DENIAL E-Book

Keith Kahn-Harris

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The holocaust never happened. The planet isn't warming. Vaccines harm children. The Earth is flat. Denialism comes in many forms, often dressed in the garb of scholarship. It's certainly insidious, but what if, as Kahn-Harris asks, it actually cloaks much darker, unspeakable, desires? If denialists could speak from the heart, what would we hear? Kahn-Harris sets out to expose what lies at the heart of denialism. The conclusions he reaches are shocking. In a world of 'fake news', are the denialists about to secure victory?

Leseprobe

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After a successful business career in toy invention Tom decided, at the age of eighty, to engage his passion for literature. In a digital world where time is short and books are throwaway, Tom’s aim was to restore the art of the essay, and to create exceptionally beautiful books that would be cherished.

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www.nottinghilleditions.com

DENIAL

The Unspeakable Truth

–

Keith Kahn-Harris

Contents

– Title Page –– Preface –– 1 The Failure –– 2 The Audacity of Denialism –– 3 Doing Denialism –– 4 The Gap –– 5 Predicament and Pathos –– 6 The Denier’s Alternative –– 7 The Post-Denialist Age –– 8 An Alternative –– Other titles from Notting Hill Editions –– About the Author –– Copyright –

– Preface –

I’ve always loved nonsense dressed up as scholarship. During my A-level studies in early modern history, one of my teachers gave me a copy of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail to read and report back on to the class.1 I loved it. Its outré thesis – that Jesus survived the crucifixion and went to live in the South of France and spawned a secret society, the ‘Priory of Zion’, that has acted as a hidden hand in the history of Western civilisation – was thrillingly written. And of course, as I took pleasure in pointing out in my class presentation, it was no less improbable than the Christian story of crucifixion and resurrection.

I cannot say that my teacher’s point-by-point dismantling of the book’s thesis was a shock to me; I never seriously believed its claims. But the debunking was disillusioning because my first exposure to the world of alternative history was so much fun. I felt the same about other works I devoured as a teenager, such as Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of The Gods, a 1970s bestseller arguing that aliens visited earth and inspired the glories of ancient civilisations.2 Books like these seemed to me to be delightful in their portentous ludicrousness. Finding evidence that debunked their claims felt like a duty; it also felt like a disappointment. Although I was never taken in, I almost envied those who were.

My Jewish upbringing meant that I had been conscious of the Holocaust from an early age. As a teen who liked to read radical anti-fascist publications such as Searchlight, I also heard about Holocaust denial, although I never encountered it first-hand. This was pre-Internet, and it took commitment to track down such works – commitment that, as a soft suburban Jew, I didn’t have. But I did yearn to explore this demi-monde. What could be sillier than arguing the Holocaust never happened? It was all a big joke to me. A Jewish university friend and I used to fantasise about forming a Jewish metal band that espoused Holocaust denial and boasted that we really do kill Christian kids and use their blood in our Passover rituals. On holiday in Egypt, another Jewish friend and I visited bookstores to ask if they stocked Did Six Million Really Die? and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. What larks!

Today, it’s harder for me to see the fun in all this. The breezy insouciance with which I consumed ‘alternative’ scholarship was based on the assumption that none of it really mattered. In my cynical, self-absorbed late teens and twenties during the smug 1990s there was no reason to think that neo-Nazis were anything other than marginal idiots; alternate histories and conspiracy theories similarly appeared to pose no threat to anyone.

I should have looked harder. It wasn’t just neo-Nazis and fringe cranks who were constructing alternative scholarship; big business and conservative politics were doing it too. Of course, I knew that there were those who denied nicotine was addictive, who tried to prove that environmental pollution wasn’t happening or wasn’t harmful. I was appalled at this, but it wasn’t my major worry. What I didn’t spot was either their long-term determination to prevail or the threads that tied them to the shady world that I refused to take seriously.

Mea culpa. We are a long way from the smug certainties of 1990s liberalism, and my attitude to those who challenge real scholarship is no longer one of indulgence. As I will show in this book, for decades, centuries even, something deeply poisonous has been growing. This poisonous process has produced diseased fruit in our ‘post-truth’ age.

My focus is on denial and denialism, which deploy a cluster of techniques that enable those with unspeakable desires to pursue them covertly. What I thought were simply ridiculous (if sometimes nasty) examples of human loopiness, are much more than that. Holocaust denial is not just eccentricity; it is an attempt to legitimate genocide through covert means. Denials of the harmfulness of tobacco, of the existence of global warming, and other denialisms, are, similarly, projects to legitimate the unspeakable.

Yet I have retained just enough of my youthful indulgence that my approach to denial and denialism in this book is not only one of condemnation. I continue to have just enough enjoyment of alternative scholarship that I can sense something more in it than just evil pseudo-science. I can feel the audacity, the joys, the predicaments, the wretchedness and – above all – the desire that courses through multiple assaults on knowledge.

That lingering empathy means that I have no choice but to recognise the allure of denialism and to face up to the fact that to condemn is not enough. How can one suppress desires so strong? Rather, we have to consider what alternatives are available to the deniers. As this book will show, these are neither easy nor pleasant. They force us to confront brutal dilemmas and hard choices.

I don’t know whether confronting what I call in this book the denier’s alternative can lead to a better way of dealing with our desires. What I do know is that, as I suggest in the final two chapters, we may soon be forced to do so. Something is shifting, something profound. And perhaps, in an odd way, cultivating an appreciation of the mischievous freedom at work in alternative forms of knowledge that I revelled in during my youth might be a better way of facing the dark times ahead than angry pessimism.

—

This book has been gestating for some time. I owe its existence to my editor, George Miller, who first saw potential in the project. I also owe a lot to those with whom I have discussed my ideas as they developed over the intervening decade.

More broadly, I owe more than I can express to my wife and children. Having a loving and settled family life has given me both the motivation and the peace of mind I needed to expand my writing and thinking in new directions.

Notes

1 Baigent, M., Lincoln, H., and Leigh, R., The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982; London: Jonathan Cape).

2 Däniken, E. von, Chariots of the Gods: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (1968; New York: Putnam).

1

– The Failure –

A chameleon changes its colouring to hide among the leaf litter. A cat flattens its shape and creeps soundlessly in the long grass. They do not announce to their prey that they are hungry and wish to kill to sate their desire.

Human life also requires that we suppress open expressions of desire. The range of circumstances in which this suppression is necessary may be greater than for other forms of life – hiding signs of sexual arousal, hiding envy, hiding dislike – but the principle remains the same: if we desire things, we may have to dissemble in order to gratify that desire or simply in order to be able to continue living alongside others.

Humans treat some desires as illegitimate. Further, humans generate a vastly more complex and diverse range of desires than non-humans, and they are enmeshed in a vaster range of circumstances. That leads to a similarly wide variety of ways of suppressing signs of desire.

How do we do this? Through language.

Human language allows us to speak not just of concrete needs, but also of abstract ideals. Language allows us to cooperate in small groups and to conduct projects that coordinate the lives of billions. The language we use is unique to us as individuals and at the same time a collective accomplishment.

Language is used to conceal as much to reveal. 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’.1

The same capacity of language that allows us to be social beings also allows us to shape how we understand ourselves and our desires. 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.

When does deception become harmful? In this book, I want to explore one of its most pernicious forms. This book is about denialism, the danger it poses and what we can do about it.

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 humdrum deceptions and self-deceptions. It represents the transformation of the everyday practice of denial into a new way of seeing the world and – most importantly to this book – 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 denialism has come to be applied to a strange field of ‘scholarship’.2 The scholars in this field engage in an audacious project: 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 (caused by humans) 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.

Denialism and denial 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, who deny the link between HIV and AIDS (or even HIV’s existence) and cast doubt on the effectiveness of anti-retrovirals. His reluctance to implement national treatment programmes that made use of anti-retrovirals has been estimated to have cost the lives of 330,000 people.3 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 the discredited theory that the MMR vaccine causes autism, persuading parents not to vaccinate their children.4

More commonly though, denialism’s effects are less direct but more insidious. Global warming denialists have not managed to overturn the general scientific consensus that global warming caused by human activity. But what they have managed to do is provide 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 slow the temperature increase was always going to be an enormous challenge. Global warming denialism has helped to make the challenge even harder by, for example, influencing the non-ratification of the Kyoto Protocol during the George W. Bush presidency and Donald Trump’s stated intention to withdraw the US from the Paris Accord. There is no shortage of frightening predictions about what will happen if we do not act now to stall or reverse climate change.5

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 by implication any other Turkish minority that would dare to raise troubling questions about the status of minorities in Turkey both today and in the past. 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. Holocaust denial gives succour to antisemites worldwide and has become an important part of opposition to Israel in some Muslim states.

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 policy-making. Even ‘far-out 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 all-encompassing suspicion.

The current controversy over the ‘post-fact era’, ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ did not come out of nowhere. Donald Trump, Alex Jones and Breitbart did not materialise from the ether. Rather, their prominence and success are the outcome of decades of hard work by denialists to encourage suspicion towards scholarship and science. In the post-war period, when the tobacco industry began its epic attempts to cast doubt on research that demonstrated the danger of their product, they were laying the groundwork for an even more ambitious project.6

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 onto 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. Denialism’s ability to cast doubt can ensnare any of us. The writer Will Storr, in his book on ‘enemies of science’, reflected on the corrosive impact of this doubt:

It is as if I have caught a glimpse of some grotesque delusion that I am stuck inside. It is disorientating. It is frightening … It is as if I am too angry, too weak to bear the challenge of it. And there is a fear there too, lying secretly among all the bluster: what if they’re right?7

While certainty can be dangerous, so is unbounded scepticism. 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 you are being constantly lied to, paradoxically you may be in danger of accepting the untruths of others. Denialism blends corrosive doubt with 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, it is obvious how denialism might feel like an assault on your life’s work, your core beliefs or even your life.

Those whose life or work is challenged by denialism can and do fight back. This can even include, in some countries, 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 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.

Respectful debate and angry abuse, legal protest and marginalisation … None of these strategies works, 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.8 The judgement was devastating to Irving’s reputation and unambiguous in its rejection of his claim to be a legitimate historian. The judgement bankrupted him, he was repudiated by the few remaining mainstream historians who had supported him, and in 2005 he was imprisoned in Austria for Holocaust denial.

But Irving today? He is still writing, still 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 Deborah Lipstadt won, 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 by debunking, or through attempts to discredit its proponents. That’s because for denialists, the existence of denialism is triumph enough. Central to denialism is an argument that ‘the truth’ has been suppressed by its enemies. To continue to exist is therefore 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: every day in which 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 on which 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 return, 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. This can be counter-productive and lead to blindness and dogmatism.

One manifestation of this anger is the resurgent ‘new atheism’ that emerged in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, propounded by authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.9 For these figures, creationism is an outrageous symptom of the stupidity of religion. While outrage is often understandable, it often overwhelms the scholarly method that they are defending. Such scientists are often poor social scientists, finding it almost impossible to attribute creationism and other offences against science to anything other than religious idiocy and wilful stupidity.

One of the terms batted around in debates over religion, reason and denialism is ‘enlightenment’. While this ostensibly refers back to the process, from the seventeeth century onwards, in which the notion of reason-based enquiry laid the groundwork for modern science, scholarship and the industrial revolution, it is too often reduced to a kind of buzzword, with limited historical meaning. This can prevent a reckoning with the more problematic features of enlightenment and modern science. As John Gray has shown, the Enlightenment also laid the groundwork for utopianism and apocalyptic thinking.10 Modern fundamentalisms, religious and otherwise, cannot be disengaged from the rest of modernity – they are not simply throwbacks to a pre-enlightenment age.11

Denialism and related vices are also not the only threats to science and reason: governments and corporations that may sign up to the values of science and reason can, through secrecy, venality and cynical policy-making, undermine the free and open flow of knowledge. As Dan Hind has noted, ‘the invocation of the Enlightenment decays into a kind of blackmail – “either you are with us, or you are against progress and reason”.’12