Source of book: I own this
Well, this is definitely the most depressing book I have read this year, and that is in the face of some significant competition. Unfortunately, it is also far too accurate and explains much of what we have experienced during the Trump Era.
The core idea is this: Denialism is different than denial - all of us are in denial to some benign extent as a cost of living in society (just like lying is a necessary social skill to exist in human society.) Denialism is an entire system of creating justification for believing lies, supported by pseudoscience, and taking on a life of its own. Denialism is a way to keep our darkest desires - the ones it is socially unacceptable to speak openly - hidden. And to legitimate those dark desires.
Kahn-Harris examines a few of these and mentions others. He chooses Holocaust denialism as an obvious one - he is Jewish after all. He also looks at climate change denialism as another.
There are others mentioned, and I am all too familiar with some of them. For example, Young Earth Creationism, which has developed an entire industry to lend plausibility to its beliefs. And the “vaccines cause autism” one. And a number of others.
Some of these are relatively benign, while others - the foundation of the MAGA movement, threaten to destroy democracy and plunge us into another dark ages.
The reason this book is so dark to me is that it can’t really offer solutions except on the margins. A few of us have indeed had a “moral epiphany” and others have walked away once the core darkness of the soul is exposed. But for many - perhaps most - people, what we experience is the unpleasant realization that we and they do not share the same moral values. As the author puts it, “moral diversity.”
This is the most devastating thing that Trump has revealed - he is a symptom, not the cause of our deep soul-sickness as humans, and as Americans. Many of us truly want to see others suffer and die, even if we hurt ourselves in the process.
The book also hit close to home because my parents are increasingly steeped in denialism, to the incredible damage of their relationships with me and my family, and others within my birth family.
In the introduction, the author mentions his childhood flirtation with conspiracy theories - this was pre-internet, so we weren’t as openly awash in denialism as we are now. He even considered forming a Jewish metal band that pretended to espouse Holocaust denial. (Ha ha we’re so funny, amirite?)
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.
The first chapter lays the foundation quite well, and had some lines that have really caused me to think more deeply. For example, he does a deep dive on desire and why it is so complicated for humans.
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.
Denial is just one form of the lying we need to do in order to function in society - we lie to ourselves about our desires. This is often benign, but it can cross the line into destructive. He also explains the difference between benign denial and denialism.
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.
He then mentions some of the denialisms that the book will examine.
In recent years, the term denialism has come to be applied to a strange field of ‘scholarship.’ 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.
With the exception of Holocaust denial, every single one of those other denialisms either are or have been believed by my parents. (At least I think they no longer believe in AIDS denialism, but I’m not 100% sure…) And, unfortunately, many others. Covid vaccines will kill you eventually and actually spread the disease. LGBTQ people are living in sin and/or are caused by bad parenting. Trickle Down Economics works. And on and on it goes.
Denialism is not stupidity, ignorance, mendacity, or psychological pathology. Nor is it the same as lying. Of course, denialists can be stupid, ignorant liars, but so can we all.
The author then looks at what is behind these denialisms.
Nor is denialism simply a desperate attempt to avoid facing an incontrovertible moral truth. I do not believe that, if only I could find the key to ‘make them understand,’ denialsists would think just like me. A global warming denialist is not an environmentalist who cannot accept s/he 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 combatting 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 as a barrier to acknowledging moral differences.
And therein lies the horror. As I have come to realize, many of my fellow Americans (and most of my former Evangelical tribe) do not share my morality. At all. And that includes my parents, unfortunately. We have profound moral differences that cannot and thus will not be resolved.
The author does make a good point that it is important to understand that humans all have some vulnerability to this - none of us are as moral as we want to think we are, and he can understand the “why” of denialism to a degree.
Even if I may have difficulty in putting myself in the position of people who believe profoundly different things to me, I can certainly empathize with the predicament that denialists find themselves in. Denialism arises from being in an impossible bind: holding to desires, values, ideologies and morals that cannot be openly spoken of.
Kahn-Harris also quotes Michael Specter (a debunker of denialism) with an interesting insight that really explains both MAGA and my parents well:
“We have all been in denial at some point in our lives; faced with truths too painful to accept, rejection often seems the only way to cope. Under those circumstances, facts, no matter how detailed or irrefutable, rarely make a difference. Denialism is denial writ large - when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable life.”
And the author expands on that idea a bit:
Denialism can usually be traced back to a kind of founding trauma, a shocking explosion of knowledge that directly threatens something fundamental to oneself or to a group of which one is a part.
As a result of this knowledge, it is necessary to make a choice.
In these moments, the future opens up into a number of possible paths. The main path leads where it should lead, where it has to lead to remain a decent person: towards accepting the conclusions that the evidence demands. Yet taking this path might mean sabotaging one’s economic interests, repudiating one’s life’s work, or struggling to reconcile one’s deepest beliefs with irrefutable contrary evidence.
Oh yes, all three of those apply to my parents in different ways. Definitely financial interest (and that applies to us all, probably), my mom’s sense of identity as a stay-at-home mom, and the fundamentalist religious beliefs that are threatened by any evidence against them. With LGBTQ grandchildren, this particularly requires a pernicious form of denialism. As the author points out:
In any case, all denialists share a burning desire to continue to appear decent while rejecting the path of decency. It is motivated by a yearning to carry on as one is, without conceding that one was ever on the wrong path.
Unfortunately, denialism is pretty much impervious to any refutation. It just grows stronger the more you fight it. Which is an unsolvable dilemma for those of us living in reality.
To a degree then, denialism always wins. To present itself as a viable option, denialism can adopt scholarly or polemical styles according to what will work best with a target audience. Those who attempt to counter denialism can lose when they position themselves as scholarly experts and lose when they present themselves as clear communicators.
I guess on the plus side is that for people who are committed to thinking and a healthy skepticism (my wife and I have noted that we both have active bullshit detectors, something our parents seem to have mostly lacked, which is why they fell hard for religious batshittery) is that it really isn’t that difficult to identify denialism.
You can make a good or bad argument to demonstrate anthropogenic global warming, the historical reality of the Holocaust, or the reality of evolution; denialists can only make bad arguments against them. In this respect, denialism is defined by absence as much as presence. This is another reason why it is wise to judge arguments by their best proponents. If you search for the best argument for a position and find only denialist techniques, then you are looking at denialism.
This turned out to be true for me. I have rejected a lot of denialist ideas that I was taught, both at home and at church - and in my former political affiliation that I was raised in - because I made the “mistake” of actually reading their best arguments. I came to believe in evolution in significant part because I started actually reading the “best” arguments for creationism and realized they were both bad and dishonest. Ditto for “alternative medicine,” trickle-down economics, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, and more.
A later chapter talks about the gap - the gap between our desires and what we feel free to say about them. Unsurprisingly, the chapter opens with a quotation from the Hebrew scriptures commanding genocide.
And this really is the reality that Trump has unveiled. In the past, humans proudly celebrated the commission of genocide. Openly. But culture has changed. At least somewhat.
Earlier despots had a language through which their bloodthirsty deeds could be proclaimed. They had much else too: systems of belief that legitimized and even sacralized the looting of wealth from their own and others’ lands, the rampant inequalities that resulted from it, and systems of government, knowledge and social order based on faith rather than evidence.
And now? Now what could once be spoken of, even celebrated, is officially denied. It’s not just genocide: the bad things that are done today by governments, by powerful corporations, by religions and other systems of belief can rarely be openly admitted, let alone justified. Today’s denialists are the wretched descendants of the proud propagandists of the past.
This gap causes hypocrisy, naturally. The gap between what we humans want to believe we are and what we actually are.
A gap has opened up between private desires and the public language of values…Almost anything is privately thinkable, but many things are publicly unspeakable.
Of course, there is nothing new about a gap between public values and private desires. The very existence of a ‘public sphere’ presupposes a realm of civil virtue that is greater than the private realm of the individual. In fact, the very existence of publicly shared notions of ‘the good’ implies that not everyone can live up to it all the time. Only in a society without any kind of collective organization and norms would it be possible for there to be no conflict between public and private.
The author later talks about how denialism doesn’t always mean a true desire to do evil (although in some cases it does), but more a desire to avoid the consequences of pursuing desires.
How, then, does one square the not-always-unspeakable outcomes that denialists desire with my argument that denialism is driven by the gap between what people desire and what is speakable? My answer is that it is the consequences of pursuing these desires that is unspeakable. A successful fight for inaction on global warming as part of a desire to preserve untrammelled carbon-based free market capitalism will inevitably cause the suffering of millions, if not billions…Denialism allows these visions to be pursued as if they were cost-free. Desire is preserved from the reality of its consequences.
As he points out, even genocide denialism is a desire to avoid consequences.
Even genocide denialism is driven by a similar fear of consequences. The Holocaust and other genocides inevitably involved dirty work - bodies that needed to be herded, killed, and disposed of - that only appeals to a small minority of even the most ideologically driven genocidaires. Denialism preserves genocide as a beautiful, spotless dream; as the cost-free removal of a hated class of persons from the world.
This is what Trump promises, by the way. A cost-free ethnic cleansing, a sanitary way to make America white again that we don’t have to actually watch, or even acknowledge.
There is another line that I think is truly profound, and particularly reflects my parents’ embrace of denialism.
The personal reasons behind the desires that leads to denialism may be various, but what denialists do share is the common, collective effort to reshape the world as they would like it to appear. For that reason, the specter haunting denialism is the disappointing, maybe even embarrassing, reality that we cannot mold the world as easily as we would like.
Unsurprisingly, this leads denialists to increasing doses of cognitive dissonance. Which is, alas, as likely to be resolved by selective denial of reality as by positive change. Again, something I see in my parents, who have decided to blame me for the consequences of their actions in rejecting my wife and children.
Like the author, I do genuinely feel for denialists - it is a terrible way to live.
My quasi-religious, quasi-medical (and fully patronizing) use of the word ‘saving’ is deliberate, not because I consider denialists to be somehow fallen and corrupted, but because denialism is shot through with desperation and anxiety that shows it to be a kind of predicament; a burden, for all the bluster and defiance.
The book gets particularly dark, though, when it looks at the alternative to denialism for the denialist. And that is something we are seeing increasingly in what the author calls our “post-denialism” future and present. And that is openly stating those dark desires.
And that really is what Trump has done: made evil great again. A man like my father can now openly praise ethnic cleansing: “I don’t like Trump’s style, but at least he is finally doing something about the Hispanic problem…” Bigots can openly admit to wanting to murder LGBTQ people. Neo-Nazi groups can openly post racist fliers in my neighborhood.
One unexpected thing in this chapter was the source of many of the quotes - those that do in fact state the desires openly. On the issue of global warming, the most pernicious came either directly from Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises, or from the organizations dedicated to their ideas.
Never heard of them? I haven’t talked about them much on the blog, but they are essentially the godfathers of the modern Social Darwinist movement in economics, the ideas that Ayn Rand eventually put in her poorly-written novels. And they boil down to the idea that it is morally wrong to use government to restrain the rich and powerful, who should be allowed to exploit, pillage, and even murder as they see fit. Because evolution or something. Unsurprisingly, these are the people willing to say that it is morally appropriate to destroy the planet no matter what the suffering for others, as long as we can get rich doing it. Saying the unspeakable out loud.
And this leads to the problem many of us have in our new post-denialist age:
Can we handle a world of radical moral diversity? Can we live with other human beings when the profound differences that divide us are out in the open? What would it be like to live next door to someone who can openly proclaim his wish for millions of people to die?
And later:
This possibility means that there is now no avoiding a reckoning with the discomfiting issues that those who fight denialism prefer to avoid: how do we respond to people who have radically different desires and morals to 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? We cannot assume that if people ‘knew the truth’ they would be like us. Denialism has hidden this moral diversity from us, but increasingly there is no hiding place.
And therein lies the problem for me. A deeply distressing realization over the last decade or so has been that most of the people I grew up with, most of those I went to church with, most of those in my neighborhood, do not in fact share my core moral values. And that unfortunately includes my parents. Both on the grand scale of “those people” and whether they have value, but even on the question of whether I matter to them. The answer, by the way, is “definitely not.” They threw me away as soon as I challenged their ideology and politics. And, unfortunately, looking back, I think that my mother has never actually wanted the best for me. Rather, she wanted me to suffer in recompense for how the other firstborn males in her life made her suffer, and as proof that she was right all along. That’s an unspeakable truth, but it is no longer tenable to believe the opposite.
For the author, what limited hope there is is contained in the idea that at least some people, once the mask of denialism comes off, will back away from the abyss. Whether this happens or not remains to be seen - I’m deeply skeptical myself, having found that even family relationships were not enough to change people. But maybe once the consequences become apparent, some will change their mind? We will see.
In any case, this book does at least help one understand the dynamics of denialism, and the dark disease of the soul it conceals. Kahn-Harris makes his case well, and even though it is uncomfortable to consider that he may be right, I think it is something many of us will have to confront in the coming days. Whether we like it or not, many of the people we live among are not merely indifferent to the suffering of others, but actively seek to create it. That’s who we are as a species, unfortunately.
For those of us who seek to transcend those tendencies toward violence and hate, we have a lot of work ahead of us, and we will need to stick together to protect the targets of that violence to the degree we can. At least now the mask is off.
I have no answer for exactly how we handle living among people with profound moral differences. I can say that for myself, I cannot ever be close friends with them. That’s a bridge too far for me. In a weird sort of way, I feel like I understand better what it must have been like being an early Christian, weirdly devoted to the idea of loving your neighbor in a world where that was considered laughable. It’s just a shame that the people using Christ’s name are overwhelmingly on the opposite side than that of the early Christians.
