4 days ago
A Theory of Conspiracies
Conspiracy theories are theories too, M Dentith tells Tom McKinlay, and we should judge them on their merits.
Conspiracy was part of the landscape for M Dentith growing up.
That was in Devonport, on Auckland's North Shore, where there's long been talk of secret tunnels associated with the old fortifications at Maungauika/North Head.
There were a couple of leading theories.
The first was that there were two old Boeing aircraft — brought to New Zealand early last century for a flying school — buried in the tunnels. The second was that the tunnels were sealed after ammunition was dumped there.
The official position is there are no such secret tunnels.
The first of the two theories seems unlikely to Dentith. Why would the government want to hide from the public the location of a couple of old planes?
The second one seems more plausible, given Devonport has some pricey real estate.
"Rich people do not want to know that the hillside that abuts their palatial mansion could explode if a tourist knocks on a rock in the wrong way," they say.
Dentith is not recounting the stories because they have a strong opinion one way or the other but rather as a possible explanation for the direction their career has taken.
Because Assoc Prof Dentith, these days of the International Center for Philosophy at Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai, is now one of the world's foremost philosphers of conspiracy theories, a researcher of rumours, fake news and secrecy.
Among their publications is the 2014 book, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories — the first of its kind in its field.
The professor is in Ōtepoti Dunedin as a visiting fellow of the University of Otago, where, among other things, they this week gave a lecture suggesting treating conspiracy theories as inherently mad, bad or dangerous would be a mistake.
We need to approach conspiracy theories as we do all other theories, on their merits, they say.
And in a world seemingly beset by conspiracy from all sides, it certainly seems as though we're called upon to consider more conspiracy theories, more of the time.
Dentith confirms that, yes, interest in the field in which they've been quietly working away has experienced a significant uptick.
"So, initially, everyone is asking, why are you doing a PhD in conspiracy theories? Nobody finds these particularly interesting," they recall.
"And it really is only after I finished my PhD, in 2012, that the politics seems to change in a way that conspiracy theories start becoming, if not more popular, certainly they're being used by politicians more as a kind of rhetorical measure to tarnish their foes or to burnish their credentials."
We're talking President Donald J. Trump, of course, and his advocacy of the "birther conspiracy", his talk of the deep state and his nods and winks to QAnon, but also the likes of those other heroes of the right, Hungary's PM Viktor Orban and the UK's Boris Johnson.
"Donald Trump is one of the first political candidates in recent memory to really push conspiracy theories as being, 'you are being told lies by the establishment, believe me, instead'," the professor says.
It's certainly not unprecedented. Dentith cites the "Red Scare" in 1950s America, driven by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Eventually, people push back against that sort of politics and it falls out of favour, they say — before it comes back around again.
So these political elites — Donald, Viktor, Boris et al — start using terminology that used to be verboten but suddenly becomes part of the discourse once more.
The receiving environment for conspiracy theories also changed as a result of Covid, Dentith says, which detonated an explosion of interest.
All of that notwithstanding, according to US polling data, at least, there aren't any more conspiracy theories now than there were 20 or 30 years ago, the professor says. What may have changed is that with the rise of social media, we've become more aware that people believe conspiracy theories.
"And I think because we're more aware than ever before that there are conspiracy theories being talked about, we then want to know, well, how do we respond to these conspiracy theories? And sometimes we want to know how to respond to them because we think, well, they're obviously false and why do some people believe them? And sometimes we want to know how to respond to them because we go, there might be something to this conspiracy theory. I mean, I'm sure you're aware at the moment in the United States, Donald Trump is accusing people who believe in the existence of an Epstein list as believing a vacuous and false conspiracy theory."
But a lot of people are thinking, well, Jeffrey Epstein was indeed a convicted sex offender and facing sex trafficking charges when he died in a jail cell, and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty of child sex trafficking — and yet no-one else has been arrested, none of the customers of the sex trafficking.
"And so it seems reasonable to go, well, maybe there is a list. I mean, it may not be a literal black book that Jeffrey Epstein kept in his pocket, but presumably the FBI have a list of people they think were the clients of Jeffrey Epstein ... What should I believe about this?"
Well, working out what to believe is where the philosopher can help.
Dentith is an epistemologist, so their interest is in the study of knowledge.
"So, how do we justify our beliefs? How can we work out whether our beliefs are true or at least plausible given the available evidence we have? And so I belong to a group of philosophers who say, look, when you encounter a conspiracy theory, don't assume it's necessarily false. The better question to ask is, is there evidence for this particular conspiratorial claim?"
Sometimes, and perhaps even most of the time, conspiracy theories will turn out to be false. But most theories turn out to be false. Science is littered with failed theories, they say. Only a subset of theories ever survive.
"But sometimes when people put forward a conspiracy theory, there is something to it. Like when people accuse the governments of the UK and the US of fabricating evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And so the question then becomes, well, how do we work out whether a conspiracy theory is something we ought to believe."
Dentith offers a toolbox of three factors.
The first of which is to consider how conspiratorial is the country you're living in?
Relatively open societies are less likely to accommodate successful conspiracies. If they do happen, it is only rarely and they're often quickly exposed.
On the other hand, some societies are very closed and may also be corrupt.
"So, I lived in Romania for two years doing post-docs in Bucharest, and Romania is by its own admission a moderately corrupt, moderately politically bad environment. It has a government that lies to its people more often than people like.
"And so Romanians entertain conspiracies because conspiracies happen in their political system quite a bit."
This is what's called a prior probability calculation — how conspired is the society you're living in? If it's highly conspired, a conspiracy theory may well be true.
The next question is "what does the evidence say?". Because regardless of how conspired or un-conspired your society is, you still have to consider the particular claim.
"I think about when Nicky Hager released the book, Dirty Politics, and John Key at a press conference said, 'we can't believe anything Nicky Hager says. He's just a conspiracy theorist.' And God bless the journalists who were present there, saying, well, yeah, Nicky Hager is a conspiracy theorist, but what does the evidence say in this particular situation, Prime Minister? Because there was evidence that, if not John Key, John Key's office was feeding information to people like Cameron Slater."
So that's what we call a posterior probability, Dentith explains, an evaluation of the available evidence at a particular time.
Finally, it pays to think about the alternative explanations for any given conspiracy theory — there may well be a more prosaic explanation for it all.
"How likely is this hypothesis versus another?
"So you consider all those probabilities, and then from that you can go, well, maybe I should believe the conspiracy theory or maybe there's some evidence here, but there's another explanation which is better, which is non-conspiratorial."
So far, so good. But either confirming or debunking the conspiracy isn't necessarily the end of the matter, as conspiracies come shipped with a cost, as in the example of Romania — they chip away at public trust.
Globally, there is the example of fossil fuel interests' very successful attempts to undermine action on climate change. As work such as Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway's book Merchants of Doubt has shown, many of those involved in the denial industry had previously argued against tobacco control, disputing the harm cigarettes cause. They were serial conspiracists for hire.
Alexios Stamatiadis-Brehier, an Athenian philosopher of conspiracy theory has pointed out that once you are aware of such examples, they call into question establishment views, because you see how lobbyists are influencing policy in particular ways.
It leads to that loss of trust in authority.
"People talk about this thing called post-truth, that nobody really believes anything any more," Dentith notes, with a caveat that it might be overstated.
Whatever the case, they point out that we're better to know of authority's failings. Take the "unfortunate experiment" at National Women's Hospital here in Aotearoa, they say, that had disastrous consequences for some of the women involved.
"It turned out that we may have actually been almost too trusting of authority in the beginning of the 20th century. And the question now is, have we gone too far? Or are we at the kind of natural level that we're meant to be when it comes to trusting people we have no direct influence over but have sway in our lives?"
It is just as well to be aware that the people in charge aren't necessarily as interested in our well-being as we might once have thought.
We're making progress, then, across the shifting contemporary currents of truth and conspiracy. But it's not smooth sailing yet.
The information ocean on which we float affords unequal access to the facts, and the winds might be blowing in a particular direction for a reason.
Back in Trump's America the media landscape is increasingly dominated by billionaire oligarchs pursuing their own self-serving ends, where the algorithms promoting particular views are closely guarded secrets and order the news feed according to others' agendas.
"If you're enmeshed in a media landscape which is giving you slightly inaccurate or highly inaccurate information, it makes it very difficult for you to be able to assess the plausibility of a claim," Dentith says.
"And it also makes it difficult for you to find out about alternative hypotheses you might also consider as well.
"If your media landscape means you aren't even finding out about the things you should normally find out about, then that's going to drive your beliefs down into pseudo-scientific beliefs, radically polarised extremist political beliefs, and some of those are going to end up being unwarranted or suspicious conspiracy theory beliefs as well."
It's a bit of a depressing situation, Dentith concedes, because we don't yet know how to dismantle the media echo-chambers where conspiracy festers.
There's some comfort to be taken from those US polls showing conspiracy theories are no more prevalent than they ever were, they say. But, on the other hand, the percentages involved are somewhat irrelevant when the most powerful nation on earth is currently run by a conspiracy commander in chief.
"Maybe not that many people believe in a deep state conspiracy theory. Donald Trump does. Donald Trump is currently President of the United States of America.
"And those conspiracy theories are affecting everything from immigration to economics to whether or not particular land masses should belong to the US or not. So in the end, it doesn't really matter how many people believe these theories."
Closer to home, Dentith says, we have a Deputy Prime Minister who seems to believe that any criticism of his policies, certainly in the case of the Regulatory Standards Bill, is due to a conspiracy by academics — some of whom he has diagnosed as being affected by a "derangement syndrome".
In that case, the counter-conspiracy is that David Seymour, who has had links to the international libertarian organisation the Atlas Network, is a shill working to introduce its radical more-market economic policies here.
It could be part of an international Atlas conspiracy, Dentith says. Or, it could simply be that Seymour's personal politics are aligned with the network.
"Maybe it's not a conspiracy, maybe they just share common cause."
Again, whatever the case, we need to step back and look at the facts.
Dentith has a definition of a conspiracy theory that they think helps: A conspiracy theory is just any explanation of an event that cites a conspiracy as a cause of that event, they say.
It's a pretty neutral sort of definition, relatively free of pejorative, leaving us with the theory itself to examine and interrogate.
"Yeah, the way you work out whether a conspiracy theory is a good theory or a bad theory is also in part how you work out whether a psychological theory is a good theory or a bad theory, a political theory is a good theory or a bad theory, a scientific theory is a good theory or a bad theory," they say.
"We should treat conspiracy theories in the way that we treat any kind of theory about the world — by going, look, I don't know whether it's true or false on the face of it, some investigation has to be made.
"And that doesn't mean I'm advocating that every single person, when they get up and they have their coffee and their breakfast and they open their newspaper, has to go, all right, I have to work out whether these theories are true or false. But there need to be people out there whose job it is to investigate these things, whether they be investigative journalists, whether they be historians, whether they be political analysts, there need to be people out there who are open-minded enough to go, well look, it looks like an implausible claim, but some implausible claims turn out to be true, so I'm going to go off and investigate it and then tell people what I've found."
