[lit-ideas] Re: Five Years Ago
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 07 Oct 2006 12:26:35 -0400
>>I'd love it if there were satisfactory answers given to
the dozens of unanswered questions about 9/11.
This short essay addresses the issue somewhat. -EY
______
We the Sheeple? Why Conspiracy Theories Persist
By Edward Feser 20 Sep 2006
Conspiracy theorists allege that the events of 9/11 are not
adequately explained by the "official story" fingering
Osama bin Laden and his network as the culprits. What
really needs explaining, though, is not 9/11, but the
existence of such conspiracy theorists themselves, whose by
now well-known speculations about what "really happened"
that day are - not to put too fine a point on it - so
mind-numbingly stupid that it is mystifying how anyone with
a functioning cerebrum could take them seriously even for a
moment.
The problems with such theories have been pretty thoroughly
exposed by now. Here is just a sample: If the aim of the
conspirators was to motivate the American people to go to
war, why wouldn't the crashing of airplanes into the World
Trade Center suffice? What was the point of secretly
placing explosives throughout the towers - no small task -
and thereby risking exposure? If the government was really
willing and able to orchestrate such a massive conspiracy
here at home, why couldn't or wouldn't it also carry out
the far easier task of planting evidence of WMD in faraway
Iraq? If the cell phone calls made from the hijacked planes
were faked, how did the government find people capable of so
perfectly mimicking the voices of the victims, and how did
they acquire the detailed knowledge of their personal lives
that would enable the hoaxers to deceive so many of the
victims' loved ones and friends? If it was really a cruise
missile that hit the Pentagon, why do so many eyewitnesses
report having seen an airplane crashing into it? If it was
also really a missile, and not an airplane, that crashed in
Pennsylvania, then why did eyewitnesses report seeing an
airplane in that case too? And what really happened to the
airplanes in question and their passengers? If even a third
rate burglary like the one committed at the Watergate hotel
couldn't be kept secret, why hasn't someone, anyone involved
in this massive plot, or with knowledge of those who were
involved, come forward to reveal what he knows? And so on
and on.
Of course, conspiracy theorists have tried to provide
answers to some of these difficulties for their case, but
the "answers" are even more ridiculously far-fetched and
unfounded than the original theories themselves. Nor do they
have any good answer to the central problem with all 9/11
conspiracy theories, which is this: Everything that
happened that day has a ready explanation in terms of bin
Ladenist aggression together with two implacable forces of
nature: government incompetence and the laws of physics.
(Check out the recent book Debunking 9/11 Myths, or this
useful website, if you really have any doubts.) There is
simply no need to posit a government conspiracy in order to
explain the evidence. Meanwhile, the conspiracy theories
themselves face all sorts of difficulties, as we have seen.
So why even bother with them in the first place? Haven't
these people (a few of whom are philosophy professors and
scientists) ever heard of Occam's razor? Haven't the less
learned among them - mouth-breathers of the sort who, while
they could never understand a word of Noam Chomsky's serious
scientific and philosophical work, still think he's "cool"
and enjoy reading about him in the liner notes of Rage
Against the Machine albums - at least seen this?
The standard view of pop psychologists is that the reason
people are attracted to conspiracy theories is that such
theories provide reassurance that catastrophic events never
happen for trivial reasons. Hence (it is said) the reason
so many people think Oswald didn't act alone in the Kennedy
assassination is that they just don't want to believe that
JFK was murdered by some lone nutcase; it had to be part of
something bigger and more meaningful. Similarly, we are
told, 9/11 conspiracy theorists are just sensitive souls who
can't face the awful truth that a guy in a cave somewhere
was able to bring down the twin towers and set the Pentagon
ablaze.
I think this sort of explanation is, in the present case
anyway, pretty obviously false. Al-Qaeda, not to mention
the global Islamist movement of which it is a part, is far
more than a guy in a cave. It is (or at any rate was in
2001, before being seriously degraded by American military
action and anti-terrorism measures) a vast and well-funded
international network led by intelligent and sinister
ideologues with a flair for the dramatic, and who see
themselves as part of a centuries-old jihadist tradition.
If you want a grand conspiracy led by
James-Bond-movie-style bad guys, look no further. And yet
the 9/11 conspiracy theorists will hear none of it. The
reason they reject the "official story," then, cannot be
because they'd rather believe that something big was behind
9/11, because the "official story" just is that something
big was behind 9/11.
Furthermore, people inclined to believe in conspiratorial
explanations tend to do so even when there really isn't
anything to be "explained" in the first place. For example,
the conspiracy at the heart of The Da Vinci Code wasn't
posited to account for some catastrophic event à la the JFK
assassination or 9/11; it's just a plot device for a bad
novel (albeit one inspired by crackpot "scholarship"). Yet
thousands seem hell-bent on believing that something like it
must really be true of the Catholic Church.
A clue to the real attraction of conspiracy theories, I
would suggest, lies in the rhetoric of theorists
themselves, which is filled with self-congratulatory
descriptions of those who accept such theories as "willing
to think," "educated," "independent-minded," and so forth,
and with invective against the "uninformed" and
"unthinking" "sheeple" who "blindly follow authority." The
world of the conspiracy theorist is Manichean: either you
are intelligent, well-informed, and honest, and therefore
question all authority and received opinion; or you accept
what popular opinion or an authority says and therefore must
be stupid, dishonest, and ignorant. There is no third option.
The Enlightenment Connection
Crude as this dichotomy is, anyone familiar with the
intellectual and cultural history of the last several
hundred years might hear in it at least an echo of the
rhetoric of the Enlightenment, and of much of the
philosophical and political thought that has followed in
its wake. The core of the Enlightenment narrative - you
might call it the "official story" - is that the Western
world languished for centuries in a superstitious and
authoritarian darkness, in thrall to a corrupt and
power-hungry Church which stifled free inquiry. Then came
Science, whose brave practitioners "spoke truth to power,"
liberating us from the dead hand of ecclesiastical
authority and exposing the falsity of its outmoded dogmas.
Ever since, all has been progress, freedom, smiles and good
cheer.
Now this is, as magicians Penn and Teller have elegantly
summed up 9/11 conspiracy theories, bullshit, a historical
urban legend on par with Washington and the cherry tree.
The picture of the Middle Ages accepted by most people,
including most "educated" people, is in fact little more
than an ideologically driven construct, a holdover from the
Reformation and Enlightenment eras and the various
anti-Catholic propagandists active therein. (See here for a
few examples of widely accepted myths about the Middle
Ages, and here and here for a more accurate picture of the
medieval world.)
Still, the standard Enlightenment narrative has had a
powerful influence on the way modern people understand the
relationship between authority, tradition, and common sense
on the one hand, and science and rationality on the other.
We tend reflexively to assume that the popular or received
wisdom, especially if associated with some "official"
source or long-standing institution, is always ripe for
challenge, and also that if some independent thinker or
writer takes an unconventional position, however extreme or
counterintuitive, then there simply must be something right
in it, or least worth listening to. "Innovator" and
"iconoclast" are among our favorite terms of approbation,
and "questioning authority" and "thinking outside the box"
are applauded even by many self-described conservatives. By
contrast, "unoriginal" and "conventional" are treated as
if they were synonyms for "unintelligent" and "unthinking."
The picture of science that has gone along with this tends,
accordingly, to portray it as in the business of
overthrowing long-standing opinions and common sense in
general. We used to think the earth was at the center of the
solar system, but Copernicus showed that the sun is;
Einstein revealed that whether two events are simultaneous
is, contrary to common sense, relative to who is observing
them; and so forth. The history of science, as popularly
understood, is thus a story of daring individuals
constantly challenging current orthodoxies and authorities,
and constantly being proved right.
Now as the philosopher David Stove has argued, the modern
tendency toward hyper-skepticism seems largely to be the
result of a massive overgeneralization from a mere handful
of cases where common sense turned out to be mistaken.
Another philosopher, Michael Levin, has given it a name:
the "skim milk" fallacy, the fallacy of assuming, in the
words of Gilbert and Sullivan, that "things are seldom what
they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream," so that common
sense can in general be presumed to be mistaken. To be
sure, where phenomena remote from everyday human experience
are concerned - the large-scale structure of spacetime, the
microscopic realm of molecules, atoms, and so forth - it is
perhaps not surprising that human beings should for long
periods of time have gotten things wrong. But where
everyday matters are concerned - where opinions touch on our
basic understanding of human nature and the facts about
ordinary social interaction - it is very likely that they
would not, in general, get things wrong. Biological and
cultural evolution would ensure that serious mistakes
concerning such matters would before too long be weeded out.
The detailed reasons for this are complex, but when spelled
out they provide the basis for a general defense of
tradition and common sense of the sort associated with
thinkers like Burke and Hayek.
Moreover, the popular image of scientific practice described
above simply doesn't correspond to reality. Thomas Kuhn
certainly had his deficiencies as a philosopher, but he was
a good historian of science, and his famous description of
"normal science" - on which ordinary scientific practice is
in fact very conservative, with scientists working within
and developing a general theoretical picture of the world
that they have inherited from their teachers and rarely
think to challenge - is surely correct. Indeed, it has to be
correct, since it is really just not possible to treat
authority, tradition, and common sense as if they were in
general and in principle likely to be wrong. For in forming
our beliefs we must always start somewhere, and have nowhere
else to start except the general picture of the world we
have inherited from our parents, society, and people who
due to special experience or study have more knowledge of a
subject matter than we do. Of course, we can and do often
criticize some particular part of this picture, but the
very criteria we appeal to in order to do so typically
derive from other parts of it. What we cannot coherently do
is question the inherited picture as a whole, or regard it
as if there were a general presumption against it.
Even very radical shifts in worldview typically presuppose a
deep level of continuity between the view that was
abandoned and the one that comes to be adopted. Hence the
Protestant who converts to Catholicism (or vice versa) does
so on the basis of religious premises both traditions have
in common. Hence the secularist who rejects Christianity as
a whole typically does so on the basis of scientific and
moral principles that developed out of the Christian
tradition itself. (See here, here, and here.) And hence the
conspiracy theorist who claims to believe that the
government and the media are in thrall to some purportedly
sinister force or other (the military-industrial complex,
the Mossad, or whatever) invariably bases his theory
precisely on materials drawn from these sources (such as
newspaper accounts and television news broadcasts, and even
the Warren Commission and 9/11 Commission reports, which
JFK assassination buffs and 9/11 fantasists, respectively,
comb for evidence to support their case).
The Hermeneutics of Suspicion
This is, in fact, part of why the medievals had the respect
for authority that they did. They by no means believed in
following authority "blindly" - indeed, Thomas Aquinas
regarded the argument from authority as the weakest of all
arguments. But they did think that the fact that some
authority has said something gave us at least some reason
to think it is true, even if that reason might often be
overridden by other, better reasons to conclude otherwise.
That is to say, they acknowledged that it is simply a
necessary feature of the human condition that our starting
point in coming to know about the world must always be what
we have inherited from some authority or other - parents,
church, scholars, government, or whomever. Such authorities
might not always have the last word, but they cannot fail
to have the first word. And to reject the mindless view
that authority as such is always to be questioned is not to
embrace the equally mindless view that authority is always
to be trusted. It is rather just to take the sensible
middle ground position that authority has an unavoidable
and necessary place in our lives (intellectual and
otherwise) even if it is something fallible that we often
need to be cautious about.
At some level, everyone knows this, even if some people
pretend to think otherwise. The secularist who chides
religious believers for having faith in what the Church
teaches will also tell them, in the very next breath and
with no sense of irony, to shut up and trust the experts
where scientific matters are concerned. That there are
philosophers and theologians who can present powerful and
sophisticated justifications of religious belief is taken to
be no defense of the average believer - he ought to "think
for himself," says the secularist. And yet while the
average secularist couldn't give you an interesting
explanation or defense of quantum mechanics, relativity
theory, or evolution if his life depended on it, the fact
that there are experts who can do so is taken by him to
justify his own faith in their findings. As the philosopher
Christopher Martin has noted, the real difference between
medieval and modern people is not that the former believe
in the need for authority and the latter don't - in fact
both medievals and moderns believe in it and act accordingly
- but rather that the former admitted that they believed in
it, while the latter pretend they don't.
This pretense of contempt for authority per se is by no
means a mere foible. It can lead to very serious
intellectual errors, as it does in the work of such
apostles of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" as Marx and
Nietzsche. For the former, all moral, legal, religious, and
cultural beliefs, practices, and institutions are "really"
mere expressions of the interests of the dominant economic
class within a society; for the latter (and especially for
such contemporary Nietzscheans as Michel Foucault), they
are "really" just expressions of a more general "will to
power." As such, they are to be regarded with distrust, and
indeed (on at least some interpretations of these doctrines)
as having no objective validity whatsoever. Authority,
tradition, and common sense come to be regarded as
something to be constantly unmasked and undercut rather
than consulted as necessary, though fallible, sources of
wisdom. Indeed, they come to be regarded as something
positively hateful and oppressive, from which we must
always feel alienated.
Such doctrines are notoriously difficult to formulate in a
way that is both coherent and interesting. If interpreted
as universal claims, they undercut themselves - Marxism and
Nietzscheanism themselves turn out to be just two more
masks for some sinister interest or other, with no objective
validity. If instead they are not interpreted as universal
claims - that is, if it is held that either Marxism or
Nietzscheanism alone constitutes objective truth and ought
not to be regarded with suspicion - then they seem arbitrary
and question-begging.
If, to avoid these problems, they are softened into the more
modest claim that people often believe in or promote
various moral, religious, or political ideas out of
self-interest, then they become trivial. Everybody has
always known that. And from the fact that someone somewhere
might have a selfish motivation for believing or promoting
some claim, it simply doesn't follow that that claim is
false or even doubtful. To think otherwise is to commit the
ad hominem fallacy of "poisoning the well." If our
believing that the earth is round benefits globe
manufacturers, it would be stupid to conclude from this that
it must really be flat after all. Similarly, if our
believing that 9/11 was caused by a bunch of jihadist
fanatics acting without help from any government conspiracy
somehow benefits the Bush administration, that is simply no
reason whatsoever for doubting that it really was so caused.
I would suggest, then, that the post-Enlightenment pretense
of hostility to authority, tradition, and common sense as
such, and especially the extreme form of it represented by
the likes of Marx and Nietzsche, is what really underlies
the popularity of conspiracy theories, particularly those
involving 9/11. The absurd idea that to be intelligent,
scientific, and intellectually honest requires a distrust
for all authority per se and a contempt for the opinions of
the average person, has so deeply permeated the modern
Western consciousness that conspiratorial thinking has for
many people come to seem the rational default position. And
it also explains why even mainstream outlets like Time and
Vanity Fair, while by no means endorsing the views of the
conspiracy theorists, have tended to treat them with kid
gloves, as if they were harmless and well-meaning
eccentrics instead of shrill and hate-filled crackpots. The
belief that extremism in the attack on authority is no vice
has a powerful appeal even for suit-wearing journalists and
media executives (especially if they are liberals), even if
they have too much sense to follow it out consistently.
Yet no civilization can be healthy which nurtures such
delusions, for they strike at the very heart of a society's
core institutions - family, religion, schools, political
institutions, and so forth - and replace the (sometimes
critical) allegiance we should feel for them with a
corrosive skepticism. Conspiracy theories are only the most
extreme symptom of this disease. Less dramatic, but in the
long run more dangerous, is the relentless tendency of the
Western intelligentsia to denigrate the Western past and
present, massively exaggerating the vices of their own
civilization and the virtues of its competitors, and
putting the worst possible spin on the motives and policies
of its current leaders while minimizing or excusing the
crimes of its enemies. This would be dangerous under the
best of circumstances. It is doubly so while we are at war
with enemies who know no such self-doubt and self-hatred.
Edward Feser (edwardfeser@xxxxxxxxxxx) is the author of
Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction (soon to be
reissued in a revised edition) and editor of the
forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Hayek. He is a regular
contributor to the blogs Right Reason and The Conservative
Philosopher.
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