Past Caring? A Journey into the New Age of Post-Denialism.

Q:How many conspiracy theorists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A:DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!

The above joke, which has amused me on social media recently, works because most of us know someone who's disappeared, or is disappearing down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole (usually on the Internet) and, in many cases, we'll have tried to be reasonable with them. We'll have asked where they get their information from? How do they know so much about incredibly complicated subjects when even the world's greatest scientists admit there is still much to be discovered?

Often, perhaps surprisingly, these requests will be met with hostility, abuse, and an ALL CAPS passive-aggressive statement that we should DO OUR OWN RESEARCH. But what if we don't have the skills to do that research? What if we're not an expert on Covid, on the holocaust, or on climate change? What if we've not spent years studying these subjects? What if we're confident enough in ourselves to admit the limit of our knowledge and trustworthy enough of respected others who, through hard work, have more expertise than us in these fields?

We haven't all had enough of experts, no matter what Michael Gove might say. I was with Skeptics in the Pub online to hear Dr Keith Kahn-Harris's The End of Denialism. It sounded like it might prove to be a hopeful and optimistic sequel to last January's Denial, Denialism and Post-Denialism:Why is Speaking Truth so Difficult?, also with Kahn-Harris and the last talk I attended at The Monarch in Camden before Covid saw the doors locked.

Which it was, after a fashion. The optimism was measured and cautious but it was there. It wasn't a completely new talk. The first half consisted of a brief background into what denialism is (essentially loudly denying that climate change exists, denying that AIDS exists, or saying that evolution isn't true and can be disproved), the quotes from Stanley Cohen and Chris Hoofnagle that featured in my blog about that last talk, and a brief reminder of Kahn-Harris's rather Adam Curtisesque concept of 'the gap'.

The gap, it's worth repeating, is the idea that there is a yawning chasm between what we know is the good, and proper, thing to do and what we desire. Which can often inflict pain and hurt, and even destroy, others. Genocide, quite shockingly, wasn't always seen as a bad thing. Julius Caesar boasted of genocide and was celebrated for it but in the modern age, perhaps since the Industrial Revolution, we have become more sensitive and now only a psychopath would celebrate genocide.

Even the Nazis, nobody's idea of the good guys, tried to hide the fact they were carrying out a genocide. They knew it was wrong. It didn't stop them doing it but they knew it was wrong. Modernity had erased the ability to enact, or even discuss, these dark desires. Scientific breakthroughs and the age of rational thought told us how we were supposed to behave but the problem was the dark desires were still there.

In all of us, to different degrees. Denialism bridged the gap by creating new truths, untrue truths, which could then justify people thinking, saying, and even acting upon, terrifying and dangerous ideas. The reason this talk had been updated so thoroughly since January last year is that, since then, something rather big has happened in the world of denial and denialism and that thing, you won't be surprised to read, is not Greggs introducing a vegan steak bake to their takeaway menu.

It is, of course, the pandemic. But, before we got to that, Dr Kahn-Harris started his journey in a fairly unlikely location. The American sociology professor Kari Norgaard, in 2011, released a book titled Living in Denial - Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life and it told of her time living in a small rural community in western Norway that made a lot of its money through winter sports.

One year the snow didn't arrive until January. Unseasonably late and hugely damaging to the local economy. The locals, though they were not uneducated, simply didn't mention climate change. Deep down, they knew they were victims of it but they were in denial. In denial but not denialists.

An example of Covid denial, rather than Covid denialism, came with last year's Cheltenham Festival, the large horse racing event that took place between the 10th and 13th of March 2020 and has been widely held responsible for increasing the nationwide spread of Covid. Thousands and thousands of people gathered in tightly packed spaces, heavy drinking, with little possibility of social distancing despite the fact that many scientists had warned the event should not have gone ahead.

By this point, the dangers of Covid were obvious (you only had to see the news from Italy) and the vast majority of those in attendance would have been aware of the danger. But they simply chose to ignore it - or downplay it. They were in denial but they weren't, for the most part, denialists. Denialism is different to denial in that it doesn't simply ignore the truth, pretends something isn't happening. Instead it argues, often very loudly, against the truth.

Covid denialism takes several forms. The stronger forms include claims that masks can't stop the spread of viruses, that Covid doesn't exist, or even that viruses, in their entirety, are a hoax. A strong proponent of these beliefs is Piers Corbyn, Jeremy Corbyn's weather-forecaster, anti-vaxxer, and conspiracy theorist brother who has compared the vaccine rollout to Auschwitz and is running in May's London mayoral election.

Weaker or, as Kahn-Harris suggested, wannabe versions of Covid denialism come from the likes of social commentator, eugenics advocate, and Twitter pervert Toby Young. Young funds an online project, Lockdown Skeptics, which claims lockdowns don't work and that masks can be ineffective but does not go as far as suggesting Covid is a hoax.

Kahn-Harris felt, taking his science hat off for a moment, that Young had only failed to take that last step into full on denialism because he either wasn't brave enough or because, despite himself, he still had some shred of human decency and couldn't bring himself to be that heartless. It was an argument, Kahn-Harris believed, that could also be made for (and against) Boris Johnson.

Johnson vacillated, oscillating wildly in the wind of various influences, in the face of major decisions about lockdown and it resulted in the UK ending up with the highest coronavirus death toll in Europe, the fifth highest in the world, and the largest hit to the economy of all G7 nations. There's a part of Johnson that would have liked to have been like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro.

The nations they were/are in charge of, the US and Brazil, have the two highest death tolls in the world. But Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro simply don't care. Controversially, and perhaps a little cheekily, Kahn-Harris said, because of this, they had more integrity and more consistency than Johnson. Trump and Bolsonaro don't care about the people of their country, they don't pretend to care, and they're not even remotely bothered that it's so obvious they don't care. Johnson doesn't care either - but he desperately wants people to think he does.

Chaos, mayhem, and even death are trifling concerns for the likes of Trump and Bolsonaro and this is where we arrive at what sounds like a frightening new dawn of post-denialism. Many holocaust deniers have, for years, been making coded arguments that even though they don't think the holocaust happened, they believe it should have or that it should in the future.

Advocating the very thing they deny the existence of. QAnon offers a denialism so total that it goes beyond denialism and becomes something else. It offers up a whole world of untruths and in that world there are various ideas, theories, and schools of thought. All of which have nothing, absolutely nothing, to back them up. There is no attempt whatsoever at creating an institute or replicating scholarly language to give a veneer of respectability to their baseless conspiracy theories.

It's simply a case of making a lie up, throwing it out there, and seeing what damage it does. It's as useful to a discussion of ideas as lobbing a hand grenade at a peace conference. Another rising star of post-denialism is Billie Piper's ex husband, former Lewis star, and abysmal musician Laurence Fox. Worryingly, another London mayoral candidate (honestly, check out the list - the UKIP guy is genuinely called Gammons).

Fox boasts of hugging large groups of invited dinner guests in his home during lockdown and claims that "compliance is violence". It seems unlikely he'd see himself as on a par with Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte (who has boasted of murdering people, told his army that rape is an acceptable act, and even joked that he'd liked to do some raping himself) or ISIS who not only celebrate murder and rape but use them as recruiting tools.

ISIS have even published a guide book so that their operatives can carry out rapes more effectively. Duterte, ISIS, Fox, Bolsonaro, and Trump, the post-denialists, no longer bother even paying lip service to modernity or rational thought. Among the post-denialists you will find people who freely acknowledge that Covid exists and that it kills but, quite simply, don't care. They talk of 'herd immunity' and remain quite indifferent to the fact that this would certainly lead to hundreds of thousands, probably millions, more fatalities.

In Texas, mask wearing and social distancing are no longer mandatory and all businesses have been able to open at 100% capacity since earlier this week. Covid's not gone away - but the governors don't care. They want to get back to normal. Time will tell how foolish, or lethal, this decision proves. I'd not be comfortable if I lived in Texas.

On January 6th this year, as Trump supporters and QAnon followers stormed the Capitol in Washington DC (resulting in several deaths) it looked like the age of post-denialism was entering its most deadly phase. But Dr Kahn-Harris greeted this news, surprisingly, with a note of cautious optimism. If we oppose denial using education and we oppose denialism with debunking how do we oppose something as impervious to human suffering as post-denialism?

We allow people to express their basest desires which post-denialists, as we've discovered, are more happy to do than those in simple denial. The question is can we handle this new era of people openly saying ever more awful things, spreading ever more vile ideas? The crumb of hope comes in the fact that by allowing this dialogue, no matter how low it stoops, people get it out of their system. They learn about, and acknowledge, the gap between what is right and what they want - and they learn how to live with that gap as part of their lives.

Dr Kahn-Harris was, as I said, only cautiously optimistic about this (and I can see this story spinning out in many unforeseen directions and am even less optimistic) but he did believe that it was our best hope. His research into this subject had been thorough and his thoughts on it were both candid and erudite. I was fascinated by them, agreed with most (if not all) of them, and thank him, and Cleo Bellenis from the Winchester branch of Skeptics who hosted, for their time.

Dr Kahn-Harris wasn't even put off by the tech gremlins that delayed the start of the talk and which, in the chat sidebar, some of the 200+ attendees, in jocular fashion, blamed on aliens, ghosts, Meghan Markle, the deep state, Russia, 5G, homeopaths, and something called a 'womble stick'. In truth it was because Kahn-Harris had bought an app to speed up his connection and it, quite clearly, had the opposite effect.

Equally interesting was a nearly hour long Q&A session after the talk that featured a guest apperance from Luna the cat and took in Assad's use of chemical weapons in Syria, Trump's Twitter ban, the recent meeting of Steve Bannon and George Galloway, the motivation for Toby Young's behaviour (daddy issues, basically), cancel culture, Elon Musk, Adolf Eichmann, Kinder eggs, the Anglo-Swiss power metal band Gloryhammer, and the 9/11 conspiracy theory that the towers of the World Trade Center were really hollowed out free energy masts created by Nikolas Tesla (even though he died thirty years before they were built) and kept secret, and ultimately destroyed, by Thomas Edison. Seventy years after his own death.

That's the thing with these post-denialist beliefs. They're really easy to laugh at. At least until they kill you.