Measles—Called ‘Gift from a Goddess’ in Sanskrit, measles can help to mature the immune system, may help prevent autoimmune illnesses such as cancer,* asthma and allergies in later life.
—Someone on the internet, later repeated by the ‘Australian Vaccination Network’
The WHO’s newest measles summary in the Weekly Epidemiological Record reports more than 26,000 cases of measles in 36 European countries from January–October 2011 . . . These outbreaks have caused nine deaths, including six in France, and 7288 hospitalizations.
—World Health Organization
Something odd happened among Australian voters after the 2013 federal election, in which the conservative Coalition defeated the Australian Labor Party: progressive and conservative voters swapped economic mindsets, as if they’d opened up their skulls and handed each other their brains. A week after the election, according to a poll conducted by Essential Research, 68 per cent of voters who backed the Coalition believed economic conditions in Australia would get better in the subsequent twelve months. By contrast, just 16 per cent of Labor voters thought they would. They were more likely to believe conditions would get worse: 59 per cent of Labor voters thought the Australian economy would deteriorate.
But barely eight months earlier, when Labor was still in government, it was the reverse: 50 per cent of Labor voters thought the economy would improve in the subsequent twelve months while only 21 per cent of Coalition voters thought it would. Instead, 51 per cent of them thought it would get worse; just 21 per cent of Labor voters agreed.
The Australian economy hadn’t changed much in the interim. It continued to be a low-inflation, low-interest rate, low-unemployment economy with a much-envied triple-A sovereign credit rating. By the standards of most of the last thirty years in Australia, the economy looked good. What had happened? With their side in power, conservative voters dramatically changed their view of the economy, seeing sunshine and prosperity when, merely months earlier, all had looked dismal. With their side out of power, Labor voters went from bullish to bearish in a heartbeat. It was like a body-swap comedy as imagined by economists.
Partisanship even affected how voters saw their own personal finances: if your side of politics is out of power, you’re more worried about your financial situation; if your side is in, your affairs take on a much rosier hue. It’s one thing to view the economy—a nebulous entity that frequently produces mixed signals—through a political filter but, weirdly, voters even do so about something they have first-hand knowledge of: their own money.
This has been demonstrated in other countries as well as Australia, particularly the United States, where independent voters can provide a third viewpoint for pollsters on economic and financial matters in addition to Republican and Democrat voters.
This is a specific kind of Stupid: denialism, a refusal to change one’s viewpoint even in the face of indisputable data.* Denialism isn’t scepticism, not even, per Descartes, radical scepticism; scepticism implies a willingness to accept evidence if it meets a certain standard. Denialism is a refusal to accept any evidence, no matter how good or epistemologically sound—unless it says what you want it to say.
Australia went through a fascinating period of economic denialism from 2010–13, with conservative voters and business figures refusing point blank to acknowledge the strong performance of the Australian economy because it was a progressive government presiding over it. Conservative voters thought the economy was in trouble, and even disagreed with economic data that showed how well the economy was doing; business leaders insisted the productivity of Australian workers had gone into reverse under Labor, whereas official data showed strong growth in labour productivity; conservative politicians warned of a wages explosion even as data revealed slowing wages growth for the country’s workers.
It’s less clear whether the same flip-flop occurred when the Australian government last changed, in 2007, but the Australian economy was much stronger that year than in 2013, and the Coalition still lost office. When conservative prime minister John Howard channelled Harold Macmillan and told Australians—with perfect accuracy—that they’d never had it so good, his comment instantly became a potent weapon for his opponents, as if Howard had uttered some unspeakable heresy. He lost not merely government but his own seat in Parliament, only the second Australian leader ever to do so.
But, interestingly, this kind of denialism doesn’t necessarily flow through to consumer behaviour. The same polling shows conservative voters made consumption choices at similar or often higher levels than progressive voters in 2012. That is, despite professing to view the economy and their own financial circumstances more dimly, conservative voters reported making major purchases, such as new cars, new homes and overseas holidays, at rates higher than progressive voters, who viewed the economy and their own circumstances more positively. So, thankfully, economic denialism seems to have little real-world impact. It’s more accurately seen as an footnote of human nature revealed by our obsession with opinion polling, but without any consequences—unless you’re a professional pollster.
But that’s just your starter for this particular form of Stupid. There are other forms of denialism, and they have a lot more impact than voters seeing the economy through brown-tinted glasses because the party they support is out of power.
While refusal to accept anthropogenic climate change shifts a little over time and reacts to temporary things like extremes in weather, broadly it’s been the same across Anglophone countries for some years: a small minority outright reject that there’s any global warming, a sizeable minority refuse to accept any human contribution to warming, and about half or a little more of people accept what the world’s climate scientists have been saying for a generation about human-caused global warming.
In Australia, the numbers haven’t shifted much for some time—in late 2013, just over half of Australians believed in human-caused climate change while 36 per cent believed it was entirely natural. In 2012, a Yale/George Mason University poll found around 54 per cent of Americans believed global warming was caused by humans and 30 per cent thought it was natural; in 2013, a poll by UK specialist outlet Carbon Brief found 56 per cent of Britons believed humans were responsible and 33 per cent said it was natural. In Canada, the numbers were a little different—58 per cent and 20 per cent, according to an Angus Reid public opinion poll, with another 13 per cent rejecting it entirely.
So, overall, in English-speaking countries there’s a solid chunk of people, between a fifth and a third of the population depending on where you are, who acknowledge climate is changing but refuse to see that humans have played any role in that change, in addition to a small number who refuse outright to accept what even some aggressive climate denialists now admit: that it’s warmer than it used to be.
And we know who these people are. Data from Australian polling shows that there is a perfect correlation between age and a propensity to believe global warming is natural, rather than human-induced. The key age is around fifty-five; after that, people are more likely to dismiss anthropogenic climate change than accept it. Climate change denialists are not merely likely to be baby boomers, but are more likely to be male than female, and tend to be politically conservative. UK data suggests British denialists are older, conservative and male. Data from the US shows they’re usually old, male, conservative and white. If greenhouse emissions also caused erectile dysfunction and prostrate problems, climate change would have been stopped dead decades ago.
These are, not coincidentally, the very people most challenged by social and economic change. Older white males grew up in a world that gave them social, economic and political pre-eminence, a world in which they could legitimately expect to have their own needs perceived as a priority by society, even if they were blue-collar males. They now live in a world that accords them less and less priority, whether it’s politically, economically or sexually, a world in which they’re expected to compete like everyone else. Climate change denialism is thus partly an angry reaction to a changing world—not one with a warming climate so much as a more inclusive society, a more diverse political class, a more competitive economy.
It also means that institutions traditionally controlled by older, conservative males, such as corporations, political parties and mainstream media outlets, are more likely to be climate change denialists than the rest of Anglophone societies—which is one of the reasons why in the West we’ve done so little about climate change despite so much evidence of the damage it will cause. Large corporations have channelled vast amounts of funding into anti-climate change science campaigns. In the US, Republican politicians have been strongly hostile to climate action; in Australia, the conservative Coalition threw out a leader committed to climate action and replaced him with a denialist who claimed climate change science was ‘absolute crap’ and who, once elected prime minister, set about dismantling a successful carbon pricing scheme established by the previous government.
The strong correlation between political conservatism and climate change denialism is likely the result of several factors: conservative political parties have stronger links with business, and particularly big business, many sections of which have a strong interest in preventing action to address climate change; and government intervention of the kind required to address climate change, even if via a market-based mechanism, is inconsistent with the small-government rhetoric of modern conservatives. But it also appears to derive from the conviction that climate change is a political rather than scientific issue. Framing it thus requires conservatives to oppose the existence of climate change and any action to prevent it because to acknowledge its existence is, they believe, to hand a win to their enemy: progressives. That kind of Stupid lies behind the death threats and savage abuse directed at climate scientists, who are perceived as political opponents by denialists, not researchers dispassionately explaining the evidence before them. That’s despite the fact that climate action is fundamentally a prudential policy, that preventing uncertainty associated with dramatic environmental and economic change is an intrinsically conservative position and that a conservative icon like Margaret Thatcher (a scientist, perhaps coincidentally) advocated climate action more than two decades ago.
Unlike economic denialists, this form of Stupid has real-world consequences. To the extent that climate change denialists in Western countries are able to slow or (in the case of Australia) reverse action to halt the rise in greenhouse emissions, they inflict a range of costs on developing nations over the long term in relation to higher mortality and health impacts, and economic costs that poorer, less resilient and economically marginal nations will have greater trouble managing than Western countries.
But those same impacts will also be inflicted on denialists’ own communities. Due to climate change, more older Australians will die in heatwaves, the impact of tropical diseases will be greater, the costs of extreme weather will increase and the economic impacts of rising temperatures on the agriculture and tourism industries, for example, will be borne by the consumers, businesses and taxpayers of the future. To the extent that eventually Western economies will have to decarbonise in face of catastrophic climate change, climate inaction also imposes greater costs associated with delay on future generations.
Climate change denialists are therefore engaged in intergenerational economic warfare on their own societies. They won’t witness the worst aspects of climate change—luckily for them they’ll die before they occur. But their children and grandchildren will be affected by them. The refusal of older people, and particularly old white males, to accept the need for climate action shifts costs that they themselves are causing onto their descendants, all of whom will pay higher prices, higher taxes and higher insurance premiums and enjoy poorer health, lower economic growth and fewer jobs because of climate change. Denialists are a form of economic parasite preying on their own offspring, running up a bill they’ll die before having to pay. And every year of delay increases the costs that future generations will have to bear.
Still, there’s another form of denialism that has a much more immediate and direct human impact than climate change denialism.
In Australia, the US and the UK, vaccination rates for children for preventable diseases like measles are strong, at over 90 per cent. For measles vaccination, this represents a recovery from the massive damage done by Andrew Wakefield and his debunked claims of a link between measles vaccination and autism. But Wakefield still caused a vaccination gap in the UK, as a consequence of which large numbers of children over ten in Britain remain unvaccinated, thus providing a pool for the disease. In 2012, there were over 2000 measles cases in the UK, with twenty children hospitalised. Far from being a benign coming-of-age condition, as claimed by anti-vaxers, measles alone kills 150,000 people a year around the world.
And there continue to be pockets of anti-vaccination fervour. The number of children on the Australian Childhood Immunisation Register with a ‘conscientious objection’ has gone up nearly tenfold, to nearly 40,000, since 1999. This sentiment can be found among both well-educated, affluent urban parents and alternative lifestyle communities in regional areas.
The persistence of anti-vaccination sentiment in affluent communities is particularly strange, but seems to reflect middle-class parents who want to differentiate themselves, to demonstrate that they’re not part of any ‘herd’, the immunity of which is so important for keeping preventable diseases contained. And if climate change denialism is associated with the right, vaccine denialism is associated not merely with too-posh-to-jab bourgeois denialists, but with the left, often linked to conspiracy theories about Big Pharma (in league, frequently, with the male-dominated medical profession) pushing ‘chemicals’ on ‘our kids’.
In reality, ‘our kids’ are the victims of this form of Stupid, and not in the long term when they become consumers and taxpayers, but now: unvaccinated children (and there are a small number who for medical reasons can’t be vaccinated) get sick and die from preventable diseases. Moreover, they can infect partially vaccinated children, thereby exposing to disease and death the children of parents who have acted responsibly in protecting their children, and babies too young to have begun vaccination.
Vaccination denialism is thus an insidiously evil type of Stupid: Stupid with a body count. It kills and harms kids, often injuring them permanently, and not just the children of denialists, which is horrendous enough, but even those of parents who have tried to protect their kids.
Like climate change denialists, vaccination denialists also tend to rhetorical excess; both have more rabid members who issue death threats to, and demand the jailing of, scientists who disagree with them (i.e. believe normal science). But vaccination denialists go further even than the most rabid opponent of the ‘warmist conspiracy’. In Australia, they have called doctors ‘full penetration’ rapists, called vaccination programs genocide and (inevitably) invoked Nazi Germany. ‘There will come a time,’ a prominent Australian anti-vaxer wrote online in 2008,
I pray to God that it will happen in my lifetime—when those who have pushed vaccines upon innocent, helpless babies—doctors, pharmaceutical companies, government officials—will be proven to have lied and cheated these instruments of death into our children’s bloodstream. When that occurs, the outcry will be heard around the world and there will not be enough hiding places on the globe for these murderers to hide . . .
Worst of all, they have harassed grieving parents who have lost children to preventable diseases, seeking to discourage them from publicly blaming diseases like pertussis (whooping cough). Australia also has the honour of having produced Ann Bressington, a now former (thankfully) South Australian MP, who managed the intellectual feat of combining climate change and vaccination denialism with being an anti-fluoridationist, a chemtrail believer and a self-proclaimed opponent of ‘Agenda 21’ and other tinfoil-wrapped causes (bringing to mind the immortal question to Shirley MacLaine: ‘Is there anything you don’t believe in?’). She has publicly claimed vaccination is in fact a tool of global population reduction—yes, this woman not merely votes, she actually got elected.
As with economic denialism and climate change denialism, vaccine denialists are impervious to facts. Andrew Wakefield has been discredited, struck off, had his papers withdrawn, demonstrated to have engaged in fraud, demonstrated to have acted unethically towards his (handpicked) child patients, demonstrated to have planned to make money from the autism scare he unleashed, and couldn’t even get lawsuits up in the litigation havens of the UK or Texas. However, his work is still cited approvingly by anti-vax types and Hollywood Z-listers Jenny McCarthy and Rob Schneider. * McCarthy eloquently expressed the level of scientific understanding of anti-vaxers with her memorable statement: ‘Think of autism like a fart, and vaccines are the finger you pull to make it happen.’
There may be a small number of genuine sceptics in the ranks of economic, or climate change, or vaccination denialists, or poorly informed people who may change their mind in response to clear data, but the majority simply deny in the face of all contrary evidence—cherrypicking what data they can to support their own case, substituting anecdotal evidence for data, applying judgement inconsistently (how many climate change denying businessmen don’t insure their businesses against risks far smaller than the chance of climate scientists being collectively wrong?) and dismissing—as Wakefield’s supporters do—contrary data as the product of a conspiracy.
Meantime, the toll of misery, suffering and death caused by this Stupid mounts. Take pertussis, a debilitating and sometimes fatal illness that is particularly dangerous for newborns, as babies can’t be fully immunised until they’re six months old. Peer-reviewed studies have compared both international and domestic US rates of infection based on differing rates of vaccination and show a very strong correlation between lower rates of vaccination or higher rates of ‘conscientious objection’, and higher pertussis infection rates—even among children who have been partially vaccinated.
•
The persistence of denialism often prompts the lament that key authority figures in a debate aren’t ‘communicating effectively’. Doctors should be better at explaining the benefits of immunisation, we’re told; or politicians have lost the power to explain themselves to voters, to discuss complex economic ideas, to communicate anything that doesn’t simply confirm voters’ pre-existing beliefs; scientists, more used to fussing around with their beakers and Bunsen burners than talking to actual people, don’t effectively communicate climate science—and anyway, scientific method, with its caveats and hypotheses and refusal to embrace absolute certainty, is tailor-made for cherrypicking.
There’s some truth to such complaints, and there are always ways to package truth more effectively. For example, explaining that climate change and carbon pricing dramatically improves the economically dismal case for nuclear power is likely to garner support from conservative older males. But the complaint doesn’t address the core of denialism—no matter how well-explained facts are, no matter how compelling the presentation, they’ll be rejected because denialists are being guided by their own emotional needs, rather than reason.
Denialism is an expression of ‘motivated reasoning’—an inability or unwillingness to separate emotion from reasoning, meaning we reason to reach a preferred conclusion, rather than to find the truth regardless of what we’d personally like. We use our core of personal beliefs, personal preferences and individual experience, rather than an objective framework, to guide our reasoning. Voters opposed to the party in power don’t want to admit the economy is doing well, given that would reflect positively on a government they loathe, so they claim the economy is underperforming even while they behave as though it is fine. Anti-vaxers prefer anecdotal evidence of the effects of immunisation and dismiss as the efforts of a conspiracy the reams of data available on its safety and benefits. Climate change denialists see climate change as a left versus right issue and thus regard it as a political argument that they and their political tribe must win, regardless of the facts, or a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy they must unmask, not an issue of scientific fact or prudent judgement.
‘Motivated reasoning’ isn’t just about why people tie themselves in knots trying to refuse evidence and logic; it also embodies the tension between reason and sentiment, a tension that has long, and significant, historical antecedents in Western intellectual history. The conflict between what we want to believe, and what reason and evidence tell us is true, has been at the centre of European thought for centuries, and denialism often repeats exactly the same arguments that have been used against reason throughout history.
To trace this tension, we need to go back to the role of organised religion in Western society, and for that we have to start with a methodological note of sorts.
There’s plenty that is Stupid in religion. And not just silly Stupid, reflecting that the primary purpose of religion is to give self-obsessed humans the illusion that their lives might have some higher meaning rather than being a mere accident of physics in an otherwise indifferent cosmos. As we’ll see later in this book, religion is a delivery mechanism for dangerous forms of Stupid—Stupid that kills and hurts and victimises huge numbers of people. But religion is also a powerful driver of non-Stupid things—of philanthropy, of aid to those in need, of education, of solace and comfort. In this sense, religion is probably better understood as an amplifier of and vehicle for other human characteristics, rather than being innately Stupid or non-Stupid.
But in the modern, secularised West, we have little understanding of just how central to European society Christianity has been for most of the last thousand years. We also have a skewed conception of Christianity as anti-, or at least resolutely non-, intellectual, seguing easily from the Inquisition and the persecution of Galileo through to the modern Republican Party of Intelligent Design and Legitimate Rape. But Christianity (meaning both the Catholic Church and later Christian movements like Protestantism) in the high Middle Ages and the early modern period was the key engine of Western thought. Moreover, because of its central role in Western society, not merely was that society suffused with religion to a much greater degree than we can now comprehend, but Christianity was suffused with social and secular concerns in a way that would be equally incomprehensible to people of the twenty-first century.
Indeed, it is hard to distinguish between Christianity and Western society in intellectual terms up until the seventeenth century. Thus, intellectual developments within Christianity were in effect intellectual developments in the whole of Western thought. That’s why we’re now, however improbably, detouring back to the Reformation to explore why Jenny McCarthy wants people to stop pulling fingers.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the theological monopoly of the Catholic Church came under unprecedented pressure from two different directions—humanism and Reformism. Both are important movements in the Western intellectual tradition. Both challenged the basic position of the Church, that it was the only body able to interpret the divine will, that its priests were a necessary medium to connect ordinary people with the Christian deity and that its teachings were the only path to salvation.
We’ll deal with some of the other consequences of this challenge in later chapters, but for now we’ll stick to the intellectual impacts. The Church’s ‘no salvation without us’ business model—and ‘business model’ isn’t sarcasm, this was an institution of enormous economic as well as political power—couldn’t withstand the arrival of a disruptive technology: printing. The early modern Church was the music industry of its day, albeit with less cocaine and better composers, hapless in the face of a new technology that empowered the people formerly known as its worshippers. It wasn’t merely that people could now—assuming they were literate—read a wide range of material on religious and political matters. Rather, both humanism and Reformism posited a much greater role for individuals in religion and, it would become clear, beyond religion as well.
Humanism emphasised the use of reason and evidence—in particular, critical textual analysis, the historical importance of which has long since been forgotten. Humanism celebrated source documents and subjected them to searching scrutiny, trying to extract as much information from them as possible. Classical and early Christian texts were pored over, as were the books of the Bible itself; it was no longer sufficient to accept either the official position of the Church on what a particular text said, or even the commentaries of philosophers and Church fathers. If possible, the original texts on an issue must be accessed and analysed to determine not just their authenticity, but the historical circumstances in which they were written and the message they were intended to convey when they were written.
Humanist scholarship was boosted by an historical accident: western Europe was at this point rediscovering, or seeing for the first time, a number of key classical books—many after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottomans, which sent Orthodox scholars fleeing westwards with them.
This sort of focus on books had been seen before in Europe, particularly during the eighth- and twelfth-century renaissances (yes, there were several renaissances; it wasn’t all buboes and flagellants between Christopher Plummer’s death in Fall of the Roman Empire and Michelangelo), but this time it was fuelled by printing. Printing had a stupendous scholarly impact on Europe, even through simple things like standardisation of texts and a massive expansion in readerships, let alone more complex long-term impacts. Some of those, such as the epochal reorientation of humankind towards the visual, are discussed by Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy: McLuhan described printing as causing a ‘split between head and heart’ in Europe.
Consider how important standardisation was: medieval copies of even the most crucial patristic and philosophical texts were riddled with errors made by the photocopiers and printing presses of the Middle Ages—tired monks beset by cramped hands, poor light and minds numbed with drudgery. Printing enabled different versions of key texts to be shared and compared so that errors could be identified and eliminated. And the widespread dissemination of printed texts dramatically expanded the number of readers scrutinising them, the result being many more standardised, authoritative philosophical and theological works and many more scholars to examine the same text, whether in Edinburgh or Vienna.
Most of all, the Bible itself, previously chained up like a wild beast in the local church, became increasingly available to anyone who could read—a truly radical development. Martin Luther, for example, could plausibly claim to have never read a Bible before he arrived at a monastery.
Printing thus provided a massive spur to new religious thinking—the spread of early Protestantism can be tracked in England along trade routes that carried books to literate communities, such as weaving towns, where books would be distributed and (even more importantly) discussed by people by themselves, without guidance from institutional churches.
But while Reformism encouraged a much more personal faith than that offered by the Catholic Church, which continued until the twentieth century to perform its central ritual in a tongue virtually no one spoke, it wasn’t much more encouraging of reasoning than Catholicism. Key Reformers like Luther and John Calvin saw reason as having only a limited, and subordinate, role in religion; both emphasised, albeit with different weighting, the crucial nature of grace. Humanism might have helped create the conditions for the Reformation, but they were very different intellectually. Humanism was bibliocentric, focused heavily on the written word and its derivation; Protestantism was Bibliocentric, focused on the Bible; ‘the Word’ in Protestantism was that of God, and oral, not written—a distinction that will continually reappear in this discussion.
Moreover, Reformed churches quickly learned the lesson the Catholics had long ago learned: that letting people go their own way on religion fragmented and undermined organised worship. Institutionalised Reformism thus copied the Catholic Church in repression. Calvin executed the intellectual Michael Servetus, who had outraged not just the Catholics with his biblical interpretation, but the Lutherans and the Calvinists as well, a trifecta that saw him burned alive in Geneva. And the flames in which he perished were just a warm-up. Elizabethan England was tough on Catholicism and tough on the causes of Catholicism, with what would later be called a zero-tolerance policy for Romish priests: they were assumed to be spies and were tortured and executed virtually on sight.
Or there was the Thirty Years’ War, an epic of sectarian bloodshed between different rulers (the idea of wars between states, rather than monarchs, was still developing), the numbing brutality of which Bertolt Brecht sought to re-create by making us sit through Mother Courage. That conflict was eventually settled on the basis that people would have to accept the religion of whoever was ruling them at the time, and if they didn’t like it, they’d have to move somewhere else. Somewhere else, as it turned out, often meant the afterlife—if, for example, you were a Huguenot in France in 1572, or one of the tens of thousands of women killed after being accused of witchcraft (the witch crazes peaked at the end of the sixteenth century).
For others, elsewhere meant another continent. Many Protestants were so disgusted both at the persecution they endured at the hands of their rulers and at having to live in the same country with people who didn’t share their religious views, that they left Europe altogether, sailing west until they reached North America, where they set up their own colonies. There, fulfilling the fears of endless division of the early Reformers, some split off to form yet more colonies over ever narrower doctrinal differences. We’ll come back to them.
Back in Europe, the Holy Spirit was out of the bottle, too. Handing individuals a personal link to their god drove a proliferation of faiths that even savage crackdowns couldn’t halt. The availability of the Bible, and other texts, fuelled this proliferation—thus we first start to see censorship in the Reformation context; among the first books banned was the Bible itself, by Henry VIII.
The humanist impulse contributed to this ever-fracturing process of religious evolution. The remarkable seventeenth-century Dutch Jewish philosopher Spinoza (strictly speaking he was a lens grinder who did philosophy in his spare time) contrasted religion as developed by churches, almost entirely without the Gospels, with a close study of the Gospels themselves. Spinoza, in the humanist tradition, argued that the Gospels should be treated as literary texts composed by many authors, rather than divine revelation (and anyway, Spinoza argued, God was an infinite substance who was everywhere, not a single being). Treating the Bible as holy writ meant, for Spinoza, worshipping paper and ink. Close study of the Bible, he said, would reveal the simple, uncluttered message of religion, which was limited to loving the deity and loving one’s neighbour as oneself.
For Spinoza, it followed from this that no one had any business dictating a person’s interior faith, a view fundamentally at odds not merely with the Catholic Church, but with much of Reformism: both gave themselves the right to dictate faith and remove from society (well, remove from life, in practice) anyone who disagreed with them. Spinoza wasn’t the first to urge toleration, but he provided an intellectual basis for it that, along with his reasoning that democracy was the most effective form of government and his argument that there was no point trying to regulate free speech, were to prove profoundly influential in the eighteenth century.
So, okay, what does all this have to do with Jenny McCarthy’s autistic flatulence, apart from Martin Luther’s famous claim he could chase Satan away with a fart? It sets the scene for the critical clash between reason and sentiment, in the Enlightenment.
To understand this better, we have to understand there were, like multiple renaissances, multiple Enlightenments, and not just those in individual countries (your Scottish Enlightenment, your French, your German and so on—please say them in the appropriate accents); the term ‘family of Enlightenments’ has been used by historian J.G.A. Pocock, while Jonathan Israel has, crucially, divided it into ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ Enlightenments, which is the more important distinction for our purposes.
The moderate Enlightenment is the one we all know—Voltaire, salons, wigs, epigram-ready table talk and so on—which was primarily reform-minded and anti-clerical in nature, rather than genuinely politically radical. There was even Enlightened Despotism, an early example of ambush marketing by some eighteenth-century monarchs who wanted to distinguish their particular brand of kinder, gentler tyranny from run-of-the-mill absolutism.
But the radical Enlightenment fully embraced the application of reason, no matter where it ended up, and its adherents didn’t stop at wanting to turf out the Church. They eventually argued for fundamental social and political reforms, such as democracy, women’s suffrage and anti-colonialism.
Both these Enlightenments were, crucially, elite phenomena—a characteristic their critics wouldn’t forget. Those being freed from the grip of the Catholic Church and absolutism were mainly middle- and upper-class, educated Christian men. Voltaire famously told dinner guests to stop discussing atheism in front of the servants unless they wanted to be murdered in their beds, because religion was all that kept the lower orders in line.
And despite the famous role of women in hosting salons, barely a quarter of women could read in eighteenth-century France. ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,’ is how Immanuel Kant commenced his 1784 pamphlet ‘An answer to the question: What is enlightenment?’ and he wasn’t merely following personal pronoun convention. Kant was, per Monty Python, a real pissant when it came to women: they were, the philosopher considered, ‘timid, and not fit for serious employment’. Rousseau, who sits apart from the French Enlightenment but who was a hugely influential figure, was deeply misogynistic and convinced that women had to be kept controlled and domesticated. And Voltaire and the encyclopaedist Denis Diderot, like Luther, shared Europe’s rich history of anti-Semitism and poured out bile about Jews that could have been used by the Nazis.
But Diderot stood apart from Voltaire and particularly Rousseau in extending Spinozism to fundamentally more radical ideas than Voltaire, who was a friend and faithful correspondent of despots enlightened or otherwise. In an intellectually aggressive phase at the end of his life, Diderot called for wars of liberation of oppressed peoples against monarchs, aristocrats and clerics, attacked colonialism and supported the education and liberation of women. And Voltaire and Rousseau were infuriated by their inability to defeat the radical philosophes and Spinozists through argument.
Rousseau’s objection to Diderot and the more politically radical philosophes was one that is at the core of the tension between reason and sentiment: he criticised reason itself. Reason, for Rousseau, was a corruption caused by civilisation, the faculty that had led humankind (or more accurately, for Rousseau, mankind) away from the simplicity of the natural state in which it had been happy, into an age of misery. Rousseau’s attack on reason, drawing on two centuries of ‘noble savage’ stereotyping induced by Europe’s contact with the New World, was a key moment in anti-intellectualism. Reason wasn’t merely useless but corrupting; it had all gone wrong once humans—sorry, men—began using their brains logically; until then, they had existed in a state not of Hobbesian brutality, but of simplicity and instinctive bliss. McLuhan’s ‘split between head and heart’ caused by printing had now been articulated clearly.
This Edenic soft primitivism of Rousseau, by the way, is echoed in the thinking of many denialists: the anti-science views of climate change denialists (former prime minister John Howard declared in 2013 that his ‘instincts’ told him climate change wasn’t real) and the bizarre argument of anti-vaxers that a disease like measles is a benign coming-of-age process visited upon lucky children by Nature (portrayed as a maternal, nurturing female deity) with which the unnatural—and male—forces of science and medicine shouldn’t interfere. Rousseau couldn’t think of any arguments to counter those of Diderot and other radical philosophes, but he knew they were wrong in his heart, he said.
Rousseau had a fan in a political figure who emerged in the French Revolution: Robespierre. The Jacobins condemned not merely moderate Enlightenment philosophes but the whole Enlightenment project, and particularly radical Enlightenment ideas of free speech and a free press. Those philosophes still alive by the time of the Terror were hunted down and executed or, like Thomas Paine, forced into hiding. And the greatest Jacobin charge against the radical Enlightenment was, echoing Rousseau, its elevation of cold rationality over emotion and the sentimental simplicity of common folk.
Robespierre was a devastating orator, and his rise to power was partly built on his rhetorical gifts. And the conflict between reason and sentiment was also partly one between literacy and orality, which echoes the bibliocentric–Bibliocentric distinction between humanism and Reformism. This is a key theme of McLuhan’s in The Gutenberg Galaxy, the supplanting of oral/aural culture by the homogenising, specialising, hierarchical culture of the printed word.
This literacy–reason/orality–sentiment tension can also be observed in the American history of religion. While the French Revolution was underway, across the Atlantic, the American colonies—by now liberated and federated with the help of pre-Revolutionary France, the genocide of native Americans and some signally inept British statesmanship—had begun developing their own anti-intellectual tradition.
Fifty years ago, in Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), Richard Hofstadter argued that it was the American evangelical tradition as it emerged in the eighteenth century that created an actively anti-intellectual form of religious expression in the United States. The American churches established by the Puritan refugees we saw earlier in this chapter were, if not overtly humanistic, still scholarly in nature—Harvard was established less than twenty years after the arrival of the Mayflower, at Cambridge, a town named after the university (famously, the more Puritan of the English universities).
But with the American Revolution and the growth of the new republic, the established colonial churches found themselves fighting a losing battle against uncontrolled, populist frontier evangelicism. This time, the disruptive technology was the human voice, not books: Americans were voracious readers and would soon create a massive newspaper market, but books themselves could be few and far between in many American communities, particularly on the ever-moving frontier (although novels were frequently serialised in magazines and, occasionally, newspapers). Preaching—particularly of the fire-and-brimstone variety—was central to the second Great Awakenings that swept the new nation from the middle of the eighteenth century.
Preaching had always been a key part of the Protestant tradition. English Protestant Reformers demanded, and got, a graduate clergy in the sixteenth century, and the university curricula of the time remained focused on the profoundly oral medieval scholastic tradition of the trivium and quadrivium, aimed at delivering a graduate skilled in oratory and verbal argument. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritans expected sermons lasting three hours at a minimum when they attended service, and sometimes complained when that was all they got; ministers who failed to occupy the pulpit for such heroic lengths were mocked as ‘dumb dogs’. The preaching of the Great Awakenings and of Methodist preachers also saw Herculean feats, not in duration but in volume: preachers such as colonial-era Methodist George Whitefield could, Benjamin Franklin reported, address unaided 20,000 people at open-air gatherings.
This literacy–reason/orality–sentiment distinction keeps reappearing. The spoken word delivered by a gifted orator to a group is personally engaging, an unrepeatable performance that delivers a communal emotional experience, one that engages both aural and visual senses. The written word is visual only, more detached and analytical, less emotional, homogenising, capable of constant repetition, consumed alone.
Hofstadter suggests that in the febrile environment of nineteenth-century American religion, Darwinism and then industrialisation and urbanisation (in which the South conspicuously trailed the rest of the United States, and still does) elicited a backlash against modernity and provided the historical antecedents for twentieth-century Christian fundamentalism. Where Rousseau had accused intellectuals of being unwilling to lift a finger to save the lives of their fellow citizens, early-twentieth-century American fundamentalists declared college graduates were going straight to hell. A similar mindset was to be found in the Ku Klux Klan, whose ‘Imperial Grand Wizard’ in the 1920s contrasted emotion and instinct with what was ‘coldly intellectual’—the former ‘have been bred into us for thousands of years’ (presumably 6000 years maximum), ‘far longer than reason has had a place in the human brain.’ Rousseau could not have expressed it better.
The Scopes Trial in the 1920s encapsulated the pure form of American anti-intellectualism, as articulated by the unusual figure of William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, aka ‘The Great Commoner’, had been a three-time Democrat candidate for president in a remarkable populist political career (in his first run for president in 1896, he was, and remains, the youngest-ever major party candidate, at just thirty-six). Bryan’s political success had been powered by—here we are again—his prodigious oratorical gifts: he routinely spent several hours a day delivering long speeches, and his ‘cross of gold’ speech against the gold standard that secured him the Democratic nomination in 1896 remains the, um, gold standard of US political oratory.
Bryan, who had personally campaigned against evolution both for religious reasons and because he believed it promoted conflict and had helped cause World War I, argued in the Scopes Trial that evolution should not be taught in Tennessee public schools not merely because it was ‘condemned’ in the Bible, but because few Tennesseans believed in it. Teaching evolution amounted to the undemocratic imposition of the rationalist views of a small number on ‘the views entertained by the masses’. In other words, Bryan wanted science by ballot box. Bryan won the case (the result was later overturned), but was humiliated by his opposite, Clarence Darrow, on the stand and died soon after, thereby becoming an unlikely symbol of Southern fundamentalism.
A different, if only partial, resolution of the reason–emotion tension had been proposed by late-nineteenth-century New England philosopher and psychiatrist William James (brother of Henry). We’ll return to James later in another context, but in the late 1870s, in his essay ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’, he made the point that rationality can incorporate characteristics of sentiment, such as aestheticism. As per Ockham’s Razor, we prefer simplicity—or, as James put it, ‘parsimony’—over complexity and lack of clarity in explanations, and a coherent and satisfactory explanation provides intellectual comfort in a way something less satisfactorily rigorous does not. James, perhaps unfortunately, never taught in Tennessee, and remained a Harvard man all his life.
The United States isn’t the only country to be labelled anti-intellectual (either from the left or the right: critics like Allan Bloom have charged American universities with fostering irrationality). In fact, the lament, that ‘_____ is the most anti-intellectual country in the world’ is routinely applied to their own country by Australians, New Zealanders and the British as well as Americans, although Vichy France, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Franco’s Spain all displayed a strain of anti-intellectualism.*
In the US and Australia, the reason–emotion tension has been channelled into a standard conservative attack on progressives, with a powerful, out-of-touch liberal ‘elite’ alleged to be somehow controlling governments in opposition to the needs of ordinary people. In this myth, which echoes the Jacobin hostility to the philosophes, the average voter invariably possesses ‘common sense’ (although that doesn’t get celebrated so much when they throw out conservative governments or re-elect progressive ones) while elites are always ‘intellectual’, ‘sneering’ and ‘technocratic’—a term that encapsulates the entire charge of cold, unfeeling rationality. The elevation of personal experience—which we discuss later—to the apex of sound argument in public discourse is another form of privileging sentiment over reason: facts and logic are no match for the real emotional experiences of people; to know is one thing, but to feel is better.
In a culture where rationality is contrasted negatively with the instinctive pragmatism of ‘ordinary folk’, in which ‘intellectual elites’ are characterised as a kind of public enemy, denialism, whether it’s the killer kind peddled by the anti-vax crowd, or climate change denialism peddled by old white men, or ordinary refusal to acknowledge how the economy is performing, is enabled. If our institutions have changed since the early modern period, we’ve retained much of the Stupidgenic environment that the humanists and the philosophes faced.
In such an environment, data and logic, carefully compiled and written down, become suspect, the tools of manipulators, or simply irrelevant and elitist, compared to the emotional life of ordinary people. How can it make kids healthier to put diseases in them? And ‘I heard of someone whose little girl got sick after being immunised.’ ‘It was hotter in summer when I was a kid.’ ‘How can the economy be doing well when I know someone who lost his job?’ Instinct and anecdote, in a manner that would have delighted Rousseau and Robespierre, remain more credible than written evidence. Denialism remains as easy to embrace as it has ever been throughout history, driven by our urge to reason our way to what we want to believe, not what might be true regardless.
BK
* Yes, you’re right—cancer isn’t an autoimmune illness.
* Climate change denialists routinely reject the word as somehow offensively anti-Semitic because it invokes images of the Holocaust. As British psychologist Paul Hoggett has noted, this misses the point that the most critical ‘Holocaust denial’ was not the behaviour of right-wing anti-Semites (and Iranian presidents) decades after the event trying to cobble together evidence that gas chambers never existed, but the denialism of the German people at the time that the Holocaust was being implemented by their own government.
* Whose work as actors is more likely to induce fatal reactions than vaccines—boom tish!
* Anti-intellectualism is also regularly treated as a new phenomenon—as Hofstadter noted, intellectuals seem to have a ‘lamentably thin sense of history’.