It’s interesting for a historian to understand their field of study from first-hand experience. Interesting, but these days not all that common; historians write all kinds of things about crops and farming, for instance, but most of them have done very little growing of vegetables.
So, why “heresy”? What does that have to do with the demands of our secular (and yet not so secular) decades? Over the last five years it has turned out that the process of demonizing people who challenge consensus beliefs which many can soon enough see are stupid remains a common one in human societies. Over the centuries, nothing has changed: human beings will still collectively profess delusional beliefs which no one really holds for long, if they receive enough propaganda and social pressure judging them as wicked if they do not. This doesn’t have much to do with religion, unless we accept the analysis that we now live in a scientist age in which science has taken on all the dogma and social function which religion had in former times.
So what has the experience of becoming a heretic been like for me (and others)? Probably quite close to a very mild version of what it was like in the past, among the freemasons and the alumbrados of Spain, for instance. There’s an initial buzz of excitement as you meet fellow heretics (even in semi-secret) and realize that you share common cause in slaying the beast of an insane corruption that has taken over your society. Then it quickly transpires that many of your fellow heretics are in fact crazy and you fairly soon feel alienated from them.
Meanwhile normies who can see that you are at least as much right as wrong slowly begin to tolerate your presence, and you come to inhabit a netherworld in which no one much likes you, but everyone decides it’s best to continue as if nothing has happened. Eventually, government moves on to other crises/targets and you no longer receive fishing emails from people who turn out to be spooks (let’s say, the papal nunzios of a previous era). You are forgotten, unless you have been an outsized heretic, in which case you may be made an example of.
There’s an initial buzz of excitement as you meet fellow heretics. Then it quickly transpires that many of your fellow heretics are in fact crazy and you fairly soon feel alienated from them.
But how did the joy of heresy begin? There is a certain freedom at the start which is intoxicating. To begin with, there’s the excitement in realizing one doesn’t have to accept this bullshit lying down. In academia, for those who were immersed in fighting the lunacy, and the broader intellectual and societal collapse during the Covid years, those early days sometimes now feel in retrospect like the pangs of teenage years. Here was a chance to make new alliances, to rediscover lost youth: swirling intellectual pheromones swishing about, alighting here and there in brief dalliances which soon (like a teenage infatuation) meant little or nothing, as those we had felt intoxicated by turned out to be idiot grifters unable to distinguish between a crisis, an opportunity, and the spambots of another secret service agent who can dole out tripe until the cows come home.
Pretty soon, the appeal of heresy began to wane (perhaps also a common phenomenon over the centuries). Visiting a museum with one prominent heretic, he asked me why it was that paintings produced in colonial Brazil had Africans in them. Taken aback, I mentioned the history of slavery and trans-Atlantic traffic, of which he then professed complete ignorance. A year or so later, when I was discussing the rise in antisemitism with another prominent Covid critic, who is also a professor in the social sciences at a “world-leading university”, he refused to accept that antisemitism meant “the hatred of Jews”, and doubled down, expatiating on the “antisemetic [sic] genocide against the Palestinians”.
When I was discussing the rise in antisemitism with another prominent Covid critic, a professor at a “world-leading university”, he refused to accept that antisemitism meant “the hatred of Jews”, and doubled down, expatiating on the “antisemetic [sic] genocide against the Palestinians”.
Meanwhile it turned out that many fellow heretics merely had their eye out for the main chance, an opportunity to gain followers—even if, sadly for them, never as many as went to the genuine heretic-loons like Candace and Naomi, for whom no story was ordinary enough that it could not magically mutate into proof that lizard-like creatures were promoting mRNA-shedding and DESTROYING THE WORLD.
The problem was that in those years, the alternatives were (if it is possible) even worse. And maybe that’s how heretics have always felt. We could keep silent as insanity, inhumanity, neocolonial barbarism, and the consequences of decades of immensely corrupt austerity-inducing policies unfolded, a silence (let’s call it consent) that would however mean that we could remain firmly in the academic/social fold. Or we could speak up, while making clear that we neither believed that 5G had caused Covid, nor that Vladimir Putin was a much-maligned freedom fighter, nor again that the vaccines were installing new genetic platforms to microchip the human race.
In the end, no one would know what to make of us. Those who had given us media airtime would see that we weren’t prepared to continue the brave struggle into whatever the next fight might be (our heresy was “single cause”), and so couldn’t add grist to their mill.
Our now ex-comrade heretics might soon tell us in private that they thought we were being groomed for the deep state, but over time at least the people we worked with on a day-to-day basis would stop giving us the cold shoulder in meetings (just as earlier heretics may eventually have been welcomed back into the outer fringes of society). Eventually we might find ourselves sitting next to leaders from the “other side” who acknowledged to us privately that the heretics’ position had quite a lot to it, but had been impossible to advocate at the time for political reasons.
The experience of all this in the 21st-century university has certainly been revealing about human nature and ideas. People who had furiously refused eye contact from beneath an N95 mask in the kitchen area might become positively friendly. Eventually tolerance became guarded interest. Perhaps there was something worthwhile in all this critical/heretical work? Although not so much so that you would dare to talk about it with those involved. Meanwhile, as a heretic, you only realized the depth of the crisis at work when much-esteemed peers wondered aloud if this work on Covid would now segue into analyses of Ebola or Marburg (a disease which has killed less than 500 people worldwide in its entire recorded history). Apparently, though, that was what would make it really relevant.
Episodes of heresy often flare up at moments of social stress, and societies love to be able to ostracize those who refuse to share in a collective insanity. Most people, meanwhile, are too scared to stand up to what clearly is insane, generally for reasons of self-preservation. Maybe they’re not so dumb after all.
Eventually, after the panic passes, everyone does their best to try to forget, although it’s hard to forget which side others were on. There are various reasons “not to mention the war”, and the reminders of heresy—why it emerges, why there will always be heretics, and how societies deal with heresy—is certainly one of them.
