Just a few decades ago it would have sounded trite to say that science, and other forms of legitimate reasoning, had finished off religion, faith, superstition and all the other forms of nonreason. This process began much earlier these few decades, and in 1882 motivated Nietzsche to proclaim that “God is dead.”  But Nietzsche’s proclamation was not only a statement about history, it was also a warning about troubled times to come precisely because we, “… unchained this Earth from its Sun.” 

Nietzsche was prescient on this score. Those troubles are upon us today. Not only is religious anti-science back in full force, the very idea that discourse should strive for truth is under challenge. How can this be? How can an otherwise reasonable person believe that the universe was created 6,000 years ago? How can a person believe that Hillary Clinton was running a child pornography ring out of a pizza joint in D.C. while campaigning for president? How can anyone deny the Holocaust or the dangers of global warming? How do people still manage to assert that Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Africa or that the present pandemic is God’s punishment for homosexuality? Adrian Bardon’s The Truth About Denial tries to answer these questions. It is a very important, highly documented and otherwise well-reasoned book.

Every human being carries around a set of beliefs about all manner of things. Think of these beliefs as road signs that direct how we live, the choices we make, even what emotional responses we will have to external events. How do matters that we might believe become what we do in fact believe? Here are three ways: (1) Some slip in unnoticed, as children or from sly propaganda or from assuming the truth of others who are in error. We hear time and again about the status of the GDP and naturally assume it must be the most important measure of how the economy is doing. It is not. (2) Some beliefs are the result of the gathering and understanding of evidence, as a detective builds a case for the district attorney. (3) Some become our beliefs because not believing them would be just too painful. “Denial” is a term that characterizes the third of these. It is, “… the emotionally motivated rejection (or embrace) of a factual claim in the face of strong evidence to the contrary.” This “motivated belief” is actually believed. It is not a lie, except perhpas to ourselves. 

Bardon reviews a good deal of the social psychological research that looks at how people form and maintain their beliefs. Some of this describes mistakes that people make in deciding how likely a future event is, or what the cause of an event is. But what is relevant to Denial is the research about the pressures that people face to hold and to assert certain belief. 

Why is denial not the predominant method of forming beliefs? There are at least two reasons. The first is that such a condition would be disastrous in our lives, for obvious reasons. The second is that nature has placed in our brains a resistance, an irritation, from holding two opposing beliefs. The psychologist Leon Festinger called this irritation, “cognitive dissonance.” To engage in denial requires that we overcome the irritation, the uncomfortableness of cognitive dissonance to allow us to believe an idea is in opposition to our own understanding of “the facts.”

Bardon mentions techniques and inclinations that are implemented below the level of explicit consciousness that help bypass recognized evidence. “Implicit bias” is the automatic, less than explicitly conscious, process of implementing a prejudicial judgment. “Confabulation” refers to incorrect after-the-fact explanations of one’s own behavior as when a person is extra friendly to customers, explains it as the result of a good night’s sleep, when it was in fact it was the presence of a smell that is known to produce good feelings (e.g., baking cookies). Affect bias occurs when, unknown to a person, their affective or emotional state (anger, anxiety) causes them to behave in a certain way. “Group serving” motivations refer to the power of group affinity to influence what we come to believe. If a person cherishes their membership in a golf club comprising mostly energy executives, that desire to be in the in-group could affect that person’s actual beliefs about the dangers of climate change. The person might preserve their ingroup mindset by “confirmation bias”, the selective choice of evidence or experts that reinforce the beliefs which preserve a desired status. The author is scrupulous about citing the literature of these and other behavioral propensities. Having established some of the important psychological propensities that make denial possible, the author applies the discussion to three separate conversations prevalent in our society today.

He writes first about science denial, especially applied to climate science, its warnings and recommendations. He then writes about denial in economics. This is important to show that denial, as a phenomenon, is not a consequence of lack of knowledge or education in general. His example in this case is the idea that that tax relief for the very wealthy will (1) pay for itself in increased revenue and (2) trickle down to enrich the lives of the less wealthy. This idea has highly educated proponents despite all the evidence, and there is much, to the contrary. Some of its adherents may, of course, know that these are false and so are prevaricating. But this would apply to by no means all professional economists.

Finally, he focuses upon denialism and religion. Here, his point is that the basic ideas of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are so contradictory to rational thinking as to constitute denial. That is, I believe it to be true because I want or need it to be true. The arguments against the reasonableness of these religious traditions are not new.

All three treatments are detailed and well argued. I suspect that many of those who are sympathetic to Bardon’s treatment of climate denial and to conservative, University of Chicago style, economics, will not be as accepting of his ideas as applied to even the most moderate forms of religion. Episcopalians practicing denial in their religious commitments?  In a sense this might be a test for those with the idea they are free of denial. 

This book provides its readers with a serious lesson. It is to motivate its readers to be self-aware about how they come to believe what they do, and how they sometimes protect their established beliefs against competing ideas, even ones that are more deserving of their commitment. If I were still teaching college logic, which I did for many years, I would require this book for the course. But it is not a logic textbook. It is a book that all concerned people can benefit from.

John Mullen is a writer and philosopher and writer living in the fishing city of Gloucester, Massachusetts. He is the author of the widely read, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy: Self-Deception and Cowardice in the Present Age, Penguin/Meridian 1988. His novel, The Woman Who Hated Philosophers was published by Swallow Tail Press in 2017. He is also the author of Hard Thinking: Reintroducing Logic to Everyday Life, Rowman Littlefield, 1995 and co-author with Byron Roth of Decision Making: Its Logic and Practice, Rowman Littlefield, 1991.