Faith metastasizes

Johann Hari has written an excellent article on the vexing topic of right-wing reality-denial. A sample:

Indeed, if you spend any time with American right-wingers -- as I have.....you soon find that your arguments don't center on philo-sophy. You have to concentrate on correcting basic factual errors about the real world. They insist Europe has fallen to Islam, since Muslims immigrants are becoming a majority and are imposing sharia law. In reality, Muslims make up 3 percent of the population of Europe, and most of them oppose sharia law. They insist Franklin Roosevelt caused the Great Depression, and should have cut government spending. In reality, whenever he did cut spending -- as he tried periodically throughout the 1930s
-- the economy began to tank. But explain this patiently -- with a thousand sources -- and they simply shriek that you are lying, and they know "in their heart" what is true. They insist gay marriage would cause the institution of the family to collapse. In reality, where it has already been introduced in Europe, hetero-sexual families continue just as before. On the list goes: evolution is a lie, a blastocyst is akin to a baby, torture produces actionable intelligence...

The most interesting part, however, is when Hari asks why the right has become so susceptible to reality-denial, and puts his finger on something I've long believed. This eruption of delusional thinking is not something that could equally easily have occurred in any ideological movement, and just happens to be afflicting the American right wing at the moment. On the contrary, it's solidly linked to how the American right, over the last decade or so, has increasingly based its very identity on a form of belief which proudly and stridently rejects logic and evidence as standards for evaluating truth -- that is, religion. Here's the key passage:

It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" -- which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" Australia exists, or fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

Once a person finds it positively virtuous to hold a certain set of beliefs regardless of how much evidence and logic contradict them, it becomes all too easy to accept and cling to a widening range of other beliefs which also defy evidence and logic.

Not every religious person ends up becoming delusional across the board, and not every delusional person got that way because he started out religious. But it obviously makes it a lot easier.