Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy theories abound, on right and left. Some are loony or worse. But in their recent Modern Conspiracy, Emma Jane and Chris Fleming observe that “the act of conspiring . . . is not inherently noxious” (6).

After all, “politics, business, and even family units would struggle to function in recognizable forms if they were deprived of the ability to conspire about election strategies, marketing campaigns, and birthday presents.” Some conspiracy theories are loony, but “the same cannot be said . . . for conspiracy theories that suggest powerful people sometimes conspire corruptly and against our best interests” (6).

Besides, those who expose and refute conspiracies “can sometimes be as one-eyed, agenda-driven, and immune to counterevidence as they conspiracy thinking they condemn” (7).

Jane and Fleming’s little book is an effort to stand back and assess the phenomenon of conspiracy theory with a bit more scientific objectivity. One of their themes is the fact that conspiracy theories thrive in the “epistemic ambience” of late modernity, “whose signal characteristics are doubt, scepticism, and ultimately paradoxical relationship with institutional authority and truth.” Conspiracy theory has to be seen in the “context of the Internet’s radical DIY-ification of just about everything” (8). There is also the factor of desire: “both conspiracy theorizing and conspiracy theory debunking appear to delight its participants,” since both give a “powerful sense of private knowledge” (9).

Their book is subtitled, The Importance of Being Paranoid, and then mean it: “It may turn out that, as a cognitive style, paranoia has many more adherent than simply those who believe their neighbour may be an upwardly mobile reptile. Furthermore, we argue that the temptation to dismiss all forms of conspiracism as ‘paranoia’ is not only uncritical and un-self-reflective; it tends to miss precisely what should be encouraged: that one of its sources is the reticence [read “reluctance”] to accept uncritically someone else’s conception of a universal good or an unquestionable truth” (10).