As the Worm Turns

This seems like an incredibly useful site, if only for resources like How to Be a Crank. The steps seem pretty simple: come up with a wacky idea, disseminate it amongst the gullible, refuse to respond to criticism and claim persecution when people try to engage you in open debate. It doesn’t just sound like cranks and denialists — it sounds like a recipe for every blog entry on the internet!

Conspiracy theorists, science denialists and Ann Coulter — they all share these essential crank features; the interesting question is why. We can point at the fact that human beings are barely rational animals. We’ve always had cranks and weirdos, but why are there so many of them now? How do they get their own television shows? Is it a virus? An alien invasion?

Personally, I blame the Enlightenment. The story of our post-modern condition in a nutshell: at one point we all thought that there was one Grand Unifying Truth about everything, with only the small problem of not being sure what it was. Sure, there were plenty of contenders — the Catholic Church, the various Protestant churches, scientists, mystics, communists, capitalists — but there was no generally accepted method for deciding between them. The Enlightenment was the culmination of the search for this Grand Truth that would unite everyone in perfect harmony and happiness: we would use Pure Reason to finally decide the right way to live, the right things to think, the correct religions to follow, and all strife and contention would be over.

The Enlightenment failed, of course. We found that reason can tell us that the best way to get from B to A, but it can’t tell us if A is intrinsically better than C, if we’ll be happy once we get A — or even if A was a good idea to begin with. So we became pluralists and classical Liberals. We decided that, if reason can’t tell us whether A was better than C, we’ll just let people be free to choose for themselves.

But it’s easy to mistake pluralism for relativism. Pluralists think that since we can’t find absolute reasons to force someone to choose A when they really want C, we should let them be free to decide for themselves. This isn’t an blanket endorsement of C, no matter what it is. In fact, if C doesn’t meet certain criteria — it hurts others, deprives others of their own right to choose, creates un-compensated-for economic externalities — pluralists reserve the right to deny anyone the option to choose C.

Relativists think that since there is no universal and definitive reason to choose one option over the other there is no real difference between them. A and C are arbitrary and equivalent. Imagine that you are a relativist and you prefer C to A. You can’t point at reasons why someone should pick C. You can’t adduce objective, rational arguments for choosing C. There is nothing intrinsic about C that can compel anyone to choose it over A. So what do you, as a relativist, do?

You shout. You yell. You bend the truth. You refuse to respond to criticism. You disseminate your position amongst the gullible (using the internet!) and use your army of fellow-traveling relativists to clog the comments of non-believer’s blogs. You claim persecution. You make irrelevant comparisons. You say outrageous things that you can’t justify. You slander the opposition.

On some level the relativist thinks that — since the Enlightenment project failed — the only way to defend a position is through manipulation and dirty tricks.

I better back off a bit. Obviously the relativist doesn’t consciously think that all options are the same. Most of the relativists I am talking about — be they cranks like DaveScot on Uncommon Descent or political absolutists like Michelle Malkin — would resolutely deny they are relativists in any sense. They see themselves as the Last and Best Defenders of the True Faith. But their actions belie these claims and show that they can’t recognize a real distinction in kind between the available options.

Intelligent Design cranks claim that Darwinism is “consensus science” — that institutional structures and the ‘secularism’ and atheism of its adherents drive them to defend a theory, not on its merits, not because it’s true, not because it explains the facts, but because they have political reasons to believe it. Global Warming denialists claim Climate Change is “consensus science” — that bureaucratic structures and its adherents’ hunger for grant money drive them to defend a theory, not on its merits, not because it’s true, not because it explains the facts, but because they have political reasons to believe it.

So how do the cranks and denialists respond? By doing the same damn thing. They defend an alternative theory of their very own — not on its merits, not because it’s true, not because it explains the facts, but because they have political reasons to believe it.

The usual response by the Good Guys is to call the cranks and denialists dishonest, to call them liars, to call them manipulators. After all, they criticize science for being fundamentally, intrinsically political in nature — to further their own political goals. That’s proof that they are somehow shady, sneaky, underhanded and hypocritical, right? Doesn’t the case of Philip Johnson and the Wedge Strategy and the amount of money donated to Daniel Inhofe by the oil and gas industry confirm it?

But when the Good Guys claim that only they are honest and everyone else is lying, that’s usually a sign that they are in the grip of their own kind of conspiracy theory — and, by nature, I distrust all conspiracy thinking. I think the more parsimonious answer is to take the cranks and denialists at their word, to accept that they say what they think is true.

Philip Johnson and William Dembski don’t say things about Darwinism they know are untrue in order to further their political goals; they pursue their political goals because they believe Darwinism is untrue. Senator Inhofe doesn’t give long rambling speeches denying climate change because he was bought off by the oil and gas industry; he accepts large amounts of money from industry because he believes that fossil fuels are benign and that climate change is an excuse for watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside) bureaucrats to extend their power even further.

They believe these things because they can’t tell the difference between politics and science. They can’t tell the difference because they think that science is just another kind of politics.They can’t tell the difference because they are unknowingly infected with the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age.

They can’t tell the difference between science and politics because they are post-modern relativists.