Phil 100
Spring 2023
J. BLAIR
Below you will see 5 essay questions that pertain to the posted article “A Better Way to Think About Conspiracies”. It relates to some of the things we’ve been talking about (e.g. Arguments from Authority). Please type out an answer for each question. The last question on the final exam will be where you’ll upload your completed assignment (pdf, doc, docx). Thus, you won’t be able to upload your assignment before you open the final exam on canvas. By completing this assignment, you can earn up to 10 points added to the final exam. This has the potential to significantly raise your grade on the final but it obviously cannot be a replacement for it. Here are the questions:
Let’s define a “conspiracy theory” as a theory asserting that a secret of great importance is being hidden from the public (see the Me
iam-Webster dictionary). To understand this article, it’s important not to define a conspiracy theory as one that is automatically false; or one that is simply asserted without the giving of any evidence (someone who holds a conspiracy theory may give evidence for the theory; and such evidence may or may not be good evidence). A conspiracy theory is, however, by definition a theory that is neither held by the mainstream media nor believed by a majority of people; it’s fringe, non-conventional view.
QUESTION 1:
Does Ross Douthat, the author of “A Better Way to Think About Conspiracies”, believe that the recent phenomena of many Americans believing in conspiracy theories is a completely new thing in the history of America? (1 paragraph).
QUESTION 2:
What is the notion of a “reality czar” and does Douthat endorse this idea? Explain (1 paragraph).
QUESTION 3:
Another approach to combating the spread of disinformation (and resultant false beliefs) is to teach people to only ever believe that which comes from the “mainstream media consensus.” Does Douthat endorse this approach? Explain. (1 paragraph).
QUESTION 4:
What is Douthat’s basic view concerning how we should view conspiracy theories? (1 paragraph)
QUESTION 5:
Douthat proposes a tool-kit of sorts (a set of principles) to draw from when critically assessing various conspiracy theories. What are at least 3 such principles? Explain. (1 paragraph for each principle).
nytimes.com
Opinion | A Better Way to Think About
Conspiracies
Ross Douthat
10-12 minutes
People will always be interested in conspiracy theories. They need
a tool kit for discriminating among different fringe ideas.
March 2, 2021
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Credit...Marcus Schaefe
Trunk Archive
No problem concerns journalists and press-watchers so much
these days as the proliferation of conspiracy theories and
misinformation on the internet. “We never confronted this level of
conspiracy thinking in the U.S. previously,” Marty Baron, the forme
executive editor of The Washington Post, told Der Spiegel in a
ecent interview. His assumption, widely shared in our profession,
is that the internet has forged an age of false belief, encouraged
y social media companies and exploited by Donald Trump, that
equires new thinking about how to win the battle for the truth.
Some of that new thinking leads to surprising places. For instance,
my colleague Kevin Roose recently reported that some experts
wish that the Biden administration would appoint a “reality czar” —
a dystopian-sounding title, he acknowledged, for an official
charged with coordinating anti-disinformation efforts — as “the tip
of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality
crisis.”
Meanwhile, my fellow Opinion writer Charlie Warzel recently
explored the work of the digital literacy expert Michael Caulfield,
who argues that the usually laudable impulse toward critical
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thinking and investigation is actually the thing that most often leads
online information-seekers astray. Instead of always going deeper,
following arguments wherever they seem to lead, he suggests that
internet users be taught to simplify: to check arguments quickly
against mainstream sources, determine whether a given arguer is
a plausible authority, and then move on if the person isn’t.
I’m pretty doubtful of the “reality czar” concept, but Caulfield’s
arguments were more interesting. We should be skeptical that the
scale of conspiracy thinking today is a true historical novelty; the
conspiracy theories of the Revolutionary era, for instance, would
e entirely at home on today’s internet. But we’re clearly dealing
with a new way in which people abso
and spread conspiracies,
and a mind-altering technology like the internet probably does
equire a new kind of education, to help keep people from losing
their senses in the online wilds or settling in as citizens of partisan
dreamscapes.
But that education won’t be effective if it tells a too simplistic story,
where all consensus claims are true and all conspiracy theories
empty. In reality, a consensus can be wrong, and a conspiracy
theory can sometimes point toward an overlooked or hidden truth
— and the approach that Caulfield proposes, to say nothing of the
idea of a centralized Office of Reality, seem likely to founder on
these rocks. If you tell people not to listen to some prominent
crank because that person doesn’t represent the establishment
view or the consensus position, you’re setting yourself up to be
written off as a dupe or deceiver whenever the consensus position
fails or falls apart.
I could multiply examples of how this falling apart happens — I am
old enough to remember, for instance, when only cranks doubted
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that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — but the
last year has given us a thuddingly obvious case study: In January
and Fe
uary of 2020, using a follow-the-consensus method of
online reading could have given you a wildly misleading picture of
the disease’s risks, how it was transmitted, whether to wear masks
and more.
Is there an alternative to leaning so heavily on the organs of
consensus? I think there might be. It would start by taking
conspiracy thinking a little more seriously — recognizing not only
that it’s ineradicable, but also that it’s a reasonable response to
oth elite failures and the fact that conspiracies and cover-ups
often do exist.
If you assume that people will always believe in conspiracies, and
that sometimes they should, you can try to give them a tool kit fo
discriminating among different fringe ideas, so that when they
venture into outside-the-consensus te
itory, they become more
easonable and discerning in the ideas they follow and
ing back.
Here are a few ideas that belong in that kind of tool kit.
Prefer simple theories to baroque ones
Consider two theories about Covid-19: the conceit that it was
designed by the Gates Foundation for some sort of world-
domination scheme, and the theory that it was accidentally
eleased by a Chinese virology lab in Wuhan, a disaster that the
Beijing government then sought to cover up. If you just follow the
official media consensus, you’ll see both these theories labeled
misinformation and conspiracy. But in fact the two are wildly
different, and the latter is vastly more plausible than the former —
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so plausible that it might even be true.
What makes it plausible is that it doesn’t depend on some complex
plot for a one-world government; it just depends on the human and
ureaucratic capacity for e
or and the authoritarian tendency
toward cover-up. And this points to an excellent rule for anyone
who looks at an official na
ative and thinks that something seems
suspicious: In following your suspicions, never leap to a malignant
conspiracy to explain something that can be explained by
incompetence and self-protection first.
Avoid theories that seem tailored to fit a predetermined
conclusion
After the November election, I spent a fair amount of time arguing
with conservatives who were convinced that it had been stolen fo
Joe Biden, and after a while I noticed that I was often playing
Whac-a-Mole: They would raise a fishy-seeming piece of
evidence, I would show them something debunking it, and then
they would just move on to a different piece of evidence that
assumed a different kind of conspiracy — shifting from stuffed
allot boxes in u
an districts to computer shenanigans in
subu
an districts, say — without losing an iota in their certainty.
That kind of shift doesn’t prove the new example false, but it
should make you suspect that what’s happening is a search fo
facts to fit a predetermined na
ative, rather than just the
observation of a suspicious fact with an open mind about where it
leads. If you’re reading someone who can’t seem to internalize the
implications of having an argument proved wrong, or who
constantly cites easily discredited examples, you’re not being
discerning; you’ve either wandered into someone’s ideological
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fixation or you’re a mark for intentional fake news.
Take fringe theories more seriously when the mainstream
na
ative has holes
For example: If you tell me that the C.I.A. killed John F. Kennedy, I
will be dismissive, because the boring official na
ative of his
assassination — hawkish president killed by a Marxist loner who
previously tried to assassinate a right-wing general — fits the facts
perfectly well on its own. But if you tell me that some mysterious
foreign intelligence agency was involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s
strange career, I will be more open to your theories, because so
much about Epstein’s dizzying ascent from prep school math
teacher to procurer to the famous and the rich remains mystifying
even now.
Likewise, every fringe theory about U.F.O.s — that they’re some
kind of secret military supertechnology, that they’re really aliens,
that they’re something stranger still — became a lot more plausible
in the last couple of years, because the footage released by
Pentagon sources created a mystery that no official or consensus
na
ative has adequately explained.
Just because you start to believe in one fringe theory, you
don’t have to believe them all
This kind of slippage is clearly a feature of conspiratorial thinking:
Joining an out-group that holds one specific outlandish opinion
seems to encourage a sense that every out-group must be on to
something, every outlandish opinion must be right. Thus the
person who starts out believing that Epstein didn’t kill himself ends
up going full QAnon. Or the person who decides that the Centers
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for Disease Control is wrong about their chronic illness ends up
efusing chemotherapy for cancer.
But at the same time, there is no intellectually necessary reason
why believing in one piece of secret knowledge, one specific
conspiracy theory, should require a general belief in every fringe
idea.
Here revealed religion offers a useful model. To be a devout
Christian or a believing Jew or Muslim is to be a bit like a
conspiracy theorist, in the sense that you believe that there is an
invisible reality that secular knowledge can’t recognize and a set of
decisive events in history that fall outside of nature’s laws.
But the great religions are also full of warnings against false
prophets and fraudulent revelations. My own faith, Roman
Catholicism, is both drenched in the supernatural and extremely
scrupulous about the miracles and seers that it validates. And it
allows its flock to be simply agnostic about a range of possibly
supernatural claims and phenomena, to allow that they might be
eal, or might not, without making them the basis of your faith.
Some version of that careful agnosticism, that mixture of openness
and caution, seems like a better spirit with which to approach the
internet and all its ra
it holes than either a naïve credulity or a
ittle confidence in mainstream media consensus. And I suspect
that’s actually what a lot of polling on conspiracy theories
traditionally captures: not a blazing certainty about what really
happened on 9/11 or who killed Kennedy or how “they” faked the
moon landing, but a kind of studied uncertainty about our strange
world and its secrets.
What we should hope for, reasonably, is not a world where a
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“reality czar” steers everyone toward perfect consensus about the
facts, but a world where a conspiracy-curious uncertainty persists
as uncertainty, without hardening into the zeal that drove election
truthers to storm the Capitol.
It’s that task that our would-be educators should be taking up: not
a rigid defense of conventional wisdom, but the cultivation of a
consensus supple enough to accommodate the doubter, instead of
making people feel as if their only options are submission or revolt.
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