Few things are more annoying than the self-assured convert. They regard their doubters with the heavy condescension of a parent with a wayward child – seeing in them the naïve indiscretions of their past. Oh, they’ve walked these roads before; they know the traps; the obstacles. With a sympathetic smile and an arm around your shoulders they’ll try to drag you down the path to righteousness.

Doubtless there’s been research into this phenomenon but I can’t believe that anyone has put it better than Luke Wright (the poet, not the luckless one-day cricketer). In Ode to Cigarettes he writes of how gave up smoking and took up “telling people that [he'd] given up”…

The obsession grew

I’m on twenty sanctimonious brags a day

I’m nipping out at lunchtime to shout at strangers in the street

“Oi – cancer boy! I’m better than you! Eight fucking weeks!”

The danger is that while you might repudiate ideas that you had previously held, the attitudes that led you to adopt them may endure regardless. The unreasonable impulses that led you to nurture them might latch onto another dogma that provides relief. So, a haughty Christian might become an atheistic ass. A rabid Trotskyite might become a smug Conservative. Someone who’d denounced all criticism of Justin Bieber might decide there’s no good music beyond heavy metal.

I say this in the knowledge that I may fall into this trap, and to assure you that I’ve striven to avoid it.

I started trying to “debunk” conspiracy theories pretty much as soon as I got into politics. When you’re that naive, and filled with juvenile presumptuousness, you want the kind of arguments that won’t leave you feeling stupid. Thus, you’ve (what do I mean “you’ve”? I’m talking about me!) no great desire to enter a discussion of rights theory. It’s much easier to look for silly people to demean. These include creationists, and the religious generally; Daily Mail commenters and, for me, conspiracy theorists.

It was far more difficult than I’d expected, though. They had more substantial, and technical, theories than I’d prepared for. Moreover, the arguments were more septic than sceptical – marked by the prejudice and vitriol that spawns bigotry. So, I drifted away and began to realise that most of what I’d thought was true was wrong. New interests occured. (I started blogging!) A while later, though, I tuned into a radio programme, Little Atoms, which purported to uphold “ideas of the Enlightenment”: scepticism, human rights, free inquiry and so on. Its presenter claimed these values set them in opposition to such evils as totalitarianism, pseudoscience and conspiracy theory. How, I wondered, do these things offend the Enlightenment?

What’s the Beef?

In 2010 a ruminative Tony Blair bemoaned that his critics won’t accept that the invasion of Iraq was a “reasonable” decision. No, he sighed, “there’s got to be some conspiracy behind it – some great deceit that’s gone on”. He appeared to think this notion was quite patently absurd. However, as the war was launched among numerous fabrications, distortions and lies, many of which stemmed from his own mouth and pen, it’s far from groundless. That’s charitable, in fact.

His powerful peers have shared his disdain for the suspicious. So, Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organisation, dismissed as “conspiracy theories” the claims that its treatment of the influenza scare might have been compromised by its associations with Big Pharma. An investigation by the British Medical Journal revealed links with “experts who had declarable financial and research ties with pharmaceutical companies producing antivirals and influenza vaccines”. Clearly the truth was much more complicated than Chan’s sneering might have one believe.

Why do powermongers feel so comfortable with this insult? Well, “conspiracy theorists” are weedy, bullied striplings in the playground of ideas.  From the gossip columnists to highbrow opinionators, everyone thinks they’re fair game: “cranks”, “nutters”, “loons”; febrile fantasists, battering out dementing narratives from their mother’s basements. Easy intellectual pickings. This is unfair, and evidence that one’s respectability in intellectual circles depends more on one’s status that the value of one’s thoughts.

I’ve not flipped to a dichotomous dogma and don’t believe conspiracies – of any scale, at least – are unextraordinary or at all straightforward to enact. On the other hand, I hope to show that (a) politics is conducted in the kind of devious, furtive manner that legitimises notions of conspiracy and (b) that the investigation of such theories demands critical engagement, not distant scorn.

Definitions of “conspiracy theory” are so vague and varied that’s it’s not a useful term. On the other hand, it’s so ubiquitous that trying to evade it would be like arguing with a Guardian columnist and not using the word “progressive”. I’ll define it as I feel its critics use it: to apply to covert and deceptive schemes of broad social relevance.

“I don’t beliiieve it!”

One of the first critics to discuss the notion – or, at least, a notion – of “conspiracy theory” was the liberal philosopher Karl Popper. His opinion is still referenced to dismiss such theories but I’d suggest that this due to his reputation, not the value of his thoughts. In The Open Society and Its Enemies he offered a critique of the “conspiracy theory view of history”. He defined it thus…

It is the view than an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed) and who have planned and conspired to bring it about.

The Open Society… opposed the view of theorists who uphold the dogma of historicism, by which history unfolds in an inexorable (or, at least, expectable) sweep. To him, the “conspiracy theory view” isn’t one that perceives a conspiracy, some conspiracies or a heck of a lot of the things but one that assumes all events are the result of devious conspirators. This is even clearer in a later work, collected in Conjectures and Refutations…

…the conspiracy theory of society cannot be true because it amounts to the assertion that all events, even those which at first sight do not seem to be intended by anybody, are the intended results of the actions of people who are interested in these results…

One could hardly disagree with Popper: such a view is bunkum. History is influenced by economic trends, environmental factors, scientific progress and, indeed, total happenstance. On the other hand, no one beyond a clutch of wild-eyed demagogues cleaves to such a view. Applying it to conspiracy theories qua conspiracy theories is a herring of the deepest scarlet.

The existence of conspiracies is harmonious with Popper’s judgements. The histories of the Roman Empire or Elizabethan Britain can’t be traced through plots but they’re still littered with the things.

So, what of the individual “conspiracy theories”? First, are they – as the contemptuous use of the term suggests – inherently absurd? Brian Keeley, Professor of Philosophy at Pitzer College, tried to define a class of theories that are “unwarranted” – incredible by definition. He was unsuccessful…

My conclusion was that, alas, such an analysis fails. The chief problem is that there is a class of quite warranted conspiracy theories about such events as Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair, etc., and that there is no principled way of distinguishing, a priori, the two classes from one another. There is no “mark of the incredible,” as it were (as Hume argues there is for reports of miracles). As a result, contrary to being able to reject conspiracy theories out of hand, prior to any investigation, we ought to adopt an agnostic attitude with respect to conspiratorial claims.

Nonetheless, opponents of supposed “conspiracism” often act as if such theories can be dismissed offhand. They cite a priori reasons to assume they’re impossible, largely based on the assumption that they’re too improbable. These points are often compelling but they’re too informal to replace pragmatic study. And, besides, they’re often less compelling than they seem to be.

Occam’s Rusted Razor

In his Voodoo Histories David Aaronovitch takes a stab at defining “conspiracy theories”…

…the attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unlikely…

But how do we measure likelihood? Never fear. Aaronovitch promises a “sophistication“…

…the attribution of secret action to one party that might far more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another.

This is as sophisticated as a cartoon penis. We’re still no clearer as to what’s likely, reasonable or, indeed, complicated, and how we’re supposed to diagnose such features. The author relies on the principle of parsimony – Occam’s famous razor – by which a theory that explains the data of a case is preferable if it contains the fewest new assumptions.

There are several points to be made in response. One of the most vital principles of the, er – principle is that hypotheses should satisfactorily explain the data. You can’t merely draw an elegant impression of a case; you have to build your theory round the structure of its facts. So, you can’t accept an explanation that affirms your prejudices, nor dismiss one if it contradicts them, before you’ve assessed the evidence the subject has produced. Otherwise it reminds me of detective stories where the hapless companion assumes a dead girl with a pistol in her grip must have committed suicide before the keen-eyed hero notes the gun is in the wrong hand. (Yes, I hear you – they’re not real – but true events can be as strange. When Dan Leach confessed to murdering his girlfriend the investigators were bewildered. They’d happily concluded that the victim topped herself.)

Sometimes you can take a rough, intuitive judgement and be on secure ground. If, for example, a banker choked on a sweet tomorrow you’d be fairly safe assuming he’d been careless eating gobstoppers, and that no one had invented sinister, expanding sweets. This is what someone far cruder than your genial host might term “common sense”. Yet there’s nothing very scientific about it. How, for example, would we systematize the “complication[s]” of a theory? Count up all the people who’d have to be involved? But what if the theory that seems to indict more people offers the most satisfying motive for a deed? I can’t disagree with Tim Wilkinson’s judgement that…

…this kind of casual appeal to Ockham’s razor is generally no more than an attempt to lend an air of methodological rigour to one’s vague appeal to plausibility, or worse still, to orthodoxy or official endorsement.

To which I’d add that we can’t live our lives without vague appeals to plausibility. It’s just that we shouldn’t consider them indupitable proofs.

A Conspiracy So Vast

The most popular criticism of these blasted theories is that they implicate too many people to be realistic. In some cases I suspect there is a lot of truth to this. Hell, it’s difficult enough to stop people blabbing about your exposed penis; let alone convince them to partake in murder. Yet this needn’t mean that it’s impossible to do; and judging theories by such a metric is extremely crude.

For all that plots have been associated with cabals they needn’t be egalitarian in their conception and enactment. That someone is involved in a conspiracy needn’t mean they’re aware of it. Roles, in many cases, could be designated without their agents grasping the extent or nature of the operation. In the heightened secrecy of the Manhattan Project the various elements of nuclear production were divided between technicians, few of whom had any understanding of its magnitude. “My rule was simple,” their commander later said, “Each man should know everything he needed to know and do his job and nothing else.”

Indeed, people’s skills may be co-opted without their knowledge. This typifies conspiracies of any scale. An assassination (like, we’re told, that of JFK) needs someone to supply a gun; a non-suicidal airline bombing (such as Lockerbie) involves the baggage handlers; an attack on the scale of 9/11 (as we’re told it) calls for the unconscious abetment of migration officials; flight instructors and intelligence staff.

There are those, in an any theory of human affairs, who’d have to be aware of what’s being done. To accuse someone of evil – if, indeed, the acts are evil; they needn’t be – would require some hefty data to corroborate one’s charges. It’s not something to do lightly. On the other hand, if such data exists, one’s faith in human goodness shouldn’t be an obstacle to judging it. Crimes from Imperial Britain to occupied Iraq are proof enough that guys “like us” can sin with the worst of ‘em.

I’ll admit I’m being somewhat legalisatic about what’s possible. None of this means it’s not improbable that even hundreds of people could enact conspiracies and never be foolish or remorseful enough to expose the truth. The trouble is that (a) it’s difficult to gauge how many people would be implicated in an act, (b) it’s harder to work out how many would be conscious and (c) it’s quite impossible to know how many agents tips a theory from the realms of likelihood and into the fantastical. It’s no excuse, again, for a priori sneering.

The Democracy Defence

Most of those who doubt supposed “conspiracy theories” believe all sorts of plots are being enacted by dictators. It’s a mainstream view, for example, that the Nazis set the Reichstag ablaze to provoke anti-semitism, while, unfortunately, the idea that Saddam Hussain was quietly manufacturing nuclear weapons was, er – quite respectable in pre-war America.

Rather, these sceptics hold that large-scale conspiracies couldn’t take place in democratic states. The philosopher Edward Feser, for example, argues that democracies are “sclerotic and risk-averse”. This is contradicted by a history of venture and downright recklessness, from heedless wars – Vietnam, Iraq – to perilous diplomacy – JFK’s blockade of Cuba, or the Marshall Plan.

Feser argues that democracies are too conflicted for its agents to enact major conspiracies. He claims they’re “incapable of implementing any decision without reams of paperwork and committee oversight”. Again, this seems flatly untrue. Taking the lone of example of Feser’s homeland, the U.S., it’s obvious that one can’t trust the different legislative bodies to hold themselves to account. Time and again proposals which should have inspired grave scepticism if not outright refusal have faced scant resistance. In the cases of both Vietnam and Iraq, unnecessary wars of great strategic risk and moral dubiousness were enacted with enthusiasm.

But, says Feser, democratic states are not homogeneous – their different agencies are exactly that: they clash; compete. This is a decent point. (And such a state is surely preferable to an autocracy!) Still, while they might differ at some points that doesn’t give us cause to trust that they’re always at loggerheads. (In times of national crisis I should hope they’re not.) Two points occur: firstly that agencies may be too mutually accusable to have an interest in exposing one another. As the agents of the CIA abused suspects in secret prisons, for example, FBI officials hacked into American phone calls. Moreover, if there was cause to feel something could help or harm the both of them they might collude in pursuing or opposing it. CIA and FBI officials were conspiring in acts of torture long before the tactic was acknowledged.

What, I hear a fictional sceptic ask, of the free press? Expecting the media to reveal conspiracies sounds rather credulous but isn’t totally absurd. After all, it isn’t just a lapdog: it’s shown that it can bite. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s exposés of Watergate helped to bring down a President; Seymour Hersh brought to light the Mai Lai shooting; reporters from Julius Chambers to Greg Palast have been embarrassing the powerful for centuries. Still, there are reasons to believe we shouldn’t trust the media to reveal the sins of the elites. If it’s the guard dog of the public then it’s old, missing teeth and eerily liable to side with the burglar.

The press, stuffed with and owned by establishment figures, can be dreadfully intolerant of theories that challenge it. After Gary Webb exposed the CIA’s complicity in the drug trade he was subjected to a barrage of criticism that left his thesis untouched but his career in tatters. He was fired, cast from the media, slipped into depression and eventually killed himself. “If we had met five years ago,” he said before his death, “You wouldn’t have found a more staunch defender of the [press] than me.”  “I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests…The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.”

Insiders, like Nick Davies in his Flat Earth News, have revealed that there’s little money, time or patience for investigative journalism. Kevin Toolis, a filmmaker for the BBC’s Panorama and Channel 4′s Dispatches, told a panel that, “The commitment to spending money on this stuff is dying a death.” If we look at how much was exposed by Wikileaks and keep in mind that this didn’t include top-secret information it’s not unfair to assume that lots of murky deeds evade the press.

Assaulted Nuts

“A constant feature of modern conspiracy theories,” David Aaronovitch writes in Voodoo Histories, “Is the exaggeration of the status of experts”. This is, somewhat ironically, an exaggeration but it’s true that many theorists brandish supposedly expert opinion as a mark of their value. His example is the U.S. shock jock Alex Jones referring to Michael Meacher MP, who at one time voiced suspicions about the attacks of 9/11, as the “former number 3 in the Blair government”. In fact, Meacher was never in the Cabinet. (Though it’s hard to see why one should be impressed by proximity to Blair. Surely anyone who got that close and didn’t slap the fellow deserves our condemnation, not respect.)

This, I’m happy to admit, has been a failing of some theorists. One generous explanation might be that, as we’ve seen, theorists have often been accused of lacking credibility. Their desire to justify their views is understandable if not excusable.

While some have overemphasised the prowess of their allies, though, common theories are rarely confined to amateurs. Among those who’ve doubted that Oswald was the lone murderer of JFK is the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The official verdict on his brother Robert’s shooting has been challenged by forensic scientists. Many academics and professionals have denied the quasi-official view of 9/11. That doesn’t mean they’re right, of course, but it does mean that the image of “conspiracy theorists” as twitching, basement-dwelling paranoiacs (with a PhD in Bullshit Studies, possibly) cannot be maintained.

Sceptics, even as they charge theorists with stretching their comrade’s credentials, have devalued them. Mocking those who doubt that the conspirators of 9/11 were Osama and his men, Aaronovitch notes that the Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice boast just two engineers (one of whom “devote[s] himself to studying the mechanics of dentistry”). Yes, perhaps, but the far larger and more widely promoted Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have long counted hundreds among their members.

Making Curiosity Uncool

But let’s take a step back. I’ll be the first (or, well, among the loudest) to admit that (a) people who theorise conspiracies are often stitching bogus narratives around a little data and a lot of prejudice and (b) that large-scale conspiracies – ie. those which demand the conscious involvement of thousands of agents – would be no picnic to enact and onerous to keep under wraps. At a certain scale it must be near-impossible.

This is no excuse for the assumption that they’re false, however; let alone absurd. As Professor Keeley writes, their data should be considered – not merely because it’s possible that they’re correct but as it might lead one to a more plausible but nonetheless provocative conclusion.

So, you don’t have to believe the Bilderberg is an omnipent elite to find its secretive union of power disquieting. You don’t need to conclude that Lockerbie was engineered by X, Y or Z to feel the case against Megrahi remains unconvincing. You needn’t believe all that’s been written about 9/11 to decide that much is still unknown or unexplained.

This nuance is lost on some skeptics. After 9/11 the opinion among hawkish commentators was, “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.” Amongst some defenders of official or quasi-official narratives the opinion seems to be, “You’re with us or you’re with the theorists.” You either cleave to the mainstream opinion or you have to be proposing an alternative. An absurd alternative.

In a piece that marked the freeing of the alleged Lockerbie bomber Geoffrey Robertson proclaimed…

If Megrahi was guilty of the Lockerbie bombing (and, conspiracy theories aside, the evidence justified the verdict), then Gaddafi must have given the order…

Not all of us who doubt the prosecution of Megrahi argue there was a conspiracy (though, indeed, there may have been). Hell, not all us insist that he was innocent (though, of course, we’ve seen no reason to believe that he’s guilty). The inference that one must draw from Robertson’s remarks, then, is that an idea which runs counter to official narratives is a “conspiracy theory”. This is strange, even regardless of the false idea that this legitimises its dismissal.

But, as evidenced by Blair and Cho’s remarks, quoted above, the charge of conspiracism is deployed without rigour. When Matt Taibbi exposed Goldman Sachs’ profiteering they dismissed his accusations as “conspiracy theor[ies]”. When the lobbying of AIPAC came under scrutiny its defenders shrugged off critics as “conspiracy theorists”. Concerned about the impact of depleted uranium? Well, according to the U.S. government that makes you, yes, a conspiracy theorist. Believe PNAC was influential? Well, that observation makes you a conspiracy theorist.

Supposedly sceptical opponents of “conspiracism” don’t merely assail grand ideas of cosmic malfeasance but all notions of covert, duplicitous behaviour. Such critics, I assume, cleave to an idealistic view of modern democratic states. Aaronovitch, for example, wrote, in a column for the Times…

…in a mature democracy, there is an enormous amount to be taken on trust (dictatorships don’t have to worry about this), and a belief that your PM or president is, in some way, a superior version of yourself — a father figure — helps to create such trust.

Heaven help us if somebody should undermine that trust!

The media is good at telling us that politicians are dishonest. (Think of Paxman’s hectoring of luckless spokespeople.) The trouble is that this supposed deception invariably takes the form of “spin” – the polish that our statesmen rub over the turds of their ideas. There’s nothing particularly controversial about this: it’s a standard, accepted and, to many people, entertaining tactic of a government’s strategems. Yet the operations of the state, and the banks and corporations, are often far more dishonest and malignant than that. (Enough that, if they were “superior version[s] of [ourselves]“, suicide would be the only honourable choice.)

The scorn for “conspiracy theories” has helped to drive parapolitical investigation into the realms of esoterica. When events remain mysterious the press don’t see them as opportunities for research but as wellsprings for eccentrics.

This is dangerous – it lets powermongers off the hook. We’ve seen they can promote their schemes not merely disgenuously but with outright fabrications (the Gulk of Tonkin, or the attempts to link anthrax, ricin and nukes to Saddam). They can assassinate characters (COINTELPRO) and, if it suits them, people (Mossad are experts at that). Whole campaigns have been enacted without civilian awareness (so, Nixon and Kissinger rained bombs on the Cambodians). Crimes are used as stepping stones towards a greater cause (look back through history and take your pick).

The world is a hostile, alienating place. Power has been concentrated in the hands of often unaccountable elites; backed by covert insitutions. That much is as arguable as the words, “The sun is hot.” From there it’s just a matter of how altruistic they are – and, considering the decades of conflict and exploitation we’ve experienced, you wouldn’t trust the buggers – and how honest they’re prepared to be – and, considering their habits of lying to us, hiding things from us and swotting those who let things slip you wouldn’t bank on ‘em. This doesn’t mean we should envisage cosmic conspiracies, nor expect Ickean levels of iniquity. Accusations based on prejudice rather than facts should be dissected with the vehemence of an anatomist. But it’s still enough to think that plots aren’t merely features of the past; that world events demand suspicion, not assurance and that “conspiracy theories” deserve sceptical assessment, not contemptuous denial.