Author: Ophelia Benson

From Why Truth Matters by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, Continuum 2006, pp. 18-20.

But does it really matter? Is it worth bothering about? Academic fashions come and go. Dons and professors are always coming up with some New Big Thing, and then getting old and doddering off to the great library in the sky, while new dons and professors hatch new big things, some more and some less silly than others. Casaubon had his key to all mythologies, Derrida had his, someone will have a new one tomorrow; what of it.

Yes, is our answer; it does matter. It matters for various pragmatic, instrumental reasons. Meera Nanda discusses in Prophets Facing Backward the way Hindu fundamentalists in India have drawn on postmodernist scepticism and hostility to science in “Hinduising” Indian science, education, textbooks and the like. Richard Evans argues in his book In Defense of History that postmodernist scepticism about historical evidence and truth, along with valuable insights, also has dangerous implications.

Nazi Germany seemed to postmodernism’s critics to be the point at which an end to hyperrelativism was called for…There is in fact a massive, carefully empirical literature on the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Clearly, to regard it as fictional, or unreal, or no nearer to historical reality than, say, the work of the ‘revisionists’ who deny that Auschwitz ever happened at all is simply wrong. Here is an issue where evidence really counts, and can be used to establish the essential facts. Auschwitz was not a discourse. It trivializes mass murder to see it as a text. The gas chambers were not a piece of rhetoric. Auschwitz was indeed inherently a tragedy and cannot be seen as either a comedy or a farce. And if this is true of Auschwitz, then it must be true at least to some degree of other past happenings, events, institutions as well.[1]

That passage is in a book published in 1997. Three years later Evans saw his point enacted in a court of law.

In the David Irving libel trial held two years ago, in which I served as an expert witness for the High Court in London, Irving was suing Penguin Books and their author Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history. It was not difficult to show that Irving had claimed on many occasions that no Jews were killed in gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. He argued in the courtroom, however, that his claim was supported by the historical evidence. The defence therefore brought forward the world’s leading expert on Auschwitz, Robert Jan Van Pelt, to present the evidence that showed that hundreds of thousands of Jews were in fact killed in this way. Van Pelt examined eyewitness testimony from camp officials and inmates, he looked at photographic evidence of the physical remains of the camp, and he studied contemporary documents such as plans, blueprints, letters, equipment orders, architectural designs, reports and so on. Each of these three kinds of evidence, as the judge concluded, had its flaws and its problems. But all three converged along the same lines, creating an overwhelming probability that Irving was wrong.

Just as important as this was the fact that it was possible to demonstrate that Irving’s historical works deliberately falsified the documentary evidence in order to lend plausibility to his preconceived arguments, principally his belief that Hitler was, as he said on one occasion, “probably the best friend the Jews ever had in the Third Reich”. Falsifying documents involved not just leaving words out from quotes but even putting extra words in to change the meaning. For example, quoting an order from Himmler that a “Jew-transport from Berlin” to the East should not be annihilated as if it were a general order that no Jews at all, anywhere, were to be killed, by the simple expedients of adding an “e” to the German word Transport, making it plural, and omitting the words “from Berlin”, and hoping that other researchers wouldn’t trouble to check the source, or if they did, wouldn’t be able to read the handwriting (which is actually very clear and unambiguous). Or by adding the word “All” to the note of a judge at the Nuremberg Trial in 1946 on the testimony of an Auschwitz survivor which actually said “this I do not believe”, after a small part of her testimony, to make it look as if he did not believe any of it. If we actually believed that documents could say anything we wanted them to, then none of this would actually matter, and it would not be possible to expose historical fraud for what it really is.[2]

Notes

[1] Richard Evans, In Defense of History, W.W. Norton and Company 1999 pp. 106-7

[2] Richard Evans, Contribution to the ‘Great Debate on History and Postmodernism’, University of Sydney, Australia, 27 July 2002, published as “Postmodernism and History” at Butterflies and Wheels, October 22, 2002.

Deborah Lipstadt looks at the decision by the editors of the student newspaper of Northwestern University, The Daily Northwestern, to publish an article by Arthur Butz.

Things at Northwestern seem to be going from bad to worse. Electrical Engineering Professor Arthur Butz has, after many years of total obscurity in anything but the world of Holocaust deniers, once again grabbed headlines by praising Iranian President Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denial. Mr. Butz has as much expertise on the history of the Holocaust as I do on building bridges. But he has tenure and this means that, as long as he does not introduce this false information into his classroom, he cannot be fired.

But Butz is an old story. He just manages to roil the waters periodically. What is surprising is the lack of common sense shown by the editors of the Daily Northwestern. They recently decided to run a column by Butz in order, they said, to “facilitate a more educated debate over Butz’s beliefs.” After being subjected to serious criticism for doing so, they defended themselves in an editorial in which they said that they took “considerable care before publishing [Butz’s] column. All the facts used were all verified.”

They want to facilitate a more “educated debate” over Butz’s beliefs? That is akin to facilitating a debate between flat earthers and scientists or between people who said there was no slavery and historians of slavery. Butz’s beliefs are documented lies. Don’t take my word on it. Take that of the Royal High Court of Justice and two different Courts of Appeal. I spent over six years defending myself against David Irving, once the world’s leading Holocaust denier. He sued me for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier in one of my books. He waited until the book appeared in the U.K. where the burden of proof is on the defendant.

I do not believe history belongs in the courtroom. Historians conduct their “battles” in scholarly journals and at conferences. Mr. Irving thought otherwise and due to the nature of British law I had no choice but to defend myself. Had he won, my books would have been pulped and his version of the Holocaust would have been declared legitimate.

Rather than face any legal obstacles, Irving freely repeated his – and by extension Butz’s – arguments in court. The world press reported on them daily. No one faced any legal obstacles. A dream team of historians closely examined Irving’s claims about the Holocaust. They found his work to be a “tissue of lies.” Many of Irving’s claims come straight from Butz’s work and from that of other deniers Butz praises in his article in the Daily Northwestern.

Yet these editors protest that “all the facts” in Butz’s article, including his claim that there were no gas chambers, “were verified.” What are they talking about? Butz cites Fred Leuchter’s findings that that “the alleged gassings were not possible at the alleged sites.” He describes Leuchter as “our foremost execution technologist.”

Leuchter, who falsely claimed to be an engineer, is not an execution technologist but a scam artist. He told different penitentiaries that if they did not hire him to check their execution facilities he would offer his “expertise” to the condemned person and testify that the execution process at these prisons was faulty. The Alabama Attorney General [now a Federal judge] warned other states about his scam.

Moreover, Leuchter’s findings were all proven by scientists and forensic specialists to be utterly wrong. Even the lab which did the testing for him said his conclusions are all wrong. His mistakes were so fundamental that a high school student would not make them.

All this information is available in the transcripts of my trial and in Richard Evans Lying about Hitler, Robert Jan van Pelt’s The Case for Auschwitz and my History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving.

Let the likes of Butz and Irving go on talking to neo-Nazis and other deniers. That is their right. Neither the Daily nor any other paper has an obligation to publish such lies. Then let them all slip into the obscurity they so well deserve.

And let the Northwestern student body decide whether the student editors at the Daily are to journalism as Arthur Butz and David Irving are to history. Of these editors, the best that can be said is that their minds were so open their brains fell out.

This article was first published by Deborah Lipstadt at History on Trial and is republished here by permission. Deborah E. Lipstadt is Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. Her book, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving, was rated by Amazon.com as the 4th best history book of 2005. Professor Lipstadt, who is currently teaching at the Gregorian Pontifical Institute in Rome, can be reached at her blog ‘History on Trial’.

The New York Times has done it again: they’ve enlisted an ignorant reviewer to review a philosophical book. The reviewer is Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor at The New Republic. The book is Daniel Dennett’s latest book, a “naturalistic” account of religious belief. Whatever Mr. Wieseltier knows about philosophy or science, he effectively conceals in this review. The sneering starts at the beginning:

The question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett’s book. “Breaking the Spell” is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.

Perhaps it is correct that the “question of the place of science in human life” is a philosophical, not scientific question, though I wish I could be as confident as Mr. Wieseltier as to how we demarcate those matters. But “the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical” is not a “superstition,” but a reasonable methodological posture to adopt based on the actual evidence, that is, based on the actual, expanding success of the sciences, and especially, the special sciences, during the last hundred years. One should allow, of course, that some of these explanatory paradigms may fail, and that others, like evolutionary psychology, are at the speculative stage, awaiting the kind of rigorous confirmation (or disconfirmation) characteristic of selectionist hypotheses in evolutionary biology. But no evidence is adduced by Mr. Wieseltier to suggest that Professor Dennett’s view is any different than this. Use of the epithet “superstition” simply allows Mr. Wieseltier to avoid discussing the actual methodological posture of Dennett’s work, and to omit mention of the reasons why one might reasonably expect scientific explanations for many domains of human phenomena to be worth pursuing.

But onward with the sneering of the ignorant:

Dennett flatters himself that he is Hume’s heir. Hume began “The Natural History of Religion,” a short incendiary work that was published in 1757, with this remark: “As every enquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature.” These words serve as the epigraph to Dennett’s introduction to his own conception of “religion as a natural phenomenon.” “Breaking the Spell” proposes to answer Hume’s second question, not least as a way of circumventing Hume’s first question. Unfortunately, Dennett gives a misleading impression of Hume’s reflections on religion. He chooses not to reproduce the words that immediately follow those in which he has just basked: “Happily, the first question, which is the most important, admits of the most obvious, at least, the clearest, solution. The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion.”

So was Hume not a bright? I do not mean to be pedantic. Hume deplored religion as a source of illusions and crimes, and renounced its consolations even as he was dying. His God was a very wan god. But his God was still a god; and so his theism is as true or false as any other theism. The truth of religion cannot be proved by showing that a skeptic was in his way a believer, or by any other appeal to authority. There is no intellectually honorable surrogate for rational argument. Dennett’s misrepresentation of Hume…is noteworthy, therefore, because it illustrates his complacent refusal to acknowledge the dense and vital relations between religion and reason, not only historically but also philosophically.

Has Dennett misrepresented Hume? Mr. Wieseltier might have availed himself of a fine on-line essay on Hume’s philosophy of religion by someone who actually knows something about Hume. Paul Russell (Philosophy, British Columbia) writes (with some emphases added in bold):

In 1757 Hume published “The Natural History of Religion”, a work that proposes to identify and explain the origins and evolution of religious belief. This project follows lines of investigation and criticism that had already been laid down by a number of other thinkers, including Lucretius, Hobbes and Spinoza. Hume’s primary objective in this work is to show that the origins and foundations of religious belief do not rest with reason or philosophical arguments of any kind but with aspects of human nature that reflect our weaknesses, vulnerabilities and limitations (i.e., fear and ignorance). Related to this point, Hume also wants to show that the basic forces in human nature and psychology that shape and structure religious belief are in conflict with each other and that, as a result of this, religious belief is inherently unstable and variable. In arguing for these points, Hume is directly challenging an opposing view, one that was widely held among his own orthodox contemporaries. According to this view (e.g., as presented by Cleanthes), the evidence of God’s existence is so obvious that no one sincerely and honestly doubts it. Belief in an intelligent, invisible creator and governor of the world is a universal belief rooted in and supported by reason. From this perspective, no person sincerely accepts “speculative atheism”. Hume’s “naturalistic” approach to religion aims to discredit these claims and assumptions of theism.

Dennett’s naturalistic approach, even with its different speculative explanatory mechanisms, aims to do the same thing. What Mr. Wieseltier confidently pronounces Hume’s theism is, alas, not so clearly ascribed to Hume according to those who actually know something about Hume. There has been misrepresentation of Hume, I fear, but not by Professor Dennett.

Mr. Wieseltier’s confident ignorance extends beyond Hume scholarship, unsurprisingly. He continues:

For Dennett, thinking historically absolves one of thinking philosophically. Is the theistic account of the cosmos true or false? Dennett, amazingly, does not care. “The goal of either proving or disproving God’s existence,” he concludes, is “not very important.” It is history, not philosophy, that will break religion’s spell. The story of religion’s development will extirpate it. “In order to explain the hold that various religious ideas and practices have on people,” he writes, “we need to understand the evolution of the human mind.”

Just as scientific questions are clearly different from philosphical ones in Mr. Wieseltier’s simple world, so too are historical and philosophical questions. He does not seem to realize that an account of the historical genesis of a belief can have bearing on the epistemic status of that belief, that beliefs with the wrong kind of etiology are epistemically suspect. But quite apart from the banal epistemic point, the material quoted by Mr. Wieseltier suggests that Professor Dennett’s concern is not purely epistemological, but also rhetorical and psychological: namely, how does one get people to give up on religion? Like Nietzsche (and perhaps, in a different way, Hume), Dennett apparently puts his hopes in a convincing historical narrative.

As to Dennett’s speculative natural history of religion, Mr. Wieseltier observes, fairly enough, that “it is only a story. It is not based, in any strict sense, on empirical research. Dennett is ‘extrapolating back to human prehistory with the aid of biological thinking,’ nothing more. ‘Breaking the Spell’ is a fairy tale told by evolutionary biology.” He does not observe that religion is also, by the same criteria, “only a story,” a mere “fairy tale,” and one which can’t even pretend to continuity with explanatory paradigms we have reason to deem reliable. To call Dennett’s story “a pious account of his own atheistic longing,” is I think shameless projection: it is Mr. Wieseltier who has genuinely pious longings, which is why he is reduced to sneering at Professor Dennett while spewing out a tissue of confusions and misrepresentations.

That we are in the presence of the pious (and the very confused) becomes even clearer later in the review when Mr. Wieseltier complains:

It will be plain that Dennett’s approach to religion is contrived to evade religion’s substance. He thinks that an inquiry into belief is made superfluous by an inquiry into the belief in belief. This is a very revealing mistake. You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content.

It is true that you cannot show a belief to be false by explaining its origin, but it is clear you can show that holding the belief is not warranted by explaining its origin. (This is an important topic I have dealt with elsewhere.) If you believe buying stock in High Tech Miracle, Inc. is a good investment based on recommendation of your broker, and then you discover that your broker recommended it because he is an investor in the company and a beneficiary of its rising stock fortunes, you no longer have a reason to believe it’s a good investment–though it might turn out to be one, of course, but you no longer are warranted in believing that. Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, Dennett and many others exploit this form of argumentation, without making any mistakes, let alone abandoning “reason,” as Mr. Wieseltier–whose arrogance may even outstrip his ignorance–remarkably claims.

There is more one could say about the muddled particulars of this display of mindless anti-intellectualism and feeble apologetics for religion, but other work beckons this Sunday afternoon. Mr. Wieseltier concludes that Professor Dennett’s book is “shallow and self-congratulatory.” Perhaps it is, but on the evidence of this review one is actually warranted in applying those adjectives only to the review’s author.

This article first appeared on The Leiter Report on February 19 and is republished here by permission. Brian Leiter is Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Law & Philosophy Program at the University of Texas at Austin. The Leiter Report is here.