Conspiracism is not Freedom Friendly

A propos of the conspiracy theories swarming like pestiferous gnats around the death of bin Laden, John Derbyshire had this to say:

I speak here as a person just temperamentally allergic to conspiracy theories. They belong, in my mind, to that much bigger continent of ideas whose central organizing doctrine is that things are other than they seem, the continent of gnosticism.

Now I know of course that things sometimes are other than what they seem. As a connoisseur of mathematical paradoxes and sometime student of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, I'm very well aware of that.

In human affairs, however, it's not the way to bet. Furthermore, it engenders a suspicious, mistrustful cast of mind that can all too easily tip over into paranoid insanity.

It's especially not the way to bet when discussing government action. Government, most of the time, is a great blind blundering beast, incapable of any kind of subtlety. What you see is what you get, with due allowance for stupidity and incompetence.

This last point is the one that strikes me at the moment. It continues to amaze me that so many libertarians are also conspiracists. True enough, the conspiracy theories they like are not the Nazi kind (It's all a Jewish plot!), nor the Communist kind (It's all a capitalist plot!). They like the kind that, like Huck Finn's Pap, are "agin the gummint".

But that does not mean that these theories are liberty friendly. In fact they are the opposite. One thing that distinguishes conspiracism from serious scholarly thinking about real-world conspiracies (eg., the 19 religious nut-jobs who destroyed the World Trade Center) is that it attributes what I call "superpowers" to the villains of its narratives, capacities that are well beyond the abilities of normal human beings. At the very least, they attribute to the conspiracy the ability to change history by coordinating the efforts of an disparate array of people, without any leaks, without the thing unraveling in mid-process, with no death-bed confessions, and all of this invisible, inaudible -- undetectable to everyone but the conspiracist.

This violates a central tenet of enlightened libertarianism: the proposition that, in the immortal words of Dave Barry, government is stupid.

[For my earlier jottings on the cognitive illness I call "conspiracism," see this.]

Holocaust Denial: Typical Conspiracist Quackery

As I write, there is a huge conference of holocaust-deniers in full swing in (not too surprisingly) Iran. David Duke, formerly of the KKK, is "representing" the United States. I wouldn't normally think a gaggle of Jew-baiting "researchers" and admirers of Hitler is worthy of comment, but I want to take this opportunity to quote from an excellent statement about the conference made my Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League (and, by the way, a holocaust survivor):

Holocaust denial is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that posits that Jews, for their own selfish purposes, created a monstrous tale of their own destruction and deliberately inflicted the hoax on the entire world, It presumes that Jews control the international media and all other forms of information, for how else could such a 'fantasy' flourish the way it has.

This is worth bearing in mind: Holocaust denial is not only a conspiracy theory, it has to a remarkable degree a quality that I have identified, in earlier posts, as definitive of conspiracism: the attribution of miraculous powers to the alleged conspirators. Those who think that conspiracism is freedom-friendly (because it is often anti-government) should think again. With the possible exception of the Communists, the Nazis were the champion conspiracists of all time. As I've argued earlier, this is no coincidence. These guys were only anti-government when they were not in charge of the government.

Mr. Foxman's point here is to explain, as briefly as possible, why Holocaust denial is not just another "theory," but actually a form of anti-semitism. I maintain a thesis that is a generalization of this: that conspiracist writing is always (or virtually always) a form of hate literature, because it ascribes horrific, hate-worthy Powers to the Evil Other.

One reason we don't usually think of Holocaust-denial as a conspiracy theory: the Holocaust was itself a conspiracy. It was a real conspiracy, and like any large-scale real conspiracy, it was impossible to keep secret. It was known about in the West while it was going on. The first reports of it reach the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland in mid-1942, weeks after it began. American Jews held public rallies about it. They begged FDR to allow more Jewish refugees into the US so that they could escape the genocide. Chaim Weizmann asked Roosevelt to bomb the rail routes to the death mills. Can a conspiracy theory take the form of denying a(nother) conspiracy? Sure. In fact, 9/11 conspiracism does exactly that: it denies a conspiracy of 19 religious nutcases to destroy various American landmarks. Being a real conspiracy, unlike the fabulous ones hatched by conspiracists, it came unraveled even while it was being executed (the fourth plane crashed in the Pennsylvania courtryside). Evil, real evil, does not have any special Powers.

[To see my earlier posts on conspiracism, look here, here, here, here, here, and here.]

Is My Dismissal of Conspiracism Unscientific?

A blogger writing under the name of Erasmo makes an interesting point, here, about my original post on Conspiracism. My view, which I admit is an extreme one, is this: conspiracism is actually qualitatively different from legitimate scientific and scholarly work. It is in some ways closer to magical and religious thinking than to scientific thought.

Erasmo points out, in effect, that I am using a priori reasoning to justify ignoring empirical evidence. This is itself a very unscientific thing to do. So I am the one who is being unscientific and not (necessarily) the conspiracy "theorist."

He is quite right that by implication I am saying that scientists and scholars are right to ignore the latest conspiracy theory, without even looking at the evidence for that theory. But I would add that a priori reasoning, of this sort, is not alien to science at all.

Suppose I am an astronomer, specializing in the study of planets. I am deluged with new findings about extrasolar planets, more than I can keep up with. One fine day I get a self-published monograph in the mail, detailing "new evidence" that planet earth is flat. You know what I am going to do. I'm going to toss the book, and without looking at the new evidence. Is this unscientific? Is this irrational?

I think the answer to both questions is "no." We have many different methods for determining the truth, and they vary widely in quality. The highest-quality procedures -- such as (in science) a controlled experiment or a (in the legal realm) a trial with elaborate rules of evidence -- are difficult and expensive, and consequently are reserved for resolving a special category of issues. There are, however, many questions we answer every day of our lives, and as rational beings we generally apply lower-quality truth-determining procedures to them. An astronomer who tosses a flat-earth treatise is acting, with barely a moment's conscious thought, on a lifetime of experience that tells him or her that the earth is not flat at all. This almost instantaneous reaction is a very very low-grade truth-determining procedure, admittedly. It is barely a procedure at all! But I would point out that it is not anti-empirical. It is a priori only in the sense that it does not collect any new evidence.

Now you've probably guessed where I am going with this analogy. I probably will not go out and investigate all the web sites that Erasmo recommends to me. (I also, though this will take a lot of will power on my part, am planning to never read another book on the Kennedy assassination.) There are a number of reasons for this, but one, and a sufficient one, is just this: these theories basically posit the existence of super-brilliant human beings with amazing superpowers, who can bring off wildly complicated, all-but-perfect deceptions. If I did believe that such beings are possible, I certainly would not think that they work for the federal government. And if I did believe that, I certainly, certainly would not identify them with the Bush administration. I admit that having such a thought and acting on it constitutes a very low-grade truth-determining procedure. Like I say, it barely qualifies as a procedure at all. But it does not consist in ignoring empirical evidence. To the contrary! If I were to waste a lot of time reading 9/11 conspiracist websites I would be ignoring empirical evidence: six decades of experience with my fellow-humans, which convinces me that this is just not the way the world works.

That is one pretty good reason for rejecting conspiracism, lock, stock and kaboodle, without looking at the details of each theory. Here is another: Conspiracism, like religion, is an obvious case of motivated belief. It's obvious why Christians believe they have immortal souls, and it has nothing to do with evidence. If the belief is true, then the world is the sort of world they want to live in. Therefore, they believe it. In a similar way, it is obvious that 9/11 conspiracists have reasons, political or religious or both, to believe that 9/11 was not brought off by nineteen hate-crazed religious wack-jobs from the Middle East. A world in which this is true is more their kind of world. Ergo, they believe in it. This, in fact, is painfully obvious to everyone but the conspiracists themselves. Conspiracism is a kind of thinking that, in general and as a kind of thinking, does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Mark Twain's defense of lying -- "The truth is the most valuable thing we have: let us economize it!" -- can also be applied to empiricism, in the sense of examining new empirical evidence. We have to economize it, and that means investing it on hypotheses that deserve that high-quality sort of attention. Conspiracism, I am afraid, just does not make the grade.

Conspiracies Real and Imaginary

A Finnish individual, writing as "Nordic," posted an interesting comment on my original positing on conspiracy theories. Nordic points out that there have been many real conspiracies throughout history. This is undeniably true -- though I would deny one of Nordic's examples, the conspiracy that killed JFK. But many examples of perfectly real conspiracies come to mind. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, not by a lone gunman, but by a conspiracy that was aimed at several members of his administration. The Watergate break-in and coverup was a real conspiracy. Heck, the 9/11 attacks themselves were the work of a conspiracy -- not a conpiracy of Israeli and American military organizations by of 19 religious nutcases. So conspiracies are real.

But given that my account of conspiracism holds that there is a sharp discontinuity between that sort of thinking and real theories, I probably have to find a difference between the conspiracies that conspiracists obsess about, and the conspiracies that exist in the real world that you and I actually live in. The alternative would be to say that conspiracism only differs from legitimate theoretical work in terms of it its methodology, and that might end up blurring my supposedly sharp distinction. The difference might then be at most a difference of degree: they are being less rigorous, etc., but they are really in the same business as the social scientist.

Note that a similar issue arises in the case of cryptozoology, the belief in creatures like yetti, sasquatch, and the Loch Ness monster. If cryptozoology is bunk, how is it that scientists find find new species, or ones thought extinct, all the time? What about the ceolocanth ("the living fossil") and the giant squid? Isn't the cryptozoologist just doing what the legitimate zoologist is doing all the time?

How, indeed, is the coelocanth different from Bigfoot? Answer: verifiable physical traces. They reeled in the coelocanth. They netted the giant squid. But they've never found a dead sasquatch, nor any traces from which dna can be extracted. No skeletons. No hair. No poop. Unlike bears, sasquatches do not shit in the woods. (Tip of the hat here to the wonderful "Penn and Teller: Bullshit!" episode on cryptozoology.)

What is the similar sharp difference between the infinitude of real conspiracies, and those that are products of conspiracist fantasy? I can think of several, but they all rest on a single one. Real conspirators are, like you and me, fallible. For that reason, real conspiracies tend to be, if they are successful, rather small and short-lived. The successful ones also tend to be very simple, in terms of the number and difficulty of the individual actions required to bring them off. The Reichstag fire, for instance was very simple indeed: just start a fire when nobody is looking. Real conspiracies in general have a marked tendency to come unraveled. The ones that are large and long-lasting are extremely well-known (the CIA, the Communist Party, etc.).

By contrast, the phony conpiracies of conspiracists have God-like powers, including an almost supernatural capacity to stay (unlike the CIA and the CP) virtually invisible to anyone but the conspiracy theorist. Just think how many hundreds of people would have to be involved in order to fake a moon landing or the 9/11 attacks. With no mistakes made by any, any of them, and no defectors, never a death-bed confession, etc. Truly, these were organizations of supermen! The conspiracy that killed JFK was a very, very different sort of thing from the one that killed Lincoln. The latter began to fall apart almost immediately. The former has remained airtight and without a single flaw or weakness for over 4 decades. Pretty interesting, don't you think?

Real conspiracies, I would claim, inhabit the world as it is understood by modern science or by common sense. This is a world of finite beings with finite powers. It is a world where ever gain has its cost, and every strength its Achilles' heel. It is a world of probabilities and degrees of rational certitude. The world of the conspiracist is not like this. It is a world inhabitied by fabulous superbeings with amazing superpowers. A world of absolutes and infallibilities. It is basically the world as apprehended by magical and religious ways of thinking. It is the world of faith, of what Eric Hoffer called the "True Believer."

That is I suppose its greatest attraction.

Are Conspiracists Really Enemies of Authority as Such?

I've been thinking about Edward Feser's conservative take on conspiracy theories: that they are really a case of the Enlightenment spirit taken to its logical limit, with the individualistic "theorist" rejecting tradition and authority in favor of the judgement of his (it always is a "he") own mind. It's an application, he says, of the "skim milk principle," so named after the Sir Arthur Sullivan lines "Things are seldom what they seem/Skim milk maskerades as cream."

I should probably point out first of all that my own account and Feser's have something in common. They are both basically epistemological accounts of cospiracism. That is, they both interpret it as a knowledge claim and assess it in terms of whether its methodology is competent to (or seriously meant to) support claims to knowledge.

However, within the wide parameters of epistemological accounts of conspiracism, my view is virtually opposite of Feser's. Connspiracy "theories" are not really theories at all. They are, as Plato would say, not logos but mythos, stories that deliver the subjective satisfaction (the drug-like high) of theories without the difficulty, discipline, or rigor of doing actual theoretical work.

As I said below, Feser's account does admittedly explain something that my own account seemingly cannot: namely, that conspiracists tend to be individualists who are "agin the guvmint." I should add something to my account. But what?

I guess what I am inclined to add is a denial that the explanandum phenomenon, the thing to be explained, exists. True, we do think of the typical conspiracist as some weird guy who lives in his mom's garage and has a web site that reveals the key to human history. But that is a sort of illusion of perspective we get by looking only at the conspiracists immediately around us. Step back and look at the big picture.

Historically, conspiracism has often been a very nasty tool in the hands of authority, the worst and most authoritarian authorities. What was Nazi antisemitism but a giant conspiracy theory? Soviet Communism was rife with conspiracy theories. At the time he died (and it was just in time) Stalin was obsessed with The Doctors' Plot, a conspiracy theory that was to have served as the basis for massive arrests and killings. Just the other day, the dictator of Sudan used a conspiracy theory to deny responsibility for mass murder in the Darfur region and blame it all on Israel.

Again, Medieval witchraft hysteria had the most salient traits of conpiracism, inasmuch as it opposed a foe that was a) very powerful, b) very, very bad, and c) invisible (undetectable by ordinary common sense thinking).

Conspiracism is a wonderful excuse for doing terrible things to innocent people. A conspiracy theory would, if true, justify taking extraordinary means against people who look innocent because, don't you know, THEY are about to do terrible things to us, and they are very good at looking innocent. It's what they do!

As a non-conservative, I maintain that beating up on people in just this way is one thing that authority, throughout history, has shown a certain tendency to do. Lord Acton said it: Power corrupts.

Why Conspiracism Persists: Another Take

There is a very interesting article on why conspiracism is so pervasive and popular, despite its obvious stupidity, here at TCS Daily

Interestingly, the author, Edward Feser, a conservative professor of philosophy, gives an explanation that is virtually the opposite of mine. I see these "theories" (which aren't real theories at all, as I've said) as offering all the comforts and advantages of irrationality, while he seems to see them as the product of an over-reliance on -- reason! He points out the the intellectual posture of the conspiracist is inevitably that of the lone skeptic, casting aside "the official story" and thus overthrowing the power of authority, to which the masses have uncritically submitted. The governing myth, in his view, is that of the Enlightenment: truth is on the side of the lone intellect, while custom, tradition, and authority represent nothing but illusion.

As a matter of history, I think Feser's Enlightenment-run-amok theory is plainly wrong. Modern conspiracism begins with the Abbe Agustin Baruel's writings about the Bavarian Illuminati. The Illuminati -- the bad guys in this conspiracist yarn -- are Enlightenment extremists, free-thinking foes of both king and church who sought to establish a new regime of freedom and reason on the ruins of all traditional institutions. The first thing the Illuminati did, according to Baruel, was to cause the French Revolution. (How? I guess they pulled some of those "strings" you've heard about.) The arch conspiracy theorist of my own lifetime, Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, believed the the Illuminati were the ones at the bottom of all the other conspiracies. The Commies were just one part of it.

Anyway, Baruel's conspiracy "theories" were apparently the product of a profoundly reactionary hatred of the Enlightenment, not the reverse.

I have to admit, though, that Feser's view does explain something that mine so far does not: that conspiracism tends to have an anti-authoritarian slant. The conspiracist is usually, like Huck Finn's Pap, "agin the guvmint." Or in some cases, the Church. (Da Vinci Code, anyone?)

So I have to add something to my explanation. But what? I'll have to think about that.

Yet Another Conspiracy Theory: Lower Gas Prices

The day before yesterday I wrote the posting immediately below. One of the examples of conspiracy theories I cited was the "capitalist plot" explanation of rising oil prices. Since the middle of the summer, as you probably know, gas prices have been sliding downward. And what do we see in the press and on the net but a conspiracist explanation of dropping oil prices. There is simply no end and no limit!

There is an interesting piece on this by one Dan Gainor at Human Events. Okay, Human Events is a right wing publication and Gainor's charming essay is an attack some talking head at CNN (which unlike him I do not watch) who has been purveying this particular "theory." As a matter of fact, as a recent USA Today and Gallup poll shows, some 42% of Americans believe some form of this idea, so unfortunately we can't blame it all on those pointy-headed liberals at CNN. The appeal of conspiracism is very, very broad. This is the one thing that makes it, in all its irrational stupidity, worth thinking about. Something is going on there that tells us a lot about what makes most people tick.

On thing that just amazes me about this is how little responsibilty conspiracists feel to explain how THEY are supposed to be able to bring off the spectacular effects that conspiracists attribute to THEM. What is the source and nature of their mysterious super-powers? USA reports, from a knucklead-on-the-street interview, some guy in LA saying "I'm sure there's some sort of string-pulling going on." That's it. THEY are doing this to us. How? Somehow. End of story.

Conspiracy Theories: What's Really Going on There?

I’ve been reading a really interesting book: Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in the United States, by historian Robert Allen Goldberg (Yale U. Press, 2001). I’m trying to figure out what these seemingly mad ideas are so powerful, and so popular. What the Hell is going on there?

Conspiracy theories have popped up many times in history, Goldberg tells us. You might think that it all began with the Jewish plot to take over the (nineteenth century) world, but what about the Antichrist, and the grand-daddy of them all, Satan and all his devils? And in the eighteenth century there was the Adam Weishaupt and the fabulous Bavarian Illuminati. But recent decades do seem to represent something new in history: conspiracy theories have been multiplying like mad. Among them are: JFK was killed by a conspiracy that did not include Oswald (or in which he was “just a patsy”), ditto for RFK/Sirhan and MLK/James Earl Ray. The Oklahoma City bombing was perpetrated by the government – with Timothy MacVeigh as the patsy! The Moon landing took place on a Hollywood sound stage. Marilyn Monroe was murdered, Elvis’s death was faked so he could avoid publicity, Princess Di’s death was faked so she could get away from the paparazzi. Vince Foster was murdered because he knew too much. Then there are Roswell and Area 51. In fact, JFK was killed because, like Foster, he knew too much, but in his case it was about – UFOs! The Elian who was sent back to Cuba was a ringer. And of course, every time a reduction in the supply of petroleum results in an increase in the price of gas at the pump, it isn’t because of some abstruse, hard to understand “law” of supply and demand, it’s because of a conspiracy of oil companies fixing the prices. And, since Golderberg's book was written, the dawn of what may turn out to be the Golden Age of conspiracist lunacy. The WTC towers and the pentagon were hit by cruise missiles, cleverly disguised as passenger planes (which were somehow spirited away and disappeared). Light and telephone poles next to the Pentagon that seem to have been sheared off by a large passenger plane were actually stage props. The cellphone messages from United 93 were fakes concocted by actors. And on it goes.

What do all these ideas have in common? Goldberg points out that they all weave together disparate facts into a consistent, unified structure. They also promise one power: to find the behind-the scenes cause of things feels very empowering.

Also, as Goldberg points out, conspiracists tend overwhelmingly to be male. Joe MacCarthy, Robert Welch, Mark Lane, Louis Farrakhan, Oliver Stone, Fetzer and Barrett. The leading Roswell nut-cases and Area 51 wack-jobs – all men. Conspiracism is a testosterone-rich environment. I would add that this can be partially explained by the fact that conspiracist thinking is a power-grabbing fantasy. This is something that men seem to be more interested in than women.

I would also add, though, that both these functions are filled by real theories. Boyle’s law and the law of supply and demand integrate diverse phenomena and promise to empower us through understanding. But I maintain that conspiracy “theories” are not real theories. What is the difference?

For one thing, real theories mean work. It takes work to understand them. They are abstract, difficult. They always use often use a highly specialized conceptual aparatus, and math symbols that only those who have spent long, boring hours of study can understand. And even after you understand them, they assign you more work. The law of supply and demand means that, if you don’t like gradually rising gas prices, you have to get off your butt and find more sources of fuel. (Damn! That could take years! Let’s just sit here and hate the oil companies some more!)

Of course, once you realize that everything is the fault of Big Oil or the Jews, there is nothing at all that you can do about it. But that is actually liberating: Nothing to do! You’re off the hook! The power rush was from the insight itself, realizing what the real cause was. You’ve penetrated the Veil of Maya. Actually gaining and using real power – that’s just more work!

There is one more huge difference between conspiracism and real theory. Conspiracies make good stories, as Goldberg reminds us. Think how many movies depict conspiracies, from Birth of a Nation through Meet John Doe and and The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May to dozens of current offerings. By contrast, a real theory is a cold minuet of bloodless abstractions. No story there.

In addition, I would point out that a conspiracy theory appeals to a common and pervasive human emotion: namely, hatred. Conspiracies have the two characteristics that separate the Hateful from all other things: they are powerful, and they are very, very bad. If your dominant emotion is a haunting, free floating hatred, and you need something to fasten it to and justify it, try a conspiracy theory! If might be just what you were looking for!

So conspiracy theories are the sort of theory that would naturally appeal to someone who is intellectually lazy, prefers instant gratification, thinks in terms of concrete images instead of abstractions and mathematical symbols, and needs to feel more powerful; someone who is troubled by nasty emotions that do not seem to be appropriate responses to the world that they actually see around them.

So my explanation has to be that conspiracism is so popular because there are a lot of people like that -- or there is a lot of that in people!

Now, "Theorist" Has Thanked Wisconsin Republican

I wrote the post just below this one yesterday. Today I checked Kevin Barrett's website and what do I see but the following:

Barrett Thanks Nass, Invites Nass to 9/11 Lecture

Kevin Barrett responded politely and gratefully today to Steve Nass's claim that Barrett is using the University of Wisconsin to get publicity for his 9/11 views.

"Steve Nass has done more to publicize me and my views than anyone," Barrett said. "If it weren't for Nass, most people would never have heard of me or my views."...

And he ought to know!

Conspiracy "Theorist" Should Thank Wisconsin Republicans

Seeing a headilne (a headline!) in today's Wisconsin State Journal, announcing a talk by local conspiracy "theorist" Kevin Barrett, it occurred to me that there is no way he would be getting this invaluable free publicity, if Republicans in the Wisconsin state legislature had not called for his dismissal from the University in July. Thanks a lot, fellas!

In the excellent "Penn and Teller: Bullshit!" episode on conspiracy theories, they show a clip of a "theorist" saying that the WTC towers were destroyed by explosives, and that the crew and passengers of the four planes that somehow disappeared from the face of the earth are all "in the pay of the government." Penn Gillette says at this point, "You know, I hope this asshole runs into a family that lost a loved one on one of those planes, who probably wouldn't take kindly to his theory that Daddy is faking his death." I agree that the more extreme conspiracy "theories" are not merely nutty but a spectacle morally offensive to behold. But attempts to censor them (though supported by law blogger Ann Althouse) are a part of that sorry spectacle: a sad, short-sighted, self-defeating part.