Timestamps

[00:00:16] “Outrage Porn Messaging: Both Sides Guilty”

[00:02:07] “Ending Antisemitism and Promoting Awareness”

[00:04:35] Holocaust denial in education: A global phenomenon

[00:06:55] The Problem with Both Sidesism

[00:15:42] Combating Holocaust Denial Through Communication Strategies

[00:26:28] “Reviving Inquiry-Based Learning and Historical Scholarship Standards”

[00:33:41] The Ninth Candle’s Mission to End Antisemitism Through Education.

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions.

Speaker A

Welcome to Outrage Overload a science podcast about outrage and lowering the temperature. This is episode five. When I first approached the topic of this episode, the prototypical title was It’s okay to Punch Nazis? Here’s something Bill Maher had to say about that.

Speaker B

This is what bothers me about liberals there are no Nazi throwing Jews in the ovens now in America.

Speaker A

Let me explain. As you know, the outrage overload podcast is science oriented, intended to be nonpartisan. If we talk about politics, we bring in scientists who talk about the psychology or neuroscience of politics, not about specific issues. In that context, we often talk about how both sides are guilty of using outrage porn messaging designed to trigger moral outrage, how all of us can fall into self delusions like motivated reasoning and such, regardless of party affiliation and so on. Because we frequently talk about both sides in the context of the research we discuss, I want to do a specific episode on both sides ism both in a general sense and also specifically making a distinction in the context of the podcast. Generally, I don’t express positions on specific issues or try to change anyone’s politics on the podcast. There are other places for those discussions, but I thought it was important to dedicate an episode to clarifying this both sides ism issue. So that’s how I came to reach out to Luke Berryman. He is the founder of the 9th Candle, a Chicago based nonprofit organization whose mission is to end antisemitism by sharing knowledge. He has been in education for over a decade, teaching at the University of Cambridge and at schools in Britain and the United States. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Nazi propaganda at King’s College London. I discovered Luke Berryman from an article in Education Week titled how Holocaust Denial and Other Bogus Claims are Poisoning Schools with the subtitle don’t be fooled by both sides ism.

Speaker C

When I think of both sides ism, I think more than anything else, it’s referring to a really misguided idea, which is that because you have an opinion about something, you deserve to be heard and taken seriously.

Speaker A

I have to be transparent here that this episode is unlike the typical outrage overload podcast episode. In fact, it would not be unfair to call it out as outrage porn. We’re going to expose some abhorrent views, views that can objectively be considered outrageous, and that’s intentional. Another point of this episode that there are things that are objectively outrageous. I think most people can agree that Holocaust denial is such an example. Most people, regardless of where they lie on the political spectrum, would find it extreme and outrageous. It’s important to me that this podcast does not become simply outrage porn about outrage porn. So this episode will be an exception. But I’m willing to break from my usual format here, because I feel strongly about speaking to these questions of objectively outrageous and both sides ism. And it’s also an opportunity to create awareness for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Here’s my interview with Luke Berry.

Speaker B

There’s so many questions on this article and on this whole topic. And in some sense, this article is sort of outrage porn for me because it’s quite scary that this stuff is going on out there.

Speaker A

Right.

Speaker B

But, yeah, so on that front, you talk about how there’s this sort of movement of people that sort of want to have bring in Holocaust denial into education as sort of like, well, we’re going to have to talk about that.

Speaker A

Because that’s out there.

Speaker B

Is this a relatively new thing? How pervasive is it? I think you’re mostly concentrating on the paper in the situation in America, but I assume this is kind of starting. I mean, from what I’ve read, this kind of thing is kind of happening globally.

Speaker C

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, as for how long it’s been going on, I think this is a relatively recent phenomenon, or it certainly changed flavor recently. Holocaust denial is not that new. But if you look back even as recently as early this century, so 2000s, someone like David Irving, who’s an example of a famous Holocaust denier, he wanted to be seen as an academic. He wanted to be treated as seriously as scholars in the field. And his Holocaust denial rested on a kind of historian’s facade. So he would do archival work, for example. He would go and visit sites in Eastern Europe. And that’s very different from the kind of Holocaust denial that I was writing about in the article, in which in this kind of this newer version, it’s more to do with, well, I have this opinion on it, and because I have this opinion, I deserve to be heard. And it’s not really rooted in any kind of research or even masquerade of research, because Irving wasn’t doing research, really, but he masqueraded as if he was. And now the feel of it is very much anti scholarship. And I’m from Europe, but I’ve lived in the US for a while, so I can’t speak really as to how pervasive this is in Europe right now. But it’s certainly global. It’s not exclusive to the US.

Speaker B

Yeah, well, thank you. We should probably cover a little bit. I like the way you sort of frame both sides ism and sort of framing how to sort of challenge it on sort of a factual basis as opposed to sort of a personal basis because you get a lot of things like the hey, there were good people on both sides, right? Which is more about the people than it is about the sort of facts of the story and what’s happening there. And you sort of bring up this philosopher’s, this type of ethics right. This ethics of belief. I’m sorry.

Speaker C

Yeah, the ethics of belief.

Speaker B

Yeah. Introduced by this 19th century mathematician and philosopher, William Clifford. I’ll just quote your article real quick. Logically, then whether we find Holocaust denial offensive doesn’t matter. It’s simply unethical to teach it to even to hold it as our own opinion, because there’s overwhelming evidence to show that the Holocaust happened as mainstream academics and historians describe. I like that approach, and I want to first have you explain a little bit. Then I kind of want to talk about how we implement it.

Speaker C

Right. When I think of both sides ism I think more than anything else, it’s referring to a really misguided idea, which is that because you have an opinion about something, you deserve to be heard and taken seriously. Right? And that’s something that we’ve lived with across the media and society for at least the last five or ten years now. And so this is by no means restricted to Holocaust denial. We see it with things like flat earth theory. We see it with things like conspiracy theories, about 5G, about using bleach to cure COVID. That because this is your opinion, you deserve to practice it, to have it heard. And I simply don’t think that that’s true. There is, for me, at least a red line, which is that nobody has the right to believe something that is demonstrably wrong. Nobody has the right to believe something that is objectively untrue. And so I think in the article, the kind of example that I am with is that no one has the right to teach or believe that two plus two equals five. Right? So for me, that’s what both sides ism, is it definitely doesn’t refer to the kind of peer review process, I guess, where you’re having two sides of a debate. It’s more to do with this thing about differentiating opinion and facts and yeah. Then when it comes to outrage.

Speaker A

I.

Speaker C

Feel like, yeah, for one thing, definitely whether you’re outraged or not doesn’t matter. An opinion that is objectively wrong doesn’t deserve to be heard. But I also find, especially in the type of work that I do with Holocaust education, while outrage is a perfectly understandable response, it’s not really a useful one. If your goal is to teach, if your goal is to lower the temperature, if your goal is to build bridges in communities and get kids to talk to one another, then being permanently outraged is not going to help you. And so that’s very much the kind of philosophy that we take, is to have a deep breath and then work out how we can talk about this.

Speaker B

Right? I mean, there was a lot of debate this goes back like, five or six years ago, I think it was, when what was that? That Spencer guy, I think, got punched by somebody, and that kind of made us that was kind of a meme and everybody for a little while. Everybody kind of had a lot of debate about this whole notion of can you punch Nazis? Kind of thing. And it brought up a lot of nuance because in some ways it should be really simple, right? This should be their pretty clear kind of a thing. But then you get all this kind of nuance and people could intellectuals could go off in all kinds of directions on this and you kind of have principle versus other kind of things. And I think there’s a version of that that’s kind of when you hold these kind of views, you don’t really get a seat at the table with the intellectuals or the academics that are really studying it. And how do you make that happen, right? And how do you do that in practice? Because then you do start getting these free speech people and all this kind of stuff. Even in this notion of objectively agreeing what’s a bad thing and what’s a good thing. You’ve got things like 911 that were pretty unifying at that time, right? I mean, you definitely had your outliers, but they were outliers pretty much. We all said, yeah, this is a bad thing. We’re kind of unifying the country a little bit. A lot of scholars now sort of believe if a 911 type thing happened, it wouldn’t have that same effect. It could drive the country apart. And if you look at something like January 6, and the thing is that the GOP side has moved away from even classifying that as a riot or as an insurrection. And I think it’s down to, I think a recent poll, I think it was in July, it’s down to like it went from 33% down to just 13% and so are willing to say it was an insurrection. And if you really start doing the math on all that, it’s like something like 20% of the electorate believe this stuff. What do you do?

Speaker A

That’s a difficult voice just to say.

Speaker B

We’Re not going to let you come to the table. I mean, that’s one in five people, right? That’s a difficult thing. They’re out there, they’re voting, they’re winning elections, they’re serving on school boards and things like that. So it’s very hard to just blanket say, well, we’re not going to give them a voice.

Speaker A

So how do we deal with people.

Speaker B

Like that, that believe these things, especially if they’re as abhorrent as Holocaust denial?

Speaker C

That’s a really great question. So Clifford, the guy that I mentioned in the paper, has some really interesting thoughts on this. And one of the reasons that he takes such a hard line on not allowing people to believe something without sufficient evidence is that he says it’s impossible to believe one what we would call a conspiracy theory. It’s impossible to believe one conspiracy theory without it infecting the way that you see the world generally, right? So with something like the insurrection and not wanting to describe it as an insurrection, I don’t see that as being an issue of semantics over one term. This is to do with a much broader worldview and it probably sucks in a whole load of other conspiracy theories and ways of doing debate, too. For me, I’m always willing to have these discussions about things like Holocaust denial or the Insurrection or whatever it happens to be, but there needs to be some base agreement about the frame of the debate itself. So, again, I think the difficulty with even the concept of coming to the table to discuss something like the Insurrection is that the mode of discussion that’s preferred by that type of mindset doesn’t really allow for constructive debate because it’s about shouting your opponent down, it’s about being as crass as possible. It’s about deliberately shocking and outraging. So I don’t think there’s a quick fix. I certainly don’t have a claim to a quick fix or a single idea. For me, this is going to be a generational shift. That’s why I’m focusing my energy on educating and working with kids and trying to get them to see this as the abhorrent thing that it is, this kind of cultural moment that we’re in. I wish that I had a happier answer.

Speaker B

Right.

Speaker C

Sorry.

Speaker B

Yeah, well, it’s kind of funny because I always talk, when we’re talking a lot of these papers that are sort of talking about the political divisions and other things, all the phenomena going on out there, and I was like, I always try to ask, what can we do? Where we go? A lot of doomsdaysayers out there. I mean, once in a while you get some practical things, but it’s definitely challenging. Everyone knows it’s a challenging space time that we’re in.

Speaker C

Right, well, I think as one practical thing, and I suppose this is something that we do with the 9th candle, is that you can make the best effort to do all of the right things yourself. Right. So, for example, we’re very committed to using non aggressive language. So if you look at other organizations in our space, you’ll find it’s very common for understandable reasons. It’s very common to talk about combating, anti Semitism, tackling it, fighting it. And we deliberately step away from all of that language because inadvertently, it sends out the message that you’re here to engage in battle, and it’s not going to help you to achieve your own goals. Right. So I think we take it on ourselves to lower the temperature as best we can, and that means kind of waving the white flag from the beginning and saying, we really are just here to have a conversation and talk constructively. And I found that at the very least, that does help to open doors that may otherwise be closed. So I think if we’re looking for practical things, that’s one useful idea perhaps is to adopt all of the best practices yourself and stick to them. No matter how tempting it might be to yell the other side down, it’s never going to help you achieve your goals.

Speaker B

Right, yeah. Whether it’s in this context or almost any context.

Speaker C

Right.

Speaker B

So disinformation isn’t sort of a main theme of the podcast, but you can’t help it’s going to raise its head because it’s sort of on the periphery all the time in many of these situations. And certainly Holocaust denial is sort of a monster. And that’s a big one.

Speaker A

Right.

Speaker B

That’s a giant example of that. We certainly know that it’s very hard when somebody has adopted a position like that. Changing their minds is often pretty hard. And if we’re not going to change their mind, some of it seems like it’s making those positions sort of politically or socially is maybe a better way to say it socially unacceptable. I just don’t really give them a place. But as we were talking about before, I mean, that’s kind of hard when this population is getting as big as it is with some of these crazy ideas. So in your paper, you cite several examples of people trying to introduce Holocaust denial education. Have you had success in sort of slowing the tide of that at all?

Speaker C

Oh, boy. Well, I honestly don’t know. I hope so. But that’s a really big, long term goal, I think, not just for us, but for every advocacy organization like ours. So I feel like our impact is more on the individual kids that we can connect with. And like you said, it’s a massive population. So that means in some senses, the impact is very, very small. But for the kids that we do reach, you can see that it’s deep and that it’s lasting. So I guess my best hope is that there is some kind of ripple effect in their communities. I don’t think this is going to be something that one organization is going to be able to stop alone again. So if we’re talking about both sides as an idea, I think it’s important to turn a critical lens on your own side. And certainly one thing that I see among organizations like mine is that we don’t collaborate among ourselves anywhere near enough. Right. And I think that’s because the nonprofit landscape in general leans toward competition. Nonprofits operate on a shoestring. They are vying for the attention of a small circle of interested people, and that can lead them to trip over themselves, and relationships freeze over pretty quickly. But when you’re dealing with something as big as Holocaust denial, you’re only going to make a serious impact if you can reach out and work together. And so I think that’s something that we can all do more of. Definitely.

Speaker B

Right. Yeah. It does sound like you’re sort of planting the seeds or whatever for metaphor you want to do there, that these roots will take hold and have some longer term effect.

Speaker C

Yeah. And I think as well, when one of the examples that I spoke about in the article was this one from Texas, where a kind of local school administrator told their faculty that they would have to teach Holocaust denial. But if you listen to the recording of that particular meeting, which is available, it’s out there on the Internet, and you listen to the whole context, unfortunately, it’s even worse than one individual administrator saying, I think you should teach Holocaust denial. It’s actually a side effect of this much bigger bill with much wider implications, where, in an effort to ban critical race theories from school, critical race theory, as it’s known, which I think is a very problematic term anyway for what they’re trying to describe. In an effort to ban critical race theory from school, they introduced this bill, that’s worded so vaguely, and it just says that any controversial topic, teachers should try and frame this topic with counterarguments and both sides and things like that. But then the problem is the bill doesn’t define what a controversial topic is. So a teacher puts up their hand and says, well, if the Holocaust is controversial, and then the administrator says, well, yes, then you have to teach both sides of the Holocaust, whatever that means. But just by the same token, if a teacher comes in and says, well, I find the idea that the earth is spherical to be controversial, therefore I am going to teach flat earth theory. Or if a teacher comes in and says, well, I find Darwin’s theory of evolution to be controversial, therefore I’m going to teach creationism. Or I find the idea of two plus two equals four to be controversial, therefore I’m going to teach two plus two might equal five. Holocaust denial is my particular focus because that’s what my group does. But the problem is, sadly, much, much.

Speaker B

Bigger than that, right. Some people might be legitimately believe those things, but I mean, if you have a bad actor that wants to take advantage of something like that, it’s certainly there. And this is, of course, a challenge when you sort of try to legislate sort of morality, I guess, right? Yeah. But that’s a perfect example of this sort of trying to find something that’s sort of universally accepted, or we all agree this is a thing that we should do something about, or we think it’s a bad thing, and this definition falls apart pretty fast. And this whole thing that there’s nobody that knows the answer. So you can question something like this two plus two equals four. Well, no. Who really knows the answer? Right.

Speaker A

You go down that path, right?

Speaker C

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B

You say you’ve had luck on more individual sort of at the bottom up level. Have you had some larger organizations, educational organizations, sort of buy into what you’re saying and go down that path at all?

Speaker C

I think so, yeah. That the philosophy that we champion has been well received, and I think that people are increasingly recognizing the need for inquiry based learning when it comes to the Holocaust. So there is, I suppose, a culture, maybe a tradition of teaching the Holocaust through stories. So that is telling the kids what the experience of the Holocaust was like. So we all remember studying things like Anne Frank’s diary in school. These days. It’ll be something like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Maybe they watch Schindler’s List. And all of these things have their merits. But what it boils down to is telling the kids what the experience of the Holocaust was like. It was terrible, therefore, we shouldn’t let it happen again and again. Perfectly understandable why people would want to go down that road, but it doesn’t really teach the kids anything about how or why the Holocaust happened in the time and the place that it did. If you want to equip them with that knowledge, then you can only do it through inquiry based learning, which means working with documents, learning how to analyze them, learning how to conduct research, learning how to work with sources. Working out what’s a reliable source from an unreliable source and then getting all of that information, assembling it into a coherent narrative that has some kind of explanatory power and then presenting it to your peers. And learning how to receive constructive criticism and feedback and then improving your own idea through that cycle. And I think in the post truth era, inquiry based learning is more important than it has ever been. And yes, certainly when I’m speaking with other organizations, that note is beginning to strike home, I like to think. And part of the reason for that is because the current methods that we have for teaching the Holocaust are self evidently failing. Right. The situation is getting worse all of the time, and yet there’s more organizations like mine than ever. So we’re doing something wrong, and I think the need for this shift is beginning to be recognized.

Speaker B

Thank you for that. Yeah, that was helpful.

Speaker A

Yeah.

Speaker B

I mean, that’s so true that that inquiry based working is so is just so lacking. You know, we just people have just gotten used to this idea. Well, I have an idea. It must be right. I have an opinion that must be I must be done now. My work is over.

Speaker C

And in some senses, inquiry based learning, it went out of fashion because it’s regarded as quite stuffy and old school. Right. And there was a big shift during the education towards experiential learning, where the idea is that you’re going to immerse yourself in a subject, that you’re going to learn it by doing it somehow. And in some senses, that shift was all for the good. But I feel like something got lost in the process. The baby went out with the bathwater. And it’s important to get some kind of standards for historical scholarship back into the equation. And I think if that can be embedded in the next generation, then so many of these issues that we have right now will resolve themselves because they are their symptoms. Right? When politicians stand up and tout COVID conspiracy theories, or when local administrators tell their faculty that they need to include Holocaust denial, or whenever you read news stories about Flat Earth Theory or 5G or any of this other stuff, they’re all symptoms of bigger, bigger problems. A bigger problem, which for me is traceable back to the way that we learn in school, the way we teach and the way we learn things well.

Speaker B

And I think even in our day to day lives at this point, we all need to sort of revert to doing more of it. When we get in the podcast talking about things like outrage porn, and you’re reacting to it, if you see that, and then you go into that mode of doing some inquiry on that and go see what the documents really say and see what’s really happening, and that’ll.

Speaker A

Help cool that temperature a little bit.

Speaker B

But yeah, I think that’s a huge piece of it, even at our individual life, just doing more of that and taking a step back and looking at more than one, we seek out those information sources that tell us what we want, right?

Speaker C

Outrage porn. It’s a really useful term because it describes exactly what it is, right. That there is a voyeuristic element to this. And I think certainly from my corner, it it seems that outrage has become a tool for virality, right? And young people in particular see going viral as something to aspire to. They see that as a good thing. And therefore, if something causes outrage, whether it’s hurtful or offensive, is neither here nor there, right? The causing of outrage is itself a good thing. And so then when an organization like mine ramps up by saying, this is the most offensive thing we’ve ever seen, it’s only pouring more fuel onto the fire and it’s only doubling down and kind of underlining the idea of outrage as a tool for going viral. And for us, the focus is very much so. Like when it comes to anti Semitism, again, for example, we don’t go into schools and tell kids, this is so hateful, therefore you have to reject it, even though it obviously is really hateful. We go in and try and show them that it contradicts itself, right, because it’s portraying Jews as simultaneously rich and poor, as simultaneously superior and inferior, as simultaneously controlling society and tearing it apart. It contradicts itself. And so we try and present it to them as something that’s so ridiculous, it’s really not worth your time. And I feel like, again, that it just pours water on the fire and helps lower the temperature of it. If you pull out the outrage rug from under the feet and stop it from being this tool of virality.

Speaker A

I.

Speaker C

Think that’s an important step forward.

Speaker B

Yeah, that’s absolutely terrific. Yeah, that’s so true. Because you’re already at ten, you’re trying to send somebody some more outrage. There’s no eleven, right? You just can’t turn it up anymore.

Speaker C

Yeah. And for me, that’s why it’s so frustrating, because the response so clearly isn’t helping. So I think, again, if we’re pulling back to what we were talking about at the beginning, I think a positive, practical step is to ask oneself, how can I shift gears? What can I change about the way I’m responding to this? To try and lower the temperature and at least set the stage for a constructive conversation.

Speaker B

Right. Yeah, that’s perfect. And that’s a big piece of sort of that’s kind of the mantra we have here. That’s first step is sort of look inwardly.

Speaker A

Right?

Speaker C

Right. Yeah, exactly. And again, I think that’s important, and it’s important in every facet of what we do at the 9th Candle, because, again, organizations like ours, the need for Holocaust education is taken as self evident. And I get that in itself is not helpful. If you go into a school teachers right now, it’s pretty much the most overworked, underappreciated profession in the world. And if you’re opening pitches, the need for this is self evident. That’s not going to open any doors for you. We need to be prepared to explain why this matters and why it’s important for kids to learn about it in a particular way. And if you can’t do that, then you’re never going to be able to facilitate dialogue. And that should be the goal, right?

Speaker A

That should be the goal, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B

Well, thank you so much, and thank you for your organization and all you’re doing there. And I’ll make sure I have show notes, but what’s the site, just to make sure we have it right.

Speaker C

So it’s the nine thcandle.com.

Speaker B

Perfect. Okay. Yeah. You’re doing the Lord’s work, for lack of a better term.

Speaker C

Thank you. Yeah, well, it’s one step at a time, but each step is rewarding.

Speaker B

All right, well, thank you very much, Luke, for making the time. I really appreciate it.

Speaker C

Thank you for having me on.

Speaker B

I really enjoyed talking with you. If I have questions about this stuff, you’re the man I’m going to look for. All right. We still didn’t decide if we can punch Nazis or not, but.

Speaker A

All right.

Speaker B

Thank you, sir.

Speaker C

All right, thank you. Bye bye.

Speaker A

That is it for this episode of outrage overload Luke Berryman’s organization. Once again, is The Ninth Candle working to end Antisemitism through education. Please donate at theninthcandle.com see you in a few weeks.