Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole
Read Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole Online
Authors: Stephen Law
FURTHER PRAISE FOR
BELIEVING BULLSHIT
“How many times have you found yourself taking part in frustrating arguments in which you are confident that the available evidence strongly supports your position, and yet your opponents somehow keep on managing to come up with superficially plausible but spurious reasons why they should not accept that evidence? Stephen Law has done us all the great favor of presenting a systematic analysis that will allow you to spot such slippery tactics and to counter them with good old-fashioned reason and common sense. What is more, he has done so in a very readable (and often amusing) way. Nice one, Stephen!”
Chris French
Professor and head of the
Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, Goldsmiths,
University of London, and editor of
Skeptic
magazine
“If you want to escape being sucked into black holes of absurdity, this timely and necessary book offers eight great strategies to keep you safe.”
A. C. Grayling
Professor of philosophy,
Birkbeck College, University of London
“One mightn't end up agreeing with all of Law's examples of how we fall short of the ideal of appropriately guarding ourselves against false belief, but his general account of the manners in which we do fall short convinces and it cannot but help one in raising one's guard.”
T. J. Mawson
Fellow and tutor in philosophy,
St. Peter's College, University of Oxford
Published 2011 by Prometheus Books
Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole
. Copyright © 2011 Stephen Law. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover image © 2011 Media Bakery.
Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso-Cooke.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Law, Stephen.
Believing bullshit : how not to get sucked into an intellectual black hole / by Stephen Law.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–1–61614–411–1
ISBN 978–1–61614–412–8 (e-book)
1. Fallacies (Logic) I. Title.
BC175.L39 2011
165—dc22
2010049343
Printed in the United States of America
M
stephenlaw.org
.
INTELLECTUAL BLACK HOLES
E
How do intelligent, college-educated people end up the willing slaves of claptrap? How, in particular, do the true believers manage to convince themselves and others that
they
are the rational, reasonable ones and
everyone else
is deluded?
This book identifies eight key mechanisms that can transform
a set of ideas into a psychological fly trap—a bubble of belief that, while seductively easy to enter, can then be almost impossible to think your way out of again.
Cosmologists talk about black holes, objects so gravitationally powerful that nothing, not even light, can break away from them. Unwary space travelers passing too close to a black hole will find themselves sucked in. An increasingly powerful motor is required to resist its pull, until eventually one passes the “event horizon” and escape becomes impossible.
My suggestion is that our contemporary cultural landscape contains, if you like, numerous
Intellectual Black Holes
—belief systems constructed in such a way that unwary passersby can find themselves similarly drawn in. While those of us lacking robust intellectual and other psychological defenses are most easily trapped, we're all potentially vulnerable. If you find yourself encountering a belief system in which one or more of these mechanisms features prominently, be wary. Alarm bells should be going off and warning lights flashing. For you may now be approaching the event horizon of an Intellectual Black Hole.
FAKE REASONABLENESS
Note that the mere fact that a set of beliefs is attractive doesn't make it an Intellectual Black Hole. Take a set of beliefs about water, such as that it freezes at 0 degrees centigrade and boils at 100. People are also powerfully wedded to these beliefs too, but that's because they are
genuinely
reasonable. The seductive draw of the beliefs that lie at the heart of an Intellectual Black Hole, by contrast, has nothing to do with whether they're reasonable or true. To those trapped inside, the core beliefs may
appear
quite sensible. But that appearance is illusory—a product of the belief system's ability to disable the truth-detecting power of reason and get its victims to embrace instead habits of thought that are deceptive and unreliable.
AIM OF THIS BOOK
The central aim of this book is to help immunize readers against the wiles of conspiracy theorists, cultists, political zealots, religious nutcases, and promoters of flaky alternative medicines by setting out some key tricks of the trade by which such self-sealing bubbles of belief are maintained. We'll see how an impregnable fortress can be constructed around even a ridiculous set of beliefs, rendering them immune to rational criticism and creating a veneer of faux reasonableness.
Most of us will have had at some point the frustrating experience of trying to hold a reasonable conversation with someone powerfully committed to some ludicrous system of belief, and so will have come up against at least some of the strategies documented in this book. My aim here is to unpack and explain in some detail
eight key strategies
, which I call:
- Playing the Mystery Card
- “But It Fits!” and The Blunderbuss
- Going Nuclear
- Moving the Semantic Goalposts
- “I Just Know!”
- Pseudoprofundity
- Piling Up the Anecdotes
- Pressing Your Buttons
In each case I (1) set out the strategy, (2) explain what is wrong with it, and (3) provide illustrations of how it is applied.
DANGERS POSED BY INTELLECTUAL BLACK HOLES
Why worry about Intellectual Black Holes? What does it matter if some people happen to believe absurd things?
There's no doubt that Intellectual Black Holes can exist without causing any great harm. They remain dangerous, however. In some cases, the dangers are obvious. The hazards posed by an extreme cult, such as the Reverend Jim Jones's (which ended in the mass suicide of his followers in the Guyanan jungle), are abundantly clear. Once our minds have been captured by such a belief system, we become vulnerable to the wiles of those who control it. Victims have even been led into committing terrorist attacks.
There are less dramatic but still significant dangers. Every year, millions of dollars are spent on alternative medicines that, in many cases, just don't work. Not only do these medicines not work, people relying on them may expose themselves to serious risk as a result. For example, people may die as a consequence of relying on homeopathic treatment rather than conventional immunizations to protect them against malaria. Belief in the efficacy of homeopathy to protect against malaria, or that homeopathy has any kind of genuinely medicinal effect, is not supported by the evidence. So why do people believe it works? In large measure because of the kind of belief-inducing mechanisms examined in this book—particularly
Piling Up the Anecdotes
and
Playing the Mystery Cards.
As promoted and defended by at least some of its practitioners, homeopathy is an Intellectual Black Hole.
Each year vast sums are also spent on astrologers, psychics, and others claiming extraordinary powers. Vulnerable people waste both cash and emotional energy seeking out reassurances about lost loved ones that are, in reality, worthless. Again, many of these people have become convinced, or have convinced themselves, about the reasonableness of their belief in psychics and spirit mediums by the mechanisms described in this book.
So Intellectual Black Holes can allow people to be taken advantage of financially. Indeed, they are big business. But victims can be taken advantage of in other ways too.
Intellectual Black Holes can also lead people to waste their lives. In some cases, true believers may be led to abandon friends and family and throw away real opportunities, all for the sake of furthering their belief system's hypnotically attractive, if bogus, cause.
A SLIDING SCALE
We should acknowledge that Intellectual Black Holes lie at the end of a sliding scale. The fact is, almost all of us engage in these eight strategies to
some
extent, particularly when beliefs to which we are strongly committed are faced with a rational threat. And in fact, under certain circumstances, there may be little wrong in using some of them
in moderation
(as I will explain). What transforms even a belief system into a Black Hole is the
extent
to which such mechanisms are relied upon in dealing with intellectual threats and generating an appearance of reasonableness. The more we start to rely on these kinds of strategies to prop up and defend what we believe, the more Black Hole–as to whether what he says ilike our belief system becomes, until a Black Hole is clearly what we have got.
ON RELIGION
This book includes several religious examples of Intellectual Black Holes—including Young Earth Creationism and Christian Science. However, it's worth emphasizing at the outset that I'm certainly
not
suggesting that every religious belief system is an Intellectual Black Hole, or that every person of faith is a victim.
True, I illustrate how even core mainstream religious beliefs are sometimes promoted and defended by means of strategies covered in this book. But that's not meant to show that beliefs in question are false, or that they
couldn't
be given a proper, robust defense. Just because some religious people choose to defend what they believe by dubious means doesn't entail that no one can reasonably hold those same beliefs.
ON BULLSHIT
So, to be clear, when I talk as I do about an Intellectual Black Hole being a
bullshit belief system
, it's not the
content
I'm suggesting is bullshit but
the manner in which its core beliefs are defended and promoted.
According to philosopher Harry Frankfurt, whose essay
On Bullshit
has become a minor philosophical classic, bullshit involves a kind of fakery. A bullshitter, says Frankfurt, is not the same thing as a liar. The bullshitter does not knowingly tell a fib. He does not assert something he knows to be false. Rather he just says things to suit his purposes—to get away with something—without any care as to whether what he says is true.
1
I don't entirely agree with Frankfurt's analysis of bullshit. Frankfurt's definition, it seems to me, is in at least one respect too narrow. People regularly talk about the latest self-help fad, astrology, feng shui, and Christian Science as being bullshit, and their practitioners as bullshit artists, even while acknowledging that those who promote these beliefs typically do so in all sincerity. Not only do they believe what they say, it matters to them that what they say is true.
What nevertheless marks out practitioners of astrology, feng shui, and Christian Science as bullshit artists, I'd suggest, is the kind of faux reasonableness that they manage to generate—the pseudoscientific gloss that they are able to apply to their core beliefs. They create the
illusion
that what they believe is reasonable, while not recognizing themselves that it's only an illusion. They typically manage to fool not only others, but themselves too.
ON STUPIDITY
Victims of Intellectual Black Holes need be neither dim nor foolish. The sophistication of some of the strategies examined in
this book demonstrates that those who use them are often smart. Nor need those who fall foul of Intellectual Black Holes be
generally
gullible. Victims may, in other areas of their lives, be models of caution, subjecting claims to close critical scrutiny, weighing evidence scrupulously, and tailoring their beliefs according to robust, rational standards. They are able to, as it were,
compartmentalize
their application of these strategies.
So if, after reading this book, you begin to suspect that maybe you have become trapped inside an Intellectual Black Hole, there's no need to feel foolish. People far cleverer than either you or me have fallen victim.
APPENDIX A TO THE INTRODUCTION
Why Do We Believe What We Do?
This book does not attempt to provide an overarching theory of why we are drawn to particular belief systems in the first place, or why we are drawn to using the kind of mechanisms described in this book in their defense.
Why, for example, is belief in supernatural beings—such as ghosts, angels, dead ancestors, and gods—so widespread? Belief in such supernatural agents appears to be a near-universal feature of human societies. There is some evidence that a predisposition toward beliefs of this kind may actually be innate—part of our natural evolutionary heritage. Psychologist Justin Barrett has suggested that the prevalence of beliefs of this kind may in part be explained by our possessing a
Hypersensitive Agent Detection Device
, or H.A.D.D.
2
The H.A.D.D. Hypothesis
Human beings explain features of the world around them in two very different ways. For example, we sometimes appeal to natural
causes
or
laws
in order to account for an event. Why did that apple fall from the tree? Because the wind blew and shook the branch, causing the apple to fall. Why did the water freeze in the pipes last night? Because the temperature of the water fell below zero, and it is a law that water freezes below zero.
However, we also explain by appealing to
agents
—beings who
act
on the basis of their
beliefs
and
desires
in a more or less rational way. Why did the apple fall from the tree? Because Ted wanted to eat it, believed that shaking the tree would make it fall, and so shook the tree. Why are Mary's car keys on the mantelpiece? Because she wanted to remind herself not to forget them, so she put them where she thought she would spot them.
Barrett suggests we have evolved to be overly sensitive to agency. We evolved in an environment containing many agents—family members, friends, rivals, predators, prey, and so on. Spotting and understanding other agents helps us survive and reproduce. So we evolved to be sensitive to them—oversensitive, in fact. Hear a rustle in the bushes behind you, and you instinctively spin round, looking for an agent. Most times, there's no one there—just the wind in the leaves. But, in the environment in which we evolved, on those few occasions when there is an agent present, detecting it might well have saved your life. Far better to avoid several imaginary predators than be eaten by a real one. Thus evolution will select for an inheritable tendency to not just detect—but
over
detect—agency. We have evolved to possess (or, if you prefer, to
be
) hyperactive agency detectors.