Decades ago, when I was a very smart atheist wondering why everyone else wasn't a very smart atheist like me, I read a book by a "professional skeptic" (read: defender of mainstream goodthink) named Michael Shermer, called Why People Believe Weird Things. There was also a follow-up essay called "Why Smart People Believe Weird Things," and his answer was (quoting from memory), "because they're better at rationalizing beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons." That stuck with me, and it struck me even at the time that Shermer himself had unwittingly furnished an excellent example of that process in his chapter on "Holocaust denial." It was very, very obvious that Shermer had accepted the official story for what he would call "non-smart" (i.e. not evidence-related) reasons -- namely, the fact that questioning it in any way would mean career suicide, social ostracization, and possibly a prison sentence -- but he had used such smartness as was at his disposal to put together a lengthy rationalization that could pass as "intellectually respectable" but was in fact convincing only to the convinced. (Before I read Shermer, it had never occurred to me to question official history; his ridiculous apologia sowed the first seeds of doubt.)
I haven't read anything by or about Shermer since my fedora-tipping days, but I am 100% certain, without even having to check, that he fell for the birdemic hook, line, and booster. How could he not have?
(Confirmed: "The peck hesitant may be compared to spectators at a witch burning, more concerned about women being witches (believed to cause plagues, among other catastrophes) than about the inquisition burning people alive." That's, you read that right; he's using that simile for the peck hesitant.)
For a while there, questioning the birdemic/peck was nearly as socially dangerous as "denying the Holocaust," and I think a lot of smart people Shermered themselves. Among the Christians I know who went all in, a disproportionate number were Christian "intellectuals" or apologists -- people who felt a need to make rationalizations for their faith. Rationalization -- the habit of constructing ex post facto rational or "scientific" arguments for what one already believes for entirely different reasons -- opens one up to almost unlimited self-deception.
Thinking about the people I know who did not fall for the birdemic, one thing most of them have in common is that they don't feel the need to rationalize or play the Studies Have Shown game -- that they are willing to admit that many of the things they believe are metaphysical assumptions, intuitions, or gestalt judgment calls. This is from an email I wrote during the hysteria.
If I did some research and put together a list of Ten Reasons We Know Pro Wrestling Is Fake, that would only invite people to pick apart the ten reasons, and to present counterarguments of their own (like that one time Stone Cold Steve Austin broke his wrist for real and went to a real hospital or whatever), and there we would be stuck, ever "learning" and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. In fact, the only fully honest thing to say is, "It just is fake! I mean, just look at it!" So that's what I'm going to say [about the birdemic].
The discipline of not rationalizing is also good because it weans you off the need for your convictions to be "respectable" and helps you care a little bit less about what other people think.
