How skepticism can fight radicalism, conspiracy theorists, and Holocaust deniers | Michael Shermer

Liberal college students have taken to shouting down certain right-leaning speakers on campus that they don't agree with. Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, thinks that is the worst thing you can do. He posits that all you do when you prevent someone from speaking is make certain people want to hear them more. This has led to the rise of the conspiracy theorists and why fringe ideas—from something as silly as flat-earth believers to something as morally reprehensible as Nazism and Holocaust deniers—have been pushed back into the mainstream.
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There’s a market for what we do; that is, skepticism. What is skepticism? It’s just a scientific way of thinking. So why aren’t scientists doing this?
Because they’re busy doing their own thing in their particular fields. What the skeptical movement has developed is a set of tools like the Baloney Detection Kit, a set of tools to deal with particular claims that are on the margins of science like creationism, intelligent design theory, the anti-vaccinations, the holocaust revisionists, you know, all these conspiracy theories and so on and all these alternative medicines, there’s hundreds and hundreds of these claims that are all connected to different sciences, but the scientists in those particular fields are too busy working in their research to bother with what these claims are because they claims really aren’t about those fields, they’re just hooked to them.
They’re about something else, because back in the ‘80s when I first saw some professional scientists debate Duane Gish, the “Young Earth” creationist, they did not fare well. And I saw some holocaust historians debating or confronting Holocaust so-called revisionists or deniers, they did not fare well because they didn’t know the special arguments that are being made by these fringe people that have nothing to do with the science really, they have an agenda, and they’re using these little tweaked questions to get at the mainstream and try to debunk it for their own idea logical reasons.
So for example, like Holocaust revisionists, they make this the big deal about why the door on the gas chamber at Mauthausen doesn’t lock. “I mean if it doesn’t lock how are you gassing people if you can’t lock the door? So they must not have gassed people in there, so if they didn’t gas people at Mauthausen they probably didn’t gas people at any of the death camps. And if they didn’t gas people at any of the death camps then there must not have been a Holocaust.” What?! Wait a minute. All from this door that doesn’t lock?
Well I eventually went and found out that that wasn’t the original door; that took me a couple of years, but that’s the kind of specialty thing that skeptics do that mainstream scientists, scholars, historians don’t have time to do.
So over the 25 years, not just us there’s other skeptic magazines and conferences and groups of people that meet at meet ups and so on all over the world, and it’s because of the Internet, especially this whole idea of what we now call fake news, alternative facts, has gotten bigger and bigger and it just gets unfolded in real time online within minutes and hours and we have to jump on it fast.
That’s really in part what we do so that’s what we’ve been doing for 25 years is kind of putting out brushfires here and there, but also developing a set of tools that can apply to any future ideas, because I don’t know what’s going to be popular five years from now. Heck I don’t know what’s going to be trending tomorrow, who knows?
So you’ve got to have these tools at the ready and that’s what we’ve been doing at Skeptic magazine, but let's address a college campus issue these days.
Ok, I really think this goes back to the 1980s. I noticed it first when I was in graduate school, the second time when I got a PhD in the history of science.
My first round was in the ‘70s in experimental psychology graduate school, and I didn’t notice any of this campus stuff. In the late ‘80s when I was in my doctoral program—because history deals a lot with literature, the kind of post-modernist deconstruction of what texts means, it was really taking off. So I initially thought “What is this? But okay I’ll give it a shot I’ll keep an open mind here and just try to follow the reasoning.” And I kind of see where they were going.
So what is the true meaning of Jane Austen’s novel here, or Shakespeare’s play there, or this novelist or that author? And I can see that there may not be one meaning. Maybe the author meant it as kind of provoking you to think about certain deep issues and you have to find your own meaning in the text. Okay, I can understand that.