231. How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist

 

First, never say anything to a conspiracy theorist about the theory itself.  You are an academic, a scientist, and you don't pronounce on anything without examining it.  So you say, "I haven't looked into it."

Your excuse (and you need one; scientists are supposed to be curious) is that you are pressed for time and have to trust others to filter out theories worth looking into.  In this case you say, "I trust the mainstream American newspapers."

Your defense (and you need one; scientists are supposed to draw only on reliable sources) is that mainstream American newspapers are more reliable filters than any source you can turn to.  You regard an American journalist as a scientist pressed for time.  But remember, you are asking American newspapers only to tell you whether or not to take the theory seriously, not to tell you whether or not it is sound.

Your argument (and you need one; you have named the people who, by ignoring their theorizing, have gotten these theorists called "conspiracy" theorists) is that those who write for mainstream American newspapers are in competition with each other, and are as eager to get ahead as scientists, and are as alert to each other's lapses, while the sources the theorists rely on are in harmony with each other, and ignore each other's lapses.  You believe that judgment tested in competition is more reliable than judgment free of such testing.

Your purpose is to leave open the possibility that the conspiracy theory is true (a scientist never closes the door to new evidence and alternate theories) while avoiding commitment to investigation and even discussion. 

Your chief enemy is your own conscience as a scientist.  You feel uncomfortable showing indifference to offered evidence of a world-changing truth, and trusting non-academics to support that indifference.  You feel guilty turning away from people that look up to you.  But trust me.  If you value ordinary life you don't want to open yourself up to the extraordinary effort examination of a conspiracy theory will require, not if it's anything like the currently popular ones.   There's no end to what's on the Zapruder film, or in the Tower debris, or at the Roswell site.

Maybe, though, the best defense is to get people to stop looking up to you.  Change your identity.  Pull Error Philosophy on them.  Say, "Look, I'm not really a scientist.  I'm just a time-pressed wonk getting through life by making the best hunches he can.  My hunch that the Times and the Post have the right slant on this has taken me this far and since there's not a whole lot of good ordinary life left I think I'll just stick with them."

230. "Don't tell me about your doubts, tell me something you BELIEVE in."

 

Let's say an Error Philosopher hears that, Dave Gardner playing the Southern preacher, and takes it seriously.

"Well, the first thing I believe in is my own mortality.  I am going to die and I don't know when.  If I thought I were going to live forever I'd be wrong to give up on the Ideal, the Truth.  If I thought I had no mortal limitations I'd be wrong to have such a low aim, to avoid Error.  I'd have time to overcome my limitations.  I couldn't be an Error Philosopher.

"The second thing I believe in is the Good Hunch, what truth philosophers call probable inference.  I believe that in the time I have, with my limited abilities, I can come pretty close to what brilliant creatures, with a lot of time, will conclude is very reliable belief.  I mean, close enough, enough anyway to get me through the rest of my life without making Big Mistakes.

"The third thing I believe in is the value of ordinary, normal life.  That's what avoidance of Big Mistakes lets you live.  It's so valuable that, especially for those who have made a Big Mistake or two, or come close, you don't mind missing out on the extraordinary."

Does that mean you doubt the value of the extraordinary achievement?

"No, I doubt the value of a gamble for it.  You often risk the loss of what I have put a high value on, normal life, and you don't get very good odds.  They're like for a straight flush.  But you've got to figure the odds in each case.  And keep in mind that there's a joker in this deck.  From time to time up jumps, from the normal life, an extraordinary achievement.  The person going along, enjoying all that daily life has to offer, suddenly produces work that knocks the socks off of everybody.  That's more likely in some fields than in others (I'm thinking of mathematics) but it's possible in all.  t has something to do, maybe, with peace of mind."

One last thing.  Why do you call this a "philosophy"?

"For the same reason Mark Twain signed a letter to the editor with the name of a preacher friend of his: to give it more weight."

And why do you capitalize so many of your ideas?

"Same reason.  It's what Germans do.  I've even considered giving the whole cluster a German name: Irrtumphilosophie."

229. From First Grade to Weapons Grade

 

"Don't be a Just Me" was a motto on the wall of my first grade classroom.  In seventh grade, where we learned to debate, this had become, "Look at it from the other fellow's point of view."  I thought of this when I read Geoff Dyer's explanation (Financial Times, 12-4-13) of China's declaration of an Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea: China is "attempting what aspiring great powers often do to prevent another country from dominating its own region."

All right, grown-up youngster, be fair.  Look at it from China's point of view.  There's the U.S. with its Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) covering all the waters around its borders, there's Japan with its ADIZ, there's Russia with its.  An ADIZ is not a legal or treaty thing; it's just declared.  Great, and sometimes not-so-great, powers have such things. 

Say you're Chinese.  For such a long time your country was far from being a great power.  Just the opposite.  Great powers took from China what they wanted.  In 1895 Japan took, among bigger things (like Taiwan), the Diaoyu Islands.  A small thing  but still a great power thing.  Do you want to be a great power?  Get an Air Defense Identification Zone.  And if it overlaps Japan's ADIZ  at the Diaoyu Islands, so much the better.  Here's mud in your eye, Shinzo Abe.

Not so fast, says Joe Biden, you're "unilaterally trying to change the status quo" (NYT, 12-3-13).

"Whose status quo?" the fair-minded seventh-grader sees himself, Chinese, asking the U.S.  "The established situation in the Pacific has you running things right up to our coastal waters.  Just the way you ran things in 1961 (this 12-year-old does well in history) when Khrushchev sent his boatload of missiles to Cuba.  Remember?  The U.S. had missiles in Turkey, right on the Soviet Union's border.  And was ready to press the button if the Soviets put some on its borders.  "We can do it but you can't," that was the status-quo motto in 1961.

That's the way established powers talk to rising powers.  Most of it is probably arrogance and habit but, you know, I think a lot of it is just plain fear.  Like what Spartans felt when they saw the power of Athens rising.  "What will they do to us when they are fully powerful?"  Martin Wolf, writing in last Tuesday's Financial Times ("China must not copy the Kaiser's errors," 12-3-13) makes the comparison to Germany, and gives us a telling reminder of the fear in the hearts of the established powers, Britain and France, as Germany rose, and moved to stand alongside them in the 20th century.  Wolf shows how that move was mishandled, and we come away certain that established powers can mishandle their establishment as badly as rising powers can mishandle their rising.  His reminder, that "seemingly minor events can quickly escalate to catastrophic proportions," needs no elaboration to give us a shudder.

Keeping an established power happy without making a rising power unhappy is pretty difficult but smart statesmen can do it.  The Kennedy team handling the missiles the Soviet Union (in the position of a rising power) was sending to Cuba did it.  They made a deal: the Soviets would turn their boat around and we would remove the missiles we had stationed in Turkey.  But there would be no public announcement of the removal, or even admission of the deal.  That left Americans, the mass of them, believing that they were as great as they ever were.  Since the turnaround was public they could claim victory.  But their leaders would make no such claims.  "No crowing" was Kennedy's final instruction to the team.  That would let the Soviets think they were as good as anybody. 

The seventh-grader has no seat at the realpoliticians' table but is his voice unheard?  I think not.  No graduate of an American elementary school can entirely silence the voice that speaks for fairness to the other fellow and in this case, inside those tough, anti-communist counselors, I think there must have been a voice asking why the U.S. could put missiles on its adversary's borders and the adversary could not do the same.  I'll go further.  I'll bet some were asking, "What would I be feeling about my borders if countries along them had not leaped across them so many times to savage us, as the Germans did so devastatingly to the Russians just a few years ago?"  Americans, with their 3000 miles of ocean on each side, have a hard time imagining the feelings of exposed countries, but if they're not going to be haunted by their seventh-grade teachers they have to.

Smart seventh-graders read "Look at it from the other fellow's point of view" as a sub-motto of "Use your imagination," and when they grow into realpoliticians the blackboard motto will become "get inside the other fellow's head, look at the world the way he looks at it, and the way he looks at you."  The results could be as different as what's inside a Chinese head and what's inside an Iranian head.

Say a grown-up seventh-grader gets inside an Iranian mullah's head and looks out at us.  What does he see?  Pure Evil.  The Great Satan.  When he looks, as that mullah, at his own people what does he see?  Potential martyrs for Good, caring little about their own lives in the fight against Evil.  If the seventh grader is at all an Error Philosopher (Posts #224 and 226) he'll see tolerance of nuclear weapons in the hands of such a mullah directing a nation as The Big Mistake, to avoid which his country has to Go Big (here meaning "do anything necessary to keep nuclear weapons out of such hands").  So people who adhere to seventh-grade ideals aren't necessarily going to be doves.  They could be bigger hawks than John McCain.  With controlled sympathies.  It won't matter that in the past Iranians have been victims, our victims (in 1953).  Decisions have to be made for, and sympathies directed to, the living and their descendants only.  There's no point, at a bargaining table, in sympathizing with the dead.

That in Iran is a million miles from what we have in the East China Sea, beginning with what's primary inside the Chinese head: material, or commercial, interests — all that trade with the U. S., all that need for the natural resources missing in their own country.  The trouble with the Fighter Against Evil is that in his head there are no material interests you can work with.  In the Fighter Against Foreign Devils there are God's plenty.  What Marx (dialectical materialism) didn't put there Confucius did. Confucius, that god (yes, you can call Confucianism the "Chinese religion") of realism and worldliness.

There, in the Far East, is the hope we can't have in the Near East.  Mutual material interests push China and the U. S., represented by skilled diplomats at the table, to a peaceful settlement that lets each side go home speaking like big-power winners.  "See, we got them to accept our defense zone."  "See, we got them to bring their defense zone down to match that of reasonable nations" (the Chinese ADIZ required — perhaps for future bargaining — more of entering planes than the others' did).  They come out with the Chinese feeling as good as anybody and the Americans feeling as great as they ever were. Rising power happy, established power happy.  Fairness that makes the seventh grader happy.  Achieved by diplomacy that makes the realpolitician happy.

 
-->

228. When Error Philosophers Become Parents.

 

-->

I see no reason for the Avoidance Parent not to follow the same general rule the Avoidance Ruler follows: come down big on the Big Mistakes and wave away the little ones.  The Big Mistakes a child can make are the life-ruining ones, like doing heroin.  In my day it was getting a girl pregnant, or getting pregnant.  The promising child goes, bang, from a wide world full of options (this college? that career? the best country to pursue it in?) to a narrow world of practically zilch options (work at this plant?  apprentice yourself to that trade? clerk in whose store?). That was in my town but the range of jobs available to a partially educated husband was small in nearly every town and inability to move far (how could you, with no savings and a baby?) made it smaller.

OK, that is the Big Mistake, that is the nuclear catastrophe, the quagmire, the released genocide, and unless he (or she) is confident the child will avoid it on his own the Avoidance Parent will go big on it as he went big on the toddler to keep him out of the street.  And with the same acceptance of collateral damage, physical or psychological.  No injury by a parent is as great as what an automobile or a heroin addiction can do.

Parents, like nineteenth-century rulers, are prone to gauge a mistake by the injury done not to the child but to themselves, their pride, their sense of their (or their family's) position.  And they often fail to distinguish real injury from symbolic injury.  Dress, facial hair, music, posture, indecorous language, most of the gestures of teenage rebellion, do only symbolic injury.  The Avoidance Parent, having identified the Big Threat that does Real Injury, will wave them aside — as Napoleon III, France's great Attainment Ruler, should have done with the Ems telegram, the indecorous language of which led him to declare the war that lost Alsace.  Loss of a province, loss of a child, the same confusion is behind it.

In the family, as in the world arena, the Error Philosopher will be an anti-romantic.  No "Follow your dream," no "Excelsior!" no "Be President."  Just avoid the Big Crash that, with romantics, follows not just failure but simply falling short.  He'll redefine failure.  So that a child who grows up to be a quarrelsome, dogmatic bore will be recognized as a failure.  Despite his Nobel prize.  The payoff to the child? He'll se that there's no need to make it in the big leagues.  Playing decent ball in the neighborhood is, as long as it satisfies you, good enough.  The payoff to the parent: no reproaches like Biff's to Willy Loman: "I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody!"

Does this mean that the nation will win fewer Nobel prizes?  It could well be.  Maybe that's the way Error Philosophy will play out beyond the family.  Buy into it and we may buy out of a cure for cancer.