We are joined today by the writer, sociologist, lecture and music critic, Keith Kahn-Harris. His books include Judaism: All That Matters, Uncivil War: The Israel Conflict in the Jewish Community, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge and his latest book Denial: The Unspeakable Truth and this will be the topic of our discussion today.
2 thoughts on “The MWS Podcast 141: Keith Kahn-Harris on Denialism”
I found this a very interesting podcast. There are lots of things I could say about it, but I particularly found the account of techniques used by denialists, and of possible responses, interesting. Perhaps the most important point for me, though, is that of the relationship between denialism and absolutisation. Perhaps I need to read Keith’s book to be more confident about this, but it seems to me that denialism may be just another way of talking about absolutisation. Although denialism seems to be just a negative position, the crucial aspect of that negativity seems to be its narrowness of focus, so that other alternatives are simply not considered (hence Keith’s points about decontextualized obsession with detail by denialists, and about asking what they want positively as a strategy in response). Dominated by anxiety and lacking the genuine confidence that would let them explore alternatives, denialists focus only on keeping down and dismissing the rejected view, meaning that their positive view is just an abstraction with little developed relationship to experience. That’s precisely what I would have said previously about absolutisation.
The implications of that equation would be that denialism is a wider phenomenon than just the examples you discussed. For example, many official attitudes of the Catholic Church could be described as denialist, because they focus on dismissing caricatured ‘materialist’ alternatives and demonising secularism. Of course, the attitudes of individual Catholics, like any other individuals, are more complex than that. Or Marx could be described as a denialist because he focused on the overthrow of the bourgeoisie rather than specifying exactly what could feasibly be done after that, and he was notoriously vague about the future communist society. I’d be interested to know whether Keith agrees with that.
Thanks for the interesting comment. I’m sure it’s correct that one could extend the concept of denialism into a broader range of examples. However, I think it works best applied to a narrower set of cases.
I found this a very interesting podcast. There are lots of things I could say about it, but I particularly found the account of techniques used by denialists, and of possible responses, interesting. Perhaps the most important point for me, though, is that of the relationship between denialism and absolutisation. Perhaps I need to read Keith’s book to be more confident about this, but it seems to me that denialism may be just another way of talking about absolutisation. Although denialism seems to be just a negative position, the crucial aspect of that negativity seems to be its narrowness of focus, so that other alternatives are simply not considered (hence Keith’s points about decontextualized obsession with detail by denialists, and about asking what they want positively as a strategy in response). Dominated by anxiety and lacking the genuine confidence that would let them explore alternatives, denialists focus only on keeping down and dismissing the rejected view, meaning that their positive view is just an abstraction with little developed relationship to experience. That’s precisely what I would have said previously about absolutisation.
The implications of that equation would be that denialism is a wider phenomenon than just the examples you discussed. For example, many official attitudes of the Catholic Church could be described as denialist, because they focus on dismissing caricatured ‘materialist’ alternatives and demonising secularism. Of course, the attitudes of individual Catholics, like any other individuals, are more complex than that. Or Marx could be described as a denialist because he focused on the overthrow of the bourgeoisie rather than specifying exactly what could feasibly be done after that, and he was notoriously vague about the future communist society. I’d be interested to know whether Keith agrees with that.
Thanks for the interesting comment. I’m sure it’s correct that one could extend the concept of denialism into a broader range of examples. However, I think it works best applied to a narrower set of cases.