This is very interesting, but I sense contradictions. If denialists have fundamentally different moral standards, then how can they be said to have conceded the argument that the things they deny are immoral ? And while I very much like the notion that denialists are trying to transform science rather than destroy it, seeking as they do validation from scientists, this seems to me at odds with their statements that flat-out deny objective reality. Of course there may be very different factors at work : a complex issue like climate change is very different to a simple one like the shape of the Earth. You don't have to reject objectivity to be a climate change denialist*, you just have to be misinformed/confused. In contrast the mindset of a Flat Earther is necessarily fundamentally unscientific or anti-scientific. Nevertheless, an excellent long read.
* I do wish the article had elaborated more on the differences between skepticism and denial. A misinformed skeptic is an entirely different beast to a denialist.
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 acknowledgement; 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 acknowledgement that, if anthropogenic climate change were actually occurring, we would have to do something about it.
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.
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.
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.
Drumpf 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 Drumpf 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 new generation of denialists aren’t creating new, alternative orthodoxies so much as obliterating the very idea of orthodoxy itself.
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.
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?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drives-people-to-reject-the-truth
People are more afraid of being proven wrong than of not being right.
ReplyDeleteDenial is a form (or stage) of grief. See the Kübler-Ross model.
ReplyDeleteWhich makes what grief itself is an interesting question.
It's usually interpreted as sorrow over loss or misfortune. I'm working on an alterrnative, based on mental world models: grief is a response to the realisation that a previously useful world model has proved invalid.
Sometimes that is personal loss -- death of family membeers or friends, injury, loss of status or position, loss of physical goods.
But loss of guiding models can be just as pronounced, and seems to be the common thread underlying all forms.
Denialism becomes far more understandable in this context.
Contnuing the thought above. Given that emotions are evolved, and serve an evolutionary purpose (first noted by Darwin), the question becomes: what is the evolutionarry benefit of denial, if any? Is there one, or is it merely a very widespread, highly consistent, emergent pathology?
ReplyDeleteAlso; there's some disagreement on the K-R model, though the main strain of it actually bolsters my interrpretation above: K-R were studying grief not over the loss of a loved one, but of patients being informed of a terminal illness. A change of mental world-model.
I've been poking around psych lit on emotions and grief a bit ... the area seems not particularly well developed and numerous inconsistent models exist.
Context my ass gentlemen. In science circles, as Rhys Taylor knows, denialism is a label applied to anyone who states or minimizes the impact of anthropogenic climate change. There is no quality of emotion measured or applied. The climatology community did not ask linguists of psychologists for permission to misuse their word. They are singularly unrepentant.
ReplyDeleteDenialism is a direct result of a public relations campaign orchestrated by the same people who worked for the tobacco industry. Note deliberate us of "orchestrated". The connection was investigated and documented. It's simple.
The talk was titled Manufacturing Scientific Ignorance and it was given in San Francisco at the same AAAS meeting Susan Solomon did a plenary.
If you're interested in members of the general public who are of higher than average scientific literacy, but choose to believe climate denialists, go to Dan Kahan's blog at Cultural Cognition where you'll boggle at the number of papers on precisely this.
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius I think the denial as grief notion is nicely expressed in the article :
ReplyDeleteIn 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... Denialism is, in part, a response to the vulnerability of denial.
I can imagine denialism as being an unfortunate accidental consequence of higher reasoning coupled with emotions. Paul Bloom gives some nice examples of irrational behaviour having a rational evolutionary purpose : having a bit of a temper means people are less likely to provoke you, falling madly in love is more likely to lead to a children than calmly suggesting you'd like to mate. A long-standing idea of mine is that confidence, back in prehistoric times, was a good indicator of ability. Start falsely claiming you're a good mammoth hunter and pretty soon you'll end up crushed to death. Whereas in the modern era false confidence is far less likely to take you out of the gene pool.
In that sense denialism could be a largely accidental result of behaviours which are generally beneficial to evolution. As long as it isn't so crazy that it results in individuals preventing their own breeding, evolution can't operate. And as a widespread force, denialism does seem mostly restricted to abstractions rather than concrete reality, Darwin Award winners notwithstanding.
Bob Calder Yes, but I doubt very much any campaign of denial doesn't strongly appeal to emotions rather than rational analysis. Emotive forces are inherent in it.
ReplyDeleteBob Calder This is why Proctor's neologism, agnotology -- culturally induced ignorance -- is so useful.
ReplyDeleteYes, the expressed beliefs are deliberately induced, as a concious strategy. That component is not denial.
But the acceptance of the beliefs is. If the mass of the public were not vulnerable to that message, then we'd not have a problem. But the messaage is accepted, in all appearances genuinely, by some non-negligible fraction of society. And therein lies the problem.
And real, true, denial.
The Trump/Clinton race provided a natural experiment for a team from Germany who used the two groups of voters to disentangle how data can be interpreted differently depending on expectations.
ReplyDelete