DENY!

"Deny. You're such a liar. You won't know the truth if it hits you in the eye. Deny. You're such a liar. You're selling your no-no all the time" - Deny, The Clash.

What is the difference between denial, denialism, and post-denialism? Why do we all sometimes choose to believe obvious lies? Is this, as it seems, happening more and more these days and, if so, why? Why, and how, have the far right managed to industrialise denialism to serve their own ends so successfully and, perhaps most importantly, what we can do to counter this weaponised spread of misinformation?

They're all pretty big questions and if they didn't all get answers at last night's first London Skeptics in the Pub talk of 2020 - Denial, Denialism and Post-Denialism:Why is Speaking Truth so Difficult? with Keith Kahn-Harris at The Monarch in Camden, that wasn't necessarily the point. Kahn-Harris was there to ask questions, present his theories, and, as befits these Skeptics events, make us think a bit. Or even a lot. Maybe make us think in a different way.

So, on a wet Monday in January I dragged my sinusitis addled body north of the river, grabbed the long coveted upstairs seat (it's usually taken by the time I get there), pulled out the trusty ol' jotter, listened to the Monarch's mostly impeccable selection of eighties music (Prefab Sprout, Dexy's Midnight Runners, and The Blue Nile's Tinseltown in the Rain), and supped my first pint of the year (a nice cold Red Stripe), before spending forty-five minutes captivated by Kahn-Harris's wonderful, thoughtful talk.

Kahn-Harris, who's written a book on the subject - Denial:The Unspeakable Truth, began by outlining a few of the more noteworthy, and outrageous, events that people have chosen to deny before going on to explain what, in his view - though I concurred, is the difference between denial and what he's calling denialism.

There are people who deny evolution happens/happened, there are people who deny that AIDS exists, there are people who deny the existence of global warming/climate change, there are people who deny the holocaust (or other genocides in Armenia, Bosnia, and Rwanda), and there are, of course, anti-vaxxers. A subject London Skeptics in the Pub (and speaker Richard Clarke) covered, very well, in November 2018.

Denial of these things is spoken about a lot but, Kahn-Harris contested, do we talk about it in the right way? We get angry, irritated, and confused by people who choose to deny all the evidence that these things happened or are happening but we rarely seek to find out what underpins the phenomena of denial.

In November 2012, Donald Trump (you knew it wouldn't be long before he cropped up) tweeted that "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive". This was before he was (officially) campaigning for the presidency but was his eventual rise to that position of power the ultimate triumph of denial or, and I'll get to the difference soon, even denialism?

In 2001, the South African sociologist and criminologist Stanley Cohen (who, in 1972, had already achieved some notoriety when he popularised the term 'moral panic') wrote the book States of Denial:Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering in which he defined denial as:-

"a statement about the world or self (or about the knowledge of the world or your self) which is neither literally true nor a lie intended to deceive others but allows for the strange possibility of simultaneously knowing and not knowing. The existence of what is denied must be somehow known and statements expressing this denial must be somehow believed in"

Cohen had identified, and articulated, the duality that is at the heart of denial. Alcoholics and other substance abusers were cited as a classic example of people in denial. They know full well the damage they are doing to themselves but they structure their lives as if they don't. If they structure their lives at all. Every one of us does it to various degrees. In intent it is often not pernicious and is more concerned with self-preservation.

Because the scope of denial is so broad, Kahn-Harris proposes that it's not sufficient to cover what we've seen happening over the last decade or so and that's where 'denialism' comes in. The best definition of denialism has come from the American surgeon, skeptic, and blogger Mark Hoofnagle:-

"Denialism is the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none. These false arguments are used when one has few or no facts to support one's viewpoint against a scientific consensus or against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They are effective in distracting from actual useful debate using emotionally appealing, but ultimately empty and illogical assertions".

Denialism, unlike denial, is a more specific, more collective, and a far more political thing. Taking in mind the distinctions that Kahn-Harris has outlined when we talk about Holocaust denial we are really talking about Holocaust denialism. It's unlikely there are websites devoted to your denial that your last relationship fell apart because of your partner and not you but in the world of denialism there are many websites devoted to how the Holocaust, in their view, didn't happen.

Denialism is institutionalised. Denial, as a more natural human reaction to events, is not. Denialists write articles and they create websites, often with serious sounding and vaguely pseudoscientific names. The Institute for Historical Review (based in Orange County, California) sounds very academic but it has links to neo-Nazi groups and propagates the idea that the Holocaust either didn't happen or happened on a much smaller scale than is widely believed.

Denial is about not saying something. Denialism is about intentionally saying something untrue. Often loudly and aggressively. Another organisation that's given itself an officious and pseudoscientific sounding name is the London based Global Warming Policy Foundation. Its chairman is the former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson. The GWPF churn out books and papers with the intention of challenging what they call the "extremely damaging and harmful policies" envisaged by governments to mitigate anthropogenic global warming.

They're actively campaigning for governments not to invest in measures to prevent what science has now proven is an imminent global catastrophe. Whereas denial can be used for self-preservation, denialism is, more often than not, actively harmful. Kahn-Harris had made a graph in which he looked at the defining features of each of these two, similar but subtly nuanced and different, nouns.

Denial is defined by silence whereas denialism is usually very noisy. Denial is about the avoidance of uncomfortable truths but denialism seeks to invent new 'truths'. Denial tends to be acted out by individuals whereas denialism often comes from a collective. Denial is often down to an ignorance, blissful or otherwise, of scholarship but denialism seeks to imitate scholarship.

As we see with The Institute for Historical Review and Nigel Lawson's Global Warming Policy Unit. Scholars have looked into techniques used by denialists and found nearly a hundred different ones but we had less than hour so Kahn-Harris narrowed it down for us by looking at the three main strategies employed by denialists.

Firstly, there is the use of 'radical doubt'. Pushing the bar of evidence ludicrously high. An example would be refusing to believe that the Holocaust happened unless they can be presented with a video, or audio, tape of Hitler actually ordering it.

The second technique employed is an obsession with detail. 9/11 conspiracists will try to bring conversations around to the melting point of steel, evolutionary denialists cite the human eye as something so singular and perfect that evolution could not have created it, and climate change deniers like to assert that if polar bear numbers aren't significantly decreasing (which they're not) then the whole thing must be a lie. Or, more likely - because it always comes down to this, a conspiracy.

The third factor is the Galileo Gambit. The idea being that as Galileo's belief that Earth and the planets revolve around the Sun was dismissed and ridiculed at the time but is now held to be true it must also be true that the beliefs the denialist holds, and states, that are also ridiculed and dismissed, must also be true. Galileo was ridiculed. I am ridiculed. Ergo, I am Galileo.

It's a basic association fallacy that holds no more water than saying "buses are red, my jumper is red - therefore my jumper is a bus" or "dogs have four legs, my cat has four legs - therefore my cat is a dog". As Carl Sagan stated, people may have laughed at Columbus and the Wright Brothers, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

If not Bojo the Clown - who stopped being funny a very long time ago. But, as ever, I digress. Most of these minor points put forward by denialists can be disproved. But it takes time and for a denialist even creating an argument, or what they'd term a debate, is considered a victory. It's a case of buying time in many respects. The longer we're arguing about the temperature in which steel melts, how the eye can be proven to have evolved, and why polar bears are not the sole indicators of climate change the less time, and energy, there is left to discuss what's truly important.

Denialists are not looking to undermine the whole concept of what truth is. They're not post-structuralist, post-modernist philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault playing relativist games and seeking to question if there even is such a thing as the truth. Denialists look to change what the truth is and that's why the term post-truth is, really, something of a misnomer. 

This isn't so much 'post-truth', not even 'alternative truth', but the terrifyingly Orwellian sounding 'new truth'. But what spurs the denialists to go so far as to try to reinvent untruths as truths? This was where, for me, Kahn-Harris's talk became braver and, for want of a better word, more exploratory.

We were presented with a few scenarios. Imagine being a tobacco executive in 1964 when it's revealed that smoking causes cancer. Imagine being an oil executive when the facts of climate change became indisputable. Imagine being a country vicar in the middle of the nineteenth century following the publication of The Origin of Species.

Your world would have been turned upside down and cognitive dissonance barely covers it. Kahn-Harris proposed an idea he called "The Gap". "The Gap" is the gap between our desires, often a mystery - even to ourselves, and the modern world of compassion we're both born into and have to (if we value our liberty) sign up to.

It is, Kahn-Harris averred, our unavoidable destiny to be torn between our societal need to be kind and fair and our base desires which may be corrupt and may stretch as far as committing murder or rape. Two thousand years ago, in Rome, victory in battle was celebrated by sating these base desires and emperors even boasted of doing so. Now, denialists use scholarly language to justify the exercising of primal impulses.

The creation of a philosophy, of sorts, that allows you to do whatever you want is understandably proving irresistible to many and the future of denialism looks bright. As the burning of Australia (27 people dead so far, as well as about 500,000,000 animals including a third of the world's koalas), and the responses to it, prove that climate change is getting worse so to, at the same time, other responses to it prove that denialists will simply dig in even deeper.

Tony Abbott, the Australian prime minister between 2009 and 2013 and representing the centre right Liberal Party, said last week, as the fires raged, that the world was "in the grip of a climate cult" despite the evidence in his own country proving, lethally, otherwise. As environmental activisits like Jane Fonda go as far as to suggest, using language that is powerful if problematic, that, eventually, there will be some kind of Nuremberg trial for people like Abbott who had the power to make changes but refused, the climate change deniers are listening.

They're getting their ducks in a row, so to speak, so that should things worsen they'll be able to say they didn't say climate change was a hoax, or a conspiracy, but that, in the words of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the science was "not yet settled".

Weasel words in the truest sense. In that they are so ambiguous that they can be interpreted in multiple ways and will be depending on what is expedient for those who uttered them at the time. But events have entered a new, and even more troubling, stage. That of post-denialism. Here's a chilling quote from the right wing American commentator Ann Coulter:-

"The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man's dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet – it's yours. That's our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars – that's the Biblical view".

Ann Coulter, of course, is a cunt. Katie Hopkins with a thesaurus. But, though she's on the extreme end of this line of thinking, she's far from alone. Holocaust denialists have said that even though they consider the Holocaust didn't happen, perhaps it should have happened. This is post-denialism and Coulter (in 2000), Trump (the China tweet, remember, came from 2012), and, most of all, Putin's regime in Russia were the forerunners, the harbingers, of this. 

Trump's post-denialism is, essentially, a lazy denialism. He's a lazy, stupid, man and he wouldn't have the skills to make it look remotely scientific even if he was inclined to do so. The fact that it's worked so well for him means he's never going to change the approach. Elsewhere, for example in Russia, there is a complex, and firmly intended, strategy, of confusion, dissemination, and not just disinformation but various different types of disinformation all at the same time with the aim of making us so confused, so bored of politics, so sure that "they're all the same" that we give up and leave them, our rightful masters, to it.

Kahn-Harris showed us a vile tweet, which I can't find now but it's horrible anyway, that in less than 280 characters manages to deny, celebrate, and take a totally apathetic position on the Holocaust. It didn't happen but if it did it was good and, anyway, who gives a flying fuck about the Jews? 

In 2020, a year that sounds like it should be the future, that's where we're at! What can we do about it? How can we counter it? Kahn-Harris wasn't sure but he felt the answer might be found if we start looking for new alternatives in the world for people who don't want to deal with 'The Gap'. Trump, Rodrigo Duterte (the current president of the Philippines who has openly boasted about raping and murdering people), and ISIS (who don't just admit to a base desire to rape and enslave people but use it as their selling point to potential converts) all share the idea that you no longer have to be ashamed of your base desires and that there's nothing wrong with enacting them.

It may seem insane but looked at logically so do all of the world's religions and, in some ways, this movement from denialism to post-denialism is an article of faith, a quasi-religion. Kahn-Harris's suggestion for a solution comes in allowing people to articulate even their darkest desires, not shouting them down, and listening but, of course, that's far from easy. Humans are morally diverse with hugely different desires. More genuine free speech will, inevitably, mean more hate speech. The truth, we hope - in the end, will out but it may not be a truth we feel very comfortable with.

It was quite a dark note to end the talk on but it was a brave one. I hadn't agreed with everything that Keith Kahn-Harris had said (although I had most of it) but it was well researched, well presented, and steered clear of offering easy answers to incredibly complex problems. As such, it took place in a room in a pub in Camden with about fifty people in attendance rather than a huge rally to 20,000 eager believers in an open air amphitheatre in Tampa, Flordia (like just one of Trump's many rallies) and, there's the rub, as long as people prefer simple lies to complex truths we're going to keep getting dragged back to this conversation.

While we debate it rationally, they get stronger. The person who changes the world for the better will be the person who finds a truth that's more appealing than lies without, at the same time, changing the meaning of the word 'truth'. We better hope she or he is out there somewhere. We better find them soon.

Though the future of the world remains utterly terrifying the future of London Skeptics in the Pub, as long as they keep hosting talks like this, looks rosy. I didn't even have space to touch on Jan T. Gross's book Neighbors:The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (or the Polish guy in the audience who strongly, and vocally, disagreed with the hypothesis of the book), late snowfall in Norway (!), or the metaconspiracy theory that is QAnon (but I've written about that before and you can read it here) which all cropped up during a tightly packed three quarters of an hour but I'm sure, if you've read this far - and if you have please let me know, you'll agree there was more than enough food for thought anyway.

An amiable Q&A session took in Brexit, Boris Johnson (as ever), Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide, Internet trolls, the alt-right, the assassination of JFK, and the idea that the denial of our own death is, to a degree, necessary if we are to create things (or people) that will outlive us. I wandered up to Chalk Farm tube glad, as ever, I'd made the trip out and I thank both Keith Kahn-Harris and London Skeptics in the Pub for managing to find light in the darkest corners of both our world and our minds.