An Indignant Denial

E mpathy 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. The discovery of evolution, for example, is inconvenient to those committed to a literalist biblical account of creation.

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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.

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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. 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. 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: 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. Mainstream science can also be dogmatic and blind to its own limitations. Human interests can rarely if ever be separated from the ways we observe the world.

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Indeed, sociologists of science have shown how modern ideas of disinterested scientific knowledge have disguised the inextricable links between knowledge and human interests. 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. O n 6 November , when he was already preparing the ground for his presidential run, Donald Trump sent a tweet about climate change.

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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. 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.

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.

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.

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The intemperance of the online world is pushing denialism so far that it is beginning to fall apart. The collective, institutional work of building a substantial bulwark against scholarly consensus gives way to a kind of free-for-all. 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.

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: 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.

W hile 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 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 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: The impact on Jewish-Zionist power would surely be minimal.

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 , for example, one KKK leader told a journalist: Eleven million [immigrants] is nothing.

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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: There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. Not all denialists are taking these steps towards open acknowledgment of their desires. In some fields, the commitment to repressing desire remains strong. Still, over time it is likely that traditional denialists will be increasingly influenced by the emerging post-denialist milieu.

T he 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 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.

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.

As if it was crime? Took me by the arm to make me flow, snapped hard, so I would let go; and then she swayed me away in her arms, I took my last breath. Emotionless, she looked and said, your time you have fully spent, make room now, for others to be content. Read on your iOS and Android devices Get more info. Capabilities Text to speech. Additional information Publisher Xlibris US. Content protection This content is DRM free.

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