The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (47 page)

But the writer, too, tells a story. Like the mind, we pick out a plot through the superabundance of information that we gather on our chosen subject. What you have read in these pages is presented as if it is the whole truth, and yet it is just a narrow path that I have picked through a landscape of facts and incident. I spent seven full days travelling with David Irving and his acolytes. My interviews with the historian alone lasted for more than four hours,
my transcript for the chapter is in excess of twenty-eight thousand words
– nearly a quarter of the length of this book. I applied my own map of salience to all that evidence, elevating the moments that I believed most relevant and that told the story that I wanted to tell. If Irving was given identical materials, he would surely have crafted a different narrative. It would be just as true as the one that you have read, and it would be just as untrue.

*

If the covert modules of our minds conspire to make us feel like heroes, then this phenomenon has an evil twin, a dangerous corollary. The Demon-Maker.

To be a hero, we must have an enemy. Every David requires a Goliath, and the tales in these pages teem with those. John Mackay conjured himself a ferocious battle-scape of witchcraft and devils and necrophiliac priests. His ideological enemy Richard Dawkins insisted that Mackay’s phantasmagorical beliefs are ‘a serious threat to scientific reason.’ The evolutionary biologist Nathan Lo was convinced that the creationists’ suppressed motive was to make money.

On another side of the world, sufferers of unexplained itches confabulated complex stories about nanotechnology and government conspiracy. In a different country still, one highly regarded expert in schizophrenia called another ‘a liar and a charlatan.’ Lord Monckton blamed almost all the dreads that have befallen the West on the nihilistic, jealous, power-crazy left, insisting that the British empire fell because of the welfare state. David Irving, meanwhile, held an intrigue of scheming Jews responsible for the same event. Despite the fact that his version of wartime events has been almost universally rejected, Professor Deborah Lipstadt still worries that it somehow presents
‘a clear and future danger’
to historical knowledge. For the Skeptic Dr Steven Novella many practising homeopaths were ‘psychopathic con artists,’ while for alternative medicine proponent Dana Ullman, Skeptics were often ‘Big Pharma shills.’

We are betrayed by our maps of salience. They plot our narratives, identify our enemies and then coat them in distorting layer of loathing and dread. We feel that hunch –
withdraw
– and then conduct a
post factum
search for evidence that justifies it. We are motivated to fight our foes because we are emotional about them, but emotion is the territorial scent-mark of irrationality. We tell ourselves a story, we cast the monster and then become vulnerable to our own delusional narrative of heroism.

The Demon-Maker loves this kind of binary thinking. It insists upon extremes: heroes and villains, black and white, in-tribes and out. This corrosive instinct is evident in the so-called ‘culture wars’. For many Skeptics, evidence-based truth has been sacralised. It has caused them to become irrational in their judgements of the motives of those with whom they do not agree. They have also sacralised reason. When we spoke, James Randi was chilling in his expression of where pure logic can ultimately lead. Viewing the matter stripped of emotion, it might make sense to persuade people with ‘mental aberrations’ and ‘histories of inherited diseases’ from having children. But the idea is obviously repellent. Randi’s belief demonstrates a truth that is sometimes forgotten by his followers: reason alone is not enough.

My encounter with the patron saint of the Skeptics was a crystallising moment. At the conference in Manchester, I struggled to
work out what it was about the movement that made me uneasy. I believe that Randi’s speech resolved the warning of my unconscious.
‘These are not innocent people. These are stupid people.’
Skeptics can be reminiscent of creationists, who think that I will go to hell because I am not a Christian. They treat belief as a moral choice. If you do not choose as they do, you are condemned. And while beliefs can have moral consequences, which the law must appropriately punish, we should not judge others for thinking their thoughts, nor be censured ourselves for the form of our hearts.

Anyone who proudly declares themselves a ‘free-thinker’ betrays an ignorance of the motors of belief. We do not get to choose our most passionately held views, as if we are selecting melons in a supermarket. Gemma Hoefkens is no more free to reject her conviction that homeopathy cured her cancer than I am to fall to my knees and flood myself with Jesus. And good. This monoculture we would have, if the hard rationalists had their way, would be a deathly thing. So bring on the psychics, bring on the alien abductees, bring on the two John Lennons – bring on a hundred of them. Christians or no, there will be tribalism. Televangelists or no, there will be scoundrels. It is not religion or fake mystics that create these problems, it is being human. Where there is illegality or racial hatred, call the police. Where there is psychosis, call Professor Richard Bentall. Where there is misinformation, bring learning. But where there is just ordinary madness, we should celebrate. Eccentricity is our gift to one another. It is the riches of our species. To be mistaken is not a sin. Wrongness is a human right.

*

The Hero-Maker tells us why intelligence is no forcefield and facts are no bullets. If you were to discuss the near-zero discount rate in the Stern Review with Lord Monckton, you would not be engaging in a simple matter of yes or no concerning an arcane point of science. Facts do not exist in isolation. They are like single pixels in a person’s generated reality. Each fact is connected to other facts and those facts to networks of other facts still. When they are all knitted together, they take the form of an emotional and dramatic plot at the centre of which
lives the individual. When a climate scientist argues with a denier, it is not a matter of data versus data, it is hero narrative versus hero narrative, David versus David, tjukurpa versus tjukurpa. It is a clash of worlds.

The Hero-Maker exposes this strange urge that so many humans have, to force their views aggressively on others. We must make them see things as we do. They must agree,
we will make them agree.
There is no word for it, as far as I know. ‘Evangelism’ doesn’t do it: it fails to acknowledge its essential violence. We are neural imperialists, seeking to colonise the worlds of others, installing our own private culture of beliefs into their minds. I wonder if this response is triggered when we pick up the infuriating sense that an opponent believes that
they
are the hero, and not us. The provocation! The personal outrage! The underlying dread, the disturbance in reality. The restless urge to prove that their world, and not ours, is the illusion.

I used to believe that it was humanity’s rational nature that built civilisation. Now I think it is our inherent desire to slay Goliath, to colonise the mental worlds of others, to
win
.

*

How many of us actually
are
heroes? Which of us have that treasured capacity? Do heroes of the kind found in literature, film and the imaginations of the masses even exist?

Over the course of twenty years, historian Laurence Rees has met hundreds of veterans from the Second World War: members of the SS, concentration camp officers, rapists, mass-murderers, unreformed Nazi veterans. His films are justly decorated with awards.

A guiding question of his life’s work seems to be, how do ordinary people become complicit in acts of evil? ‘I’ve broadly come to this conclusion,’ he told me. ‘We massively underestimate the power of the culture that we are in to shape us. People say, “I wouldn’t have done that.” But they haven’t been exposed to any of the things, culturally, that might have made them do it. And the warning I take is that the number of people in a group who will stand out against these cultural forces are much smaller than you think, and you’re probably not one of them. In fact, I think you can probably tell if you are because you’re
pretty bolshie already. If you’ve got a good career, and you’re pretty sociable and you’re going up the hierarchy and all the rest of it, where are you going to get your sudden revolutionary spurt from?’

*

There are possible objections to the idea of the Hero-Maker, as well as questions to which I don’t know the answer. The
anthropologist Daniel Everett has studied the Pirahã
, a hunter-gatherer tribe of around three hundred and fifty people in the Amazon, who seem to have no tradition of storytelling or myth. Their musical language is based on just eight consonants and three vowels. They are said to live as they speak: completely in the present.

But they do understand story. These distant and primitive people, who have been separated from the wider world for tens of thousands of years, lack a culture of art and who seem to be incapable of learning even basic counting, had no trouble enjoying a showing of Peter Jackson’s 2005 film
King Kong
. Writing in the
New Yorker
, John Colapinto reported: ‘The Pirahã shouted with delight, fear, laughter, and surprise – and when Kong himself arrived, smashing through the palm trees, pandemonium ensued. Small children, who had been sitting close to the screen, jumped up and scurried into their mothers’ laps; the adults laughed and yelled at the screen.’

I worry, too, that the Hero-Maker is overly Western in its perspective. Do hero myths differ radically in various cultures and, if so, do these differences affect how individuals deal with conflict and struggle?
A 2012 study, reported in
The Economist
, asked why levels of ‘wisdom’ in Japanese youngsters seemed to be so in advance of those of their American counterparts. Could the answer lie in the nature of the stories that they have been bathed in since birth?

In the closing stages of the writing of this book, I have experienced cold moments, in which I charge myself as being just as guilty of faulty reasoning as the most extreme people that I have met. Here I am: the atheist who concluded that religion is a ‘parasite hero narrative’; the journalist suspicious of James Randi who discovered him to be a liar; the novelist who found storytelling to be of vital importance to the advancement of humanity. Here I am: confirmation bias come alive.

I am also concerned that I have overstated my argument. In my haste to write my own coherent story, I have barely acknowledged the obvious truth that minds do sometimes change. People find faith and they lose it. Mystics become Skeptics. Politicians cross the floor. I wonder why this happens. Is it when the reality of what is actually happening in our lives overpowers the myth that we make of themselves? Are we simply pursuing ever more glorious hero missions?

*

If so, our missions can also fracture in a different way: one that has far more threatening consequences. Professor Bentall told me that ‘depressed people have a huge gap between how they see themselves and how they would like to be – their ideal self.’ Professor Lewis Wolpert writes,
‘In the inner world of the depressive self
, the self is perceived to be ineffective and inadequate, whereas the outside world is seen as presenting insuperable obstacles.’

The periods in my life when I have felt hopeless are the ones in which the narrative has collapsed. Goliath has grown too big and I have found it impossible to cast myself as the hero. The sense of non-specific wrongness that has always shrouded me is the product of a partially true, yet unhelpful plot. When I look back upon my early life I see myself at fault and in trouble, with parents, teachers, employers and lovers. My mind has seized upon these episodes to construct my autobiography. My map of salience has worked against me.

My wrongness is one story, but there are others. I look out at the Australian Central Desert and see a landscape of death while an Aboriginal sees water and shelter and food. The Skeptic tells the story of Randi the hero; the psychic of Randi the devil. We all make these unconscious plot decisions: what is relevant? What is salient? Which are the defining moments?

Why should I take it to be of such potent importance that my father believes in God? Or that a magazine journalist wants to bomb Tehran? Are these facts such a challenge to my hero illusion that I must alienate myself from friends and family? And why must I define myself chiefly as a man who used to steal and drink and be an unstable boyfriend?

*

Everything we know starts as electrical pulses, incoming from the senses. These pulses combine to construct a best-guess but distorted recreation of reality.

Having learned this fact, and tracked some of its ramifications, I find myself creeping about my beliefs, timidly peeking over their rims, examining them for cracks and presenting them nervously. I have become wary of feeling too much passion, getting carried away and emotional. Does my knowledge of the Hero-Maker mean that I must forbid myself, forever, from angrily fighting for a belief? If everyone was to do this, it would be disastrous. Progress would halt, civilisation would desiccate. I must conclude, then, that as dangerous as the illusion can be, it can also work for the good. And so the proper response is to accept my human nature, close my eyes, open my arms and fall back into it.

I will try to remember, though, that as right as I can sometimes feel, there is
always
the chance that I am wrong. And that happiness lies in humility: in forgiving others, and in forgiving myself.

We are creatures of illusion. We are made out of stories. From the heretics to the Skeptics, we are all lost in our own neural tjukurpas, our own secret worlds. We are just ordinary heroes fighting phantom Goliaths, doing our best in the service of truth when the only thing that we
really
know are the pulses.

I owe the largest debt of thanks to the great many people who have allowed me to interview them – especially to Professor Jonathan Haidt, whose account of confabulation in his amazing book
The Happiness Hypothesis
helped to inspire what was to become this one, and to Professor David Eagleman, whose
Incognito
was equally vital to my understanding of some of the principles that form the core of
The Unpersuadables
.