Suspicious types

NOEL ROONEY takes issue with the prejudices underlying academic approaches to conspiracy theory and theorists.

Ifirst became interested in conspiracy theory in the early 1980s, and my introduction to the subject was easily weird enough to get me hooked straightaway. I was working as an outdoor messenger for a firm of lawyers, and spent a good deal of my time wandering around the various inns and courts in and around Fleet Street and Chancery Lane. One day, as I walked past the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, I saw a set of placards, each as tall as an average outdoor messenger. The placards laid out a comprehensive (and frankly bonkers) theory about the Jesuits having recruited a famous Northern Irish politician of the time, the Reverend Iain Paisley, and sundry members of the British royal family, into a plot to destabilise the kingdom in readiness for a Vatican coup d’état.

Two things particularly struck me about this experience: first, the extraordinary level of (albeit mad) detail that the laboriously hand-painted placards contained; and second, that the person standing next to me, reading with equal fascination, was the tallest individual I had ever encountered. When I asked, my Ethiopian companion (for such he was) told me he was 7ft 2in tall. I copied the whole diatribe by hand into my notebook, and thus began an interest that has persisted to this day.

I soon began to look for books and articles on conspiracy theory; at that time, and for some years afterwards, I mostly found myself reading books of conspiracy theory rather than books or articles on the subject. I did findacopyof Harper’s magazine

with the now-famous article by Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 1 and eventually found my way to Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies,2 where the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ was first used as a handle for the literature I was now avidly reading.

Then came the 1990s, and the explosion of conspiracist material online, and following closely on its heels, the beginning of a burgeoning field of research into conspiracy theory. From the early 2000s, the number of books and articles on the topic grew exponentially, and conspiracy began to be seen as a field of academic, and even scientific, study. Two points of view dominated these books and articles, and they continue to do so today: first, that conspiracy theory represents a threat to democracy; and second, that conspiracy theory appeals to a particular type of person – that the label ‘conspiracy theorist’ is, in some respects, a diagnosis.

The first point of view (which we might amiably call the conspiracy theory of conspiracy theory) is understandable, and largely wrong. It is still trotted out regularly (see A Lot of People Are Saying 3 for an up-to-date version) by academics and public commentators who seem to view Western democracy as a fragile construct, liable to collapse at the drop of a tin foil hat. However, most of the conspiracy theorists I have read claim (and I see no reason to disbelieve them) that they are defending democracy, not attacking it.

The wrongness of the second viewpoint is of a rather different order. It is perhaps easiest to understand if we consider a couple of questions that appear in a large proportion of the literature on conspiracy theory. With minor variants, these questions are: what kind of person

believes in/constructs conspiracy theories? And: what makes a person believe that (insert conspiracy theory of choice or du jour) is true or plausible? On the face of it, these seem reasonable questions to ask, but behind them lurks a set of prejudices that are somewhat questionable.

Let’s broaden our perspective briefly. Assuming (as I think most of us do) that conspiracy theory is, or at least incorporates, a belief system, then we might ask whether, in studies of other belief systems (communism, capitalism, Christianity, Islam, environmentalism) these same questions are quite so regularly asked. The answer turns out to be no; while there are, of course, studies of the psychology of religious and political belief, these are not especially prominent in the study of the systems themselves. To put it another way, imagine that every time you read something on Christianity, the author asked: what type of person becomes a Christian? Or, what would make a person believe the Christian story? In fact, when was the last

Hofstadter was borrowing a clinical term for other purposes

time you read any literature on Christianity where such questions were asked? Probably never.

This type of question is not at the centre of inquiry into any other belief system, and yet it is prevalent to the point of ubiquitous in studies of conspiracy theory. Why? Is conspiracy theory a special case in the field of human belief? And if it is, what is it about conspiracy theory that justifies this status? I suspect there are a number of reasons for this rather odd attitude, some of them connected to those early essays and books on the topic, and some to do with the momentum of certain scientific (and quasi-scientific) ideas. And let’s not forget good old-fashioned prejudice; who hasn’t entertained the thought of the conspiracy theorist as a nut job, squirrelling around the Internet looking for all the other nut jobs to share crazy ideas with?

In his seminal essay on the subject, Hofstadter was at pains to point out that, although he chose the term ‘paranoid’ to characterise conspiracism, he was not using it in a clinical sense, but “borrowing a clinical term for other purposes”. Nonetheless, the feeling that there was something a little unhealthy about the paranoid style was clearly present in Hofstadter’s writing, and in most of the writing and research on conspiracy theory that followed him. If Hofstadter thought conspiracy theory was a special case of belief, however, he meant it only in the sense that he saw it as a quintessentially American school of oddness, a quality stemming from the historical fact that the United States had, itself, been founded on what could reasonably be termed a conspiracy theory.

Subsequent theorising on conspiracy theory has been less forgiving, and has tended to the belief that we are dealing with a kind of pathology, political if not personal. There are dissenting voices, of course; Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds 4 is a case in point, as is the writing of Matthew Dentith.5 But even in these more even-handed books, there is a sense that belief in

conspiracy theory is the result of a disposition, on some or all of our parts, to believe unlikely things.

In the current century, this vague feeling about human disposition has burgeoned into an academic industry. 6 The psychology of conspiracy theory sees large numbers of books and papers published every year, and pretty much every one of those papers focuses on the innate disposition, or the personality type, involved. This leads us in some curious directions; let’s consider a school of thought that I will term the ‘gateway drug’ approach to conspiracy theory. 7 In this view, a person who believes one conspiracy is more likely to believe others, and perhaps eventually all of them. Again, on the face of it, this seems reasonable, but let’s think about it slightly differently.

You are a rational, curious person, and someone introduces you to the idea that the assassination of JFK was not the work of a lone, nutty super-marksman, but actually a conspiracy involving a number of interested parties. You browse the topic online, and then read a couple of books, and you find the idea plausible, even convincing. That same someone suggests you might look at the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King (and they don’t ask for your soul

by return of post so you assume they are trustworthy). Are you more likely to: think “OK, I’ll look into it”, or throw your hands up and say, “That’s preposterous! I’m not going to even think about it”?

I’d suggest that the second response is rather less rational than the first. If a plausible case is presented to you, why would you not look into similar mysteries presented in a similar way? That is to say, if conspiracy seems a reasonable mode of thought, or a reasonable worldview to hold, then it does so by its own merits, and not because of some innate disposition on your part. And here is the nub of the problem in the psychologised approach: by concentrating on the personality of the adherent, it removes agency from conspiracy theory as a mode of thought and shifts it onto the recipient of that mode of thought. In respect of conspiracy theory as a system, it puts the cart firmly before the horse, in fact. Conspiracy theories appeal to a lot of people precisely because they are well-researched, wellargued and offer a plausible case; also because they are amusing or kooky, but that doesn’t undermine the point. They don’t appeal to us merely because we’re a particular type of person, or because we suffer from a specific pathology of personality or belief. Consider what I said earlier about studies of other beliefs and belief systems; if agency was removed from the object of belief in those other cases, what would happen to them as objects of study? If we shifted focus from Christianity to Christians, and suggested Christian belief was a form of psychological diagnosis, we would radically alter the field of religious studies, and not for the better.

There are plenty of other arguments against the diagnostic approach to conspiracy theory, not least the sheer number of people who believe in at least one conspiracy theory: after all, if everyone is a conspiracy theorist, then effectively no one is; or, to put it another way, a diagnosis that captures a majority of the population may not be telling us very much. I think it’s time we began to study the epistemology and structure of conspiracy theory properly, as a bona fide system of thought and belief, rather than trawling the stats for the elusive glint of tin foil.

NOTES

1 The Paranoid Style in American Politics, by Richard Hofstadter, Harper’s Magazine, November 1964. 2 The Open Society and its Enemies, by Karl Popper, Routledge, London 1945.

3 A Lot of People are Saying: the New conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, Nancy L Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, Princeton University Press, 2019.

4 Suspicious Minds: Why we Believe Conspiracy Theories ,by Rob Brotherton, Bloomsbury Press, November 2015.

5 The Philosophy of Conspiracy theories, by Matthew R X Dentith, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014. See also his article “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but…”, FT324:36-39.

6 For a comprehensive review of current research on conspiracy theory, see: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Psychological Research on Conspiracy Beliefs: Field Characteristics, Measurement Instruments, and Associations with Personality Traits, in Frontiers in Psychology, 11 February 2019.

7 See, for instance, Belief in Conspiracy Theories, by Ted Goertzel, in Political Psychology ,Vol15No4, December 1994, pp 731-742.

2 NOEL ROONEY is a poet and longstanding fortean. He writes FT’s regular ‘Conspirasphere’ column.

ABOVE: The tin foil hat brigade: a threat to Western democracy, or its staunchest defenders?

ABOVE: In his seminal book, Richard Hofstadter was not using the word ‘paranoid’ in its clinical sense, and yet academic approaches to conspiracy theory have tended to assume that some sort of pathology is at work.