by Jonathan Kay
Conspiracism cannot be eradicated any more than we can eradicate nationalism, midlife ennui, psychosis, or any of the other causes cataloged in Chapter 5. But among otherwise mentally healthy and open-minded individuals, it can be minimized by applying the same self-critical, self-aware mindset that has served to stigmatize racism, overt anti-Semitism, and related forms of bigotry in recent decades. As noted in Chapter 2 conspiracist mythologies tend to follow the same predictable pattern: There is no reason why people can’t learn to recognize it.
This is an educational project that, to my knowledge, has never been attempted: For all the damage conspiracy theories have wrought, they traditionally have been regarded as mere intellectual curios, and so conspiracism never has been included in the canon of toxic isms targeted by educators. Instead, the approach has been to attack conspiracism’s symptoms—often implementing a new brand of conspiracism as a cure for the old. Just as the fight against racism begat political correctness, the fight against communism begat McCarthyism, and the John Birch Society; and now, in our own era, the backlash against militant Islam and One World environmentalism has led to the Birthers.
What young minds need are the intellectual tools that not only permit them to identify established conspiracist creeds, but also allow them to identify the common features that bind all conspiratorial ideologies. The ideal time for students to receive these skills is when they are old enough to understand complex, abstract ideas, but before they have been exposed to conspiracism in a systematic way on campus or via the Internet: the freshman year of college. As the example of Luke Rudkowski shows, this also happens to be the time in life when many young people are looking to define their identity through the sort of radical, overarching secular faith conspiracism provides (which is one of the reasons so many college students fall hard for Karl Marx or Ayn Rand).
Of course, there already are numerous American intellectuals and organizations dedicated to the cause of fighting political radicalism, including the debunking of conspiracy theories. These include the James Randi Educational Foundation, an atheistic organization that specializes in refuting claims of paranormal and supernatural phenomena (and which recently has formed an education advisory panel); the Montgomery, Alabama–based Southern Poverty Law Center and Somerville, Massachusetts–based PublicEye.org, both of which take on right-wing conspiracists as part of their mandate to promote civil rights and fight bigotry; and the Skeptics Society, an Altadena, California–based group that describes itself as a “scientific and educational organization of scholars, scientists, historians, magicians, professors and teachers, and anyone curious about controversial ideas, extraordinary claims, revolutionary ideas, and the promotion of science.” (Thanks to his popular articles, books and speaking tours, Michael Shermer, the Skeptics Society’s executive director, and the editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, likely ranks as the most effective debunker of junk science and conspiracy theories in America.) Also worthy of note is Snopes.com, an amateurish-looking but surprisingly authoritative resource for debunking urban legends; and, for vetting claims made by political candidates, Factcheck.org which is run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
But the limitation associated with all of these resources is that they preach mostly to the converted—i.e., mainstream educators, journalists, and activists who already take a deeply skeptical attitude toward conspiracist movements. As explained in Chapter 7, conspiracy theorists themselves tend to cut themselves off from all but the most radical information sources; and regard even independent, well-respected NGOs as complicit in the same power structure that envelops Washington and Wall Street. (This fact helps explain why there are so many more conspiracist books sold on the Internet than debunking books. “Debunking books don’t sell,” one New York City editor warned me when I told him that my original draft of Among the Truthers contained several long chapters explaining the logical fallacies within 9/11 Truth theories. “Conspiracy theorists won’t believe you. And normal people don’t need to be told what you’re telling them. So you have no audience.”)
Moreover, given the low level of trust that Americans have in their political leaders, it is out of the question that Washington, or even state governments, should be directly involved in the sort of educational project I am describing. Consider that in September 2009, when Barack Obama delivered a bland speech to the nation’s students, urging them to work hard at their studies, many conservative Americans attacked the innocuous gesture as a form of statist propaganda—and some even kept their children home. One can only imagine the reaction if government officials instead were lecturing Americans about what sort of political ideas they should and shouldn’t believe.
What would an anticonspiracist curriculum look like? The approach I’ve taken in this book, I like to believe, helps answer that question.
One of the reasons I chose to focus on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the second chapter is that its status as a hoax is now entirely uncontroversial among educated people in Western societies. While there exist tenured North American university professors who embrace conspiracy theories about 9/11—I have profiled a number of them—there is not a single faculty member on any first-tier university campus whose career would survive if he or she said they believed the Protocols was a legitimate historical document that described a real plot by Jews to enslave human civilization. The same is broadly true of any faculty member who denied the Holocaust (though I am aware of at least one tenured university professor who is on record with Holocaust-denial—Lincoln University’s Kaukab Siddique, a Pakistan-born professor of English and Mass Communications who also believes that American Jews control “the entire economy,” and who calls openly for Israel’s destruction).
The Protocols and the Holocaust-denial movement thus would serve as generally uncontroversial objects of study in a university course that teaches students to recognize the patterns of conspiracist thought. More specifically, it would provide an opportunity to educate students about the basic themes contained in almost all systemic conspiracy theories—singularity, evil, incumbency, greed, and hypercompetence. These would be presented as warning signs in regard to the radical doctrines that students eventually will confront.
Teaching about Truthers, Birthers, anti-Bilderbergers, New World Order types, and all the rest also would be informative. But that would bring the curriculum I’m describing into the realm of current events—and thereby render it vulnerable to the charge of indoctrination or propaganda; which would in turn create friction between parents and school board trustees or university administrators, not to mention provide raw meat to the conspiracist blogosphere. Far better to have the next generation of students themselves connect the dots between the five conspiracist building blocks contained in the Protocols to more modern conspiracist movements.
Another advantage of a Protocols-centered curriculum is that it would reinforce traditional scholastic messaging promoting tolerance, especially if it also included modules on the KKK, anti-Mason agitation, Nazi propaganda, anti-Catholic hatred, and other historical examples that demonstrated the link between bigotry and conspiracism. This would help the project draw in the existing network of NGOs, education think tanks, and activists that are committed to the cause of antidiscrimination. Yet it would also be distinct from these existing campaigns: The fight against racism and its ilk typically is presented as a battle to eradicate hatred from people’s hearts; but as I’ve described here, the fight against conspiracism is an intellectual project centered on pattern-recognition.
Finally, an anticonspiracist curriculum would aim to provide students with a grounding in Internet literacy. Students would be taught the difference between news and opinion; and between websites that are run by professional journalists, and those that are not. They would be taught the limitations associated with searching for information using Google and other search engines. And they would be instructed in the manner by which multimedia effects can be used to promote misinformation.
A study of conspiracism can have benefits that extend beyond merely inoculating young minds against conspiracy theories. On this score, I’ll present myself as an example: The experience of writing this book has fundamentally altered my view of politics, faith, and the human capacity for rational thought.
That’s not something I expected when I set out in early 2008. I then approached conspiracy theorists as if they were lab specimens to be poked and prodded from the other side of a tape recorder. On the Venn diagrams of human sociology, the “conspiracy theorist” was something I imagined to be a distinct and identifiable class of pathological thinker—a breed apart from humanity’s “normal” rank and file that could be circled off in black ink.
Three years later, my view on that has changed: The tendency to imagine that world events are secretly controlled by some malign force that is seeking to corrupt the “true” course of human history manifests itself in many different personality types. Now that I have returned from book leave, and have resumed my regular work as comment-pages editor at a daily newspaper, I commonly spot this motif in the submissions that land in my inbox—from militant anti-Zionists who blame Israel for every imaginable geopolitical upheaval, to global warming skeptics who imagine that Greenpeace and Barack Obama are in league to create a one-world government.
This realization has taught me to be careful about my own ideological commitments, as well: I sometimes catch myself using forms of logic or turns of phrase that echo the conspiracy theorists whom I’d interviewed. For this reason, the act of writing this book has had a gradually moderating view on my attitude toward politics, and in my judgments of others. It has made me more self-aware when I bend the rules of logic in the service of ideology or partisanship.
Writing this book has also made me conscious of some of the biases that afflict my profession. As I’ve already noted at several points, one of the factors that has encouraged the growth of conspiracism in recent decades is the gradual erosion of popular trust in the media. To a certain extent, this trend is inevitable in a 500-channel universe: The more the mediascape fragments into disparate niches, the less prestige and influence will be retained by general-interest news outlets. But mainstream journalists often encourage this phenomenon by distorting the truth or pushing an ideological agenda. Many leftists—to cite one example from among many—grew disenchanted with their beloved New York Times when they learned that the case for war in Iraq had been buttressed by reporter Judith Miller, whose stories about Iraqi WMD were based on what we now know to be exaggerated intelligence reports. Many conservatives, meanwhile, became disgusted with the mainstream media during the 2008 election campaign, when fawning coverage of Barack Obama was broadcast and printed side-by-side with mockery of Sarah Palin and condescension toward her supporters. If tens of millions of middle-class Americans find Glenn Beck and Michael Moore more credible than the purportedly objective analysis offered by CBS, CNN, and NPR, journalists have to ask themselves: “Do we have anything to do with that?”
In no way do I believe that the mainstream media should give air time to the promotion of full-fledged conspiracy theories of the type I’ve described in this book. But nor should we muzzle or vilify those whose opinions are merely disquieting. When liberal journalists smear Tea Party types as racists merely because they ask why Barack Obama remained a congregant of Jeremiah Wright, for instance, it reinforces suspicions that the media is helping the president hide something. By denying the grain of truth in many conspiracy theories, the media betrays its own institutional biases and squanders the credibility it needs to exercise editorial judgment in regard to truly nefarious lies, genuine bigotry, and outright conspiracy theories.
We speak of the Enlightenment in the singular. But as historian Philipp Blom emphasizes in his recent book Wicked Company, there actually were several enlightenments; each led by a man of ideas trying to put his distinct stamp on the complex philosophical ferment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet all of them were bound up together by what we now describe as skepticism. Since the dawn of the scientific revolution, doctors, astronomers, and mathematicians had been challenging ancient dogmas through the exercise of reason and observation (the case of Galileo being only the most famous). Beginning with Descartes, this rigorous approach came to inform philosophy and even, as in the case of Voltaire’s caustic response to the Great Lisbon Earthquake, theodicy.
In our own age, militant skepticism has become exalted as the truest mark of great intellect. Just about every conspiracy theorist I interviewed was very proud to tell me that they trust nothing they are told—and subject every claim to the most exacting scrutiny. This sounds intellectually noble—but in practice, it leads to a kind of nihilism, since there is no fact, historical event, or scientific phenomenon whose truth cannot, in some way, be brought into question by an inventive mind on the hunt for niggling “anomalies.” In modest doses, skepticism provides a shield against superstition and false dogma. But when skepticism is enshrined as a faith unto itself, skeptics often will conjure fantasies more ridiculous than the ones they debunk.
The Church of Skepticism has tempted many of our era’s most popular pundits. Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris all have become best-selling authors by delivering scathing manifestos against organized religion, which they present as a sort of collectively experienced mental illness. Hitchens, the most influential of the trio, says he “value[s] the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object.” Yet it is important to remember that the Enlightenment did not spell the end of serious Christian theology—and most of its giants likely would have been appalled by the exercise of their legacy to promote a Godless society.
Descartes, for instance, took care to divide the world into spiritual and material realms—making God lord of the former, and science lord of the latter. As for Voltaire—whose “moderate and deist form of Enlightenment thought” (in Blom’s words) eventually would become synonymous with the Enlightenment itself—he believed that the existence of an “eternal, supreme, and intelligent being” could be established through the application of pure reason, and described religious belief as a necessary ingredient of a healthy society:
An atheist, provided he be sure of impunity so far as man is concerned, reasons and acts consistently in being dishonest, ungrateful, a slanderer, a robber, and a murderer. For if there is no God, this monster is his own god, and sacrifices to his purposes whatever he desires and whatever stands as an obstacle in his path. The most moving entreaties, the most cogent arguments have no more effect upon him than on a wolf thirsting for blood.
The philosopher was being perfectly sincere when he said “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer”—if God did not exist, we would have to invent him.
Unlike Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and their followers, Voltaire understood that man cannot survive on skepticism alone—that society requires some creed or overarching national project that transcends mere intellect. When the appeal of traditional religion becomes weak, darker faiths assert themselves: including not only communism, fascism, tribalism, and strident nationalism, but also more faddish intellectual pathologies such as radical identity politics, anti-Americanism, and obsessive anti-Zionism. As I’ve argued, all of these provide rich soil for the seeds of conspiracism. As Europe is now learning, it is very difficult to maintain secular societies in a Godless limbo, fed by nothing but the materialist salves of wealth and the welfare state, without incubating malaise and ideological instability. As the Truthers show us, rootless thinkers eventually will find a devil to fear.
A healthy society is one in which faith and skepticism—both broadly defined—are in balance; where citizens feel a sense of trust and belonging in their society and its leading institutions, but also feel entitled to challenge prevailing biases, superstitions, and authority structures. The familiar historical phenomenon of faith overpowering skepticism is the problem of pre-Enlightenment societies. But since the murder of JFK, America has been de
aling with the opposite, post-Enlightenment, problem: skepticism outdistancing faith. Like all the great traumas that America has suffered over the past half century, 9/11 has only made the yawning gap grow wider.
Diagnosing and fighting conspiracism is an important project, which is why I wrote this book. But ultimately, conspiracism is just one aspect of a larger crisis in American political culture; one that can be addressed only through a rehabilitation of the nation’s public institutions. It is a large and difficult task—but also an urgent one. On 9/11, terrorists killed nearly 3,000 innocent people and destroyed the World Trade Center. Americans should not let their collective sense of truth be added to the list of casualties.
Index
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
Abdullah (king), 129
Abrams, Elliot, 302
Adbusters, 298
African National Congress (ANC), 311
Aftonbladet, 301
Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, xxii, 157, 167
Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq, 76
AIA. See American Institute of Architects
Akihito, Emperor, 129
Akol & Yoshii, 154
Allen, Arthur, 172, 173
Allen, Woody, 305
al-Qaeda, 6, 9, 15, 21, 76, 259, 299
Alten, Steve, 288–89
American Institute of Architects (AIA), 154–55
American Psychiatric Association, 317
ANC. See African National Congress
Anderson, Brian, 234–35
Andreas, Dwayne, 58
Annenberg Public Policy Center, 320
Anti-Cancer Club, 55
Anti-Defamation League, 169, 219, 303