Orange Coyote

-->In his March 12, New York Times op-ed, literary theorist Stanley Fish offered a very pure example of the Epstein-Sowell-Krauthammer (hereafter, ESK) law. What is the ESK law? Charles Krauthammer summed it up when he wrote in a 2002 column:

Dear Editor:

Bruce Ackerman makes a compelling case that the Vice-presidency is a “design flaw” in the constitutional order created by our founders. But he neglects what the vice-presidential pick tells us in modern elections.

One of the most important things that a President does is to appoint people. The federal government is far too big for one person to run alone, so (according to the Heritage Foundation) a President must make about 3000 appointments, from his nominations of Supreme Court Justices and Cabinet Secretaries to much lower-level government officials. But the only personnel decision that voters get to see before the election is the vice-presidential pick.

So if the vice-presidency is to be abolished, may I suggest that presidential nominees instead nominate all or part of their Cabinet before the election? This would give voters some idea of whom the President would appoint and how he would make decisions. This would also give voters a better idea of what to expect from a President’s administration than they now have. (A similar proposal, but one including a vice-president, was described by the late M. Scott Peck in The Different Drum as a “community presidency”.)

I recently had an on-line discussion with a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. This was obviously not a scientific survey of conspiracy believers, but I have no reason to suspect that he was not representative. Nonetheless, I think I can draw some interesting conclusions about these conspiracy theorists (in spite of the extremely limited sample) from our exchange:

1. There is no evidence for the conspiracy theories being offered.
2. Those touted as experts are often making claims far from their fields of expertise.
3. Conspiracy theorists cite a lot of poor quality scholarship. (This is common in pseudo-sciences.)
4. True believers are often unwilling or unable to acknowledge rather simple errors.

And perhaps most disturbingly:

5. There is an element of the extreme left-wing that hates American conservatives more than Arab terrorists so much that they are willing to blame American officials for the 9/11 atrocity in spite of the lack of evidence. Apparently this is also true for an element of the extreme right-wing, but it was clearly a leftist that I was debating.

So in the second letter here, Dr. Sandra Sutphen is mistaken about who the conspiracy theorists are. It's not just rightist kooks who are conspiracy mongering. All such nonsense that I've heard personally has come from leftists (who, incidentally, are not kooky on non-political topics). I realize that my sample is probably biased, but 21st century conspiracy mongering is hardly a phenomenon of the right.

Sam Harris wrote a brilliant op-ed piece in last week's L.A. Times, but he engages in a bit of lazy moral equivalence when he writes:

Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies.

Troubling? Indeed. But "nearly as troubling"? Hardly. The comedian Bill Maher may have said it best when he said that "their" religious fanatics are scary while "ours" are merely funny. (I'd be grateful if someone knows his precise words, or can link to them, would post this in the comments.)

So why should we find Christian rightists less scary? Besides the obvious, when Christian rightists hold political offices in this country (the U.S.A.), they do not discuss Biblical prophecy in their official capacity. I don't much care what they say in their churches on Sunday, although I'm not aware of anything significant any politician has said there either. One might argue that I should be scared by "the end is near preaching" even if politicians are smart enough not to endorse it in public.

But I'm not scared because Americans (who are hardly unique here) of all kinds of ideologies seem pretty good at compartmentalizing their irrationalities. And this is a good thing! That is, many, if not most of us, have some loopy thing we believe. But we are still able to be competent, intelligent people, because we keep our crazy idea isolated. That is, someone can believe the end is near on Sunday, and then work and save for the future from Monday to Friday.

So it's not mere irrational beliefs that scare me. (I suspect that we all have those.) What scares me is those who fail to contain those beliefs.

Charles Krauthammer today calls attention to the irony of saying "Don't call us violent or we'll attack you." This is truly ironic, for I cannot imagine a surer way to convince someone that they are accurate in their accusation. Thomas Vaughan Church describes this as hypocrisy. In some sense it is, but the intention cannot be to convince. As Krauthammer says, “The point is intimidation.” It seems to work quite well at that, so this ironic behavior is actually quite rational, in that it has the desired effect of silencing some (perhaps many) critics.

This post should start a Technorati Profile for this blog.

But also note the following amusing (but meaningless) rating for this blog:

Phil Molé (writing in eSkeptic) does a very nice job explaining why there is NO evidence supporting the 9/11 conspiracy theories. He then gave a number of reasons why these stories are believed regardless of this. But I think that he missed one important cause, and this has to do with the nature of gossip. Conspiracy theories are a kind of rumor, and like other rumors, one is more likely to believe and pass on one which tend to confirm what you already believe or want to believe. (Thus rumors tend to tell us more about the person who tells them than what the world is like.) But another purpose of gossip is to hurt (or attempt to do so) the person you are gossiping about. You are less likely to pass on a juicy bit of gossip about someone you care about.

Molé, reporting on a 911truth.org conference he attended, observes that those conspiracy theorists do not act as if they “believe what they are saying”:

Here was a group of about 400 people gathered to openly discuss the evil schemes of the U.S. government, whom they accuse of horrible atrocities in the service of establishing a police state. But if America really was a police state with such terrible secrets to protect, surely government thugs would have stormed the lecture halls and arrested many of those present, or would at the very least have conducted behind the scenes arrests and jailed the movement’s leaders. Yet even the most vocal leaders of the 9/11 Truth Movement are still going strong, and no one at the conference seemed very worried about government reprisals. This fact seemingly indicates that at some level, the conspiracy theorists themselves don’t really believe what they are saying.

So why might they say it anyway? For the same reason that you might pass on (or make up) a nasty rumor about someone you dislike: it can damage their reputation. Thus gossip can be seen as indirect way of attacking someone. Unable to successfully attack the Bush administration (e.g. in recent elections), conspiracy theories try instead to spread a nasty rumor. Doing so is bound to be counter-productive, as such poisonous discourse will make many of us likely to regard such people as kooks and dismiss their legitimate criticism out of hand. However, it may be that poisoning the discourse, and thus the body politic, is precisely what is desired (perhaps to make governance more difficult).

So when Sam Harris, in a must-read article from Monday’s L.A. Times, writes:

A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.

I don’t believe that these poll respondents are being honest. Instead, I take their answers as a swipe against the Bush administration. Thus the poll is really a measure of hostility rather than belief. And these numbers demonstrate that the conspiracy theorists have been somewhat successful in poisoning the body politic.

What is the appeal of conspiracy theories?

The terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy have several things in common. They were terrible events that remain seared in the memories of all Americans who are old enough to remember them. And they’ve both given rise to numerous conspiracy theories. Because there is no evidence for these conspiracies, mutually contradictory conspiracy theories are advocated, based on the prejudices of the believer. For JFK’s killing, stories about Cubans, the Mafia, and the CIA circulated. Regarding 9/11, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists blame Israel, anti-Americans blame Bush, and pro-lifers blame abortion. Peter Bagge’s cartoon at: http://reason.com/hod/cartoon.pb090602.shtml makes this point much more eloquently than I can. (A picture is indeed worth 1000 words.) It is interesting that there seems to be a positive correlation in believing in conspiracy theories for both these events.

Appeals to ignorance (we don’t know what caused X, so you should accept my far-fetched hypothesis) are a common part of conspiratorial arguments, but I think there is a more fundamental fallacy. It is the expectation that causes should be proportional to effects. (Does anyone know if this fallacy has a proper name?) That is, it should not be so that a loser like Lee Harvey Oswald should be able to bring down the President, so he must not have. The naturalistic fallacy, confusing what is so with what ought to be, is clearly at work here. But I think there is a bit more.

These two events had a big emotional impact on Americans. And the explanations, a lone gunman and a group of foreign terrorists, were emotionally unsatisfying to many, even if they were correct. So the conspiracy theories are believed not based on any evidence for them, but because they are more emotionally satisfying to the believer. Thus, they are a lot like religious beliefs, and seem to be held with the same fervency.