The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  Harvard Professor of Psychology Jerome Bruner writes, ‘a story begins with some breach in the expected state of things.’ In its most dramatic literary form, this narrative shock is Aristotle’s ‘peripeteia’, a sudden reversal of circumstances. Peripeteia is the ultimate disruption – a life spun around without warning. What happened next? How did the hero struggle? Was resolution found? What valuable information can be harvested and fed into the neural models?

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  The brain constructs its models during childhood and adolescence, the period in which it is extraordinarily alive with creative activity. By the age of five, children have developed a sophisticated ‘theory of mind’ and are, therefore, ‘story-ready’. During our formative years we absorb many thousands of tales of ever-increasing complexity of message. Professor of Psychology Keith Oatley has observed that learning to negotiate the social world requires weighing up ‘myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.’ We build our understanding of the emotional world through the myths and legends of our culture. We are all, in part, made of fairy tales.

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  But stories are not just cultural teachers. They can be motivators and agents for epochal change. Evolutionary psychologist David Sloan Wilson has compared their effect to an imaginary ‘mutant gene’ that appears in a primitive tribesman and serves to distort and magnify his dread and hatred of his enemy, thus pushing him to fight with superior violence. Marxist philosopher Georges Sorel believed that myths were essential for revolution. Writing in Nature, Professor Paul Bloom has observed that stories have helped shift the moral codes of nations: ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to end slavery in the United States, and descriptions of animal suffering in Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and elsewhere have been powerful catalysts for the animal-rights movement.’

  Stories change us first, and then they change the world.

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  The mind is addicted to story – crisis, struggle, resolution – because that is how it experiences life. We are in the world, and we are battling against foes in order to make better lives.

  As our brains are bombarded with a superabundance of information, we are constantly searching for our plot among the chaos. Psychotics such as Rufus May are too sensitive to stories. They see salient details everywhere. But I sensed this tendency, too, in the people I have met who were not mentally ill. It seemed a common thing, to confabulate wild explanations of cause and effect that weren’t really there. Veronica Keen and her Illuminati. Dr Valerie Sinason and her Satanists. Lord Monckton and his totalitarian United Nations. Hidden plots. Conspiracies that they were fighting, bravely.

  All of it begins in the unconscious. We experience hunches about moral rights and wrongs; wordless desires and repulsions; powerful instincts that seem to come from nowhere. This constant throbbing of emotions can be unsettling. We sometimes feel things that we don’t understand, or even want to feel. When we come across an explanation of the world that fits perfectly over the shape of our feelings – a tale that magically explains our hunches and tells us that it is all okay – it can seem of divine origin, as if we have experienced revealed truth.

  When the racist lorry driver from Maidstone was a boy, he saw a party political broadcast by the National Front. ‘Everything made sense,’ he told me, shaking his head at the wonder of it all. ‘It just fitted.’ When I asked John Mackay how he knew that God was real, he explained, ‘It’s something in me.’ When Lord Monckton’s audience, with their right wing brains, heard him talk of climate conspiracy, he realised that they always knew instinctively, ‘that something was going on in this climate story that they didn’t like the smell of. They just couldn’t quite work out what it was …’

  Stories work against truth. They operate with the machinery of prejudice and distortion. Their purpose is not fact but propaganda. The scientific method is the tool that humans have developed to break the dominion of the narrative. It has been designed specifically to dissolve anecdote, to strip out emotion and to leave only unpolluted data. It is a new kind of language, a modern sorcery, and it has gifted our species incredible powers. We can eradicate plagues, extend our lives by decades, build rockets and fly through space. But we can hardly be surprised if some feel an instinctive hostility towards it, for it is fundamentally inhuman.

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  I will never forget my own experience of the brain’s incorrigible story-generating ability. Lying on Vered Kilstein’s massage table, it took hardly a nudge for my mind to produce a vivid and emotional narrative of my life as a wartime widow. To recall its principal scenes, even now, is to slip into the drizzle of genuine melancholy. A part of me becomes that doleful woman. Vered spoke of clients who had reported similarly powerful experiences: the English knight who, after cavorting with his lover, was struck during a fight over his dishevelled appearance: a fantastic confabulation woven around a humdrum dodgy shoulder.

  Consciousness is the first storyteller, and the greatest one of all. Its basis is the illusion that we are coherent individuals, in control of our beliefs and actions and operating freely at the centre of the world. Because we are driven to cause things to happen, and we witness their effects over time, we naturally experience our lives as a constantly flowing narrative. We have victories and failures, enemies and allies. We have hopes. We have goals. We have drama. Philosophers and neuroscientists ask why consciousness is necessary. Why go to the trouble of creating this sensation of singularity when we could just as easily pass on our genes as instinctively behaving zombies? Why have we adapted for this trait?

  I believe that consciousness is the Hero-Maker. The mind reorders the world, turning the events of our days into a narrative of crisis, struggle, resolution, and casts us in the leading role. In this way, our lives gain motivation and meaning. We are coaxed into hope, into heroic acts, into braving impossible odds. We are made David against Goliath and, in this way, we become stronger and more successful. How many hero stories have I heard since that night in Gympie? How many people bravely fighting to change the world? John Mackay, giving up his career in an effort to disprove the Devil’s propaganda and save unbelievers from hell. Swami Ramdev creating his paradisal world free of Western medicines. Ron Coleman campaigning to rescue the innocent from the brutish psychiatry industry. The Buddhist S. N. Goenka abandoning his business life to offer tens of thousands of people free meditation. James Randi braving death threats to prevent a coming ‘dark age’. Vered Kilstein, who is ‘one of the millions who are here to help people move to a new consciousness.’

  The neural illusions that collude in the Hero-Maker are many. We believe that we are better looking than we are, more moral than we are, less susceptible to bias than we are, that our creations are worth more, that the ‘spotlight’ is always on us and that we are incapable of true evil. Our memories rescript our past in the service of our glory. And yet a witchbag of powerful forces works against us, silently guiding our behaviour: excessive obedience to authority; unconscious prejudices; genetic predispositions and situational and cultural pressures that can drive us to terrible acts. These forces are made invisible to us. To truly be a hero, we must believe that we are our own captains, and that we possess free will.

  Through the Hero-Maker’s lens, religions and ideologies are seen as parasite hero plots; prophets and political leaders become seductive storytellers. They provide ready-made confabulations that have been generalised by use until they fit neatly onto the instincts of a certain kind of brain. Because they match up so well with an individual’s unconscious moral hunches, they can appear to be more than true. They come from out there and can seem miraculous, sacred, even worth dying for. These parasite plots serve to make people happy because they validate their emotional instincts and then give them purpose – enemies to fight and the promise of a blissful deno
uement if their quest is successful. It is an illusion. It can be a profoundly dangerous one. And it can be a profoundly useful one.

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  Our lives are lived in two realms – the physical and the narrative. The model that our brain makes of the world of objects has to be accurate. If it wasn’t, we would be bumping into walls and trying to eat chairs. But not so the invisible kingdom of feelings. That soft matrix of beliefs that we exist within – that ever-flowing narrative of loves and feuds and hopes and hatreds – can be a place of tremendous distortion. The story that is woven for us is concerned, primarily, with our hero status, and not objective truth. It is often wrong. The ‘true’ nature of reality can appear so clear and obvious that we frequently underestimate just how wrong it is possible to be. If others persist in seeing things differently, we conclude that they must be corrupt. It is what the Morgellons sufferers believe of the Centers for Disease Control. It is what James Randi thinks of Rupert Sheldrake. It is what the family of Carole Felstead believe of Dr Fleur Fisher. It is what David Irving thinks of his critics and what his critics think of David Irving.

  We underestimate how perilous it can be, if we cling too hard to our hero delusion. An expert on the psychology of evil, Professor Roy Baumeister, has written that ‘dangerous people, from playground bullies to warmongering dictators, consist mainly of those who have highly favourable views about themselves. They strike out at others who question or dispute those favourable views.’ Perhaps I saw this notion in its mildest form among the UFO-spotters who, when challenged, grumpily hardened their beliefs. And I saw it in a stronger form still in some of those whose dramatic personalities and intensely held positions have made them famous. Heretics are often betrayed by the spotless coherence of their plots. They tell the cleanest tales with the most perfect separations of good guy and bad. It is why they should not be trusted.

  But the writer, too, tells a story. Like the mind, we pick out a plot through the superabundance of information that we gather on our chosen subject. What you have read in these pages is presented as if it is the whole truth, and yet it is just a narrow path that I have picked through a landscape of facts and incident. I spent seven full days travelling with David Irving and his acolytes. My interviews with the historian alone lasted for more than four hours, my transcript for the chapter is in excess of twenty-eight thousand words – nearly a quarter of the length of this book. I applied my own map of salience to all that evidence, elevating the moments that I believed most relevant and that told the story that I wanted to tell. If Irving was given identical materials, he would surely have crafted a different narrative. It would be just as true as the one that you have read, and it would be just as untrue.

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  If the covert modules of our minds conspire to make us feel like heroes, then this phenomenon has an evil twin, a dangerous corollary. The Demon-Maker.

  To be a hero, we must have an enemy. Every David requires a Goliath, and the tales in these pages teem with those. John Mackay conjured himself a ferocious battle-scape of witchcraft and devils and necrophiliac priests. His ideological enemy Richard Dawkins insisted that Mackay’s phantasmagorical beliefs are ‘a serious threat to scientific reason.’ The evolutionary biologist Nathan Lo was convinced that the creationists’ suppressed motive was to make money.

  On another side of the world, sufferers of unexplained itches confabulated complex stories about nanotechnology and government conspiracy. In a different country still, one highly regarded expert in schizophrenia called another ‘a liar and a charlatan.’ Lord Monckton blamed almost all the dreads that have befallen the West on the nihilistic, jealous, power-crazy left, insisting that the British empire fell because of the welfare state. David Irving, meanwhile, held an intrigue of scheming Jews responsible for the same event. Despite the fact that his version of wartime events has been almost universally rejected, Professor Deborah Lipstadt still worries that it somehow presents ‘a clear and future danger’ to historical knowledge. For the Skeptic Dr Steven Novella many practising homeopaths were ‘psychopathic con artists,’ while for alternative medicine proponent Dana Ullman, Skeptics were often ‘Big Pharma shills.’

  We are betrayed by our maps of salience. They plot our narratives, identify our enemies and then coat them in distorting layer of loathing and dread. We feel that hunch – withdraw – and then conduct a post factum search for evidence that justifies it. We are motivated to fight our foes because we are emotional about them, but emotion is the territorial scent-mark of irrationality. We tell ourselves a story, we cast the monster and then become vulnerable to our own delusional narrative of heroism.

  The Demon-Maker loves this kind of binary thinking. It insists upon extremes: heroes and villains, black and white, in-tribes and out. This corrosive instinct is evident in the so-called ‘culture wars’. For many Skeptics, evidence-based truth has been sacralised. It has caused them to become irrational in their judgements of the motives of those with whom they do not agree. They have also sacralised reason. When we spoke, James Randi was chilling in his expression of where pure logic can ultimately lead. Viewing the matter stripped of emotion, it might make sense to persuade people with ‘mental aberrations’ and ‘histories of inherited diseases’ from having children. But the idea is obviously repellent. Randi’s belief demonstrates a truth that is sometimes forgotten by his followers: reason alone is not enough.

  My encounter with the patron saint of the Skeptics was a crystallising moment. At the conference in Manchester, I struggled to work out what it was about the movement that made me uneasy. I believe that Randi’s speech resolved the warning of my unconscious. ‘These are not innocent people. These are stupid people.’ Skeptics can be reminiscent of creationists, who think that I will go to hell because I am not a Christian. They treat belief as a moral choice. If you do not choose as they do, you are condemned. And while beliefs can have moral consequences, which the law must appropriately punish, we should not judge others for thinking their thoughts, nor be censured ourselves for the form of our hearts.

  Anyone who proudly declares themselves a ‘free-thinker’ betrays an ignorance of the motors of belief. We do not get to choose our most passionately held views, as if we are selecting melons in a supermarket. Gemma Hoefkens is no more free to reject her conviction that homeopathy cured her cancer than I am to fall to my knees and flood myself with Jesus. And good. This monoculture we would have, if the hard rationalists had their way, would be a deathly thing. So bring on the psychics, bring on the alien abductees, bring on the two John Lennons – bring on a hundred of them. Christians or no, there will be tribalism. Televangelists or no, there will be scoundrels. It is not religion or fake mystics that create these problems, it is being human. Where there is illegality or racial hatred, call the police. Where there is psychosis, call Professor Richard Bentall. Where there is misinformation, bring learning. But where there is just ordinary madness, we should celebrate. Eccentricity is our gift to one another. It is the riches of our species. To be mistaken is not a sin. Wrongness is a human right.

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  The Hero-Maker tells us why intelligence is no forcefield and facts are no bullets. If you were to discuss the near-zero discount rate in the Stern Review with Lord Monckton, you would not be engaging in a simple matter of yes or no concerning an arcane point of science. Facts do not exist in isolation. They are like single pixels in a person’s generated reality. Each fact is connected to other facts and those facts to networks of other facts still. When they are all knitted together, they take the form of an emotional and dramatic plot at the centre of which lives the individual. When a climate scientist argues with a denier, it is not a matter of data versus data, it is hero narrative versus hero narrative, David versus David, tjukurpa versus tjukurpa. It is a clash of worlds.

  The Hero-Maker exposes this strange urge that so many humans have, to force their views aggressively on others. We must make them see things as we do. They must agree, we will make them agree. There is no word fo
r it, as far as I know. ‘Evangelism’ doesn’t do it: it fails to acknowledge its essential violence. We are neural imperialists, seeking to colonise the worlds of others, installing our own private culture of beliefs into their minds. I wonder if this response is triggered when we pick up the infuriating sense that an opponent believes that they are the hero, and not us. The provocation! The personal outrage! The underlying dread, the disturbance in reality. The restless urge to prove that their world, and not ours, is the illusion.

  I used to believe that it was humanity’s rational nature that built civilisation. Now I think it is our inherent desire to slay Goliath, to colonise the mental worlds of others, to win.

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  How many of us actually are heroes? Which of us have that treasured capacity? Do heroes of the kind found in literature, film and the imaginations of the masses even exist?

  Over the course of twenty years, historian Laurence Rees has met hundreds of veterans from the Second World War: members of the SS, concentration camp officers, rapists, mass-murderers, unreformed Nazi veterans. His films are justly decorated with awards.

  A guiding question of his life’s work seems to be, how do ordinary people become complicit in acts of evil? ‘I’ve broadly come to this conclusion,’ he told me. ‘We massively underestimate the power of the culture that we are in to shape us. People say, “I wouldn’t have done that.” But they haven’t been exposed to any of the things, culturally, that might have made them do it. And the warning I take is that the number of people in a group who will stand out against these cultural forces are much smaller than you think, and you’re probably not one of them. In fact, I think you can probably tell if you are because you’re pretty bolshie already. If you’ve got a good career, and you’re pretty sociable and you’re going up the hierarchy and all the rest of it, where are you going to get your sudden revolutionary spurt from?’