The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  Another crucial event that was taking place during Lord Monckton’s time in government was the miners’ strike. One of his recollections of those tense days begins with him sitting in his office in Downing Street as future cabinet minister Oliver Letwin came running in.

  ‘Oh, it’s terrible, it’s terrible, where do we hide?’ wailed Letwin. ‘The miners are rioting in Parliament Square. It’s so un-English!’

  But Lord Monckton knew better. ‘Don’t be so silly!’ he admonished the young Letwin. ‘This is just what they do every Friday evening when the pubs tip out.’

  Letwin, however, was frantic.

  ‘They’re coming this way!’ he cried.

  Lord Monckton glanced out of the window. Hmm, yes. There were thirty or forty of them by now, pressing against the rickety barriers. More still were arriving. But Lord M was not in the least perturbed.

  ‘Oh, well,’ he sighed while slipping on his overcoat. ‘I’ll just go and deal with that.’

  And then he reached for his bowler hat. Letwin was agog. A bowler hat?

  ‘They’ll lynch you!’

  ‘Of course they won’t,’ said Lord Monckton.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look, why do I wear a hat in situations like this? It’s the only way to make a polite gesture at a distance. This has been known to my ancestors since time immemorial. It ran the empire. If you wanted to indicate politeness to people who were charging you, you took your hat off to them and they stopped. It works every time. Just watch!’

  Lord Monckton descended the steps of No. 10 and approached the angry miners, passing a pair of policemen who were nervously radioing for reinforcements. The revolting pitmen saw him. They began jeering. When Lord Monckton was halfway along Downing Street he suddenly stopped. He surveyed the horde. He took a breath. And he doffed.

  Immediately, the jeering turned to cheering. Lord Monckton approached the men, promised to put their complaints in a note to Margaret Thatcher, and then offered them a pint. ‘And you could have heard a pin drop,’ he remembers, smiling. ‘They were all docile and followed me across the road to the pub in double file. It was like a schoolmaster and his crocodile.’

  Since the years of his heroic calming of Downing Street, the cold war might have ended, but the power-mad left, he tells me, remain a perilous threat.

  ‘Once they had been motivated in these directions by the Communists, then these organisations took on a life of their own,’ he says. ‘They are essentially still following the KGB playbook without being aware that they’re doing so. It’s absolutely the same pattern. The main thing is power. That is the fundamental principle of leftism. It’s about this absolute control over every detail, which is why the correct word for left is “totalitarianism”.’

  And today, the enemy – in the modern form of the European Union and the United Nations – appear to be winning.

  ‘You don’t know who they are. You can’t really see them. But everybody in this classe politique is now beginning to argue for global governance.’ He tells me that the UN held a meeting last May ‘with all of its top people, to discuss ways of bringing the “nation state” to an end. It’s code for bringing democracy to an end. That’s actually at the top of the UN’s agenda.’ An early draft of the 2009 Copenhagen Treaty, he adds menacingly, ‘describes that they’re going to establish a global government.’

  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the environmental groups and many politicians sympathetic to the IPCC’s views are part of this plan to institute what Lord Monckton has previously called ‘a worldwide coup d’état by bureaucrats’ who seek to ‘impose a Communist world government on the world.’

  And the people know it. Well, they don’t know it, just know it. Not the details, the facts. They just have this hunch, you see. This intuition. This generalised emotion. Who knows where it comes from? When they hear Lord Monckton speak, they realise this feeling they have always had was true all along and, when they do, they react with such rapture, such jubilation.

  ‘I began giving talks all over the place,’ he tells me. ‘Australia, America, Europe. Huge crowds would turn up and they would jump around – standing ovations practically every time. It was clear that there was a large feeling among ordinary people that something was going on in this climate story that they didn’t like the smell of. They knew there was. They just couldn’t quite work out what it was …’

  *

  When I spoke with Professor Jonathan Haidt, I was surprised to find him offering some advice that Lord Monckton might have approved of. ‘Follow the sacredness,’ he told me. ‘Find out what people believe to be sacred, and when you look around there you will find rampant irrationality. The left have sacralised global warming. I am very certain, as a moral psychologist, that their discourse about it is not rational. They cannot be trusted to think straight about it. It’s a classic moral crusade. And when a scientific community is all on one side, morally and politically, then its ability to be objective goes out the window. Unfortunately, this is the case with global warming. I believe that the scientists are correct, but we can’t be as confident, because there are tribal dynamics going on.’

  Professor Haidt believes that, as well as global warming, the left have ‘sacralised victims and demonised capitalism’ while the right have sacralised markets. ‘They can’t think straight about the ability of the markets to solve problems.’ Perhaps comfortingly, he argues that the endless war between the political poles represents a relatively efficient model of governance. ‘The most basic question that faces any society is change versus stick,’ he asserts. ‘Stay with what you have and know, or change and strike out into the future. And there is no correct answer – you have to have a balance of both.’

  It was remarkable to observe how many of the battles of Lord Monckton were in the service of ‘stick’. His emotional instincts were to conserve the world, to defend hierarchy and order and tradition. He is an archetypal conservative.

  But perhaps the most surprising thing that I discovered, as I was conducting my research into our political brains, is that allegiances are not defined by simple, calculating self-interest.

  The studies that Professor Haidt has been involved with, and the data that he has been exposed to, have convinced him into a darker vision than the traditional one. We do not use free will in order to select beliefs and behaviours that will make the world a better place. In The Righteous Brain, he writes that moral reasoning ‘evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.’

  In this alternative vision, the brain wants to make us into heroes in the eyes of those around us and also in our own. The stories we believe, and the demons that we imagine surround us, all tend to serve a crucial narrative – that we are exceptional, that we are morally holy, that we are on a meaningful journey, and that we are right.

  And my encounter with Lord Monckton has also given me something extra – an unexpected method by which I believe we can spot faulty beliefs. Yesterday, the philosopher Dr James Garvey told me, ‘Most people would say that something’s true if it corresponds to the way the world is. This view goes back to Aristotle. But there are other people who prefer the coherence theory of truth, which says that if you have a completely coherent set of beliefs, that tends to be a true set of beliefs.’

  Over the last few days, I have become convinced that the coherence theory could not be more wrong. If a person’s set of beliefs all cohere, it means that they are telling themselves a highly successful story. It means that their confabulation is so rich and deep and all-enveloping that almost every living particle of nuance and doubt has been suffocated. Which says to me, their brains are working brilliantly, and their confabulated tale is not to be trusted.

  *

  I am walking through the courtyard of the Oxford Union, back towards the station, when I see a pair of young students laughing as they stride into the entrance. I get that thud,
again. That feeling. Avoid, dislike, unclean. My left-brain interpreter seeks to explain, to justify. And I want to say, spoiled. I want to say, privileged. I want to say, glad I never went to university. But none of that would be true. What my emotions are really a response to is something that is utterly heretical to the story that I have always told of my life.

  It is envy.

  13

  ‘Backwards and forwards in the slime’

  1 SEPTEMBER

  Mid-afternoon

  The assistant to Hitler’s ambassador is a blonde and beautiful young American. I met her in the lobby of the grand Polonia Palace Hotel in central Warsaw, where she was ticking off arrivals for the week-long tour of Second World War sites that is being hosted by the ambassador himself, the notorious right wing historian David Irving. Her name is Jaenelle Antas, and she has a measured and precise way of speaking that hints at artifice but is, I suspect, nonetheless indicative of a superior intelligence. I felt a sudden constriction of nerves when I saw her. She smiled and said, ‘One or two of your fellow tour members are getting to know one another in the cocktail lounge. Perhaps you would care to join them?’

  The room was draped about with glamorous Poles. There were bow-tied cocktail waiters, flavoured cashews served in white pots laid out on black napkins and, hanging from the ceiling, an enormous statement lampshade. I found the men up on stools, drinking lager at the bar – an American named Mark and an Australian called Alex, both in their mid-to-late thirties. They chatted harmlessly about toy models (‘I prefer dioramas. Planes, armour. German. Mostly 1:35.’) as a waiter washed glasses at the other side of the bar. I bought drinks and relaxed a little, satisfied now that these men were smart enough not to say anything obviously offensive.

  ‘Did you come straight from Australia?’ I asked Alex.

  ‘No, I’ve been having a bit of a holiday,’ he said.

  ‘Anywhere nice?’

  ‘Dresden.’

  ‘Right. Wow. Is that, wow. Dresden. And is Dresden nice?’

  ‘Good, yes, good. Very pure,’ he nodded, earnestly. ‘I only saw two blacks and one Chinese.’

  I had thought of this trip as an opportunity to test everything that I had learned so far on one of the twentieth century’s most famous heretics. It would be interesting, I imagined. I had looked forward to it. But when I returned to my room, I realised what I actually had in front of me. Seven days, among these men. Seven days, being forced to suffer a gavage of fascism while giving the appearance of accepting every word. If there was some version of defecation or regurgitation or bloodletting that you could use to cleanse your mind of things that you have heard – of purging the thoughts of others from your neurons – then that is what I needed to do.

  But there is no such thing. So I sat on my bed and I ate a mini-Toblerone.

  Evening

  I saw him at 7 p.m. in the lobby where our party were meeting. He was wearing loose corduroy trousers with a grey jumper and was carrying, in his right hand, a plastic Marks and Spencer’s bag. His grey hair was brushed and parted, his flushed, bagged and obviously once-handsome face was set off with impressive eagle’s-wing eyebrows. He glared emptily downwards, a couple of steps behind the fringe of the group, his gaze distant and forbidding and narrow. You could tell, even in his stillness, that he had a limp. One leg rested slightly too high, its corresponding arm lifting up and back a little, presumably to take some of the painful weight.

  Irving’s bad joint is a legacy of the thirteen months that he spent incarcerated in Vienna’s Josefstadt prison. He was arrested on 11 November 2005 and convicted of ‘glorifying and identifying with the German Nazi Party’ on account of two lectures that he had given in 1989 in which he claimed that Nazi concentration camps contained no gas chambers and denied that six million Jews died in the Holocaust. During the trial, Irving pointed out that since making those speeches, he had changed his position. But even on its final day, as the then-sixty-seven-year-old was pleading for his freedom, he stubbornly insisted to the court that ‘the figure of six million is just symbolic.’ The prosecutor, Michael Klackl, called for his imprisonment, arguing that Irving was ‘dangerous.’ When his three-year sentence was passed down, the historian is said to have looked bewildered. The judge asked him, ‘Do you understand your sentence, Mr Irving?’

  ‘I’m not sure I do,’ he replied.

  In 1993 the American historian Professor Deborah Lipstadt wrote that David Irving is ‘one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial’ and accused him of distorting evidence, manipulating documents and misrepresenting data in order to suit his ideological beliefs. Irving sued her for libel. He represented himself, at one point accidentally calling the judge ‘Mein Führer’. Things didn’t go well.

  The court’s verdict was delivered on 11 April 2000. The Honourable Mr Justice Gray said that ‘Irving has misstated historical evidence; adopted positions which run counter to the weight of the evidence; given credence to unreliable evidence and disregarded or dismissed credible evidence.’ He judged that Irving did this ‘persistently and deliberately … for his own ideological reasons … and for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews.’ He concluded that ‘he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-semitic and racist and that he associates with right wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.’ He then ordered Irving to pay costs of nearly £2 million, plus £150,000 to Lipstadt’s publisher.

  Irving called the verdict ‘indescribable’ and ‘perverse.’

  I have been wondering about David Irving, and what we know about the effect of genes and emotions on belief, and the processes of confirmation bias and the ‘makes sense stopping rule’. The court ruled that Irving was a conscious and deliberate liar. But aspects of his behaviour contradict this. In bringing his case against Professor Lipstadt (and a similar one against the Observer), he was inviting an overwhelming forensic and public examination of his work. If his distortions were conscious, it would be a kind of suicide. Why would he do this? If he was the kind of person who would dishonestly alter his beliefs just to suit his dastardly purposes, why did he persist in disputing the ‘six million’ figure even as he was beseeching a court for mercy?

  Might a more credible psychological portrait tell of a man who is faithfully convinced of his view and who is using his powers of intellect – which other historians have acknowledged to be considerable – to unconsciously thump, squash, twist and banish any threatening contradictory evidence away, just as we all do?

  There can be no doubt, of course, that Irving is wrong about an awful lot. My question is, does he know that he is wrong? Or have his emotional hunches led him astray, marooning him in a self-made universe of error that has been erected upon the foundations of a simple mistake? And that has been built up and up, by seven decades of research – thirty books, many thousands of interviews, millions of documents – with each new ‘discovery’ gifting the illusion more power and detail and reach?

  Night

  Before we left for the restaurant in the evening, Jaenelle gave us a motherly briefing during which Irving suddenly came alive. With a slightly dangerous look, he said, ‘Can I interrupt?’

  ‘I’m speaking,’ Jaenelle said.

  He looked affronted.

  ‘You work for me!’

  ‘No I don’t,’ she said, firmly. ‘You’re my client.’

  He stepped back into his glowering repose, a fleeting taint of self-amusement evident about his lips.

  We walked through the night, past vast Communist-built blocks that have been crowned with the neon hoardings of the conquering capitalists. My fellow holidaymakers are all men. As well as Alex and Mark there is a wealthy businessman who flew himself here in his own light aeroplane; a shorts-wearing university employee from America’s wheat-belt with a huge rectangular bottom; a tall Australian call-centre operative with a German name; a genui
ne German who flew MiGs for the East German airforce; a lorry driver from Maidstone; and a man in his sixties with a sharp public school accent who was born in colonial Kenya. All of them are immaculately ironed and tucked in. Three of them have moustaches.

  We drifted into pairs as we walked, and I fell into conversation with Alex, the Australian who enjoyed the purity of Dresden. ‘Where I live, we’ve got a lot of Lebanese,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that like?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, they hate the Jews,’ he said. ‘But I still can’t stomach them.’

  As well as being an extravagant racist, it turned out that Alex is also a keen consumer of organic produce.

  ‘Oh, I go organic, yeah – all the way. I’m not putting all that supermarket crap into my system,’ he said. ‘My sister’s kids aren’t vaccinated. They never get sick. Those vaccinations give you diseases in later life, you know. They’ve got mercury in them. That’s the most toxic substance known to man.’

  Behind us, the genuine German was becoming worried that the Polish restaurant would have no space for our party.

  ‘We have no reservation?’ he said. ‘There are twelve of us!’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said the posh Englishman. ‘The Poles are used to being invaded.’

  During the meal, Mark, the American ex-soldier, discussed Mexican immigration.

  ‘They should be “ice cold” about it, as the Führer said,’ he explained, gesticulating over his beer with his meaty hands. ‘They should build a wall at the Mexican border, then take away the perks from the immigrants. No welfare, no healthcare, no right to work. Then they’ll start to self-deport. This is what everybody wants. They’re just too scared to say it.’

  *

  At least in part, it was suspicious coherence that trapped Irving. Mr Justice Gray said, ‘All Irving’s historiographical “errors” converge, in the sense that they all tend to exonerate Hitler and to reflect Irving’s partisanship for the Nazi leader. If indeed they were genuine errors or mistakes, one would not expect to find this consistency.’