SIO172: Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris on Denialism

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 172. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. I am so happy to have you here with me today, and I've also got an interview with Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris. He's written a book called Denial, The Unspeakable Truth, and it's about different things that people are in denial of in the world, it's denialism versus denial, there's a lot of interesting facets there. Whether it's climate change or maybe conspiracy theories or other things, he studied it and has some thoughts and theories about what links these things together and maybe what we can do about it a little bit. Really interesting stuff. So, let's hop over to the interview.

0:01:21 Thomas: Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris, how are you doing today?

0:01:24 Keith: Doing good, thank you.

0:01:25 Thomas: So your book is called Denial the Unspeakable Truth, and I'm really interested in how you've formulated this and kind of what can go under the heading of denial and what the commonalities are there. It's an interesting way to frame these problems. But before we do that, I think we should do a little basic background. What do you think?

0:01:46 Keith: I'm up for that.

0:01:47 Thomas: Yeah, so tell us about yourself for listeners who aren't familiar.

0:01:51 Keith: Well, I am based in London, hence the accent. I am a sociologist by training and I've taken a fairly winding route to where I am now. My PhD was on the global extreme heavy metal scene, if you can believe that, and I continue to write about metal, but that's not the beginning and end of my interests. And I currently lecture at Birkbeck College, which is part of University of London, as well as Leo Beck College, a progressive rabbinic seminary, if you can believe. I also do an increasing amount of writing and most of the time these days I don't write academic stuff. So I write books like my current one that are kind of hybrid of scholarship and popular writing, which has how I prefer to write these days.

0:02:44 Keith: But the idea for the book, I've been wanting to write about Denial for over 10 years, and it took me until this year before I finally got a book out. It's actually my fifth book. It's something that I've be fairly obsessed with for a long time, and it's really great to get it out there now.

0:03:05 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, fascinating. I would really like to know what drove you to try to write about these things from this perspective. So what are the major things that in your book people are in denial of?

0:03:20 Keith: Well, actually, the title of the book is a bit of a bait and switch. The book is actually more about denialism than denial. But the reason it's called Denial is partly because there was already a book by Michael Spector called Denialism, but also because denialism is a fairly clunky word and it's not universally recognized or known, particularly in the UK. I think it has a stronger presence in the the in the U.S. in my experience, uh, I do talk about denial. Well,

0:03:25 Thomas: Well, what would you say the difference? Yeah, what could you define then? I guess I don't understand. What's the difference between denial and denialism in your mind?

0:04:00 Keith: Denial is something that is, quote unquote, normal. It's part of the way that humans operate. We cannot have a continuous awareness of everything, particularly difficult things. We have to strategically and tactically shift our awareness and our ability to respond to various external stimuli. But of course, denial could also be pathological. Denial can be, can be anything from simply not wanting to deal with paying your credit card balance when you've had a hard day at work and can't face it, but it, it could also be not wanting to face your alcoholism. It could also be not willing to face the fact that climate change is occurring, and it could occur on an individual and a societal level.

0:04:55 Keith: So we're talking about a lot of things when we're talking about denial. But the crucial distinction that I make between denial and denialism is that denial is about silence. Denial is about not wanting to engage with something, to try and prevent engagement with it. Denialism is much more proactive. Denial, denialism is about replacing or attempting to replace a particular truth with your own truth. So if you like, denial is silence. Denialism is noise.

0:05:29 Thomas: Yeah. Actually, that makes a lot of sense. That's an excellent distinction there. Because when I think about denial and I think about, you know, you brought up the credit card thing, I actually had a friend who kind of had a problem with that, like just was not able to kind of deal with credit card debt. And it's so weird to me to even think about because for me, it's like, oh, I got to pay the thing off whenever I got to pay the thing off. You know, even when I had had no money to now, it's just always been a habit to make sure I could do that. But he would, he would get so overwhelmed with it sometimes and kind of get depressed about it and then would just like pretend it didn't exist kind of, and just wouldn't do it. And I think that's a great distinction because it's not as though he like had a story about, oh no, actually I've got all the credit card limit in the world.

0:06:16 Thomas: I've gotten no, I have tons of money. You know, it's Not like he was replacing it with another set of facts. It was just that he was in denial of it. He couldn't really deal with that particular thing.

0:06:27 Keith: So in the book, I give a personal example that's kind of similar to that, which is, so I think one of my pet theories, which is based on nothing in particular, but it's just a pet theory, is that everybody has an addiction with their name on it. And it might be that you don't get caught up in it because you never have the chance. So if you've never been to a casino, you might, and never find out if you're a, an addictive gambler. But the addiction with my name on it is smoking, uh, cigarette smoking. And there's, over the last decade or two, there's been a pattern in my life, which is that I stop smoking, and then I have the odd one, and I keep it secret. I keep it secret from my family. I keep it secret for my friends.

0:07:19 Thomas: Well, then you wrote a book about it. Nice going. You blew your cover.

0:07:22 Keith: No, I didn't write an entire book about that. I think that would be not of interest to anybody but me. But the point is, is that I was trying not to face it myself. I was tried to create a silence around it, to use my terminology. But what I wasn't doing was trying to prove that smoking didn't cause cancer.

0:07:43 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:07:44 Keith: And what I wasn't doing was trying to say, well, the occasional secret cigarette doesn't mean that I've started smoking. And I wasn't trying to prove it. I was just trying to prevent attention from being drawn to it. So that, to me, is the difference between denial and denialism.

0:07:59 Thomas: That makes that makes a whole lot of sense. After you said that, I didn't realize there was there's a distinction there, But that that makes sense. So, OK, then to try to rephrase that question, what are some of the things you mentioned? Climate change. What are some of the things that there's denialism about in the world and in your book?

0:08:14 Keith: Well, climate change is one of the most pressing examples, but also the thing that originally brought me into it, I've for a long time been interested in Holocaust denial. I should incidentally say that while I'm calling it denialism, I do respect that Holocaust denial is the term that people use, which is slightly confusing. But there's AIDS denialism denying that HIV causes AIDS, denying that AIDS even exists. There's anti-vaccine, vaccine rather. There's creation science and intelligent design and all manner of other things. But those are the main ones, I think.

0:08:30 Thomas: Right, right, right.

0:08:52 Thomas: So what links these together? Because for me, when I think about denialism, I think that we've all heard in religious debates or whatever, me being an atheist, I've heard it portrayed that the atheist is the denialist here. I'm in denial of the fact that there's a God and there's an all that. What would make that different to you or not? You know, is it is it all relative, or is there some common thread that you're finding in denialism of the Holocaust or climate change or something like that?

0:09:25 Keith: Well, this is where the abyss threatens to open up, which is that you could end up falling into sort of a pure relativism, whereas where you think, well, what is denialism to one person is truth to another. And you ask yourself some searching questions about how do we understand what truth is? How do we understanding what proof is? Is how do we understand what science and scholarship is? But I do think there are ways you could spot it, and I'm not the first to argue that. There has been quite a lot of work over the years of identifying particular techniques, argumentative techniques, that are used in denialist communities that aren't distinctive. Now, everybody can use a denialist technique, and I'll talk about what they are if you ask me. In a little

0:09:51 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, definitely

0:10:22 Keith: Bit, but

0:10:22 Thomas: Was going to be my question. But go ahead. Yeah.

0:10:23 Keith: But But before I talk about that, but anybody can use a denialist technique. You can use an idealist technique to make a correct argument, but Only denialists, for denialists, they only have denialist techniques. That's all they Have, they don't have anything else. And so if you look at the best, most articulate uh proponents of an idea, and you find an only denialist techniques, then the chances are you're looking at denialism, and you can make conclusions on that basis about whether to trust them.

0:10:35 Thomas: Hmm. Interesting.

0:11:02 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. So it's not obviously it's Not a black and white, you know, easily thing. But but I see what you're saying there. It's kind of looking at the position as a whole, and if it's pretty much made up of people using these techniques, then it's kind of a denialism. So spill the beans on the techniques. I'm curious now.

0:11:21 Keith: Well, Once received an email from a friend who combats Holocaust denial online, and he, him and some other colleagues had been putting together a sort of a complete list of uh denialist techniques, and he'd got to over 60 or something Like that. So I'm not going to go To over 60, But one thing, one example is focusing down on tiny details, uh by, because denialists aren't able to turn over the the uh an idea completely, but what they can do is by nibbling away at the edges, by focusing down on the edges, what they could do is, to what will they hope to do, is to create doubt about the whole. So, trying to say to people, well, if this isn't accurate, then maybe the whole thing isn't inaccurate.

0:11:39 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah,

0:12:20 Keith: So I'll give you one example of that, one example of that is when the Holocaust denier David Irving took the historian Deborah Lipstadt to trial for libel in Britain a few years ago. He conducted his own defence, and one of the things that he spent a huge amount of time on was looking at aerial photographs taken by the Allies in World War II of the gas chambers or the crematoria at Auschwitz. And it was all came down to what a chimney or what event looks like from above.

0:13:00 Keith: So the Holocaust, which was an enormous event involving huge numbers of people, both perpetrators and victims, becomes focused down onto the question of what a chimney looks like from above. You find something similar with climate change analysis as well. So one thing that they're obsessed by is polar bears, the question of whether polar bear numbers are declining in the Arctic, so, you know, and the methodologies for counting polar bears, and so and so uh and so on. One of the reasons why this is, uh to a certain extent anyway, an effective technique, is that the degree of detail that they draw on could be very intimidating.

0:12:59 Thomas: Yeah, yeah

0:13:42 Keith: So I don't know anything about polar bear populations populations in northern Canada, Or how to count them, for example. I

0:13:48 Thomas: Exactly. Oh my God. I imagine a lot of my American listeners are all thinking the same thing right now, possibly, if they've gotten into the the same arguments I've gotten into, but 9-11 denial is exactly this. I mean, it's just flat out. I wonder if, I don't know if you talked about that at all in your book, but yeah, yeah, It's precisely this thing. It's, you know, when a gigantic set of buildings fall down in an unprecedented event, you know, there are so many little details. When you start talking about all the schedules of the people and the workers and the this and the that, there there are so many details that they can draw on to try to find some sort of irregularities. You know, while this person didn't report in to work that day and they actually, you know, all this stuff, because we're talking about tens of thousands of potential people involved and, you know, it is exclusively this. It's the difference between, oh, didn't that look like a compression, or, you know, that's not a compression explosion, that's a that's that's an explosion from a detonation,

0:14:09 Keith: Do a bit, actually, yes. But

0:14:55 Thomas: That whatever. And like trying to look at these, you know, the tiny picture, a couple pixels in a in a video. And the whole time, it's, this really resonated with me what you were saying, because whenever I've tried to engage with these people, which which happened a little bit, but it's just so frustrating, that's hard to do. It's it's like they don't keep the big picture in their mind. Like, okay, this little pixel on this video looks a little interesting. Therefore, there's an enormous government conspiracy involving killing our own people and and coordinating with all the, like, if you always put the, you the conclusion in like what it should be, if you always keep that in mind while you're looking at these little details, it becomes obvious, like, well, no, okay, okay, this doesn't prove that, that's, that's ridiculous. But right.

0:15:44 Keith: It's But the point is, is that they don't have a big picture, that They, because they can't have a big figure, because the we'll take 9-1-1 denial, 9-11, why do I call it 9- 1-1 I know, That's the emergency code In America. I Know, you Did I, it's like my kids, my kids really tease me for that, I don't know why I do that. Uh So, 9-11 denial, um possibility uh that it would have for this to have been a government conspiracy, I mean, there are various quote-unquote theories that the deniers offer, would

0:15:47 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah. We have 911. We're not in denial of that.

0:16:18 Thomas: Yeah, yeah,

0:16:19 Keith: Involve the most extraordinary level of really pretty much silent coordination. And as I say in my book, if that were true and were proved, it would actually show something, it would, be it would, it would tell us something entirely new about what human beings are capable of, because There's been research on of real conspiracies, and what happens with real conspiracies is once you widen the circle beyond a Limited number of People That

0:16:39 Thomas: Yeah. Like one and a half people, like it's really, it's gotta be a small number of people.

0:16:53 Keith: That's why, I mean, that's one of the reasons why the only conspiracy theories to me that I will ever entertain are ones where if they were true it would have involved a small number of people. So that's Why The assassination of JFK, some conspiracy theories there, I don't know whether they're true, they're probably not true, but I could probably give them the time of day because they wouldn't actually take that many people to be able to pull Off, but

0:17:07 Thomas: Yeah plus the Jack Ruby thing is so so insane. Like what, who was that guy? I mean, I don't know. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but like, I'll entertain some theory about like he might've thrived or somebody might've a two person, three person conspiracy revolving, revolving around him or something.

0:17:27 Keith: As I Say, it's It's so So It's A conspiracy theories there, they may all be entirely wrong, but Some of them at least are sociologically plausible, from what we Know about how Human Beings are, others of them are simply not, because they involve, I mean, so climate change denialism involves, involves, you have scientists in different disciplines, in different countries, holding different political views, all of them either coordinating to create a hoax, in some versions, or in other versions, simply all falling for the same match delusion. And it's just simply too, if that were true, it would rewrite human history, it would, not human history, would rewrite social, social sciences, psychology, whatever you want to call it.

0:17:39 Thomas: Yeah. Right, right, right.

0:18:22 Thomas: Yeah, but

0:18:23 Keith: It's just simply not a credible thing to argue.

0:18:27 Thomas: Like you say, with the not keeping in mind the big picture, you know, having grown up in a Fox News household, my parents are these people, you know, like I, I don't know if they still are. It's it's kind of too frustrating to even talk about it. But they are the kind of people who, what, what it is. And it's interesting because I wouldn't put them, and it's scary how many people this is, who watch Fox News and probably have similar feelings. It's a lot, and it's a big problem in our country. But it's not so much, and I think it goes back to what you're saying, not keeping the big picture in mind. You know, it's not, it's, they, it's not that they have a theory about how, OK, these people coordinated with these people and they did this and they falsified this. And it's that it's a cultural hatred of scientists, partially, like it's it's kind of a, like, oh, these scientists, they don't know what they're talking about, kind of thing.

0:19:20 Thomas: And then combined with they find the one, you know, the one scientist who's who thinks climate change isn't substantiated or something. And they refer to that person. And so it's it's once again, it's not keeping the entire picture in mind. It's just focusing on a few details and a few biases.

0:19:35 Keith: So that's true to an extent. I think one of the things, but one of things I think divides what you might call the classic period of denialism is actually, and I think this is the mistake that some people make in approaching it, is seeing it as anti-science. And, of course, it's anti-established science or, in the case of Holocaust denial, established scholarship, historical scholarship. But it's actually in love with science and scholarship. It desperately wants that authority. That's why it's doing it in the first place. The point is to create, to draw on the prestige of it, to try and create your own scholarly field, and that's one of the things that most denialists are desperate for, they want the validation of being seen as respectable scholars, uh, on the other side of the debate. That's why they're desperate to be debated with, because that would give them the validation that they're looking for. So, to see it as anti-science isn't isn't entirely correct.

How, having said that, though, one of the things I argue in the book is that in more recent years, we're seeing the rise of what I call post-denialism, which is – and Fox News would be a good example of that – which is where this desire to create this alternative scholarship is breaking down.

0:20:12 Thomas: Interesting.

0:21:04 Keith: And what you'll see instead is sort of assertions that are – that barely even attempt to be – to have even a surface credibility.

0:21:13 Keith: That seems to be one of the things that's emblematic about the Trump administration, about Trump himself. I mean he does draw on denialist theory but very, very lazily and often contradictory, in contradictory ways. That's what I call post-denialism.

0:21:19 Thomas: Yeah.

0:21:31 Thomas: Yeah, there's sort of a nihilism to it almost like it's it's like facts don't even matter really in some. But, you know, I do think we could be talking about different things or different levels or different kinds of denial. I'll, you know, I, my parents aren't avid conspiracy theory theorist, uh, trying to work out all the ins and outs of it. I think they're just in general, they're, they're in a culture in Fox News that's, that there's like, I think it, I mean, it is a little anti-science. Like I would draw a distinction between Fox News themselves, who I think probably are more like what you're saying, where they aren't anti-science. They, they do want to be the authorities and utilize that, that authority and have that debate. But like a lot of people in that I'm thinking of who effectively are in denial of climate change, it's just this, this, this feeling they have, this sort of like trying

0:21:36 Keith: Yes, I think that's true.

0:22:28 Thomas: To think it's sort of of like a devotion to or a higher rating of like old wives' tales kind of truth versus science, you know, like people who, people who study things, ah, they get lost in all the, you know, the their ivory tower facts and figures and all that. I really do think there is a certain level of anti-science there, yeah.

0:22:45 Keith: Well, I think I think one of the things that that has given rise to this in the first place is that modern science, and by modern, I mean the latest phase of modern, is incredibly disempowering. Everything is incredibly specialized. Scientific discourse is incredibly It's impenetrable to most. Some scientists are not particularly good at communicating their findings, and often their job depends on them not doing that, but simply being part of their own scholarly community. What, and this is different to the sort of early age of of modern science, where you'd have, you know, in the in the early enlightenment period, you'd have, you could make a contribution to optics and to calculus or whatever it was, and maybe even to history as well, where where the field was kind of open.

Now, of course, that's only a small elite who did that, but nonetheless. Nevertheless, modern scholarship is this vast behemoth that's very, very intimidating. What denialism offers, or even the softer versions, or simple denial or post-denial, whatever you want to call it, what it offers you is something very empowering, which is that you're in control, that you can see through what others can't, that you can see through the truth behind the obfuscations of the scholarly community. And I think we that at our peril. I think one of the purest examples of that is flat earth theory, which was virtually dead by the 1970s, but has been revived in recent years.

0:23:07 Thomas: Right.

0:24:08 Thomas: I thought you're

0:24:34 Keith: Uh, well Actually, yeah, it's a myth that in the pre-modern period that most people were flat. It's not actually true, um, but it's it's very pure way of saying, of drawing a line in the sand, if you like, of saying the world is exactly what it appears to be. The world appears to be flat to my eyes, to my senses, to my experience, and therefore it is flat, right. And that very eloquent, in a way, in the kind of desire that it speaks of, the desire that you could be the way the world is, the way you see the world, is the way it actually is.

0:24:34 Thomas: Gonna say like the 1470s, but yeah, okay, yeah. Yeah Do You think that's a different thing than when it's like, say, the moon landing, you know? No, I know it looks like the moon land, but it's actually not that. It's actually something else. Do you think there's a different impulse there?

0:25:18 Keith: I Think they're connected, but not identical, because faking the moon landing is something, it doesn't deal with something that we can actually see. The the curvature of the earth, whether it's flat or round, is something that's fundamental to our everyday life, whereas landing on the moon isn't. And in my experience, those who think the moon landing was fake are less concerned about what the universe looks like than they are about what political elites are doing, right. So it's not really about the same thing, although the two sometimes do go together, yeah.

0:25:46 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:07 Thomas: Yeah, so that's, it looks like the common thread then is utilizing some of these argumentative techniques. Were there any others that we wanted to talk about? I mean, I think we, you might have just talked about one, actually. Are you

0:26:19 Keith: Well, another one is, and this has got a term, um, for it, somewhat over the person who does, who's perfected it, but I can't remember his name, uh, he's a creationist. This is the technique that you often find in debates, which is, um, throwing multiple points, a dizzying number of points at you, that's it, the Gish Gallop. So that's another, that that's what it's called, which is, uh, any one of those things that this person, Gish, he's a creationist, I believe, uh, throws out at you individually, they can be easily debunked if you know a modicum about the science, but collectively, even if you are an expert in multiple scientific areas, it's almost impossible to deal with it.

And this is what I sometimes, since I published the book and articles, I get emails from various kinds of denialists. And what they are, what they have in common is they tend to be incredibly long. They tend to sort of give multiple different points that collectively are intended to overwhelm you by death by a thousand cuts, if you like, and are almost impossible to respond to. So that's another technique. Another technique is, and we talked about conspiracy theory before, is that I would say that not all conspiracy theory is denialism, but all denialism has to have a conspiracy theory within it.

0:26:41 Thomas: Thinking, and Gish Galloping. Yeah yeah I'm

0:27:58 Keith: And the reason for that is the most basic thing that it has to explain is, if all this is so obvious and the denialist is saying it is obvious, then why is it that so many people argue the opposite? And the only way they could do that is by talking about a conspiracy. And that is why they use something that's called the Galileo Gambit. Have you heard the Galileo Gambit?

0:28:25 Keith: I can't remember who came up with that term.

0:28:24 Thomas: Not sure I've heard the uh not sure for the, oh,

0:28:28 Keith: Which is basically posing yourself as Galileo, literally or metaphorically.

0:28:33 Thomas: Like you're the one who's, uh, figured it out and you're going to be persecuted kind of thing.

0:28:37 Keith: Exactly, that's exactly, common to the sense of being persecuted. The conspiracy is persecuting brave truth-sayers. Again, that is common to...

0:28:47 Thomas: You're blowing the lid off of this whole thing, and yeah, yeah.

0:28:53 Keith: Exactly, which is why, for this is why that many of us, including Deborah Lipstadt, think that the laws to ban Holocaust denial, for example, are a bad idea, because they simply feed into that. They simply feed into the sort of this desire to be martyred, uh, which you shouldn't give into.

0:28:54 Thomas: Yeah I, I don't, I don't know if you want to try to transition to, uh, talking about maybe what does work, or if that's part of your book, when trying to deal with these arguments and these people. But I would agree off offhand, I don't think that, because to my memory, I isn't there somebody who got locked up for Holocaust denial, and it didn't affect them, like it didn't affect their belief, you know.

0:29:38 Keith: What No, of course it doesn't affect their beliefs. If anything, it probably, uh, it keeps them out of circulation for a while, but their followers, uh, have a flag to rally behind. But on the question of what could be done about it, yes, I do talk about in the book, and it's frankly all a bit bleak. One of the things that that Well,

0:29:38 Thomas: Yeah yeah Nothing that seems to be every conversation I'm having these days, like, what do we do about these Trump supporters and the 30, there's six percent people believe anything he says. And it's like, well, I don't know. I was hoping you'd have more to offer. Save us.

0:30:09 Keith: I mean, I do have something to offer. I do have something definite to offer. It's just you're not going to like it, and I don't particularly like it. But first of all is, is, is what doesn't work is, is simply counterarguments. Very rarely work they can work with people who are undecided some of the time, and certainly there is a little evidence from psychology that people at risk of falling into denialism, if you're very patient and frame things in a non-intimidating, friendly manner, then you can perhaps make some progress. But one of the things that psychology has been teaching us, as in the last few decades, is how incredibly impervious to evidence is human decision making, and how human beings are not these sort of enlightened, enlightenment creatures who sort of disinterestedly weigh the pros and cons. We're sort of passionate creatures who often take positions based on non-verbal, to say the least, factors.

0:30:12 Thomas: Yeah. Okay, good.

0:30:26 Thomas: Yeah, so

0:31:19 Keith: And that means that weaning people off these things is very, very difficult. So what I do in my book is I do a kind of thought experiment, which is to say, what if we removed the reason why denialism was necessary in the first place? And my argument is that the reason why denialism, or at least most denialisms, are necessary, is they allow people to argue for something or express desires that are literally unspeakable in the modern enlightened world. World, so that's where Holocaust denial and other genocide denials are good examples because they Genocides have been carried out throughout much of human history. In that sense, they're fairly historically unremarkable. We haven't stopped doing it in the modern period, but what we've done is removed the ability to openly talk about it and justify it.

So So, in the ancient world, if you wiped out a people and burnt their villages and enslaved them, you'd build a monument to say, "Hey, I did this, isn't it great?" But even during the Second World War, the Nazis kept much of the Holocaust, if not completely secret, then certainly an open secret.

They had the language to say the Jews are evil, but they didn't have the language to say, "The Jews are evil, and every single one of them must be killed."

0:32:59 Keith: You compare that also to climate change. So if you want to keep our carbon fueled lifestyle going as long as we possibly can, then climate change means that many people, millions of people, maybe even hundreds of millions of people are going to suffer. Bangladesh is going to drown. People are going be uprooted. It's going to be a crisis and a horrific thing. Very few people have ever said, yes, the lifestyle that we live now is so precious that we should keep it going even if people suffer. We don't have a language to argue that. What I'm saying in the book is, what if the language to legitimize these things was speakable?

0:33:47 Keith: What if it was possible to openly acknowledge those desires? Then perhaps there wouldn't be any need of denialism. And then perhaps we could openly have different arguments, could actually contend with each other openly. Now, I don't like that argument. I don't like the fact that I made it. I don't want to have made it, certainly as a Jew. I don't have any desire for people to say all Jews should be killed, but that may be what it would take to have a world without denialism. And that's

0:34:28 Thomas: Yeah, I was gonna ask what that looks like. So you're I think I understand what you're saying. And It's something we heard a lot. Again, I'm likening it back to Trump, which is, you know, he's saying things that everyone was thinking that these people people think everyone was thinking them, but it was actually just them.

0:34:43 Keith: Why Trump is more of a post-denialist than a denialist, because in post-denialism it's a step towards that open acknowledgement, not completely open, don't Trump, for legal reasons much as anything else, isn't going to say to admit to his corruption, but he's closer than other people have ever gone. Sort of in terms of climate change, his policies are barely any different to George, George W. Bush's policies, uh, but George W. Bush's policies was enclosed within a much more classical form of denialism, whereas he, Donald Trump, is barely even bothering to do that work. So what I'm saying is we may actually be moving towards a world without denialism. But we are not the remotest bit prepared for that. We're not prepared because we've lost the ability to make these arguments. We've had this very unhelpful consensus that no one believes that genocide is right.

0:34:43 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah,

0:35:44 Keith: No one believes that Bangladesh should drown. But actually, some people do. They just can't say it. But the problem is, because we don't have a way of, because these ideas have not been in public circulation, so the language necessary to argue against them has atrophied. So I'm saying that perhaps if we could develop, if we could find those arguments, if there it was, if we could have an open contention between different visions of what it is to be human, then perhaps that might succeed where others can't. If we are openly acknowledging our desires, our different desires, then maybe we have a less covert process and maybe different arguments might have some kind of success in the way that they're not doing at the moment. As I say, it's a bit of a a thought experiment.

0:36:36 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:36 Keith: Why?

0:36:37 Thomas: I see what you're saying. So how would that look though? Because I, when you talk about Bangladesh should drown, I don't really feel like I'm missing a vocabulary to say, no, they shouldn't, you know, like maybe people should not drown. You know what I mean?

0:36:50 Keith: Shouldn't they all Right, so Why? Should

0:36:54 Thomas: Like, because human life has dignity.

0:36:54 Keith: They? Why? Does human life have dignity? Why? Should I care about them? Well,

0:37:00 Thomas: Well, then I can just do the same thing back. Why should they drown? Why should you know, like, if you're just going to do the the child's "why" question that never ends, that gets anybody on anything, nobody, nobody could survive that. Yeah.

0:37:13 Keith: If, well, The problem is, is that I'm not, I, yeah, I agree with you to an extent, but I actually think that those who don't want to resort to religious languages often have great problems grounding ethics and morality.

0:37:33 Keith: I suggest actually that we might be able to ground it on self-interest as much as anything else. So

0:37:39 Thomas: My next answer was going to be, well, then why don't I just kill you if that's, if your, if lives don't matter, then, you know, and then turn it, turn it back on this hypothetical, irritating person.

0:37:47 Keith: What I could say is You may not care if Bangladesh drowns, but ultimately it's going to create, well, ultimately two things. First of all, it's going to create knock-on effects of refugee crisis that are going to destabilize entire regions and ultimately will affect you even if you live in a gated community in St. Louis. That's the first argument. And the second of all is showing consideration to others also means that there's perhaps a chance they'll show consideration to you. And I think those sorts of self-interested arguments are often a lot better. I actually go even darker than that in in the book, I I imagine what I would say to a Holocaust denier, uh, instead, which is to say you know, what you might want to kill us all, and I can't argue with that, right?

If you want to tell us all Jews like me, if you don't see why, why that's wrong, there's nothing I can say, but, you know, it's a real bother, it's an enormous coordination ordination. And then at the end of it, you've lost a really convenient hate object. We'd be much more used to you alive than dead. We are persecutable. We can be tortured. We can have our lives made misery. That would be much more pleasurable than going through the huge organizational effort that genocide requires. Now, I haven't heard that argument before, but we might have to start thinking about arguments like that, because actually, I think that is a good argument, actually, you know, and

0:37:49 Thomas: Yeah.

0:38:52 Thomas: Well, that's a good argument against the extreme of we ought to commit genocide. But what about when we're, I mean, if you set your sights a little lower on like, maybe let's not be anti-Semitic, how it, then you, you still got, you know, you got to need, need a new argument for that. Right.

0:39:28 Keith: It Yeah, I think that's, yes, that's true to some extent, but that's also difficult, and um, I'm trying to work through and This is why my book is an essay, rather than, in the sense that it's exploratory rather than offering 10 things you can do to to stop denialism tomorrow. I'm I'm trying to suggest that there's a fake, there's a, we've assumed a moral consensus for a long time. We haven't really engaged with what I call moral diversity. The fact that people have, may have irreconcilable visions of what it is to be human, may have radically different desires for each other, but the problem is, is there's this stultifying consensus that even today most racists don't say "we are racist," they use some other language for it.

0:39:52 Thomas: Yeah, right, right. Yeah

0:40:33 Keith: And That's not helpful. It's become, it means that, that certainly in the case of anti-Semitism, my next book is actually on anti-Semitism and it will come out next year. One of the reasons why anti-Semitism today is so controversial is very few people will come up and say, "Yes, I'm anti-Semitic." So what you end up with is this storm of controversy in which you have some people say, "You're anti-Semitic," others saying, "No, we're not," uh, yeah,

0:40:34 Thomas: Well, Well, plus there's a lot of, yeah, and there's gaslighting in terms of like, you know, sending signals about the fact that you're actually racist. Yeah, I think about, for example, that the white power hand signal that might have started as a joke, but then once it's even if it is a joke. Once people are doing it and rallying around it, then like how much is it really a joke? If you're if you think it's funny to be identified as like a white supremacist, you Know what I mean? There's a lot of that too, like playing around. Yeah.

0:41:30 Keith: It's a weaponized deniability, if you like and I think that that is, well, it's horrible to fight, it's absolutely horrible, it takes it, and we're almost told, if you're a member of a minority, if you're Jewish or you're person of color, whatever, it's an horrible thing to face, um, because you never know where you are. But it also, it creates so much fog that we never have what we really should have. If you believe in dialogue and debate, and I do still believe in it, then it has to be, I don't like the word honest, but it has to be honest.

0:41:32 Thomas: Right. Exactly. Yeah, yeah,

0:42:12 Keith: One of the things that struck me recently, it's not in the book because I only thought about it recently, is that we We never really had a debate about climate change. The debate about climate change should have been, this is happening, should we do something about it or should we not? The reason why we've never had this debate is that the people who believe that we should do nothing about it will not come out and say it because all they'll do is deny it. That's not been healthy because it's not healthy for the political process, it's not healthy for addressing this problem, because at least if we're not going to, do, you know, I could almost accept the fact that we are not doing anything about climate change if at least in democratic countries there was a consensus for that, there was a majority for that, if that was what people had actually decided, but we haven't decided that because the question's never been properly debated or thought about or or discussed. Well,

0:42:26 Thomas: Yeah.

0:43:17 Thomas: Yeah, you know what it reminds me of actually is the, the question of abortion rights, because there's, we're in this kind of weird place in, in my country anyway, I won't speak for, I don't know what's happening over there, but we're this weird place where two large groups of people have have fundamentally different ideas, and then what reminded me of it is when you said of, you know, what it, what it means to be human, essentially, uh, almost literally, like they fundamentally, one side thinks, no, once you are, you know, the minute of conception, then there's a person there, you can't kill that person, and then the other side is not, both, the both sides aren't arguing on the same, I, uh, moral assumptions, really, they have different moral assumptions, and And then there's no real argument to be had because it's just two different languages.

0:44:10 Thomas: The other side is, well, no, women have the right to do whatever. And very, very rarely is there an actual debate on common terms, like on the same actual terms between the two sides, sides and for now for now, like the law, well, where it hasn't been restricted in a bunch of states in the south and and so on, the law allows women to to get an abortion. And so, like, there's this weird way in in that the we're kind of okay with what's happening, you know, like the left is, as long as abortion rights are there, we're sort of okay with it, but you know, we're trying to fight back against infringement. But the minute the decision goes the other way and, you know, maybe Roe v.

0:44:56 Thomas: Wade is overturned, I'm really curious because it could happen really. I'm curious what's going to happen because we're try to be able to debate it in a way that makes sense. You know, like we're gonna have to trying to change minds, but we're We're not anywhere on the same set of moral facts. You know what I mean? Is it, is there a similarity there?

0:45:19 Keith: There are similarities a degree. I think it's slightly healthier in the sense that at the very least, different parties to it are fairly clear about what they want and don't want. So if you're saying – that doesn't mean – anti-abortionists have used denialist techniques, so they do sometimes – they will talk about spurious connections between abortion and cancer or whatever. But those are supplementary rather than the center of their argument.

0:45:26 Thomas: Right. There's more honesty about it. Yeah.

0:45:51 Keith: The center of their argument is usually a particular idea of when personhood starts. Arts Now, that at least is cutting to the core of it. The problem with the abortion debate is isn't so much that people aren't saying what they really want, but what they're not doing is acknowledging the the negatives. So it's perfectly reasonable to say, look, a life is sacred, life starts at conception, and life has to be preserved, fine. The problem is is that if you take that position, then people, women as well as children, who unwanted children, will suffer.

So what I've never heard in the abortion debate is to say, look, it's horrible, it's really horrible if you're a 12 year old gold girl who's raped and has to go through the order by by a family member and has to be forced to bear a baby that they don't want and cannot care for, and it's horrible for the baby that will have to be adopted, uh, following that, but that is better than the alternative. Now, that would be an open argument, you could agree with it, you could disagree with it, but it would be a open argument.

0:45:51 Thomas: Right, Right. Right.

0:47:07 Thomas: You know, that's so interesting that you say that because I, I, you know, I said this a while back, we actually do have, believe it or not, we do have right wing assholes that are that devoted to this argument, uh, rarely, but it does happen. And I remember I'm trying to think of who it was. I can't remember. Some some I think it was a congressman who several years ago did say when someone asked, well, what about in the cases of, you know, of rape or incest? Are you still against abortion? They said, well. Well, yeah, I mean, the argument doesn't change, you know, from him, from that person's perspective, the argument does not change. You know, it is still a human. You cannot kill a human just because some other crime was committed. That does not mean that you kill them. And what is interesting to me is people were up in arms about it.

0:47:08 Keith: No.

0:47:53 Thomas: You know? Even some people on the right, but the left was like, oh, well, checkmate. You know. We just made them commit to this.

0:47:58 Keith: It's not checkmate at all, it's it's actually so

0:48:00 Thomas: Exactly. That is what I was saying at the time was, well no, that is logically coherent with his argument.

0:48:07 Keith: So what you have to make an argument against that is an argument about, uh, in terms of human life, the the life of a living grown person and the suffering that they will experience has priority over the uh life of the unborn. And again, you can agree or disagree with that, but that's an open argument. I mean, I sometimes think that the pro-choice movement could do better in the sense that framing it in terms of choice doesn't strike me as necessarily always the smartest strategy. That a better strategy might be to frame it in terms, and some activists do do this in fairness, is to frame it in times of life.

0:48:54 Keith: And also to point to the inconsistencies in the sense of, particularly on the right wing, of people who are are anti-abortion, but believe that 15-year-olds should be tried as adults and put into prison for the rest of their lives, or they believe in the death penalty. In this respect, by the way, the Catholic Church often does better than Protestants do, in the sense that the Catholic Church, or at least its official hierarchy, is consistently anti-death penalty. So I will always listen to a Catholic speaking about abortion, I, well, or at least I'm more inclined to listen to a Catholic speaking about adoption than I am to Protestant evangelicals, uh, most so

0:49:39 Thomas: Well, you don't think that's easily done away with by just saying, yeah, it's pro-innocent life. That's usually the retort I hear. And I don't know, while I disagree with them, of course, I don't know that it's logically inconsistent to say that it's possible to punish someone by death for a crime. And that's not, that doesn't conflict with not allowing people to abort an innocent life.

0:50:05 Keith: Fine, so that's that's the sort of debate we should be having, and, and in fairness, that debate does happen, uh, there are locations, I think the abortion debate, however horrible it is, isn't beyond hope, uh, in the way, in a way that other debates, I think, are, uh, it's

0:50:17 Thomas: Yeah. Interesting. So I think that illustrates your point well, that it's when the actual motives have to be kind of kept secret for societal reasons, that's when it's kind of more hopeless in a way. Like we're not, when people aren't actually saying what they believe, then you get these weird denialist tactics possibly.

0:50:45 Keith: Not so much, but it's it's partly about belief, but it talks about desire. And I talk about this a lot in the book, about wanting things, a desire that overrides you, that you want something so much that you cannot talk about it, you know, you can't, you cannot acknowledge it, and the perverse things that happen because of that. Example arguments I've given here are a bit near the knuckle. And suffice it to say that I am pro-abortion, I am anti-genocide, I are anti the drowning of Bangladesh. And in fact, I'm very, very passionate in those beliefs.

0:51:04 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, right.

0:51:24 Keith: So, you know, putting yourself into the shoes of someone else is, I think, vital. But I don't stay there. I think I hope your listeners will understand that.

0:51:23 Thomas: Yeah, of Of course. Of course. Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris, thank you so much for coming on the show. Very interesting stuff. And I know we barely even delved into it. So if people want to find the book, which I would would highly recommend because there's a lot of interesting stuff there. What's the best way for them to track that down?

0:51:49 Keith: It's on the usual outlets. So, "Denial: The Unspeakable Truth," it's called. Uh, it's published by a British publisher, but it's uh available worldwide. And I've written some other things as well, if you want to dip your toes into it. So last August I wrote a long read for the Guardian newspaper on denial, so you might, you can have a look at that, decide if you wanted a book great.

0:52:11 Thomas: Yeah, I'll pop those links in the show notes for people. And I'm also interested in maybe we can regroup another time. I'd be interested to talk more about maybe anti-Semitism and kind of the state of that in the world. It sounds like it's what you're working on next. So that could be interesting.

0:52:15 Keith: Great.

0:52:26 Keith: Yeah, that book will be out next June.

0:52:30 Thomas: Neat. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate it. Really interesting thoughts.

0:52:33 Keith: Thank you for having me.

0:52:34 Thomas: Yeah. And talk soon.

0:52:36 Keith: Talk soon. Thank you very much.

0:52:49 Thomas: Alright, thanks so much again to Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris, and thank you most of all to the supporters who make the show happen, and if you'd like to help make this show happen go to patreon.com/seriouspod, or seriouspod.com/support, it is the only way it happens, and I thank you guys so much, and that said, I will see you next week, I'm still gonna do episodes, I don't like when, I am on the record of saying I don't like when podcasts take time off, and, you know, obviously, Obviously, anyone can do what they want, but when it comes to my podcast, I try not to take any weeks off because I often think that the holidays are exactly the time when people need podcasts. I know that I always want my favorite podcasts when I'm driving over to see family and that kind of thing, road trips or being stuck in a place where there's nothing to do.

0:53:38 Thomas: I don't know. There's plenty of reasons why during the holidays people need podcasts, so I've always got the the lights on over on this app that you check out your podcasts in. So that's what I try to do. So I will see you next week. Thank you so much for listening.