Denialism drives people to reject the truth
Source: Keith Kahn-Harris in The Guardian of 3 August 2018
(Featured image found on galileo.tv)
Denials from vaccines to climate change to genocide:
- The Holocaust (and other genocides) never happened.
- Anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is a myth.
- Aids either does not exist or is unrelated to HIV.
- MMR vaccine causes autism.
- Evolution is a scientific impossibility.
- All manner of scientific and historical orthodoxies must be rejected.
- Nothing is what it seems. Nothing can be taken for granted and no one can be trusted.
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.
Denialism 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 a post-enlightenment phenomenon, a reaction to the “inconvenience” of many of the findings of modern scholarship or to the inconvenience of the moral consensus that emerged in the post-enlightenment world.
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.
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?