Ross Douthat suggests a tool kit for discriminating among conspiracy theories, which have always been among us.
NYT, 2 March, Ross Douthat: A Better Way to Think About Conspiracies, subtitled, People will always be interested in conspiracy theories. They need a tool kit for discriminating among different fringe ideas.
(Douthat is one of a couple explicitly religious columnists at NYT.)
He makes a key point that I have not previously appreciated:
We should be skeptical that the scale of conspiracy thinking today is a true historical novelty; the conspiracy theories of the Revolutionary era, for instance, would be entirely at home on today’s internet. But we’re clearly dealing with a new way in which people absorb and spread conspiracies, and a mind-altering technology like the internet probably does require a new kind of education, to help keep people from losing their senses in the online wilds or settling in as citizens of partisan dreamscapes.
…
If you assume that people will always believe in conspiracies, and that sometimes they should, you can try to give them a tool kit for discriminating among different fringe ideas, so that when they venture into outside-the-consensus territory, they become more reasonable and discerning in the ideas they follow and bring back.
He then discusses several key points, which I will simply list.
- Prefer simple theories to baroque ones
- Avoid theories that seem tailored to fit a predetermined conclusion
- Take fringe theories more seriously when the mainstream narrative has holes
- Just because you start to believe in one fringe theory, you don’t have to believe them all
And then he says this, about his fourth point, concerning organized religion.
Here revealed religion offers a useful model. To be a devout Christian or a believing Jew or Muslim is to be a bit like a conspiracy theorist, in the sense that you believe that there is an invisible reality that secular knowledge can’t recognize and a set of decisive events in history that fall outside of nature’s laws.
But the great religions are also full of warnings against false prophets and fraudulent revelations. My own faith, Roman Catholicism, is both drenched in the supernatural and extremely scrupulous about the miracles and seers that it validates. And it allows its flock to be simply agnostic about a range of possibly supernatural claims and phenomena, to allow that they might be real, or might not, without making them the basis of your faith.
I, for one, do not believe in invisible realities (which one(s)?) that secular knowledge can’t recognize. (And Roman Catholicism, with its motivated reasoning to canonize saints based on shabby hearsay evidence and extremely dubious “evidence” for chance “miracles,” seems more credulous than most faiths.)
And then this, which echoes my recent thoughts that many promulgators of conspiracy theories don’t really “believe” them.
Some version of that careful agnosticism, that mixture of openness and caution, seems like a better spirit with which to approach the internet and all its rabbit holes than either a naïve credulity or a brittle confidence in mainstream media consensus. And I suspect that’s actually what a lot of polling on conspiracy theories traditionally captures: not a blazing certainty about what really happened on 9/11 or who killed Kennedy or how “they” faked the moon landing, but a kind of studied uncertainty about our strange world and its secrets.
His broad suggestions for how to be savvy when dealing with conspiracy theories strikes me as a subject, like critical thinking and civics, that should be part of a K-12 core curriculum.
