Keith Kahn-Harris - Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth
We are all in denial, some of the time at least. Part of being human, and
living in a society with other humans, is finding clever ways to express – and
conceal – our feelings. 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.”
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. Most of the time, we spare ourselves from the torture of recognising
our baser yearnings. But when does this necessary private self-deception become
harmful? When it becomes public dogma. In other words: when it becomes
denialism.
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.
In recent years, the
term has been used to describe a number of fields of “scholarship”, whose
scholars engage in audacious projects 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 (human-caused) 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... read more:
see also
