- What’s the harm in believing pseudoscientific or non-scientific claims about the world (in general) and the human past/archaeology (in particular)
There are a lot of non-scientific claims that circle the media and our communities every day. Most of them have to do with superstitions and ramblings of conspiracists, but some are so convincing that an untrained mind could be convinced of their validity. In some cases, these tricky pseudoscientific claims have implications that, if they were true, could change entire landscapes of thought forever, and in that way, some can be considered dangerous because those implications may be racist, ethnocentric, or nationalistic. If someone comes across a pseudoscientific or non-scientific claim like this and is not educated well enough to recognize its faults and therefore believes it, they can do harm not only on a small scale to themselves or their immediate circles, but if they are indeed so passionate about this claim and believe so strongly in its rightness, they can also cause harm on a larger scale.
Some non-scientific claims, if they are not acted on, generally don’t cause any harm, except maybe to the person who believes it, because they believe in something that is false. But if they start spreading this false information or acting on it, then it becomes harder and harder to not cause any harm. When people organize groups surrounding this claim, and even go so far as to commit acts of violence against those who disagree with this claim, that’s when it goes from naïve innocence to intentional harm. When people trick others into joining this group and brainwash them into believing what they believe, they are causing harm to anyone who could be particularly vulnerable. Usually these kinds of claims have to do with one particular group of people, causing harm to others through alienation, othering, and violent divisiveness.
What kinds of claims are these that would cause someone to act violently or to organize and brainwash others? The kinds of claims that have to do with racism, sexism, homophobia, and causing a kind of false superiority within the people who are outside of this. For example, many pseudoarchaeological claims have to do with past civilizations and their amazing feats of architecture. These pseudoarchaeological claims imply that these past civilizations, many of whom aren’t European or whose descendants aren’t European, weren’t able to build these structures on their own, and required the help of a superior being who must’ve come from the sky. This promotes the idea that these past civilizations who are different then us were weaker and that their descendants are as well.
The violence that can come from promoting such false pseudoscientific claims is not worth the kick that educated people get out of them.
Hi Sabrina! I definitely agree with your arguments and I like how you brought up how harmful pseudoscientific thoughts can be to small groups as well as larger groups. I feel like we have focused on the larger effects so far, like racism and genocides, but not the smaller effects within certain circles or communities. I think you really thought outside of the box for this post and how it can escalate to larger problems, for example starting with just one person avidly believing in pseudoscientific claims, to influencing and changing other people’s opinions, to harm through alienation, othering, and violence. I think it is extremely important to recognize how much damage thoughts like these can inflict. Nationalism, ethnocentrism, and racism caused by pseudoscientific claims are very harmful to people of minorities, be it ethnicity, race, sexuality, or gender, these can cause serious problems to people that identify within these communities. Some examples are the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, and discrimination and persecution of the LGBTQA+ community in the United States and globally. These are all atrocities that lead to the harm of communities and the deaths of many people from pseudoscientific or pseudoarchaeological claims about another community. The Holocaust is the most prominent example of this. Adolf Hitler used pseudoarchaeological claims that Germans were the future of the human race and used archaeological sites interpreted wrong to fit his agenda to enact the Final Solution, or the killing of anyone that did not fit the future race. He later used pseudoscientific claims that people of different ethnicities, races, and sexualities were physically different and had to be killed. The use of these false claims allowed Hitler to escalate his political power to kill millions of people.