Decades ago, when I was a grad student living in North Carolina, the televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker had a very popular daily TV show called The PTL Club,* that combined preaching, entertainment and fundraising. The fundraising part eventually landed Jim Bakker in jail for mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy. But the show was so popular and formulaic, and its hosts so oddly colorful, that it became the object of parody on Saturday Night Live.
I found the show’s popularity strangely fascinating (despite my atheism), and tuned in from time to time. One day Jim Bakker’s soliloquy included something like the following (paraphrasing): “Without faith, why would anyone do the right thing? The fear of damnation is the only thing stopping people from killing, stealing and constantly hurting one another.”
That comment stuck with me because it was so myopic. Bakker couldn’t imagine anyone doing good except under threat of punishment. He was unaware of (or unpersuaded by) more than 2000 years of moral philosophy, or the good lives led by many of history’s non-believers. The sentiment was much more blunt and absolute than Oliver Wendell Holmes justification for law’s focus on “bad men” while acknowledging that “the good will be good in any event.”[1]
Social scientists have a variety of names for this type of logical fallacy: “false dilemma (binary/dichotomy),” “either/or fallacy,” “exclusion fallacy,” the “fallacy of suppressed evidence,” and the “excluded middle fallacy” among them. I have always thought of it (privately) as the “Jim Bakker Fallacy.”
What makes the Jim Bakker Fallacy so interesting is its internal logic. If one is unaware of the reasons why people might do good in the absence of fear of reprisal, then it is logical to infer that the threat of external punishment is what holds civilization together. And people have remarkable faith in beliefs that they come to through the power of their own reasoning.
Today, for people who get their news from ideological and social media, where editorial bias and algorithmic bias hide parts of the truth from them, it is easy to succumb to the Jim Bakker Fallacy. We see at times in energy and climate politics.
Some examples of unjustified inferences:
1. Among people who aren’t familiar with how the electric grid works, it is easy to infer that because wind and solar power are inexpensive, an all-renewables electricity system will be less expensive than today’s system. In truth, we don’t know this. It may be, but probably isn’t right now.
2. Similarly, among people who are unfamiliar the history of techno-economic innovation in the energy system, it is easy to infer that:
a. because at today’s prices an all “renewables + batteries only” electric system would be more expensive than today’s system, adding renewable energy to the grid will increase electricity rates, or
b. because we rely today on natural gas to keep the lights on in high-renewables states like California and Texas, fossil fueled electricity will always be necessary to keep energy reliable and affordable.
We don’t know if these inferences will turn out to be right or wrong either. As someone who has watched techno-economic change in the energy sector for more than 40 years, I wouldn’t be against either possibility. Yet the inferences seem logical (even ironclad) if one is unaware of research and facts that cast doubt on them. And the inferences seem even more justified if one knows of anecdotal evidence in their favor.
In today’s Balkanized information ecosystems, we are each likely to hear the anecdotes that are consistent with our prior beliefs and unlikely to hear about contradictory stories or evidence. We become too certain too quickly about too many things. Furthermore, today’s information ecosystem discourages circumspection and open-mindedness. It is not hyperbolic to say that the online world is making society dumber and angrier by the year: first, by making us certain; and second, by making us intolerant of those whose certainty contradicts our own.
But if we are aware of this problem, perhaps we can do something about it. We can escape the Jim Bakker Fallacy by getting in the habit of auditing our own political beliefs, and by looking for nuance and exceptions and caveats. As our politics deteriorates, maybe more and more people will try to cultivate a mindset that aspires to be more curious and less judgmental. That is the first step toward crawling out of the dark political hole in which we find ourselves. – David Spence
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*”PTL” stood for “praise the lord.”
[1] In an 1897 article called “The Path of the Law” Holmes argued that the landholders be designed to deter and punish “bad men” because “the good will be good in any event.”
