In which our heroes discuss WTC Building 7 and debate the merits of the latter “Die Hard” films…
Category: General
With due deference, the DUE AUTHORITY flag conspiracy theory is rubbish
If you are a New Zealander, and you have access to either Twitter or Facebook, then you will doubtless be aware that there is a particular conspiracy theory going around about our flag referendum which suggests changing the flag is a much bigger deal than John Key and friends are letting on. You might, for example, have seen this image doing the rounds:
One of the more fulsome accounts of this conspiracy theory can be found at Ben Vigden’s site here. It starts thusly:
The nature of heraldry dates back to feudal times when the flags where not just things you waved but a coat of arms stated to whom you pledged allegiance to. It showed what your rank was, entrenched your legal status from what power or Due authority your knight exercised his rights and privileges, the Crown or the State. One of the frustrating things about the change being made to the NZ flag is that no one has considered that change of heraldry and how it impacts on the very notion of DUE AUTHORITY.
Notice the all-caps. There is a lot of Freeman on the land to this thesis, which is to say it relies on some fairly weird pseudo-legalistic framework in order to work.
The nuts of the theory really is this:
A change of flag means not only that we have taken a major step to removing the DUE AUTHORITY of the crown. It also means we take away the very power which enforces both the 1990 Bill of Rights Act (the closest thing NZ has to an entrenched Constitution) and the founding plank upon which the Treaty of Waitangi has meaning. It does not matter if your pro or anti monarchy but if you take away the DUE AUTHORITY of law (which includes our flag) you then open the gates of hell or to be precise the means in which John Key can legally sign the TPPA (Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement), Currently if the matter was taken to court it would undoubtedly end up at the Supreme Court.
Herein lies the issue: apparently changing the flag is a constitutional issue such that by removing the symbol of the British Crown from the flag of our nation state, we take away due authority of the Crown we pay allegiance to. Let’s unpack this.
- The DUE AUTHORITY conspiracy theory conflates and confuses the idea of the British Crown and the notion of the Crown itself.
The authority of the Parliament in Aotearoa/New Zealand comes from it being sovereign. An interesting quirk of tradition has it that our laws need the assent of the representative of the British Crown (which in our case is the Governor General). The role of the Governor General is something many New Zealanders are eternally confused about. Almost every time a law is passed that sections of the public think is “the worse thing ever!” someone will assert “Well, the Governor General doesn’t need to assent to it.” The idea is that as laws need the assent of the Crown (here symbolised as the Queen’s representative, the Governor General), the Governor General can essentially veto laws by refusing to sign off on them.
Except the Governor General can do no such thing. The New Zealand Parliament is sovereign, and the assent of the Governor General is automatic. In this respect, the Crown is Parliament. Historically it got its power through the British Crown, but the British Crown is now but a figurehead, constitutionally. As it stands, when we refer to the “Crown” in New Zealand law, we are not referring to the British Crown. Rather, we are referring to Parliament. Which is to say that removing the symbol of the British Crown (presumably the corner we call the “Union Jack”) from our flag really means nothing whatsoever. Changing the flag would not suddenly make Parliament any more or less sovereign than it currently is.
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The DUE AUTHORITY conspiracy theory takes it that changing the flag changes our constitutional conventions.
Given that Parliament is sovereign, if Parliament changes the flag, then nothing really changes (other than getting a new, and possibly not much better flag). The authority of the state has not come from the monarch of Great Britain for quite some time. As such, a change in flag will not make it easier for the government to sign the TPPA. That is because – at the moment – all Cabinet need do is agree to the text of the TPPA, and sign it for it to come into effect. For sure, Parliament will then need to pass laws which take our new international agreements into consideration, but even if we keep the current flag, the British Crown (via the Governor General) will not be stepping in to say “No!” ((Indeed, I can imagine the British Crown just shrugging her shoulders and saying “Whatev, peeps. Liz don’t worry ’bout that kind of thing. Peace out!”))
Let it not be said that I am unsympathetic to worries about how the TPPA is likely to be signed; I oppose the current leaked text of the TPPA (Like Prof. Jane Kelsey, I’m not entirely against free trade agreements in principle, but I am against this one in particular). I am even suspicious about the current flag referendum (after all, isn’t it convenient that a well-paid panel chose three preferred-by-the-PM – the same PM that initiated the referendum – fern designs?). However, I just don’t see there being some sinister conspiracy by the PM and his cronies to make it easier to sign the TPPA; it’s easy enough for them to sign it as it stands without the hassle of changing flags. ((Indeed, if this is a sinister conspiracy, it’s potentially a really risky one. What if people vote to keep the flag? Then what happens? Do our plucky set of conspirators then assassinate the Governor General in order to keep him from refusing assent? Do they end up introducing fluoride into the Buckingham Palace water supply in order to make the Queen docile? It seems really very risky.)) Our constitutional convention currently has it that Cabinet can sign such agreements without even having to debate them in Parliament. It’s also not the case that the Governor General could refuse assent to any legislation which enables the TPPA. As such, that little slice of the British Crown in our current flag means nothing other than a constant reminder that we are a colonised country.
And that might be reason enough to think changing the flag is a good idea. Not because being reminded that this place is colonised is a bad thing – we should spend more time thinking about colonisation and its effects – but because a new flag might well be a remedy to the salt-in-the-wounds many Māori feel when looking at that symbol of colonisation. But that’s a separate issue from the TPPA. That’s the thing; just because we’re suspicious about the TPPA and the process around the flag referendum, that does not tell us that they are in any way linked. Indeed, understanding our constitutional conventions really shows that they aren’t.
Conspiracism – Who’s in (and who’s out)?
Over the last two months I have been working on a number of papers/book chapters. One is a rehash of the last two chapters of the book… Well, “rehash” is not the right term; I take the some broad analysis from the last two chapters but look at a different issue. More on this later. No, today I want to say something more about conspiracism.
“Conspiracism” and “conspiracist” are typically used interchangeably with “conspiracy theorising” and “conspiracy theorist”, but I’ve argued in the book and a recent paper that we should reserve these terms and use them only when talking about irrational conspiracy theorising and conspiracy theorists who do not have adequate reasons to believe some conspiracy theory. Part of my argument is that if we bake in the pejorative aspect to these terms, then we are avoiding the question “Can belief in conspiracy theories even be justified?” by defining away the answer. It all becomes a simple matter of definitions, rather than an analysis of the evidence, and that seems a) uncharitable, and b) not particularly philosophical. So, let’s keep a pejorative in the form of the terms “conspiracism” and “conspiracist” and look at the general classes of conspiracy theorising and conspiracy theorists with an open mind.
But here’s the rub: I’m not entirely convinced there are many, if any, real conspiracists. Confused? You probably should be.
Problem one: If we define a conspiracist as “someone who believes a conspiracy theory for inadequate reasons”, then it might turn out there aren’t many conspiracists.
One thing which infuriates a lot of us who spend time analysing conspiracy theories is the claim that people believe them just because. An analysis of what conspiracy theorists actually say in support of their theories, however, indicates that they often have quite well-developed arguments; they just don’t happen to either share the same assumptions as their opponents, or weight evidence in different ways. As comrade Gio can attest, Richard Gage has quite a long and detailed argument as to why he thinks the Twin Towers were destroyed by a controlled demolition, rather than because two Boeing 747s flew into them. Both Gio and myself disagree with Gage’s assessment as to how good that argument is, but Gage isn’t a Truther “just because”.
So, one worry about my usage of the term “conspiracist” is factored around the possibility that the worrisome conspiracy theorists like Gage turn out not to be conspiracists. Sure; we think their theories are unwarranted, but they’re not unwarranted because they aren’t based in evidence or arguments. Rather, their theories are unwarranted because on closer inspection the arguments suffer from problems of validity or soundness, in a non-trivial (i.e. not immediately obvious) sense.
Problem two: If we define a conspiracist as “someone who believes a conspiracy theory for inadequate reasons”, then it might turn out we are all conspiracists.
Most psychologists and philosophers will be happy to endorse some version of the following proposition: Most of us (if not all of us) believe at least one thing which turns out to be unjustified.
Justifying our beliefs is hard, and most of us believe a number of things that, when challenged to defend them, will turn out to be unexamined beliefs. That’s not too contentious a claim, although some philosophers will disagree (some philosophers will always disagree; it’s a discipline for disagreeable people, after all!). If we add to that my claim (which I dutifully admit I inherit from Charles Pigden) that we are all conspiracy theorists, then it seems probably (but not necessarily likely) that many of us conspiracy theorists are conspiracists about at least one conspiracy theory we believe.
For example, friend Lee keeps telling me that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a real example of a false flag operation, one which the U.S. Government tried and succeeded (for a time) to cover up. I trust Lee as a source, and I’ve also checked the Wikipedia page. Now, I know Wikipedia is not the best source in the world, which is why it is supporting evidence for Lee’s constant assertions about Tonkin, but it’s quite possible Lee is wrong or lying to me (maybe he even edited the Wikipedia page!), and so my belief that the Gulf of Tonkin incident is a false flag may well make me a conspiracist.
Note that this particular problem has an interesting corollary: I can be a conspiracist with respect to one conspiracy theory and a perfectly normal (even rational) conspiracy theorist with respect to some other conspiracy theory. I might be a conspiracist about Tonkin but have warranted beliefs about the conspiracy theory behind the Moscow Show Trials.
Problems one and two are interesting because they are decent objections to conspiracism. Problem one describes a general problem: as defined, there might not be many conspiracists. Problem two describes what we might call a specific problem: depending on the conspiracy theory I might turn out to be a conspiracist in one case and a conspiracy theorist in some other. Yet both are bullets I think we need to bite; it may turn out that there aren’t many conspiracists, or that if conspiracists exist, many of us might turn out to be one. As long as we’re aware of these issues, then I think we can proceed in the analysis of these things called “conspiracy theories” and spend some time working out whether belief in them really is as irrational as many academics claim.
Quassim Cassam’s “bad thinking” on Philosophy Bites
Last week I sent you all off to read an article Lee Basham and meself had written; a reply to Quassim Cassam’s (Warwick) piece “Bad thinkers”. This week I want to focus on Cassam’s explication of his view over at “Philosophy Bites” (a somewhat frequent podcast on Philosophy which is well worth a listen, especially since it obeys the rule “The Podcaster’s Guide to the Galaxy” ignores, which is “Shorter is better!”), because I think his explication of his view makes his case both better and yet worse.
One of the problems a lot of us in the nascent Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories field have with Cassam’s “Bad thinkers” is that it pays no attention whatsoever to the existing contemporary philosophical literature on belief in conspiracy theories. This literature is at least twenty years old, it’s not hard to find and is still small enough that you could get to grips with it within a month. If Cassam had done his homework, he would have seen that his argument is awfully similar to one advanced by Steve Clarke in 2002 (“Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorizing”), an argument which Clarke has since distanced himself from. This is not just a problem for Cassam; typically the interlocutors at Philosophy Bites are very good at placing an individual philosopher’s work into the existing literature. Yet Cassam’s pronouncements on conspiracy theorists were treated with the reverence of someone who was made out to be trailblazing, rather than contributing to a literature he does not appear to have read. ((I say “does not appear” because, of course, he might have read his Keeley, his Pigden and his Basham (maybe even his Dentith) and decided against citing it. If he has, he does nothing to show it.)) The whole episode felt very disappointing, and as one of my correspondents pointed out, if they wanted to talk to a philosopher with a long history of writing about conspiracy theories, there are quite a number of us (some with quite established publication credentials) they could have gone for who would have been much more representative of the field.
So, with all that in mind, let me discuss what I take to be some key points from the episode.
The first thing to note is that Cassam seems quite happy to work with a very general definition of what counts as a conspiracy theory – roughly, any explanation of an event which cites a conspiracy as a cause – which was not something that was clear in “Bad thinkers”. In that respect he’s working from the same playbook as most of us. However, in the podcast he maintains that conspiracy theorists or conspiracists – he uses them in a roughly interchangeable way – have bad reasons to believe 9/11 Inside Job style conspiracy theories. Not just that, but such theorists are not amenable to reason.
Lee and I have already argued against this; he’s:
a) construing a sub-set of conspiracy theorists (what I call “conspiracists”) as resembling the class of conspiracy theorists in general, and
b) calling such conspiracists “gullible” when he really just means “stupid”.
As such, Cassam’s argument gets by on misrepresenting conspiracy theorists as conspiracists in order to get to some claim that such theorists are typically gullible. In the podcast, however, he’s a little more nuanced; he admits that individuals can have both sensible and insensible views, and that we shouldn’t necessarily carry criticisms of one view over to some other. This seems to allow that conspiracy theorists could be right some of the time or wrong some of the time, and so we should not assume from either case anything about their other (possibly related) views. That seems like an improvement on what Cassam claims in “Bad thinkers” and yet flies in the face of the generalist conclusion he argues for, that such conspiracists generally suffer from the intellectual vice of gullibility.
Cassam also claims that he doesn’t want to say that conspiracy theorists are crazy or irrational. No, they are just gullible, it seems. He admits that someone like Oliver will have arguments and evidence for their views (which is an improvement on the argument he presented in “Bad thinkers”) and that the real problem is how someone like Oliver uses said evidence and arguments. Indeed, he admits conspiracy theorists can look intellectually virtuous by dint of their engaging in questioning views, and generally being sceptical. Yet he continues to asserts “They are not right”. And not just that; in the podcast he claims you can’t reason conspiracy theorists out of their belief. That doesn’t seem like gullibility; surely a gullible person can be persuaded to change their mind? No, that seems like they are, under Cassam’s view, irrational after all, despite his protestations.
As Lee and I argue in “Bad thinkers? Don’t be so gullible!” Cassam is really arguing for some claim about conspiracy theorists being stupid, and that seems like an implausible take on conspiracy theorists generally.
On the positive side of the ledger, now when Cassam discusses “Oliver” – his effigy of a conspiracy theorist – he talks about him believing information he shouldn’t and disbelieving evidence he should. Unlike in “Bad thinkers”, Cassam is not just insisting this is the case; he lays out some grounds for going “Look, these explanations are complex by their very nature, and thus hard to assess!” But he continues to claim, despite that, that Oliver’s belief in a particular 9/11 conspiracy theory must be down to him being a gullible kind of person. His defence that Oliver is just plain wrong after all? Well, he doesn’t think or believe like us, and we’re the sensible ones, right?
Cassam also makes use of some questionable psychology to reaffirm his views; he thinks conspiracy theorists suffer from some special and localised gullibility with respect to conspiracy theories. He ties this localised gullibility to what social psychologists sometimes call “conspiracy thinking”, “conspiracist ideation”, or “the conspiracy mentality”. Yet this seems like special pleading; “Look”, his argument says, “conspiracy theorists are gullible yet information rich; how we can explain the discrepancy between the fact conspiracy theorists offer arguments and evidence for their views, and yet we just know they are wrong? Well, it can’t be that they are gullible, because they don’t seem to be gullible about everything. No, they are only gullible when it comes to conspiracy theories!”
If we were take Cassam seriously (and he has a funded research project on this starting next year, so someone is taking him very seriously indeed), conspiracy theorists have some special and localised gullibility just when it comes to beliefs in conspiracy theories. Doesn’t that strike anyone as particularly odd?
This is the big problem with Cassam’s view, his constant assertion that the conspiracy theories people like Oliver believe are just obviously wrong. Cassam’s exemplar cases are theories like the various 9/11 Inside Job hypotheses, and it isn’t obvious that these theories are wrong in any trivial “anyone can see it sense”. I, too, am sceptical about 9/11 being an inside job, but that’s not because I think the various MIHOP theories are obviously unwarranted. Rather, it’s because I’ve spent the time looking at the theories and prising them apart. Yet I’m also aware that many of my “fellow travellers” have done nothing of the sort, and yet they’ll happily proclaim Inside Job hypotheses nonsense because that’s what sensible people believe!
If Cassam really believes inside job theories are obviously wrong, he’s naive and probably has not looked into the really quite complex claims Truthers typically make. These theories cite a lot of evidence, some of which requires an analysis of which experts are being referred to (and which are being ignored), the weight of the evidence with respect to the various theories and auxiliary hypotheses, and the like. Debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories is no trivial task, and yet Cassam seems to think we can just assert “These theories are obviously wrong” without saying why that they are obviously wrong. ((The implication seems to be that sensible people believe they are obviously wrong. Sensible people also said Iraq was home to Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2002. Sensible people believe a lot of things which turn out to be problematic when actually analysed…))
As such, a big part of the problem with Cassam’s view is that he is looking at the class of unwarranted conspiracy theories without actually stating his criteria as to what makes a conspiracy theory unwarranted in the first place. This is frustrating, because there is a decent literature on this (which is ably discussed in many places, including my book), which Cassam could at least point to, yet doesn’t. As such, Cassam’s view assumes the very thing he should be interested in questioning: is belief in conspiracy theories really problematic? Instead, he gives us an argument which says such views could be problematic if they were the product of gullible thinking. It’s the same old thinking we typically see in the social science approach to talk of conspiracy theories, and it’s not good enough. Cassam (and the hosts of “Philosophy Bites”) is a philosopher. As such, it would be nice if he took the time to look at what the rest of us have written on the subject before wading into the debate.
Bad Thinkers? Don’t be so gullible!
Earlier this year Quassim Cassam (a philosopher at Warwick) wrote a piece at Aeon which claims that we can explain the badness of belief in conspiracy theories by reference to conspiracy theorists being gullible. A bunch of us philosophers who have been working in the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories formed a secret group to discuss and dissect Cassam’s thesis, and that lead to Lee Basham and myself writing the following reply, which has been published over at 3 Quarks Daily:
Cassam wants us to accept the common wisdom that belief in conspiracy theories is problematic. Like Richard Hofstadter and Karl Popper before him, Cassam takes it that the problem with conspiracy theories lies not so much to do with the theories themselves but, rather, in the intellectual character of those who would believe them. Which is to say that rather than judging conspiracy theories on the evidence, our suspicion of them comes out of worries about the kind of people who turn out to be conspiracy theorists. After all, most of us have been in a situation where, when presented with a long list of reasons to believe some conspiracy theory, our immediate response has been to focus our attention on the character of our conspiratorial companion. However, Cassam’s argument for why this is the right move for us to make doesn’t just mistake political piety for intellectual virtue, but treats a willingness to challenge political beliefs as mere gullibility.
Read the rest of it here.
Episode 62 – The Great Beast vs. Waikato
In which Josh and Matthew interview Dean Ballinger, one of Aotearoa’s erudite conspiracy theory theorists.