Are Conspiracy Theorists Epistemically Vicious?

1 Are Conspiracy Theorists Epistemically Vicious? CHARLES R PIGDEN 1. Introduction Are conspiracy theorists epistemically vicious? That’s a question that smacks of the classroom, since outside of philosophy departments we don’t normally talk of epistemic, cognitive or intellectual vices. But in fact the opinion that conspiracy theorists are epistemically vicious is a widespread one, though people tend not to put the point in precisely those terms. Conspiracy theorists are widely derided as crazy, stupid or irrational, so much so that many conspiracy theorists are anxious to avoid the label even if they are, rather obviously, propounding a conspiracy theory. (‘I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but …’ – how often have you heard that from self-protective pundits and journalists timidly disposed to postulate a conspiracy but terrified of being condemned as a kook?) However, the craziness or stupidity of conspiracy theorists is not the kind of craziness or stupidity that arouses compassion or sympathy. People don't say, ‘Poor things, it's no wonder that they believe in conspiracy theories given the voices in their heads/low IQs /or genetic deficiencies.’ The thought seems to be that conspiracy theorists could do better. It is not that they haven’t got what it takes to be rational human beings. Rather they have got what it takes but they are falling down on the job. It is not that the cognitive apparatus of conspiracy theorists is defective. Rather it is a serviceable apparatus that they are (perhaps willfully) misusing. If they pulled their intellectual socks up, if they tried a bit harder, they would not be so silly. Thus a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories is less like an illness or a congenital defect and more like a moral failing. It’s a bad intellectual habit that people really ought to kick – in short, it’s an intellectual, epistemic or cognitive vice. It may be one of those vices to which many of us are naturally predisposed, like overeating or adultery. But there are some tendencies, however natural, that we really ought to resist. That, or something like it, is the conventional wisdom. It has distinguished supporters, some of whom are more forgiving than others. Quassim Cassam (a former fellow of Wadham and Knightsbridge Professor at Cambridge, currently teaching at Warwick) is commendably blunt. He invents an imaginary conspiracy theorist, Oliver, who is obviously intended as a stand-in for all those real-life conspiracy theorists whose intellectual vices Cassam wants to denounce. Oliver subscribes to the thesis that 9/11 was an inside job. 2 Oliver believes what he does because that is the kind of thinker he is or, to put it more bluntly, because there is something wrong with how he thinks … The key to what [conspiracy theorists] end up believing is how they interpret and respond to the vast quantities of relevant information at their disposal … Oliver isn’t mad (or at least, he needn’t be). Nevertheless, his beliefs about 9/11 are the result of the peculiarities of his intellectual constitution – in a word, of his intellectual character. (Cassam, 2015.) And it is pretty obvious that so far as Cassam is concerned, Oliver’s character is a bad one, that is, that he is intellectually vicious. At first blush, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule (2008)1 seem a lot less moralistic and censorious, giving the general impression that although conspiracy theorists are not, in general, performing at an epistemic optimum, the God of Rationality will forgive them for they know not what they do. Conspiracy theorists suffer from ‘crippled epistemologies’ constricted data-sets (‘a sharply limited number of [relevant] informational sources’) which make it difficult for them to arrive at the kind of conspiracy-free theories that Sunstein and Vermeule would approve of. If you are an epistemic prole (so to speak) without easy access to the relevant information, your rationality cannot be faulted if you arrive at beliefs that would be shameful or unbecoming in Harvard professors such as Sunstein and Vermeule. But in fact, the two learned gentlemen are not quite as forgiving as they may, at first, appear. For conspiracy theorists – at least the proponents of ‘false and harmful conspiracy theories’ – acquire their beliefs via belief-forming strategies that are non-rational or a-rational and which might therefore be condemned as vicious. In particular Sunstein and Vermeule suggest that many (mistaken) conspiracy theorists acquire their beliefs because of informational ‘cascades’, a sort of follow-my-leader process whereby the first people to give their opinion can skew the beliefs of all the others in their social set. In other words, conspiracy theorists are rather like high school students in a Hollywood teen movie succumbing to peer pressure, and, as everyone knows, that is a Bad Thing2. Thus the implication seems to be that conspiracy theorists would be better cognitive agents if they were a bit less conformist and a bit more critical. If they are not exactly epistemically vicious (a piece of terminology that is a tad too moralistic for social-scientific types such as Susntein and Vermeule), they would at least be more virtuous if they were evidence-driven thinkers rather than the relatively passive products of their intellectual milieux. (A possible slogan might be ‘Just say ‘No’ to informational cascades!’). 1 Sunstein, C. and Vermeule, A. 2008, ‘Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 17, Number 2, 2009, pp. 202–227. Henceforward S&V. 2 See for instance the Head Girl Kathryn Merteuil in Richard Kumble’s movie Cruel Intentions: ‘When I'm tempted by peer pressure, I turn to God, He helps me’’ – though God in this instance turns out to be a private stash of cocaine concealed in Kathryn’s rosary. 3 I shall be arguing, however, that unless we adopt a question-begging definition of conspiracy theories, there is nothing inherently vicious about believing or being disposed to believe conspiracy theories. There are, of course, plenty of conspiracy theories that it is vicious to believe, theories so far-fetched, absurd or unlikely that you cannot believe them without exhibiting some kind of intellectual vice. For instance, there are theories that you would be unlikely to accept without an irrational hatred of the alleged conspirators. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are often like this as are some anti-American conspiracy theories. (But by the same token there are conspiracy theories that a politically literate person would be unlikely to reject without an irrational fondness for the alleged conspirators – for example, the theory that Stalin conspired to kill, torture and incarcerate huge numbers of mostly innocent people during the Great Terror or the theory that the Bush administration conspired to kidnap suspected terrorists before flying them to foreign parts were they were to be incarcerated and tortured by compliant governments.) Indeed, it is possible to believe quite sensible conspiracy theories in an intellectually vicious way, as when somebody is unduly dogmatic in subscribing to a conspiracy that is in fact correct, or subscribes to a theory on the basis of flimsy or deficient evidence, when adequate evidence is available. Wishful thinking is a very common vice and it is usually vicious to believe a conspiracy theory (as indeed any other kind of theory) because you would like it to be true even if it is in fact correct and there is plenty of evidence is in its favor3. But when it is vicious to believe a conspiracy theory, it is vicious to believe it (in that way and at that time) because it is vicious to believe it (in that way and at that time). It is not vicious to believe it just because it is a conspiracy theory. Would Sunstein, Vermeule or Cassam disagree? Cassam is willing to concede that some conspiracy theories are true, Watergate being his prime (indeed, his only) example. Since he presumably does not think it vicious to believe a well-authenticated theory or to investigate a theory that turns out to be true, this suggests that in his opinion there is at least one conspiracy theory that it is now virtuous to believe and that it was once virtuous to investigate. Thus it is not necessarily vicious to believe a conspiracy theory once it has been proven, or to investigate it beforehand (which involves being ready to believe it if that is what the evidence suggests). So he might well agree that there is nothing inherently vicious about believing or being disposed to believe conspiracy theories as such. However, he does say that ‘mostly [conspiracy theories] are bunkum’. This delightfully old-fashioned expression is defined on internet dictionaries as insincere or foolish 3 Is wishful thinking always vicious? Not always perhaps. Consider those cases where (to paraphrase Hamlet) thinking makes [or helps to make] it so – including some cases in which the thinking has to be collective. Somebody believes that an ‘unelectable’ candidate can win because they would like it to be true. The candidate stands and more people start to believe that perhaps he has a chance because they like him so much and they too would like to think that he can win. The process starts to snowball and, before long, hardened cynics, not given to wishful thinking (or people who wish it were otherwise), start to believe that maybe, just maybe, the candidate can win. And so Jeremy Corbyn becomes the leader of the Labour party. When wishes can make it happen wishful thinking need not be wrong. 4 talk, nonsense or claptrap. Since Cassam does not seem to be accusing conspiracy theorists of ‘insincere speechmaking by a politician intended merely to please local constituents,’ it is claptrap that is the operative concept here. So if most conspiracy theories are not just false but bunkum or claptrap, then this suggests two things: a) that in Cassam’s opinion, the vast majority of conspiracy theories are too silly to be worth investigating, and b) that simply being a conspiracy theory is in some sense, a claptrap-making characteristic. Just as (according to intuitionist philosophers such as Sir David Ross4) being an infliction of pain is a wrong-making property of an act even though it is not always wrong to inflict pain, so being a conspiracy theory (according to Cassam) is a bunkummaking property of a theory even though there are some conspiracy theories that are not bunkum. And if being a conspiracy theory is a bunkum-making property, that presumably means that being a conspiracy theory is vicious-making property (that is, a property that makes it vicious to believe such a theory) even though there are some conspiracy theories that it is virtuous to believe. If this is correct, then Cassam does indeed disagree with me, despite the fact that, in his opinion, there are one or two conspiracy theories to which we can subscribe with a clean intellectual conscience. What about Sunstein and Vermeule? Here we have what might be described as a large print/small print problem. In a dodgy contract the large print suggests a good deal which is ‘qualified away’ in the small print so as to radically reduce the benefits and ramp up the costs. (Think of those internet contracts which we all cheerfully agree to without really reading them in which we sell our souls to Satan in the subclauses.) With Sunstein and Vemeule it’s the other way round. The upfront rhetoric of their paper suggests a bad deal for conspiracists, a generalized hostility to conspiracy theorists and conspiracy theorizing, which is belied by the careful qualifications in the body of the text. Consider for example, Sunstein and Vermeule’s title: ‘Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures’. If we think of theories as things uttered, written down or embodied in people’s brains, they are obviously subject to causal explanation, just like every other non-abstract entity. This goes for true theories and false theories, rational theories and absurd theories and a fortiori for conspiracy theories since they are obviously theories of some kind. But unless we are cognitive scientists, for whom every mental item is grist to their explanatory mill, we do not normally talk about the causes of beliefs that we take to be true or routinely rational. Given that I do in fact own a blue Ford Ka, and that I have owned it for some time, it would be a bit odd, and even offensive, for somebody to go about ostentatiously looking for the causes of my belief that I own a blue Ford Ka. This is not because my belief is uncaused but because the chief causes of my belief include both the blue Ford Ka itself and a functioning set of perceptual and cognitive 4 Ross, W.D. 1930, ch. 2 (though in conformity with the upbeat, if solemn, tone of his book he concentrates on rightmaking properties rather than wrong-making properties). See also Irwin, 2009, chs. 87 and 90. 5 capacities that collectively tend to generate true beliefs about salient personal facts. If we are not cognitive scientists, to talk about the causes of somebody’s theories or beliefs is to suggest or imply (where the implication is cancellable) that the beliefs in question are false or irrational, and that they are therefore in need of a non-rational, causal explanation. And that is what Sunstein and Vermeule seem to be suggesting about conspiracy theories in general. We need a causal explanation for most conspiracy theories since they are largely untrue or unbelievable, at least in the sense that it would be irrational and maybe vicious for sophisticated folk like themselves to believe them. Moreover, if conspiracy theories need to be ‘cured’ this suggests that they are not just false and irrational but actually diseases, if not of the individual psyche, then perhaps of the body politic. Thus the title suggests that conspiracy theories as such are not only irrational but actually dangerous, an implication echoed in the title of Sunstein’s solo book, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas (2015). But the text of the paper is not quite consistent with the implicatures of the title. Sunstein and Vermeule define a conspiracy theory as an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who attempt to conceal their role (at least until their aims are accomplished). (S&V, p. 205.) And they admit that given this definition ‘some conspiracy theories have turned out to be true, and [that given this] definition, they do not cease to be conspiracy theories for that reason’. Furthermore there are some societies where conspiracies are quite common, which means that suspecting them or being inclined to believe them (that is, by developing conspiracy theories) is, or can be, a perfectly rational strategy, and hence not intellectually vicious. ‘In a closed society, secrets are far easier to keep, and distrust of official accounts makes a great deal of sense. In such societies, conspiracy theories are both more likely to be true and harder to show to be false’ (S&V, p. 209). Thus it is not conspiracy theories as such that need to be causally explained or politically cured – rather it is a subclass of conspiracy theories: ‘false, harmful, and unjustified conspiracy theories’ (S&V, p. 204). So the large print claim suggested by the title – that conspiracy theories in general are ‘false and unjustified’ (thus requiring a causal explanation) and ‘harmful’ (thus requiring a ‘cure’) – metamorphoses into the small print claim that false, unjustified and harmful conspiracy theories are false, harmful, and unjustified. And to that we can all agree. It is, of course a close cousin to the equally uncontroversial thesis that conspiracy theories that it is vicious to believe are theories that it is vicious to believe. It would have been bit less misleading if Sunstein and Vermeule had entitled their paper ‘False, Harmful and Unjustified Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures’ (that is, if the large print had matched the small print). Nonetheless, if we read their article carefully it seems that so far as they are concerned, being a conspiracy theory is not, in itself, a bunkum-making property. 6 But that would be a bit too swift. For Sunstein and Vermeule think that although it is not ‘logically impossible, even in free societies, [for] conspiracy theories [to be] true, ... institutional checks make it less likely, in such societies, that powerful groups can keep dark secrets for extended periods, at least if those secrets involve illegal or nefarious conduct’. So although ‘conspiracy theories are widespread even in open societies, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France; ... such theories are less likely to be either true or justified in such societies’. (S&V, p. 209.) Whatever may be the case for lesser breeds without the law, the nature of ‘open’ and – sotto voce – Western societies is such that conspiracy theories involving Western governments are unlikely to be true, and hence unlikely to be justified. Since the people who believe these mostly untrue and unjustified theories display a characteristic range of cognitive defects, it seems that Sunstein and Vermeule subscribe to a qualified version of Cassam’s thesis: being a conspiracy theory about the dark doings of recent Western governments or government agencies is indeed a bunkum-making property, though not all such theories are bunkum. I shall be arguing that this thesis is, false. Not only is there is nothing inherently suspect about conspiracy theories as such – there is nothing inherently suspect about conspiracy theories involving Western governments. But I go further. It is not just that it is not necessarily or even usually vicious to be a conspiracy theorist – it is intellectually vicious not to be a conspiracy theorist. That is, the person who does not subscribe to some conspiracy theories is an idiot in the Athenian sense of the word – someone too politically purblind to take an active interest in current affairs. The principled non-conspiracist will have blinded herself to salient facts making her far too ignorant to make the grade as a citizen in a democratic society. Unless we adopt a question-begging definition of a conspiracy theory, the policy suggested by some polemicists – that of systematic skepticism towards conspiracy theories as such – would be a recipe for intellectual suicide. Despite the careless rhetoric however, that is not what anti-conspiracists usually mean. The policy that they are really in favor of is a systematic skepticism, about conspiracy theories involving Western governments or Western government agencies. It is conspiracy theories involving Western government or Western governments agencies that it is vicious to believe, whereas it can be virtuous and indeed laudable to believe in conspiracy theories involving (for example) Arab dictators and terrorist groups. Bush and Blair5 were loud their scorn for conspiracy theories., though they combined to launch a war on Iraq on the basis of not one, but three conspiracy theories (the theory that the events of 9/11 were due to a conspiracy on the part of al-Qaeda; the theory that the regime of Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al-Qaeda, making him in some sense an 5 For Blair on conspiracy theories, see Pigden, 2007, ‘Complots of Mischief’. For Bush, see below. 7 accessory to the events of 9/11; and the theory that the regime of Saddam Hussein had successfully conspired to acquire – or retain – weapons of mass destruction). As Kathryn Olmsted puts it: ‘Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th’ President Bush said on November the 10th 2001, shortly before his own administration started spreading outrageous conspiracy theories concerning September 11th and Saddam Hussein’. (Olmsted, 2009. p. 9.) To restore Blair and Bush to consistency (if not to intellectual honesty) we must suppose that by ‘conspiracy theory’ they did not just mean a theory that posits a conspiracy on the part of somebody or other, but a theory which posits a conspiracy on the part of people like them, that is a conspiracy involving Western governments or Western government agencies or perhaps commercial interests related to the government. So it is a conspiracy theory (in this sense) if MI5 or the CIA or maybe the Exxon corporation are supposed to have done the deed, but not if the alleged conspirators are foreign folk from far, far away. However, I shall be arguing that although a principled skepticism about conspiracy theories involving Western governments would not be quite as intellectually suicidal as a principled skepticism about conspiracy theories per se, to adopt such a strategy would be intellectually vicious, since it would blind such skeptics to salient facts, to threats to their liberty and to crimes that might be perpetrated in their names. Vice, Virtue and the Intellect The concept of an ‘epistemic virtue’ is not in common use, at least not under that name. It is not often in daily life that you hear somebody praised as epistemically virtuous or lauded as an epistemic saint or hero. If a funeral eulogy includes the line ‘Her epistemic virtues shone like a beacon in the darkness of an irrational age,’ you can bet your bottom dollar that the dear departed was a professional philosopher, as are most of the congregation. The same goes for the concept of an epistemic vice. Consider: ‘In some ways he was an OK guy, but epistemically he was a vicious bastard.’ Though not everybody thinks (especially after a few too many drinks) that you should not speak ill of the dead, that’s not a line that you are likely to hear at a real life wake, no matter how boozy or bad-tempered. However, just because we do not consciously employ the concept of an epistemic virtue, this does not mean that we do not recognize and commend traits that might reasonably be regarded as such. And the same goes for epistemic vices. If we praise a journalist for his nose for a good story, if we commend a judge for her skill in 8 cutting through the complexities of a case and providing a fair and balanced summing up, we are commending them for their epistemic virtues. For epistemic or intellectual virtues are habits of mind that are useful in arriving at important truths and avoiding what may be pernicious errors. The gifted journalist will ferret out facts that might otherwise remain concealed and that the voting public needs to know about. The clear-minded judge, by her helpful summings up, makes it more likely that the genuinely guilty will go to jail – that is, that useful truths will be believed – and that those who have not been shown to be guilty will get off – that is, that pernicious falsehoods will be rejected. (A mistaken verdict of ‘guilty’ is, among other things, an epistemic disaster, especially for the accused. The defendant is damaged because falsehoods are believed.) To paraphrase Hume, we may say that ‘Epistemic Merit or Virtue consists altogether in the possession of mental qualities, useful (if not always agreeable) to the person himself or to others, either from their propensity to arrive at salient truths or their tendency to avoid falsehoods, especially those with pernicious consequences’. (Hume, Enquires II, 9.1/268.) (The salience of the truths needs to be stressed. Although, like Bertrand Russell (1928), I think that there is lot to be said for ‘useless’ knowledge, it is not necessarily virtuous to pile up trivial truths. There is, for example, something epistemically sleazy, about pursuing the ancestry of Princess Diana down internet rabbit-holes when you ought to be researching papers on conspiracy theories.) Epistemic vices are the reverse of epistemic virtues. If we say of some journalist that she is a mere stenographer who would not recognize a story if it bit her in the leg, if we complain of some judge that his summings up are prejudiced and confused, then it seems that we are condemning them for their epistemic or intellectual vices. For intellectual vices are habits of thought that make people either less likely to arrive at salient truths or more prone to produce and disseminate falsehoods, often with pernicious effects. The stenographer journalist who prefers the cachet of cozy chats with the great and the good to checking the veracity of their pronouncements is likely to end up as the dupe of the elite. Important truths that they don’t care to tell will remain unknown (at least in so far as her journalistic efforts are concerned) and the fictions and half-truths that they find convenient are likely to be disseminated. Thus the stenographer journalist is falling down on the job as an agent of democracy – the powerful cannot be called to account if their falsehoods and evasions remain unchallenged, and many of the powerful are prone to both evasion and falsehood. The confused and prejudiced judge is more likely than his epistemically virtuous counterpart to help let off the guilty and condemn the innocent. Thus their intellectual failings impede the discovery and dissemination of useful truths and encourage the perpetuation of pernicious falsehoods. 9 Epistemic virtues are role-relative, context-relative and end-relative. A trait that may be virtuous in one person may be vicious in another. In a reasonably decent society it is a virtue in the average citizen to be a trusting sort of person. The default attitude should be that the people you have dealings with are fairly truthful and honest, unless you have a specific reason to think otherwise. In a society without this basic level of honesty, transaction costs tend to escalate as everybody has to insure themselves against being lied to or cheated. Every assurance has to be doubly sure. To act as if most people are dishonest when in fact they are not is to manifest an epistemic vice, as you incur the transaction costs of living in a dishonest society without any benefit, since nobody is, in fact, trying to cheat you. (And unless you are very tactful your unreasonable suspicions are likely to cause offense.) But it is very different if you happen to be a detective. As they used to say on Minder, ‘There are a lot of rogues and tea-leaves about,’ and though this may not be true generally, it is likely to be true in the detective’s line of work. Lying and cheating are likely be quite common amongst the people she has dealings with in her professional life. Hence the trusting attitude that is an epistemic virtue in the average citizen, is a vice in the detective. We can also see the role-relativity of the epistemic virtues if we revert to the judge and the journalist. Though the intellectual traits that make a good journalist have a lot in common with the traits that make a just judge, they are not precisely the same. They both have to be evidence-driven critical thinkers with a talent for logical thought and the capacity to distinguish wishes from facts. But the judge, when summing up, has to confine herself to the evidence as presented in court. It is not her job, nor would it be a virtue in her, to second-guess the evidence or to look for the story behind the story. Indeed, there is a sense in which it would be a vice in her (at least in her judicial capacity) to be too curious. It is otherwise with the journalist. It is his job, if he is an investigative journalist, to have a suspicious mind, to be on the look-out for dark doings which he can expose to the cleansing sunlight of public scrutiny. Indeed, as we shall see, Sunstein and Vermeule suggest an argument that would make a propensity to conspiracy theories a virtue in the journalist but not in the average joe. Epistemic virtues are also context-relative. When the detective and the investigative journalist return to their families at night, they had better check their suspicious minds at the door. A tendency to look for lies, conspiracies and interested motives may be all very well during the working-day, but it is likely to be disastrous round the family dinnertable. Finally, epistemic virtues and vices are end-relative. If an epistemic virtue is a propensity to discover salient truths or to avoid pernicious falsehoods, then whether a given trait is a virtue will depend on which truths are regarded as salient or useful and which falsehoods are deemed pernicious. And that in turn depends on the ends you have in view. A truth might be salient given one set of ends but useless given another. Conversely, a falsehood might be pernicious given one set of objectives and harmless given another. Hence a tendency to discover and disseminate a 10 particular range of truths might be virtuous given one set of ends but indifferent, or even vicious, given a different set of objectives. Similarly with epistemic vices. It may be that a tendency to arrive at falsehoods is always vicious (I have no strong intuitions on this point), but such a tendency is lot more vicious if the falsehoods in question are pernicious. And whether a falsehood counts as pernicious depends, in part, upon the ends assumed. This is important because some (perhaps misguided) critics have suggested that Professor Sunstein has an unduly passive conception of citizenship. Of course, the citizens get to choose between a set of pre-selected leaders every few years or so, but apart from that they are subjects to be ‘nudged’ not participants to be consulted. As Jeremy Waldron puts it: Sunstein’s idea is that we who know better should manipulate the choice architecture so that those who are less likely to perceive what is good for them can be induced to choose the options that we have decided are in their best interest. (Waldron, 2014.) Now the truths that are useful for ‘those less likely to perceive what is good for them’ may not be the same as the truths that an active citizen needs to be aware of. Errors harmless to the one might be pernicious to the other, since the active citizen has more ambitious purposes. Thus a different conception of what the good citizen should be like does not just entail a different set of moral virtues and vices - it also suggests a different set of epistemic virtues and vices. So whether Waldron-like criticisms of Sunstein are justified or not, it is, perhaps, worth stressing that when I discuss whether believing, or being ready to believe, conspiracy theories is an intellectual virtue, I shall be presupposing a more active conception of citizenship than Sunstein’s writings seem to suggest. I shall take a trait to be epistemically virtuous (for the purposes of this discussion) if it assists the active citizen in forming a clear view of current affairs, so that she can use her vote and exercise her civic influence wisely in promoting both the public good and her own individual interests. I shall assume too that such a citizen is not content to be a dupe and does not like to be manipulated, and that she takes dim view of state crimes supposedly committed in her name. Epistemic Virtues versus the Deontics of Belief Conspiracy theories are generally discussed in the context of the ethics of belief and specifically the deontics of belief. Some say that it is (usually) wrong to believe conspiracy theories whereas others contend that it is, or can be, permissible or even obligatory. The idea that it can be right or wrong to believe propositions, dates back to Descartes and beyond (after all, unbelief and heresy were both regarded as sins and not just errors), but it became a big issue in the 19th century with the work of 11 W.K. Clifford (1886) and his pragmatist opponent William James (1897). Clifford imagines a shipowner who (despite the equivocal evidence) convinces himself that his ship is sound, collects the fares of his migrant passengers with a clear and sunny conscience and, with an equally sunny conscience, collects the insurance when the ship goes down with all hands. After all, although the ship was unseaworthy he genuinely believed it to be sound when he sent it to sea. Clifford’s point is not only that it was wrong of the ship-owner to send his ship to sea, but that he was wrong to believe that it was sea-worthy just because he wanted it to be true. Clifford concludes that it is always wrong to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. William James replied in ‘The Will to Believe’ that there are some circumstances – when the issue is live, so that it is possible to believe either of two alternatives6; forced because in some sense you have to choose between them; and momentous – in which it is permissible to believe a proposition (for instance that God exists) even if the evidence is insufficient. Thus they both presuppose that it is sometimes possible to choose to believe. This thesis has been dubbed ‘doxastic voluntarism’ and challenged by recent philosophers, such a Bernard Williams (1973). They contend, in effect, that the choice between two epistemic options can never be ‘live’ in James’s sense. You are presented with the evidence and either you believe or you don’t. And since we cannot choose to believe, there is no point in telling us that we ought to believe this or to disbelieve that. Ought implies can, whence not-can implies not-ought. So since I cannot decide to believe (or disbelieve) a conspiracy theory at will, it cannot be true that I ought to believe (or disbelieve) that theory. I am with Clifford and James on this one. The alleged impossibility of choosing to believe is belied by common sense, not to mention numerous examples. Here is one from Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, which contrives to be both comic and appalling: “When we look at this issue [anthropogenic climate change], we say, This is a recipe for massive increase in government,” Bast [President of the Heartland Institute] told me, concluding that, “Before we take this step, let’s take another look at the science. So conservative and libertarian groups, I think, stopped and said, Let’s not simply accept this as an article of faith; let’s actually do our own research.” (Klein, 2009, p. 37.) 6 James concedes that we cannot choose to believe just anything. The options have to be ‘live’, and what is live differs from one person to the next. ‘If I say to you [the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown] : "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: " Be an agnostic or be Christian," it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.’ James, 1997, p.3. 12 In other words, according one of their own chieftains, rather than accept the necessity for reversing their policies to avert the threat of climate change, these ‘conservative and libertarian groups’ (including the one led by Bast) chose to disbelieve the science. Owing to the energy of their epistemic efforts we probably do not have time to prevent catastrophic climate change. Doxastic voluntarism strikes again. However the beauty of virtue epistemology (addressing the issue of what to think or believe in terms of the concept of an epistemic virtue) is that it enables us to sidestep this problem (that is the philosophic problem that we may not be able to choose to believe, not the real-world problem of Mr Bast’s dangerous beliefs). Perhaps it is impossible to decide what to believe on any given occasion. But we can to choose to cultivate intellectual habits, and since an epistemic virtue is a habit that leads to salient truths, it is possible (though perhaps difficult) to cultivate an epistemic virtue or to kick an epistemic vice. By emphasizing certain lines of thought and de-emphasizing others, we can make ourselves more or less prone to believe (or disbelieve) a conspiracy theory on any given occasion. So we may not be able to control our beliefs directly but we can control them indirectly by cultivating habits of mind, hopefully virtuous ones. (What is wrong with Mr Bast and his fellow-conservatives is that they have somehow gotten into bad habits. Perhaps we should stage an intervention.) Thus the philosophical problem is sidestepped. What to Believe Now? (to quote David Coady’s book title) is no longer the question7. Instead we ask ourselves what belief-forming habits we ought to cultivate – a systematic skepticism towards conspiracy theories or a propensity to believe if that is what the evidence suggests? Whether this propensity is a virtue or a vice depends on whether conspiracy theories are likely to be true. Conspiracies, Elites and the Open Society Sunstein and Vermeule admit that on their definition (according to which conspiracy theories involve the machinations of powerful people, who attempt to conceal their role) some conspiracy theories have turned out to be true without thereby ceasing to be conspiracy theories: The Watergate hotel room used by Democratic National Committee was, in fact, bugged by Republican officials, operating at the behest of the White House. In the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency did, in fact, administer LSD and related drugs under Project MKULTRA, in an effort to investigate the possibility of “mind 7 I should add that although Coady agrees with Clifford, James and myself that it is sometimes possible to choose to believe, he too is happy to accept the fallback position that we can control our beliefs indirectly by cultivating habits of mind. See Coady, 2012, pp. 12-17 for a brief but excellent discussion of these issues. 13 control8.” Operation Northwoods, a rumored plan by the Department of Defense to simulate acts of terrorism and to blame them on Cuba, really was proposed by highlevel officials (though the plan never went into effect). (S&V, p. 206.) Nonetheless, the rhetorical effect of their definition is to diminish the plausibility of conspiracy theories by excluding as non-conspiratorial all those well-established conspiracy theories in which the conspirators involved are not particularly powerful – conspiracies on the part of small-time politicians, corrupt officials, minor Mafiosi, millionaire (as opposed to billionaire) businessmen, low-level terrorists and provincial assassins. There are quite a lot of well-proven conspiracies (and hence well-proven conspiracy theories) in which the leading conspirators are, as The Godfather’s Hyman Roth would have put it, ‘small potatoes’. By ignoring, all those convictions for conspiracy and racketeering, all those IEDs planted in secret at the dead night by people who did not want to be detected and many of the dubious municipal goings-on that get reported in the non-satirical sections of Private Eye, Sunstein and Vermeule create the impression, without actually saying so, that conspiracies (and hence true conspiracy theories) are few and far between. [Sunstein enhances this impression in his recent solo rewrite by adding ‘In 1947, space aliens did, in fact, land in Roswell, New Mexico, and the government covered it up. (Well, maybe not.)’ (Sunstein, 2015, p. 4.) What this little joke insinuates is that once you have acknowledged Watergate, MKULTRA and Northwoods, the tale of US government conspiracies comes to an end. Sadly this is not so.] But even if we accept Sunstein and Vermeule’s slanted definition, and agree that a conspiracy theory isn’t a conspiracy theory unless some of the alleged the conspirators are powerful people, the thesis that they insinuate is still patently false. Even in the USA, which is alleged to be an open society, proven conspiracy theories featuring potent conspirators are in fact fairly plentiful. Let us start by noting some weasel words in Sunstein and Vermeule’s admission: ‘Operation Northwoods, a rumored plan by the Department of Defense to simulate acts of terrorism and to blame them on Cuba, really was proposed by high-level officials (even though it was never implemented)’. Well, if the plan was really proposed it was not merely rumored, and if you examine the relevant document in detail it turns out that some of the acts of terrorism proposed were to be perpetrated and not just simulated (though the Joint Chiefs of Staff showed a laudable desire to minimize civilian casualties by resorting to faked acts of terror – as opposed to false flag acts of terror – whenever possible). (Joint Chiefs of Staffs, 1962.) Secondly the Watergate hotel 8 A subprogram within MKUILTRA was ‘Operation Midnight Climax’. ‘In Greenwich Village and San Francisco, CIA officers hired prostitutes to lure their customers to CIA safe houses, where the hookers slipped LSD and other behaviorchanging drugs into their drinks and agents observed their reactions … the prostitutes also dropped laxatives in the drinks of their unsuspecting customers, dusted them with itching powder and surprised them with stink bombs.’ (Olmsted, 2009, p.176.) As the saying goes, you could not make this stuff up! 14 room was not just bugged but burglarized (twice) by Republican officials and their confederates, and, as at least one of our authors (Sunstein) is old enough to know, the burglaries themselves was only a small part of the Watergate story. What really brought down Nixon was not so much the burglaries as the cover–up which gradually span out of control involving more and more people in a series of conspiracies to pervert the course of justice. (There was the initial attempt at a cover-up and then the cover-up of the cover-up, the diverting of funds to finance the cover-up etc. etc.) Furthermore, in the course of the Watergate affair, all sorts of other conspiracies came to light involving attempts by Nixon and his entourage to harass and defame the regime’s many ‘enemies’. These include the ‘Canuck letter’ fabricated by Nixon’s ‘dirty tricks’ outfit9 to undermine the presidential campaign of the aspiring Democratic contender, Ed Muskie (an operation that proved spectacularly successful, when the harassed Muskie apparently wept in an impassioned response to allegations that his wife had a drinking problem).10 Another was the conspiracy to burglarize the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist (Ellsberg being the man who had leaked the Pentagon papers) with a view to discrediting him as a kook. By the time Watergate was over, 46 Nixonians had been convicted of various offences including burglary, perjury and the obstruction of justice, and Nixon himself only escaped impeachment because his successor, Gerald Ford, had granted him a Presidential pardon. (Wheen, 2000, ch. 4.) However, the conspiracies perpetrated by the Nixon administration at home were as nothing to the conspiracies that they perpetrated abroad. One was the Menu program, a series of secret and illegal bombing raids in Cambodia, initiated by Nixon and Kissinger and kept carefully secret from the Congress, the Press and even parts of the military (hence an ‘event or practice’ largely due ‘to the machinations of powerful people, who attempt[ed] to conceal their role’). This helped to destabilize the Sihanouk regime, leading to the rise of Pol Pot and the deaths of millions of people. The dropping of 108,823 tons of bombs was surely a matter of some pith and moment especially for the people who were killed, maimed and blown up. (Shawcross, 1986, ch. 1.) There is now quite a lot of data on the many other conspiracies in which the Nixon Whitehouse, and in particular Henry Kissinger, played a prominent part. One intriguing example is the conspiracy to kidnap – and maybe assassinate – the Chilean Army Commander Rene Schneider, because Schneider (unlike Nixon) believed that the Constitution required the Chilean Army to allow the Marxist Allende to 9 The dirty tricks actually employed by the aptly named CREEP (the Committee for the Re-Election of the President) were pretty tame compared to the dirty tricks proposed by G.Gordon Liddy, the Committee’s general counsel, in Project Gemstone. Addressing the Attorney General, John Mitchell as ‘General’ (with a German hard ‘G’), he proposed, among other things, an ‘Einsatzgruppe’ which would deal with opponents via ‘Nacht und Nebel’. One hopes that Mitchell, who vetoed this and other schemes largely on the grounds of cost, was not fully aware of the connotations of these expressions. See Wheen, 2009, pp. 112-113. 10 Bernstein and Woodward, 1972, Summers, 2000, pp 381-2. 15 assume power on the obviously frivolous grounds that Allende had won the election. The general was in fact murdered and the people who did it were paid $35000 by the US government (quite a large sum in those days) ‘for humanitarian reasons’. (Hitchens, pp. 61-73.) (Obviously we can’t have the children of anti-democratic assassins going barefoot in Santiago.) Another example is the eventual overthrow of Allende by Pinochet (Hitchens, 2001, chs. 5 & 6.) and a third is the coup against President Archbishop Makarios, which led to the Turkish invasion and the partition of Cyprus (Hitchens, 2001, ch. 7.) And of course, it is not just the Nixon administration that went in for this sort of thing. The Bay of Pigs was a prime example of a failed conspiracy, and Robert MacNamara recounts in his memoir In Retrospect how the Kennedy administration connived at the conspiracy to depose President Ngo Dinh Diem (the nearest thing that South Vietnam had to a democratically elected leader), a conspiracy that led to his murder and that of his brother Nhu. (McNamara, 1996, pp. 52-55.) Ho Chih Minh is said to have commented ‘I can scarcely believe that the Americans could be so stupid’, implying of course that he took it for granted that the Americans were largely responsible for Diem’s deposition and death. The Warren Commission Report on Kennedy’s assassination was, in fact, a cover-up in the sense that the President Johnson did not believe the conclusion he pressured the commission to arrive at, namely that Oswald acted alone. (Johnson feared that Oswald was part of a Castroite conspiracy. If such a conspiracy were discovered it would have forced him to go to war with Cuba with potentially catastrophic effects. Hence the possibility of such a conspiracy had to be burked. See Olmsted, 2009, p. 117 and Dallek, 1998, pp 50-52.) I could go on. Suffice to say that this is a very partial list of just some of the conspiracies that been perpetrated or planned by American governments, government agents or their associates since World War Two. If we add in powerful people who are not government associates, there are even more. For example, whilst I was writing this article, it transpired that the executives of Exxon had conspired to conceal the results of the research that they themselves had commissioned confirming the reality of Global Warming, something they had known about since 1977. ‘This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed – perhaps fatally – the planet’s response to global warming’ (Mckibben, 2015.) Sunstein and Vermeule’s response is to claim that in open society such as the United States, with built–in checks and balances and a fearless and ferocious investigative press, it is difficult to successfully conspire since conspiracies are likely to be found out. Consequently powerful people seldom conspire which means that conspiracy theories are unlikely to be true. Let us try to spell this argument in a bit more detail. 16 1) The USA is an open society. 2) In an open society (with checks and balances and a fearless and ferocious investigative press) conspiracies tend to be found out before very long. 3) Believing 1) & 2) and being moderately rational, potential conspirators in the USA seldom conspire for fear of being found out. 4) Thus conspiracy theories in the USA are unlikely to be true (which means that it isn’t rational to believe them). This suggests a division of epistemic labor with different epistemic virtues for different people depending on their social roles. Investigative journalists, public prosecutors and other officials whose job it is to sniff out corruption and the abuse of power should be prepared to take conspiracy theories seriously, and should be ready to believe in them if they are supported by the evidence. Thus a yen for conspiracy theories is actually a virtue in a certain segment of the elite. But the result of their vigilance is that potential conspirators are deterred from conspiring, so that conspiracies become relatively rare. So it would be a vice in the average joe to formulate conspiracy theories off his own bat since, absent the inside information of the public prosecutor or the investigative reporter, he would be likely to get it wrong. He should only subscribe to conspiracy theories when his betters have established them beyond reasonable doubt. Apart from this, the average citizen should not bother his pretty little head with such things. As for the investigative elite, their motto might be ‘We take conspiracy theories seriously so you don’t have to’. The problem with all this is that it is a complete fantasy. The USA may be an open society, but it is simply not true that its institutions deter potential plotters. Think of the conspiracy to talk up11 the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the attack on Saddam Hussein (a conspiracy that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths) or the much less momentous conspiracy on the part of the NSA to bug the phones of allied potentates such as the Chancellor of Germany or the President of Brazil. Nor is it true, as Sunstein and Vermeule suggest, that in an open society conspiracies seldom go undetected for long. MKULTRA, which they themselves cite, remained secret from its inception in 1953 until 1975, a period of over twenty years. The CIA 11 I choose my words with care. Though there was no doubt a fair bit of actual lying, I don’t think the Bush administration deliberately lied about the presence of WMDs in Iraq – that is I don’t think that they asserted the existence of WMDs believing in their own minds that there were no such things. That would have been politically suicidal as they could have expected to be found out in the end. Rather they talked up the presence of WMDs that they half-believed, hoped or thought it expedient to say might be there. The whole thing was an elaborate compound of deception, self-deception, bullshit (in the sense of Frankfurt 1988) and wishful thinking, plus a vulgar-pragmatist tendency to equate the truth with what it pays, in the short term, to say or believe. As Frank Rich puts it, ‘the very idea of truth [objectively conceived] is an afterthought and an irrelevancy in a culture where the best story wins.’ See Rich, 2007, especially p. 224. 17 conspiracy to subvert the Italian election of 1948 in order to head off a communist-socialist victory did not become public until the 1970s. (Ganser, 2006.) The FBI’s COINTELPRO program, designed to harass communists and other supposed subversives, remained secret from 1956 until 1971 when it was exposed not by the ‘checks and balances’ of the American Constitution, nor even by the unaided investigations of the free press, but by the ‘Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI’ an illegal leftist group which burglarized the FBI’s Pennsylvania office and sent caches of secret documents to the papers. (Olmsted, 2009, pp. 153-4.) That the organization of anticommunist intellectuals, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was a CIA front organization is a fact that remained effectively secret from 1950 until 1967. (See Saunders, 2000, and, even more interestingly, the CIA website12.) Even in an open society, long-term secrecy is not as problematic as Sunstein and Vermeule would have us believe. As for Cassam’s claim that conspiracy theories are ‘mostly bunkum’ this only true in the sense that most theories of any kind – including, for example, philosophical theories – are bunkum. But if it means that being a conspiracy theory is a peculiarly bunkum-making property, his thesis is, well, bunkum. Given the enormous number of well-confirmed conspiracy theories in the historical record, one can only assume that, in the eighteen happy years that Professor Cassam spent teaching at Oxford (I am quoting from his webpage) and that in his subsequent career at Cambridge and at Warwick, he devoted his attention to abstract topics, giving the sordid details of recent and contemporary history the go-by. On the Vices of Anti-Conspiracism So far I have argued that its not necessarily, always, or even unusually vicious to be a conspiracy theorist. Indeed it is sometimes virtuous since many conspiracy theories are not only established historical truths but salient truths so far as the active citizen is concerned. A US citizen not at least vaguely aware of the real-life conspiracies detailed above would not make the grade as an informed political agent. But I want to go further. The policy suggested by some polemicists of systematic skepticism towards conspiracy theories would be a vicious one. Ditto the policy of systematic skepticism towards conspiracy theories on the part of Western governments or their associates. In this section I shall be drawing on previous work (especially Pigden, 2006 and 2015) so I can afford to be brief. First, some obvious points. It is difficult to mount a coup without a conspiracy. If your opponents can see you coming, you are less likely succeed. Hence anyone who is aware that there are such things as coups is bound to be a conspiracy theorist, though they may be 12 http://web.archive.org/web/20060616213245/http://cia.gov/csi/studies/95unclass/Warner.html 18 a bit hazy about the details. Though ‘lone gunmen’ definitely exist, most political assassinations are group efforts and hence the products of conspiracy. Torture, which is forbidden under international law, is usually planned and partly executed in secret. The same goes for ‘disappearances’. Terrorists and guerillas usually plan their operations in secret and their tactics usually involve a good deal of covert activity. Organized crime is a conspiratorial affair, as is government corruption and espionage. If you plan to pervert the course of justice, you are likely to do it in private and unlikely to do it alone. Tax avoidance is unlikely to succeed unless planned and executed in secret, likewise insider trading. These are generally not solo activities. Thus if you are aware of any of these practices you are bound to be a conspiracy theorist since you believe in at least some conspiracies. A systematic skeptic about conspiracy theories could observe the effects of these various activities but would be officially blind to the causes. She could notice the slaughtered bodies but could not allow herself to suppose that anybody had conspired to kill them. She could notice that the money had gone but could not allow herself to suppose that anybody had conspired to steal it. She could notice the cash flowing into the organization’s coffers, but could not suppose that anyone had conspired to fund it. This does not look like a virtuous policy, since she would be depriving herself of the ability to discover salient facts. But there is more. I can prove that you, Dear Reader, are a conspiracy theorist as is every other historically and politically literate person. Since both history and the nightly news are full of coups, assassinations, acts of torture, terrorism, disappearances, corruption, tax avoidance, espionage and organized crime, you can’t believe either history or the nightly news without being some kind of conspiracy theorist. This gives us the following argument: Premise I: Unless you believe that the reports of history books and the nightly news are largely false, you are a conspiracy theorist (since history and the nightly news are choc-a-bloc-with conspiracies). Premise II: If you do believe that the reports of history books and the nightly news are largely false, you are a conspiracy theorist (since your presumably believe that somebody has conspired to fake them). Conclusion: You are a conspiracy theorist13. The only people not impaled on the horns of this dilemma are idiots in the Greek sense of the word – people who take so slight an interest in public affairs that they have no opinion as to whether history and the nightly news have been systematically falsified or not. It is obviously vicious to be 13 I developed this argument in my 2006 and it was refined by David Coady in his 2007. 19 such a person, for though you may avoid believing in any pernicious falsehoods there will be plenty of pertinent truths of which you will be unaware. Furthermore, we can conclude that every politically and historically literate person is a conspiracy theorist. Although a politically and historically literate person may take the nightly news with a grain of salt, you cannot systematically disbelieve or doubt either history or the news without forfeiting your claims to historical and political literacy. But if you cannot be historically and politically literate unless you suppose that, despite ideological distortions, both history and the nightly news are largely true, and if you cannot believe history and the nightly news without being a conspiracy theorist, then you cannot be an historically and politically literate person without being a conspiracy theorist. If you cannot be historically and politically literate without being a conspiracy theorist, you cannot be a consistent conspiracy-skeptic without rendering yourself historically and politically illiterate. Since this would be a recipe for intellectual suicide, rendering the large chunks of the social realm unintelligible, it would be an epistemically vicious policy. Hence a systematic skepticism about conspiracy theories would be epistemically vicious. But what about the restricted policy of a systematic skepticism about conspiracies involving Western governments and Western government agencies? This would not be as catastrophic as a systematic skepticism about conspiracy theories tout court but it would be a disastrous policy nonetheless. Since conspiracies of this kind are actually quite common, the corresponding theories are true, a point that was established in the preceding section. And an intellectual habit that would blind us to important truths would be an epistemic vice. Are conspiracy theorists epistemically vicious? Not necessarily, not always, and maybe not even usually. But it is intellectually vicious to be a consistent conspiracy skeptic. The broad-band skeptic commits intellectual suicide whilst the restricted skeptic blinds herself to facts which, as an active citizen, she really needs to know. Both are vicious, though self-imposed blindness is better than epistemic suicide. 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