Three Classes of Disbelievers

 Historically it may not be so unusual, but it is nevertheless noteworthy that today there are three large classes of people who deny what the conventional establishment believes. There are those who do not believe in evolution. They do not believe that biological species in the past and flourishing today, including and especially human beings, were created by a process Charles Darwin identified, called natural selection. That biological scientists of every subspecies believe that that is how the world works does not impress them; according to the deniers plant and animal species and man in particular were created in another way.

   A class of people who deny what scientists in a broad variety of fields hold to be the case, disbelieve that the earth is undergoing a process of global warming, with multiple effects to be expected—some of them unfortunate, many of them disastrous, some of them in a proximate future, others in a more distant one. A subclass of climate change skeptics concede that some such warming is in progress, but that  it constitutes yet another phase—of many different ones—in the many-million year story of our planet, that human activity, however, has nothing to do with it.

   The third tribe of deniers asserts that there never was a Holocaust. It was not the case that during the period of the second World War six million Jews were systematically murdered, the vast majority by Germans but some also by such German allies as Romanians. Yes, of course Jews were killed; there was a war, after all, in which many of Europe’s population perished, but there was not concerted effort to murder all the Jews of Europe.

   Three sizable populations dissent from what the vast majority believes, people who agree with the experts on these topics. Not during the dark ages when a tiny fraction of the population was literate, but in the 20^th and 21^st centuries and in the center of the developed world. It is a phenomenon (or these are phenomena) worth thinking about. Of the first two—which are much more American goings-on—I’ve at times thought that disagreement with what was widely believed was the equivalent in the realm of belief of the “rugged individualism” that spurns governmental welfare because people should only get what they have themselves worked for. So the analogue: I’m my own man regarding what I think, just as I myself earn what I consume. The fact that the majority of the dissenters are not the hoi polloi, but card-carrying members of the middle class and above adds to this view’s plausibility. Still, that explanation is too generic; much more specific accounts are needed.

   But first, let me deal with the denial of the Holocaust, a phenomenon much more European and Middle Eastern than American. As far as I can see, there is no special anti-Holocaust ideology. Rather, that denial is rooted in the same-old, same-old anti-Semitism of since forever. Jews are manipulative and engage in conspiracies, vide the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Their scheming has much of the world believe what is not so, with the additional undesirable consequence that the Holocaust serves as a justification for the creation and continued existence of the state of Israel. More broadly, disbelievers see Jews to be using the pretext of mass murders to exact other policies, economic and political, favorable to them in recompense for a Holocaust that never happened.

   I could cite other components of  the history of anti-Semitism, but that would not add much to the foundation, so to speak, of Holocaust denying by contemporary neo-Nazis and their sympathizers. For all I know, there is somewhere a legitimate scholar who has doubts about the evidence for the campaigns to murder Jews or about their magnitude, but if there is such a one, there surely are not many. In short, I cannot think of any other ground for this species of disbelievers than old-fashioned anti-Semitism brought up to date.

   Many of those who deny global warming or at least of human responsibility for such are politicians, industrialists, entrepreneurs; they are college educated, with good jobs—in Congress or in branches of the corporate world. I find their latest and now quite popular response to the claims under discussion to be particularly brash and truly annoying. “I’m not a scientist” is the response that is intended to close the conversation. Yeah, of course you aren’t. But neither are you an epidemiologist or a meteorologist or an electrician. But you’ll take a flu shot when you are told it is appropriate, you will protect the window of your store when you are warned that the hurricane will hit in less than twenty-four hours and you will replace wires in your house when an electrician tells you that some of them are unsafe.

   The world is full of specialists and the role of educated lay people is to seek out appropriate experts when wondering what to do and to listen what they have to say. No, you are not a scientist; you need not tell us, no one thought you were.  Rather, you are the consumer of the knowledge of a myriad of specialists who have studied and continue to study their chosen domain. Of course you are not a scientist, but as a supposedly educated person you should know how to access the knowledge that scientists have produced, if not in their professional articles and books, surely in the vast array of publications and internet postings addressed to the lay world.

   Not being a scientist, in short, is no reason to believe anything nor a reason not to believe, so why disbelieve? Three broad reasons, I think, with the first somewhat speculative. For it, I come back to that peculiarly American rugged individualism which, in this context, might be translated as a peculiar form of pigheadedness. He, everybody else--they have their own beliefs and I have mine, (which, needless to say, I prefer). Underneath this attitude is the view that there isn’t really any such thing as knowledge—claims that are true and confirmed by well-established evidence. There are only opinions, not objective propositions, would-be knowledge. All beliefs, instead, are person-dependent—in short, subjective. Climate warming is your thing; it isn’t mine.

   The second root of disbelief is more familiar. Mitch McConnell is the senior senator of Kentucky. Kentucky is a major coalmining state; and burning coal is a major source of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. The “correct” steps to take are, first, to trap those gases before they reach the atmosphere and, for the longer haul, to replace burning coal with other modes of producing energy. To require the first of these measures will impose costs on the Kentucky coal industry and the second would require a painful revamping of the state’s economy.

Hence there really isn’t any global warming and if there is, human actions, including burning coal has little or nothing to do with it.

   I will refrain from adding any of the many similar examples that could be cited. What we are talking about is the phenomenon of an interest, especially a strong interest, determining what one believes. In a “lighter” context we call it wishful thinking; but in one form or another, to have desire determine what is held to be true is a common human failing. Skepticism that there is objective knowledge, beyond “mere” opinion, together with the influence of desire on what is held to be the case are surely the main reasons for denying that there is global warming.

   The third set of disbelievers dissent from what is more generally accepted in a much broader and more radical way than either of the groups above. To deny that there is such a process as evolution and to hold that the world is about six thousand years old propels those disbelievers into an entirely different world. The only surprising thing about them is that they do not also believe that the earth is flat, since that is also true of the biblical world from which they derive their opinions. We are in effect talking about a population that derives its “knowledge”—at least about a number of utterly fundamental issues—from completely different sources from those of the population in general. We are speaking of Fundamentalist Christians who interpret the bible literally, holding it to be the inspired word of God. They very much go beyond biblical prescriptions and proscriptions regarding behavior to a large range of assertions as to what the world is like.

   It is fair to say that fundamentalists do not simply dissent from what is commonly believed; in effect they operate in a completely different sphere of thought from that of the world that surrounds them. Instead of experimenting and reasoning and observing the world as, say astrophysicists do, they search in the two testaments to find out what they assert. I can’t think of a good analogy; perhaps it is like moving from a world of Euclidean geometry to a distant non-Euclidean one. At the root, then, of the disbelief in what most others hold to be the case is the literal belief in a document that many others interpret symbolically or poetically.

   Though very different from the disbelievers previously discussed, I do want to conclude by noting that the fundamentalism I am referring to is largely American—and if it has spread well beyond our shores, that it finds its origins in this country. And it is my belief, though I have no evidence, that this particular deviation from tradition is also in part the result of that American rugged individualism, of the insistence that a person is not only the master of her or his fate, but a master of his or her truths.