Philosopher Lee McIntyre, a Research Fellow at Boston University, opens his book, “How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason,” with his account of visiting a Flat Earth Convention in 2018 — where people committed to the idea that the Earth is flat gather to exchange their particular shade of knowledge.
McIntyre goes about talking to Flat Earthers and finds them pretty unshakable in their beliefs. And why not, after all? Very few of us have actually seen the Earth curve (you have to go much higher that most airplanes do to detect it); and fewer of us still have been to space. I mean, show me some evidence!
“How to Talk to a Science Denier” could just as well have opened where it ends (on the National Mall on Jan. 6) — or at any other wacky hootenanny devoted to promoting other big lies. There is, McIntyre says, a long pedigree of organized, well-funded, truth-denial. We could take it back thousands of years in human history, but McIntyre is interested in tracing our modern efforts of “how to wage a successful campaign of misinformation,” back to the original “blueprint” of the tobacco industry’s systematic assault on the science linking smoking to cancer (the topic of one of the great books on this field, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s 2010 “Merchants of Doubt”).
“What ended in violence in Washington” on Jan. 6, he says, “began at the Plaza Hotel in New York” in 1953, when tobacco company executives first got together to confabulate a strategy that kept people in the dark about the lethal poison in cigarettes.
Indeed, there have been, by this count, 60-plus years of “largely unchecked science denial.” Every decade and every issue tied up with greed and power has had its showcase. The sham American Petroleum Institute — a cover for Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell — started to fight the global warming debate and the responsibility of extractive energy in the wake of the 1997 Tokyo Protocol.
Two other books also cover in fascinating detail these information campaigns against climate science, biology, history, medicine and, within medicine, the chemistry addressing COVID-19. The last campaign is particularly relevant today — given the presence of a pandemic that has now taken millions of lives worldwide. The title of one of these books (“The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free,” by Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney) draws out a parallel between the ways in which viruses and lies infect our bodies and our minds.
The other book is “Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics – and How to Cure It” by Richard L. Hasen.
These books tell us in various ways how all of us have cognitive biases that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years (that’s of course if you, like me, believe in human evolution).
Some 50 million Americans routinely believe in a conspiracy theory, about 9/11; the Obama birther thing; the Federal Reserve orchestrating the 2008 recession; or, for liberals, multinationals hurting us with genetically modified food (would you believe there’s no evidence?).
McIntyre reminds us that “conspiracism” (Hasen’s word) is a coping mechanism for people dealing with anxiety and loss of control. Most deniers — of whatever stripe — have spent years “marinating” in their “misinformed ideology.” For some, their version of reality is now less a belief system than a whole soup-to-nuts identity.
What do you do to shake people free of misinformation? This is a question that these authors apply on a personal level and a societal level — the authors being a mix of academic, lawyers and journalists.
On a personal level there are different levels of engagement. First, you might have to inoculate a denier, then you might have to intervene, and only after that can you try to “overturn belief.”
On a societal level, new regulations, new laws, new and more money to fund honest information purveyors, and “constant work to strengthen civic institutions” all are needed — another long view.
Simon and Mahoney in “The Infodemic” look at the challenges to press freedom around the world — in places where dictators and would-be despots call free media the enemy of the people — and call for dismantling censorship as a first step toward living in truth.
What’s clear is that facts alone are not enough when your goal is to try to get science deniers to try to change their minds — to, as one writer puts it, “try on a new identity.” But facts and spotlighting breadcrumbs on the evidentiary trail — as the Jan. 6 hearings are proving, when it comes to the big Big Lie that we’re now trying to rectify — may be where you have to start.
People may be fact-resistant, as one researcher puts it in one of these books, but we are not fact-immune.
Peter B. Kaufman works at MIT and is the author of “The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge.” His new book, “The Fifth Estate,” comes out in 2023.
