There’s a market for what we do; that is,
skepticism.
What is skepticism?
It’s just a scientific way of thinking.
So why aren’t scientists doing this?
Because they’re busy doing their own thing
in their particular fields.
What the skeptical movement has developed
is a set of tools like the Baloney Detection
Kit, a set of tools to deal with particular
claims that are on the margins of science
like creationism, intelligent design theory,
the anti-vaccinations, the holocaust revisionists,
you know, all these conspiracy theories and
so on and all these alternative medicines,
there’s hundreds and hundreds of these claims
that are all connected to different sciences,
but the scientists in those particular fields
are too busy working in their research to
bother with what these claims are because
they claims really aren’t about those fields,
they’re just hooked to them.
They’re about something else, because back
in the ‘80s when I first saw some professional
scientists debate Duane Gish, the “Young
Earth” creationist, they did not fare well.
And I saw some holocaust historians debating
or confronting Holocaust so-called revisionists
or deniers, they did not fare well because
they didn’t know the special arguments that
are being made by these fringe people that
have nothing to do with the science really,
they have an agenda, and they’re using these
little tweaked questions to get at the mainstream
and try to debunk it for their own idea logical
reasons.
So for example, like Holocaust revisionists,
they make this the big deal about why the
door on the gas chamber at Mauthausen doesn’t
lock.
“I mean if it doesn’t lock how are you
gassing people if you can’t lock the door?
So they must not have gassed people in there,
so if they didn’t gas people at Mauthausen
they probably didn’t gas people at any of
the death camps.
And if they didn’t gas people at any of
the death camps then there must not have been
a Holocaust.”
What?!
Wait a minute.
All from this door that doesn’t lock?
Well I eventually went and found out that
that wasn’t the original door; that took
me a couple of years, but that’s the kind
of specialty thing that skeptics do that mainstream
scientists, scholars, historians don’t have
time to do.
So over the 25 years, not just us there’s
other skeptic magazines and conferences and
groups of people that meet at meet ups and
so on all over the world, and it’s because
of the Internet, especially this whole idea
of what we now call fake news, alternative
facts, has gotten bigger and bigger and it
just gets unfolded in real time online within
minutes and hours and we have to jump on it
fast.
That’s really in part what we do so that’s
what we’ve been doing for 25 years is kind
of putting out brushfires here and there,
but also developing a set of tools that can
apply to any future ideas, because I don’t
know what’s going to be popular five years
from now.
Heck I don’t know what’s going to be trending
tomorrow, who knows?
So you’ve got to have these tools at the
ready and that’s what we’ve been doing
at Skeptic magazine, but let's address a college
campus issue these days.
Ok, I really think this goes back to the 1980s.
I noticed it first when I was in graduate
school, the second time when I got a PhD in
the history of science.
My first round was in the ‘70s in experimental
psychology graduate school, and I didn’t
notice any of this campus stuff.
In the late ‘80s when I was in my doctoral
program—because history deals a lot with
literature, the kind of post-modernist deconstruction
of what texts means, it was really taking
off.
So I initially thought “What is this?
But okay I’ll give it a shot I’ll keep
an open mind here and just try to follow the
reasoning.”
And I kind of see where they were going.
So what is the true meaning of Jane Austen’s
novel here, or Shakespeare’s play there,
or this novelist or that author?
And I can see that there may not be one meaning.
Maybe the author meant it as kind of provoking
you to think about certain deep issues and
you have to find your own meaning in the text.
Okay, I can understand that.
But then it kind of started to spill over
into history and I was studying the history
of science, and I kind of like to think of
science as progressing toward some better
understanding of reality that I believe is
really there.
And it’s not that science is perfect and
we’re going to get to a perfect understanding
of reality, I know that’s not going to happen,
but it’s not the same as literature, it’s
not the same as art and music; it’s different
than that.
If Darwin hadn’t discovered evolution somebody
else would have, in fact if somebody did!
Alfred Russell Wallace discovered natural
selection is the mechanism of evolution.
And if Newton hadn’t discovered calculus
somebody else would have.
Well, they did—Leibniz, and so on.
These are things that are out there to be
discovered, and I see that differently than
art and music and literature, which is constructing
ideas out of your mind.
And so I don’t think that the postmodern
kind of deconstruction of the text applies
completely to history, and you can see immediately
why it fails because this is what led to in
the ‘90s the whole Holocaust denial movement,
so-called revisionists.
They call themselves revisionists and their
argument was “all history is text, it’s
just written by the winners and the winners
write themselves as the good guys and the
losers are the bad guys and this is all unfair.
Look, maybe the winners here have unfairly
critiqued Hitler and the Nazis” and so on.
Yeah, but what about the Holocaust thing?
It looks pretty bad.
“Yeah well maybe it didn’t happen the
way we have been led to believe it happened
because, again, the history of the Holocaust
it was written by the winners.”
You can see immediately why this kind of textural
analysis can cascade into complete moral relativism
and insane ideas like Holocaust denial.
That’s when I thought okay this is wrong;
this has gone too far.
And in the mid ‘90s after we founded Skeptic
magazine in ‘92 this was one of the earliest
things we started going after because it was
around ‘95 or so that the so-called science
wars took off and that “science is just
another way of knowing the world, no different
and no better than any other way of knowing
the world.”
Wait, time out.
What was that part about we’re just like
everybody else?
Science has its flaws but it’s not just
like art or music, it’s different.
So then by the 2000s I think this really trickled
down into all the social sciences, anthropology,
biology, evolutionary biology and just attack,
attack, attack to the point where any particular
viewpoint that an oppressed minority finds
offensive or anybody finds offensive can be
considered a kind of hate speech or a kind
of violence.
You could sort of see the reasoning from the
1980s all the way through to today, you can
see how they get there, but we should have
drawn that line and stopped, well a bunch
of us tried to stop it back in the ‘90s
and well, it had a momentum of its own.
So I really think this whole idea of we have
to protest Ben Shapiro because he’s a conservative
and he’s pro-life and this is evil and wrong
and it’s hate speech and it leads to violence,
wait, Ben Schapiro is a really smart guy and
if you can’t refute his pro-life arguments—
I’m pro-choice, I think I could beat him
in a debate, or I could at least tie him in
a debate.
But if you don’t even know his arguments
because you don’t want to listen to him
and you’re going to shout him down, well,
kudos to the Berkeley people who let him speak
recently, but boy that has not been the trend
recently.
And this is the problem.
The problem is this, none of us has the truth.
The only way to find out if you’re deceiving
yourself or not, if you’ve gone off the
rails, if you’re wrong in some way is to
listen to other people who disagree with you.
And these were the original arguments laid
down by John Stuart Mill 1859, “On Liberty.”
This is the classic work.
One, I might be partially wrong and so by
listening to somebody who disagrees with me
I get to correct my idea.
Two, I might be completely wrong and off the
rails and boy good thing I figured this out
before I went to far.
Three, I might be completely right but I’m
not 100 percent sure about my arguments and
hearing somebody on the other side helps me
refine my arguments and strengthen my arguments.
If I could refute that conservative or that
radical leftist or whoever it is, then, how
much stronger my position is.
And four, it’s not just the speaker’s
right to speak, it’s the listener’s right
to listen.
Maybe I the protester don’t want to hear
this person, but maybe there’s people in
the room that do want to hear this person
for whatever reason.
It’s none of my business.
And then finally, in terms of moral progress
that I like to track, one of the biggest drivers
for the last five centuries has been the principle
of free speech.
This is at the basis of all liberal democracies
of all civil societies, that everybody must
have the freedom to express their points of
view no matter how much we dislike them.
I don’t care if you’re a Nazi or you think
we didn’t land on the moon or whatever your
ideas are, go ahead and tell us your best
arguments and we’ll see in the marketplace
of ideas how well you do.
And it’s been my experience that this is
the quickest way to silence somebody.
Like the holocaust deniers: don’t lock up
David Irving in jail like they did in Austria
when he showed up at the airport, heck no,
let him give his talk in a public forum and
expose his ideas for the craziness that they
are, for the lies that they are and then everybody
can see it.
End of story.
But if you lock him up then people are going
to be, “Oh what’s he got to say?
It must be really good because they won’t
let him say it.”
It has the opposite effect the banned in Boston
effect.
So that’s my argument for free speech and
why these college kids have gone off the rails
here.
Let the people speak if you invite them.
