eat it: to have their critique of western medicine validated by western
medicine.
The rhetoric of denialism and its critics can resemble each
other in a kind of war to the death over who gets to wear the mantle of
science. The term “junk science” has been applied to climate change denialism,
as well as in defence of it. Mainstream science can also be dogmatic and blind
to its own limitations. If the accusation that global warming is an example of
politicised ideology masked as science is met with indignant assertions of the
absolute objectivity of “real” science, there is a risk of blinding oneself to
uncomfortable questions regarding the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which
the idea of pure truth, untrammelled by human interests, is elusive. Human interests
can rarely if ever be separated from the ways we observe the world. Indeed,
sociologists of science have shown how modern ideas of disinterested scientific
knowledge have disguised the inextricable links between knowledge and human
interests.
I do not believe that, if only one could find the key to
“make them understand”, denialists would think just like me. A global warming
denialist is not an environmentalist who cannot accept that he or she is really
an environmentalist; a Holocaust denier is not someone who cannot face the
inescapable obligation to commemorate the Holocaust; an Aids denialist is not
an Aids activist who won’t acknowledge the necessity for western medicine in
combating the disease; and so on. If denialists were to stop denying, we cannot
assume that we would then have a shared moral foundation on which we could make
progress as a species.
Denialism is not a barrier to acknowledging a common moral
foundation; it is a barrier to acknowledging moral differences. An end to
denialism is therefore a disturbing prospect, as it would involve these moral
differences revealing themselves directly. But we need to start preparing for
that eventuality, because denialism is starting to break down – and not in a
good way.
On 6 November 2012, when he was already preparing the ground
for his presidential run, Donald Trump sent a tweet about climate change. It
said: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in
order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
At the time, this seemed to be just another example of the
mainstreaming of climate change denialism on the American right. After all, the
second Bush administration had done as little as possible to combat climate
change, and many leading Republicans are prominent crusaders against mainstream
climate science. Yet something else was happening here, too; the tweet was a
harbinger of a new kind of post-denialist discourse.
Trump’s claim is not one that is regularly made by
“mainstream” global warming denialists. It may have been a garbled version of
the common argument on the US right that global climate treaties will unfairly
weaken the US economy to the benefit of China. Like much of Trump’s discourse,
the tweet was simply thrown into the world without much thought. This is not
how denialism usually works. Denialists usually labour for decades to produce,
often against overwhelming odds, carefully crafted simulacra of scholarship
that, to non-experts at least, are indistinguishable from the real thing. They
have refined alternative scholarly techniques that can cast doubt on even the
most solid of truths.
Trump and the post-truthers’ “lazy” denialism rests on the
security that comes from knowing that generations of denialists have created
enough doubt already; all people like Trump need to do is to signal vaguely in
a denialist direction. Whereas denialism explains – at great length –
post-denialism asserts. Whereas denialism is painstakingly thought-through,
post-denialism is instinctive. Whereas denialism is disciplined, post-denialism
is anarchic.
The internet has been an important factor in this weakening
of denialist self-discipline. The intemperance of the online world is pushing
denialism so far that it is beginning to fall apart. The new generation of
denialists aren’t creating new, alternative orthodoxies so much as obliterating
the very idea of orthodoxy itself. The collective, institutional work of
building a substantial bulwark against scholarly consensus gives way to a kind
of free-for-all.
One example of this is the 9/11 truth movement. Because the
attacks occurred in an already wired world, the denialism it spawned has never
managed to institutionalise and develop an orthodoxy in the way that
pre-internet denialisms did. Those who believe that the “official story” of the
September 11 attacks was a lie can believe that elements in the US government
had foreknowledge of the attacks but let them happen, or that the attacks were
deliberately planned and carried out by the government, or that
Jews/Israel/Mossad were behind it, or that shadowy forces in the “New World
Order” were behind it – or some cocktail of all of these. They can believe that
the towers were brought down by controlled demolition, or that no planes hit
the towers, or that there were no floors in the towers, or that there were no
passengers in the planes.
Post-denialism represents a freeing of the repressed desires
that drive denialism. While it still based on the denial of an established
truth, its methods liberate a deeper kind of desire: to remake truth itself, to
remake the world, to unleash the power to reorder reality itself and stamp
one’s mark on the planet. What matters in post-denialism is not the
establishment of an alternative scholarly credibility, so much as giving
yourself blanket permission to see the world however you like.
While post-denialism has not yet supplanted its predecessor,
old-style denialism is beginning to be questioned by some of its practitioners
as they take tentative steps towards a new age. This is particularly evident on
the racist far right, where the dominance of Holocaust denial is beginning to
erode.
Mark Weber, director of the (denialist) Institute for
Historical Review, glumly concluded in an article in 2009 that Holocaust denial
had become irrelevant in a world that continues to memorialise the genocide.
Some Holocaust deniers have even recanted, expressing their frustration with
the movement and acknowledging that many of its claims are simply untenable, as
Eric Hunt, previously a producer of widely circulated online videos denying the
Holocaust, did in 2016. Yet such admissions of defeat are certainly not
accompanied by a retreat from antisemitism. Weber treats the failures of
Holocaust denial as a consequence of the nefarious power of the Jews: “Suppose
The New York Times were to report tomorrow that Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust
centre and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum had announced that no more than 1
million Jews died during the second world war, and that no Jews were killed in
gas chambers at Auschwitz. The impact on Jewish-Zionist power would surely be
minimal.”
Those who were previously “forced” into Holocaust denial are
starting to sense that it may be possible to publicly celebrate genocide once
again, to revel in antisemitism’s finest hour. The heightened scrutiny of
far-right movements in the last couple of years has unearthed statements that
might once have remained unspoken, or only spoken behind closed doors. In
August 2017, for example, one KKK leader told a journalist: “We killed 6
million Jews the last time. Eleven million [immigrants] is nothing.” A piece
published by the Daily Stormer in advance of the white nationalist rally in
Charlottesville that same month ended: “Next stop: Charlottesville, VA. Final
stop: Auschwitz.”
Indeed, the Daily Stormer, one of the most prominent online
publications of the resurgent far-right, demonstrates an exuberant agility in
balancing denialism, post-denialism and open hatred simultaneously, using
humour as a method of floating between them all. But there is no doubt what the
ultimate destination is. As Andrew Anglin, who runs the site, put it in a style
guide for contributors that was later leaked to the press: “The unindoctrinated
should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious
awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as
self-deprecating humour – I am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists,
because I don’t take myself super-seriously. This is obviously a ploy and I
actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.”
Not all denialists are taking these steps towards open
acknowledgment of their desires. In some fields, the commitment to repressing
desire remains strong. We are not yet at a stage when a climate change denier
can come out and say, proudly, “Bangladesh will be submerged, millions will
suffer as a result of anthropogenic climate change, but we must still preserve
our carbon-based way of life, no matter what the cost.” Nor are anti-vaxxers
ready to argue that, even though vaccines do not cause autism, the death of
children from preventable diseases is a regrettable necessity if we are to be
released from the clutches of Big Pharma.
Still, over time it is likely that traditional denialists
will be increasingly influenced by the emerging post-denialist milieu. After
all, what oil industry-funded wonk labouring to put together a policy paper
suggesting that polar bear populations aren’t declining hasn’t fantasised of
resorting to gleeful, Trumpian assertions?
The possibility of an epochal shift away from denialism
means that there is now no avoiding a reckoning with some discomfiting issues:
how do we respond to people who have radically different desires and morals
from our own? How do we respond to people who delight in or are indifferent to
genocide, to the suffering of millions, to venality and greed?
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 legitimise an unspeakable desire, the nature of the denialist’s
understanding of the consequences of enacting that desire is usually
unknowable.
It is hard to tell whether global warming denialists are
secretly longing for the chaos and pain that global warming will bring, are
simply indifferent to it, or 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
whether Holocaust deniers are preparing the ground for another genocide, or
want to keep a pristine image of the goodness of the Nazis and the evil of the
Jews. 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.
If the new realm of unrestrained online discourse, and the
example set by Trump, tempts more and more denialists to transition towards
post-denialism and beyond, we will finally know where we stand. Instead of
chasing shadows, we will be able to contemplate the stark moral choices we
humans face.
Maybe we have been putting this test off for too long. The
liberation of desire we are beginning to witness is forcing us all to confront
some very difficult questions: who are we as a species? Do we all (the odd
sociopath aside) share a common moral foundation? How do we relate to people
whose desires are starkly different from our own?
Perhaps, if we can face up to the challenge presented by
these new revelations, it might pave the way for a politics shorn of illusion
and moral masquerade, where different visions of what it is to be human can
openly contend. This might be a firmer foundation on which to rekindle some
hope for human progress – based not on illusions of what we would like to be,
but on an accounting of what we are.
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