The conspiracy community regularly seizes on one slip of the tongue, misunderstanding, or slight discrepancy to defeat 20 pieces of solid evidence; accepts one witness of theirs, even if he or she is a provable nut, as being far more credible than 10 normal witnesses on the other side; treats rumors, even questions, as the equivalent of proof; leaps from the most minuscule of discoveries to the grandest of conclusions; and insists, as the late lawyer Louis Nizer once observed, that the failure to explain everything perfectly negates all that is explained.
—Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
A Pound of Cure
On July 17, 1983, a small Indian newspaper called the Patriot published a letter bearing the headline “AIDS may invade India: Mystery disease caused by U.S. experiments.” The author—who requested anonymity, but described himself as “a well-known American scientist”—declared that AIDS had been created by the U.S. Army at its Fort Detrick, Maryland, testing facility, and warned that Washington was poised to transfer this potent new bioweapon to the government of neighboring Pakistan. While the letter went unnoticed in the West, it was picked up by the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta, and then by an energetic East German microbiologist named Jakob Segal. At the 1986 Conference of Nonaligned Nations in Harare, Zimbabwe, Segal’s forty-seven-page pamphlet, AIDS—Its Nature And Origin, became a sensation among African delegates. Western news outlets took notice. Even Britain’s respectable Daily Telegraph printed an uncritical report on Segal’s research.
Needless to say, the Fort Detrick–AIDS theory was baseless—a creation of the Soviet bloc’s aktivinyye meropriata (“active measures”) propaganda policy. As historian Thomas Boghardt argued in a 2009 Studies in Intelligence report, the original 1983 Patriot letter was almost certainly written by the KGB. As for Segal, he was a stooge of the East German Stasi, which fed the confused old man a steady stream of tantalizing documents to encourage his fantasy research.
The Soviet bloc’s effort to pin AIDS on the Pentagon turned out to be brief—in part thanks to pressure imposed by the USSR’s own medical establishment, which by the late 1980s was eager to access American data on HIV. In 1988, just three years after the Patriot letter appeared, official Soviet efforts to promote the conspiracy theory ceased. Speaking to the government newspaper Izvestia, the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences declared: “Not a single Soviet scientist, not a single medical or scientific institution, shares [Segal’s] position.”
But the conspiracist cat already was out of the bag. Die-hard communists, black nationalists, and the full menagerie of Western conspiracy theorists all signed on.
To this day, the Fort Detrick–AIDS conspiracy theory and its variants remain popular in the African American community. In a 2010 study of 214 Los Angeles–area African American men undergoing treatment for HIV, 44 percent agreed that “HIV is a manmade virus.” Thirty-five percent agreed that the disease was produced “in a government laboratory.” And 31 percent said that AIDS “is a form of genocide, or planned destruction, against blacks.” The study also found that a belief in AIDS conspiracy theories correlates negatively with adherence to prescribed antiretroviral drug regimens—suggesting that conspiracism itself, rather than any government plot, is killing black AIDS carriers.
In South Africa, meanwhile, former president Thabo Mbeki’s obsession with AIDS denialism and crackpot theories of the disease’s origins—and his consequent reluctance to distribute lifesaving medications—are estimated to have caused more than 330,000 otherwise preventable deaths. In 2000, as the world scientific community demanded that Mbeki’s government act against the AIDS epidemic, he instead sent world leaders a paranoid letter, claiming that the pressure on Africans to adhere to “established scientific truths” comprised a “campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism.” His like-minded health minister discouraged her citizens from taking antiretroviral drugs, which she called “poison,” and instead promoted natural “remedies” like garlic and beetroot.
Education, many readers might assume, is the key to eradicating conspiracism. The Fort Detrick–AIDS conspiracy theory—and Mbeki’s response to it—suggest the answer is more complicated.
The former South African president was one of the most intellectually sophisticated members of the African National Congress elite, having earned a BA in economics and a master’s degree in African studies from the University of Sussex. Yet Mbeki’s mind also was permanently scarred by his fight against apartheid. His father, Govan Mbeki, was a communist who’d been imprisoned for terrorism and treason. One of Thabo Mbeki’s brothers died under mysterious circumstances in Lesotho. A son died trying to escape the country. Within the African National Congress, Mbkei became entangled in the group’s vicious campaign to root out informants—and narrowly escaped being tortured by his fellow insurgents. Which is to say that Mbeki’s whole early life had been one constant set of battles, tragedies, and dark plots. When a mysterious new epidemic suddenly broke out in his backyard, he saw it through this same conspiratorial lens. The notion that AIDS was spread through unprotected sex, in particular, seemed to strike Mbeki as a sort of blood libel against black people—not dissimilar to those spread by white bigots during the apartheid era. Medical schools, he complained, taught South Africans that they are “germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its [sic] passions to reason . . . natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world. [Scientists] proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.”
Eventually, Mbeki relented, and permitted some distribution of AIDS medications in South African medical clinics. But he never fully backed off from his conspiracy theories, despite persistent appeals by the world’s scientific community. Only when he was succeeded in the presidency by Jacob Zuma—a man with a fifth-grade education—did South Africa fully embrace the scientifically prescribed panoply of AIDS treatments and prevention programs.
As discussed later in this chapter, I believe a certain very specific kind of education can be helpful for inoculating young minds against conspiracy theories. But as Mbeki’s example illustrates, conspiracism is only a nominally intellectual exercise. As argued in Chapter 5, it originates in an overlapping tangle of emotional and psychological factors that typically elude intellectual self-awareness, and which can’t be refuted by logic and evidence: ethnic bigotry, fear of societal change and new technologies, economic uncertainty, midlife ennui, medical trauma, coming-of-age hubris, spiritual hunger, narcissism, the psychic scars left by past traumas, and outright psychosis.
This explains why arguing down a committed conspiracy theorist is impossible. Whenever I’ve tried to debate Truthers on the facts of 9/11, for instance, all of my accumulated knowledge about the subject has proven entirely useless—because in every exchange, the conspiracy theorist inevitably would ignore the most obvious evidence and instead focus the discussion on the handful of obscure, allegedly incriminating oddities that he had memorized. No matter how many of these oddities I manage to bat away (even assuming I have the facts immediately at hand to do so), my debating opponent always has more at hand.
In this game, the conspiracist claims victory merely by scoring a single uncontested point—since, as he imagines it, every card he plays is a trump. To quote 9/11 conspiracy theorist Richard Falk (better known as the UN official who suggested that Israel’s actions in Gaza were akin to the Nazi Holocaust): “It is not necessary to go along with every suspicious inference in order to conclude that the official account of 9/11 is thoroughly unconvincing . . . Any part of this story is enough to vindicate [the] basic contention.” The defender of rationalism, meanwhile, is stuck fighting for a stalemate.
Nor does it hold any water with conspiracists that their theories have been rejected and discredited by mainstream researchers, journalists, and government officials. As noted in the Introduction, the defining feature of a true conspiracy theory is that it has, embedded within its syllogistic circuitry, an explanation for why insiders refuse to go public with their information: Either they are coconspirators themselves, or they have been paid off, or threatened.
This is why so few experts are willing to take conspiracy theorists up on their frequent challenges to hold public debates. And those who do typically are sorry they did. In the 1990s, both Phil Donahue and Montel Williams made the disastrous decision to put Holocaust deniers on television. The Donahue episode, which aired on March 14, 1994, was a particularly bad train wreck, in which the host looked on helplessly as confused Auschwitz survivors bungled basic facts about the death camps (such as promoting the myth that prisoners were turned into soap) in the face of more authoritative-seeming deniers. One would think that someone who actually lived through the Holocaust would be able to out-debate a conspiracy theorist. But that assumption is wrong: As researchers Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman wrote in their 2000 book, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened And Why Do They Say It: “Most survivors know very little about the Holocaust outside of what happened to them half a century ago, and deniers are skilled at tripping them up when they get dates wrong.”
I’ll admit to feeling personally humbled by my failure to get the best of conspiracy theorists: What was the use in going through the official 9/11 report with a highlighter and Post-it notes, much less writing a whole book on the subject of Trutherdom, if I couldn’t win an argument with a single college student? But on a more fundamental level, I also felt disillusioned by what this experience taught me about the limits of intellectual discourse itself. Even the reality of lived experience—the most direct path to truth there is—has been undermined by the conspiracist mindset, which overlooks eyewitness reports—of a plane flying into the Pentagon, or skyscrapers collapsing without any hint of internal demolition—in favour of tortured inferences from scattered esoterica.
Conspiracy theorists typically appear self-confident and even smug when they’re discussing their area of obsession. But in many cases, it’s an act: Since their entire identity is based on a nest of riddles that will unravel if they allow themselves to step outside their narrow conspiracist mindset, their emotional state is more fragile than they let on. When assembled in groups—either virtually, on the Internet, or in a real-life lecture hall—their group dynamics therefore tend to be brittle and cultish. “I simply asked logical questions that contradicted some of the conspiracy claims and demanded answers at the Loose Change Forum, [and] I got banned for that,” reports one former quasi-Truther on a James Randi Educational Foundation discussion server. “[That] really annoyed me and I signed up again asking why they banned me for bringing up evidence against [a] fake Osama video, which got me banned again. All in all I got banned a hundred times or so.”
During the course of writing this book, I became friendly with several conspiracy theorists—and in some cases, connected with them on Facebook. According to the earnest thinking I originally brought to this project, I imagined it would be possible for us to remain on friendly terms, even on the understanding that we disagreed on, say, the origins of 9/11 or the birthplace of Barack Obama. This usually proved impossible: Every conversation with a conspiracy theorist tends to migrate, in one way or another, to their central obsession; and my refusal to accept their revealed “truths” always strained the relationship to the breaking point. (For this same reason, I’ve learned from interviewing a few “Truther widows,” conspiracism often tends to create extraordinary rifts within marriages—unless both partners sign on to the same theory.)
Like all cults and cult-like movements, conspiracy theorists tend to become obsessed with dissidents, factions, internal schisms, and subplots. Many Truther purists, for instance, have seized on Noam Chomsky as a sort of Trotsky figure—primarily due to his refusal to expand his longstanding indictment of U.S. foreign policy to cover the crimes of 9/11. Some Truther books now have whole chapters dedicated to the “lies” of Chomsky and his fellow “left-wing gatekeepers.” Anti-Chomskyite Truther websites and YouTube videos also have popped up, charging that the man is nothing less than “a deep cover agent for the New World Order, a master of black propaganda whose true motives become clear with a sober and honest examination.” Truther Kevin Barrett, in particular, has made vilification of Chomsky a personal obsession, engaging the famous linguist in a 15,000-word email exchange, and then posting the whole thing to the Internet (against Chomsky’s expressly stated wishes), complete with a final Barrett salvo declaring that the man has “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims, than any other single person.”
Though I would never presume to be loathed by Truthers at this epic level, my own investigations have earned me a modest taste of this treatment—sufficient to understand their radicalized us-versus-them mentality. (Google “Jonathan Kay” and “9/11” for a sampling.) The experience also has convinced me that any effort to engage committed conspiracy theorists in reasoned debate is a waste of time. Once someone has bitten down on the red pill, it’s too late. As with any incurable disease, the best course isn’t treatment, it’s prevention.
The same is true of conspiracy movements themselves—which never entirely go away, even as the passage of years fails to vindicate their underlying theories. Even when conspiracists move on to fresh subjects, they tend to cite the truth of their old claims as validations for their new ones. Since the military-industrial complex killed JFK, why wouldn’t it have destroyed the World Trade Center? Since the Bilderbergers had Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in their pocket, why not Barack Obama as well? In this way, conspiracy theories have built up like layers of rubble that smother what once were the intellectual foundations of rationalism.
An Ounce of Prevention
“Nothing you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this: That if you work hard and diligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot. And that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.”
—Harold Macmillan, prime minister of Britain 1957–1963, quoting his classics tutor at Oxford
Conspiracism is a stubborn creed because humans are pattern-seeking animals. Show us a sky full of stars, and we’ll arrange them into animals and giant spoons. Show us a world full of random misery, and we’ll use the same trick to connect the dots into secret conspiracies. For most of us, our desire to impose an artificial pattern on world events is held in check by our rational sense, which tells us that life often is cruel and unpredictable. Or we find compartmentalized, socially accepted outlets to give expression to our pattern-seeking—such as astrology or mainstream religion. Conspiracism takes root when, for the reasons discussed in this book, our pattern-seeking appetite overwhelms these containment mechanisms.
Yet this same pattern-seeking penchant is also the key to fighting conspiracism: By teaching ourselves to recognize conspiracism’s unchanging basic structure—from its archetype in the Protocols to its modern incarnation in the 9/11 Truth movement—we can protect our brains from conspiracy theories before they have a chance to infect our thinking.
Conspiracism is deeply rooted in American thinking. Then again, the same once was true of racism. Exactly 150 years ago, the United States went to war with itself over the principle that a man could be chained up like an animal because of the color of his skin. It wasn’t till 1954 that black and white schoolchildren were granted the constitutional right to attend the same schools. Even as recently as the 1970s, well within the living memory of middle-aged Americans, the idea that blacks and whites should be able to marry one another, or use the same swimming pools, was still controversial. And then, in the space of just a few decades, everything changed—capped by an extraordinary moment in early 2009 when it could be said that America’s most powerful politician, beloved entertainment figure, and revered athlete all were black (Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Tiger Woods).
Women, meanwhile, went from ornamental second-class citizens in the typing pool and kitchen to full-fledged business-world equals. Perhaps most stunning of all was the transformation of our perception of gays. In 1973, homosexuality still was classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. Just 25 years later, NBC was airing a hit sitcom starring two gay men as part of its “must see” Thursday night lineup. Never in human history have social attitudes toward what we now (increasingly anachronistically) call “disadvantaged groups” been transformed so quickly. Never has human bigotry been winnowed at anywhere near this pace.
What developments in the Western intellectual condition permitted such a massive, wholesale shift in thinking? Whole libraries of books have been written about the struggle against racism, sexism, and homophobia, and I will not try to summarize them here. Instead, I will highlight just one essential factor, whose roots are in the Enlightenment, but which reached full bloom only in the twentieth century: civilizational self-awareness.
By this, I mean the habit of mind that permits us to stand back and objectively observe the flaws, hypocrisies, and double-standards embedded in our society. This ability is taken for granted in the modern Western world, so much so that we don’t even recognize it as a special frame of mind. But it is: Throughout human history, and in most of the non-Western world today, the superiority of one’s own tribe over others, of the faithful over the infidels, of the we over the they, has been entirely taken for granted—all corollaries of the reflexive tribalism that evolution has programmed into the hard-wiring of the human brain. Even the basic idea that a civilization should be “improved” can exist only in a society that is aware of its relationship to history and the outside world: It has little resonance in caste-ridden communities where the pace of technological change is slow, sons inherit their fathers’ jobs, social mobility is nonexistent, and the established pecking order—with all its attendant forms of discrimination—is uncritically accepted as God-given and timeless.
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 dealing 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.