BOOK: The Heretics - Adventures With The Enemies Of Science by Will Storr

HERETIC n. a person believing in or practicing in religious heresy.

            A person holding an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted. (OED)

Will Storr’s book is an exploration of the ideas that people believe in and the people that

believe in ideas, with the emphasis changing from chapter to chapter.  It seems from the start that the book could involve laughing at people with odd ideals (Creationists, homeopaths, UFO spotters all feature amongst many more fringe groups), a sort of ‘Walking With Crazies’, but ends up being a subtler discussion and therefore more interesting.  The idea of having passionate ideas is examined and not just anti-science ones.  The Skeptics and James Randi are also investigated and we are invited to see people in some ways as dogmatic in their approach as those they seek out to debunk. 

Having a belief is shown to be something that comes first and that the brain then rationalises.  One of the most striking chapters shows David Irving, the disgraced British historian fruitlessly trying to prove that Hitler was uninvolved in the events leading up to the Holocaust.  He believes this fervently, and has devoted his career to finding evidence to prove it spending time in courts and prisons along the way.  It is fair to say that if someone is willing to go to prison over something like this we are in ‘passionate belief’ territory, something which isn’t necessarily related to rationalism (but as the book discusses, isn’t necessarily unrelated to rationalism either).  The chapter on Irving is the one that most explicitly demonstrates one of the central themes of the book – that in life we are all the heroes of our own narrative and are more willing to find faults with other peoples’ beliefs than our own.

Irving is of course a more extreme demonstration of this psychological bias than most of us would be.  His belief is a very specific one – he is not really a neo-Nazi (although certainly holds dubious opinions regarding race and politics). 

David Irving, holding a copy of his book 'Hitler's War',
which argued that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust

He now believes that the Holocaust happened but that Hitler was innocent.  Storr follows him around a tour of Polish war sites with some right-wing tourists on a kind of macabre package holiday, trying to fit in with them and avoiding them finding out that his fiancé is mixed race English-Pakistani.  As time goes on, he finds that most of the other Nazi ghouls have some form of familial connection to Germans who fought in WWII.  But Irving most certainly doesn’t, with the men in his family all patriotic soldiers, this kind of ‘real world’ reason.  Irving’s reason for his belief seems more rooted in his personality as someone who has always had the innate compulsions to go against the grain and seemingly over the years this has led to stubbornness in the face of the truth.  It comes across as more of an illness. His unwillingness to listen to reason leads to him bickering with Storr over extremely minor words in sentences from Goebbels’ diaries as being mistranslations and so on.  His Quixotic quest has distorted his world view and these are the straws he clings to to support it.

This is all very interesting but perhaps what you would expect from a book about people going against the grain.  Other chapters cover less predictable subjects.  The chapter examining the Skeptic movement tries to see the other side of the coin and questions whether they are as objective as they claim.  They have a version of truth to prove, and does this lack of objectivity in some way make them untrustworthy?  Not untrustworthy in terms of making any conscious lies or misleading accusations; but in terms of being people with a devout belief that certain things need debunking and refusing to accept that their take on the truth could be wrong?  The interview with James Randi, the world famous authority on debunking what he calls ‘woo woo’ and ‘flim flam’, surprised me by being very similar to the one with Irving with his evasive answers and contradictions.  In his quest against those he sees as charlatans and conmen, Randi has sometimes seemed to use their own methods when seeking to expose them (launching angry diatribes against people who disagree with him on his blog for instance).  He loses his temper with Storr when he is criticised over the way he has handled certain events in his past in exactly the same way Irving does.  I find Randi an infinitely more sympathetic character than Irving, and want to give him the benefit of the doubt when his version of events feels shaky. 

But if he was the proponent of Hitler’s innocence and Irving was the one devoted to exposing fraudsters: what would I think of him and Irving then?  And when the interview ends with

James Randi, scourge of the psychics

Randi admitting to being a supporter of Social Darwinsm supporting the view that smokers should be allowed to “do themselves in” because they are stupid, and that the death of people with low IQ would “clear the air” the line between the two men doesn’t seem so much blurred as invisible.

The interview takes places at a Skeptic conference, with speakers like Richard Dawkins and Randi, and t-shirts, leaflets and workshops.  It seems no different in set-up to conferences seen earlier for people who believe in flying saucers or creationism.  Tellingly, a barista in the coffee bar where Randi is interviewed is quoted as telling a customer that Skeptics are like conspiracy theorists. 

Storr ends the book by discussing our view of the world, and how we are all in the process of believing ourselves to be the hero of our own story as we walk through life – everyone is a storyteller.  He also points out that as the writer of this book he is telling a story – that the interview with Irving was based on a four hour conversation and that if Irving was to write up his version he would no doubt have picked his own quotes and written a different piece.  (This book covers many more issues and subjects than I have chosen to discuss here, and someone else would have chosen different chapters and related their own belief of what it is about)  Storr shows how we find it easier to listen to people say things that we agree with, and that we should value our heretics as people who jolt us out of our comfort zone and force us to justify our own beliefs.  It is an excellent exploration of our perception of life and how we choose to place ourselves in it.