21ST CENTURY HERESY HUNTING
IAI News, UK
Feb 9 2015
A new thought crime is upon us: denial. Its persecution presents a
new challenge to our most basic freedoms.
Frank Furedi | Commentator, author and sociologist whose recent work
explores the nature of authority and mistrust. A leading voice in
discussions of fear, risk and the unknown.
Contemporary society is more comfortable with values in the plural than
with a value that everyone can embrace. Instead of “the truth”, society
prefers to lecture about truths. The celebration of non-judgmentalism
and difference can be interpreted as a self-conscious attempt to avoid
having to make moral judgments. On most issues we are free to pick
and choose our beliefs and affiliations. Educators continually inform
university students – especially in the social sciences and humanities
– that there is no such thing as a wrong or right answer. Instead of
an explicit moral code, Western society seeks to police behaviour
through a diffuse rhetoric – such as appropriate and inappropriate
behaviour – that avoids confronting fundamental existential questions.
Paradoxically, the absence of moral clarity encourages an illiberal
climate of intolerant behaviour. In a world where moralists find
it difficult to clearly differentiate between right and wrong it
is important that some kind of line is drawn between acceptable and
unacceptable behaviour. Without a moral grammar to express ideas about
right and wrong ethical guidance often has a forced and artificial
character. Too often evil is represented in the caricatured form of
the serial killer or the paedophile. The Holocaust has been plucked
out of its tragic historical context and transformed into a generic
metaphor of evil. It is joined by environmental pollution as a highly
visual representation of moral depravity. The very few examples of
unambiguous evil – paedophilia, Holocaust, pollution – are constantly
seized upon to map out acts of potential moral transgression.
Discovering new taboos is part of the job description of heresy
hunters today. Not being against the Holocaust is probably the most
ritualised and institutionalised taboo operating in western societies.
Numerous countries now have laws against Holocaust denial. For example
in Austria the denial of the Holocaust is a crime that carries a
prison term of up to ten years. Targeting Holocaust deniers is a
culturally affirmed enterprise that allows politicians to occupy the
moral high ground.
Moral entrepreneurs constantly embrace the Holocaust to lend legitimacy
to their enterprise. They also insist that anyone who questions their
version of events should be treated in a manner that is similar to
those who deny the real Holocaust. “Do Armenian citizens of France”,
asks an advocate of criminalising the denial of the Armenian genocide,
“not deserve the same protection as their Jewish compatriots?”
During the past two decades the act of denial has become the most
recognisable characteristic of the 21st century heretic. Just as
the charge of Holocaust denial serves as a moral warrant to withdraw
the right to freely question a particular version of events so the
denial of claims made by fashionable causes invite censorship and
intolerance. Following the precedent set by the anti-Holocaust denial
laws, in October 2006, the French National Assembly passed a law that
could sentence to a year’s imprisonment anyone who denied the 1915
Armenian genocide.
It is a sign of the time that very few people questioned the right
of the French state to pronounce which interpretation of the past was
legitimate and which was a crime. Yet the implication of authorising
the state to possess the power to dictate what people should believe
and what constitutes the historical truth represents a fundamental
threat to freedom. The very idea of toleration evolved because
far-sighted people understood that the meaning of the truth and the
true religion was contested and ought to be a matter for individual
reflection. From the standpoint of tolerance, truths – historical or
otherwise – are discovered by independent thinking citizens learning
from one another in the course of a debate. They should not be laid
down in a decree of the state. No doubt those who deny the Holocaust
personify the most backward and vile human sentiments but to ban their
ideas is far more dangerous than the impact of their speech. Worse
still, the suggestion that society fears the claims of Holocaust
deniers betrays an insecurity about its own ideas. By assuming the
role of the censor it betrays its own democratic principles and risks
losing the moral authority of its version of events.
The transformation of the act of denial to a transcendental generic
evil is shown by the ease with which its stigmatisation has leaped
from the realm of historic controversies surrounding acts of
genocide to other areas of debate. Denial has acquired the status
of a free-floating blasphemy that can attach itself to a variety of
controversies. One opponent of climate change denial observes that the
“language of ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’, ‘human impacts’ and
‘adaptation’ are themselves a form of denial familiar from other forms
of human right abuse”. It appears that moral crusaders have become
so overwhelmed with the act of denial that they no can no longer tell
what a difference in opinion looks like. The rhetorical inflation of
the consequences of denial is informed by the aspiration to construct a
plausible ideology of evil. The very term “denial” implies that what’s
at stake is the status of truth. Those who deny wilfully refuse to
recognise the self-evident truth. The vilification of denial ensures
that its practitioners are dispossessed of the right to have a voice.
Sadly not accepting a received wisdom is often represented not as
disagreement but as an act of denial – and with the stigmatisation of
denial this charge has acquired the form of a secular blasphemy. So
a book written by an author sceptical of prevailing environmentalist
wisdom was dismissed in Nature with the words; “the text employs the
strategy of those, who for example, argue that gay men aren’t dying of
AIDS, that Jews weren’t singled out by the Nazis for extermination,
and so on.” The suggestion that there is a common strategy of denial
used in these three highly-charged issues betrays the conspiratorial
imagination of heresy hunters.
The stigmatisation of denial represents the prelude for the demand
that it be censored. Take the attempt to stifle anyone who raises
doubts about the catastrophic representation of climate change. Such
sceptics are frequently stigmatised as “global warming deniers” and
their behaviour is often compared to those of anti-Semitic Holocaust
deniers. Some moral entrepreneurs advocate a policy of zero tolerance
towards the target of their crusade: The language used to condemn
the heretic typically appeals to a sacred authority that must not be
questioned. According to this model “overwhelming evidence” serves as
the equivalent of revealed religious truth and those who dare question
“scientists of unquestioned reputation” – that is, a new priestly
caste – are guilty of blasphemy.
Heresy hunters who charge their opponents with “ecological denial”
also warn that “time for reason and reasonableness is running short”.
It appears that ecological denial or the refusal to embrace an
environmentalist word view is to be complicit in the commitment of
a long list of “eco-crimes”. Those who denounce the new heresy often
cannot resist the temptation of seeking to shut down discussion. Some
claim that, like Holocaust deniers, those who refuse to accept the
sacred narrative on global warming should simply be silenced in
the media. “There becomes a point in journalism where striving for
balance becomes irresponsible”, argues CBS reporter Scott Pelley in
justification of this censorious orientation. From this illiberal
standpoint the media has a responsibility to silence global warming
deniers by whatever means necessary.
Crusaders against denial are not merely interested in silencing their
opponents. In the true tradition of heresy hunting they also want
to inflict punishment upon those who deny the true faith. Those who
deny the official consensus on the spread of AIDS are castigated as
“AIDS deniers”. And “if Holocaust-deniers deserve to be punished,
so do Aids deniers” argued A Smyth in First Post, before adding that
“it is high time African governments outlawed denial of the epidemic,
and persecuted those who perpetuate misinformation about AIDS or in
any way undermine efforts to tackle it”.
A similar approach is adopted by illiberal opponents of “climate
change deniers”. Australian journalist Margo Kingston wrote that as
“David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial” perhaps
“there is a case for making climate change denial an offence”. Why?
Because it is a “crime against humanity, after all”. David Roberts,
a journalist for the online magazine Grist, would also like to see
global warming deniers prosecuted like Nazi war criminals. With the
tone of vitriol characteristic of dogmatic inquisitors he has noted
that “we should have war crimes trials for these bastards”, adding
“some sort of climate Nuremberg”.
The arguments used by moral entrepreneurs suggest that denial
constitutes what traditional religion used to classify as sinful or
dangerous ideas. A long time ago theocrats realised that the authority
of their belief system would be reinforced if they insisted that
“God punishes disbelief”. Moreover they also need to be punished
because of the evil impact that their blasphemy has on others. Today’s
inquisitors have taken on board this insight and insist that since
people need to be protected from disbelief its repression is often
depicted as an act of responsible behaviour.
From: Baghdasarian
http://iainews.iai.tv/articles/21st-century-heresy-hunting-auid-491