James P. Hogan 27 June 1941 – 12 July 2010

Via James Nicoll comes the news that science fiction writer James P. Hogan died yesterday. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. Though he never was a favourite of mine, I did like Inherit the Stars and its first two sequels, yet his descent into kookery and crank science was noticable even then. Embarassing enough that he believed in Immanuel Velikovsky’s theories about the Solar System, which would’ve Venus as a “cosmic egg” birthed by Jupiter whose passage through the Solar System to its current position caused the Biblical plagues in Egypt, worse when he moved on from that relatively innocent belief into disbelieving that HIV causes AIDS, that evolution and climate change are real, but it became truely awful once he got skeptical about the Holocaust as well. He long remained circumspect in stating this skepticism other than to defend the right of various odious rightwingers and nazis to deny the Holocaust, but recent remarks left on his website leave no real doubt about his beliefs:

But when an entire nation is accused of murder on a mass scale, claims that are wildly fantastic, mutually contradictory, and defy common sense and often physical possibility are allowed to stand unchallenged, truth is openly declared to be irrelevant, no evidence for defense is admitted, and even defense attorneys for the accused can be charged and imprisoned as being guilty of the same offense. Need it be said that truth does not need this kind of protection?

Which is why the momentary twinge of sadness I’d normally feel in these circumstances is muted with the relief that at least I don’t have to read about his latest embarassements anymore. I don’t think Hogan actually embraced Holocaust denial out of evil, like those neonazis who are all too willing to celebrate it in private but know it’s good p.r. to disbelieve it in public. Even if not actively evil himself though, his advocacy did help evil, make it easier to pretend Holocaust Denial is a respectable if controversial position to make, that the existence of the Holocaust is something that can be debated rather than historical fact. His stance on other socalled controversies as mentioned above isn’t that innocent either. We’ve seen the damage climate change denial has done to slow down the fight against it and you can image how much damage can be done by denying the link between HIV and AIDS, when you already have widespread folk beliefs helping speed up infection rates e.g. in various African countries.

As such Hogan could function as the poster child for engineer’s disease, a terrible warning for what can happen if intelligent, clever people think they’re much more cleverer than they really are, too clever to believe the “obvious lies of the scientific establishment”. Hogan was trained as a design engineer but quickly moved into sales as his first career, before he started writing science fiction. It’s the perfect background for catching the crackpot bug. Not trained in doing science but rather in enginering, not smart enough or too arrogant to understand his own limitations, clever enough to spot the flaws in pop science stories but again not clever enough to realise that these stories are not the whole truth. It was this misplaced skepticism and overestimation of his own abilities that started innocent enough but led him to some very dark places.