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."

33. "Science says"

Anybody who says, "Science says...," tells you right away that he's not a journalist, not one who writes for the New York Times anyway. Journalists are not responsible for any of the clear instances that turn up in a search. Who is responsible? Readers. Of the 28 instances in the last year they, in their comments and letters, produced 16 of them. We have a clear line between popular usage and professional usage.

The professional takes more care. Care here means recognizing that the word "science" doesn't refer to anything that holds beliefs. Science is a way of arriving at beliefs. It can't say anything. Scientists hold beliefs. They can say a lot. You've got to get that straight at the beginning if you're going to go anyplace in your story or discussion.

Most of the time there's no great harm in using "science" in the popular sense. We're at a party or at the beach, and don't really want to go anyplace. But sometimes we want to make a serious point, and break into a serious discussion to do so, as many of those readers who wrote to the Times wanted to do. We either harm our case (when our popular misconception is exposed) or harm the discussion (when it's not).

Do we risk harming a discussion any time we personify an abstraction? Evolution says...Religion believes...Capitalism holds...Society demands...Feminism denies? Paul Davies, a physicist, was about as far from a beach party as you can get when, a while back, he personified science on the Times Op-Ed page (11-24-07), arguing that, like religion, "science has its own faith-based belief system." He was breaking into the most serious discussion you can have, that going on between philosophers, people who take the greatest care with what they believe. Care is their profession. Say they let Davies in. What's that going to do to their long-time discussion of religious beliefs as tested by scientists?

I think we can see right off that it's going to make it less modest. The eyes of the philosopher are going to be lowered here, following the gaze of the scientist, which is always on a particular claim made in a particular religion. Is it a claim of historical fact? Does it pass the test of such claims?

With raised eyes here we can have all sorts of interesting discussions, but we can't have a discussion that will interest philosophers. Philosophers, the ones I have read anyway, are interested in what makes a question hard. What makes the reconciliation of science and religion hard is just this thing we're looking at, a claim and a test. The Bible says 4004 years. The geological test shows a deep negative. That's where the shoe pinches. OK, let's discuss it.

What Davies will do is bring into the discussion a shoe shaped just like the science shoe, except where it pinches. The belief-system he attributes to scientists, a structure based on a belief in "the rational intelligibility of the cosmos," is one I can well imagine scientists holding. But I can't see it interesting scientists. They don't look that high. And it will bore the pants off of philosophers. Answers come too easy up there.

How did Davies subject himself to the snub I see him getting? By starting off on the wrong conceptual foot with that personification of that abstraction, science.

We observers, though, can't walk away thinking that philosophers, with their exemplary care about what they believe, have had the last word. There are other discussions and other kinds of care. Those who are very careful about what they value can be exemplary too, and say things to philosophers. A discussion where they try to work things out, never ignoring the hard part, could be very interesting.

That leaves us, surprise, with a word problem. Can we call those value people talking to philosophers "philosophers"? No, we've already used "philosophers" for people very careful about what they believe. There doesn't seem to be a good word for those very careful about what they value. Maybe "sages"?