From time to time you will start seeing guest posts from various commenters and other bloggers. If you don’t read this first ever guest post then you are missing one hell of a post. Please comment and let DG know your thoughts.
On Conspiracies and Commentary
By: Dorian Gray
Their great need, their hunger, is for good sense, clarity, truth – even an atom of it. People are dying – it is no metaphor – for lack of something real to carry home when the day is done. See how willing they are to accept the wildest nonsense. – Herzog, Saul Bellow
In an interesting coincidence this week the Mike Castle “birther” video went viral on the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. The latter, along with the JFK assassination and the 11 September attacks, have been the quintessential riddles of the lunatic fringe. Birth certificate-gate is quickly catapulting to the Mount Rushmore of conspiracies theories and this got me wondering. Why are some so prone to this type of thinking? Are these people ill or stupid or what? I don’t think so. I think most are quite bright actually (the nutter in Georgetown as a potential exception). So what then is clouding their thinking?
So I think I have had a breakthrough. I stumbled across a brilliant essay written by Mark Oppenheimer in Tablet Magazine. He interviews two of America’s leading holocaust deniers. They historically have collaborated but have recently fallen out. It is a fascinating read and illustrates how, although they champion the same issue, they do it for different reasons and have different goals. It is most certainly worth your time. It’s presented in four parts:
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/7264/the-denial-twist/
One of the deniers just fancies himself a libertarian who takes unpopular and shocking opinions just, well just because he is a “skeptic” and wants to exercise his free speech. The other is a very smart guy who is very well read and has an incredible breadth of knowledge. He even has a Masters Degree in European history from Indiana. This is the analysis that struck me and to my mind is analogous to conspiracy theorists in general.
But as one professor of mine, who had worked as a public historian, once told me: “Beware the history buff.” The buff—as opposed to the scholar, or the curious peruser, or the dilettante—eats up all this knowledge but can’t properly digest it. He (most buffs seem to be male) cannot keep facts in perspective; he fails at precisely the task the scholar is good at, figuring out which facts matter most, which pieces of evidence to privilege, what to weigh more than what. So a particular truth—that there are a lot of Jewish executives in Hollywood, or that African Americans commit more crimes, per capita, than whites—assumes an outsized importance. With no ability to create proper contexts for facts, the buff is in danger of becoming either a conspiracy theorist or a bigot, or both. This is why there is so much crossover between the communities of, say, 9/11 skeptics and anti-Semites. Conspiracy theorists and bigots are people with faulty judgment casting about for answers; but whereas the conspiracy theorist needlessly increases the complexity of the world, the bigot needlessly simplifies. “The Jews have secret meetings where they plan the world economy,” says the conspiracy theorist; “the Jews are treacherous, bad people,” says the bigot.
I think in our current 24 hour news cycle, a billion blogs, confirmation-bias driven discourse this commentary is right on target. An argument can be made to support anything, but we are failing to properly evaluate the foundations for these arguments. More often than not preconditioned ideology determines (predetermines?) conclusions and no one has the skill, the time, or the courage to challenge her or his own philosophy.
So we have a fundamental problem and I think we are all predisposed to this type of thinking. The problem defined nicely by Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptics magazine. “You want to have a mind open enough to accept radical new ideas; but not so open that your brains fall out.” This is what happening to all of us.
We recognize this easily when it comes to wild conspiracy foolishness but not so much in daily political banter. This to me is the biggest hindrance to finding some common ground.