With the Olympics in high gear last week, I decided to base my column in a sport that wasn't part of the London events: politics. I used the column to discuss the way politics, like so much in our world, has little to do with truth, and everything to do with winning. Though we all, on some level, care about the truth and the good, it generally takes a back seat to in-fighting and factionalism.
Victory in politics, as I mentioned in the column last week, almost always involves humiliation or degradation of the other side. This spectacle, this team sport, is what we're really interested in, far more than boring debates on healthcare reform. If the other side releases a comprehensive policy document, we yawn and turn the page. If their leader has a bad hair day, we stand and take notice.
This attitude, that the world is divided into teams and that victory comes with the dehumanization of all others, finds its purest expression in the conspiracy theory. I don't think that anyone would disagree with the statement that there are far more conspiracy theories than can possibly be true. Yes, American automakers all but eliminated the electric streetcar. Yes, plenty of Nazi scientists had their records cleaned so they could continue working in the USA after the war. Yes, the Gulf of Tonkin incident was almost certainly faked.
Each of the examples I just gave is supported by a wealth of evidence, often from the parties directly involved. But for every plausible theory there are more outlandish ones than can be counted. With or without evidence, however, why should we care about conspiracy theories at all? Why do their peddlers make seven-figure sums? Why do we care enough about the shadowy figures running our world to have made entire alternative realities out of conspiracies, to have created conspiracies-within-conspiracies?
The answer lies in what a conspiracy actually is. The general structure is this: there is a small group with ill intentions that secretly wields power. Each part is important. It is always a small group (tragically, Jews have occupied this role all too frequently in history), their intentions are always evil, and they are unknown to the general public (who are either noble or far too easily duped). The conspiracy theorist discovers the plot, and educates as many people as will listen, creating a core group of the enlightened. In the words of Richard Hofstadter, who wrote the seminal "The paranoid style in American politics," they are "always manning the barricades of civilization."
So far, nothing surprising. But when we look at the broader structure, the very real implications of the conspiracy are more frightening. For an example, look at the conspiracy theories around the AIDS virus. For the sake of argument, let's all put on our "evil cabal" hats and pretend that we wanted to manufacture a virus so deadly it would put the Black Plague to shame. While we're at it, we'll also manufacture the antidote for ourselves.
Without any real understanding of microbiology, it should be clear that manufacturing a virus, any virus, would be an enormous undertaking. It would of course be even larger if the virus to be manufactured had to be extremely deadly. Let's make an incredibly conservative estimate for the sake of argument and say that a team of 400 scientists could do it.
So where do we get these scientists? If we're thinking long-term, we could set up universities. So for a few decades, we'll have to put aside our evil hats and set up microbiology labs. Goodbye atom bombs, hello agar.
Now how do we actually recruit scientists for our project? We can't ask them outright whether they'd like to manufacture a deadly virus. So maybe, through careful monitoring, we find some scientists who seem to be more unhinged than others, scientists with slightly looser morals. After a few years, we gather up the number we think we need and ship them to a secret lab to start manufacturing the virus.
Now let's assume that the virus is actually made and released on the world.
If you thought the first part of the story was implausible, this is where it gets absurd. Can we really believe that none of the scientists who worked on the project get cold feet after seeing the damage caused? That not one of them goes public? After all, it's not like they could just be killed. All of these scientists have families. And what about the many other smaller actors involved? The companies who made the medical equipment, or the facility. The lab techs keeping everything running smoothly. The janitor. Are we supposed to believe that they, too, were devoid of morals?
If we don't think that anyone got cold feet, we are throwing out the world we live in for a cartoon world. A world of monsters and saints, serial killers and Atticus Finches, and nothing in-between.
So why believe in conspiracy theories in the first place? Why believe in "immense" evil?
The answer is in almost every election-season political ad, in almost every piece of political news coverage. We want spectacle. But the picture that we create with political coverage is as important as the picture we throw out. "Political theatre" gives us a world bereft of subtlety or nuance, in place of the variegated world we live in.
Conspiracy theories go further. As in the example above, one has to believe in an enormous number of extremely evil people to find most conspiracies plausible. The world is thus carved up like a Mondrian, all right angles and primary colours. But the moral nature of the world is challenged too.
We want to believe in conspiracy theories and embrace them because they render the impossibly large, often indifferent world comprehensible. Good things can happen to bad people and vice versa. Tragedy can strike without reason, unexpectedly. In short, our world can often seem random, indifferent, amoral, purposeless, incomprehensible.
Conspiracies do not see the world this way. There is no randomness or incompetence. The greatest evils are explained. The world that had previously seemed indifferent is now active and vibrant, constantly plotting corruption most foul. When something terrible happens, there is a clear reason, as every conflict, everything inexplicable is suddenly recast as a conflict between devils and beleaguered angels.
As government is reduced to caricature, so too is the world's moral order. Neither the conspiracy theorist nor the political strategist is especially interested in truth. But then again, neither are we.
A conspiracy theory is one possible reaction to a seemingly indifferent universe. But it is not the only one. This problem of evil, the seeming indifference of the universe, is one of the intractable in human history, and our engagements with it have been one of the most important forces in human history. It is this problem that will be my subject for next week's column.
