David Aaronovitch at Skeptics in the Pub London

The speaker at this month’s Skeptics in the Pub London was David Aaronovitch, speaking on his new book, Voodoo Histories and the subject of conspiracy theories more generally.

It was an enjoyable evening, and Aaronovitch made a cogent set of interesting arguments – I will probably buy his book – but I can’t help but feel that is lacked a certain killer punch.

I was pleased to see that Simon Singh was in attendance, and that the emphatic support he received was in no way bogus.

Below the fold are my impression of the evening.

Aaronovitch started, in the time-honoured fashion, with an anecdote about Kevin the camera operator. In Tunisia, Kevin came out with the belief that the moon landings were faked, pointing out various discrepancies – the waving flag, lack of starts and so on. Aaronovitch replied that it would have been harder to fake all the various landings and to maintain the silence of the participants than to actually do the moon landings.

The key point was that conspiracy theories have an advantage from the get-go: when you hear one, it takes time to gather and check the evidence against the claims for the theory. To paraphrase Churchill, a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has its trousers on.

In order to address the question, Aaronovitch said, it was necessary to look at the ‘nonsense’; nonsense in inverted comas because of the need to be aware of one’s own biases.

The first question is as to what impact conspiracy theories have.

The first conspiracy theory in Voodoo Histories is that of a Jewish plot to rule the world. Although laughable now, it had real currency after the First World War. I won’t go into the details of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but, despite the incredulity we might have now, the Times ran an editorial saying ‘have we escaped from pax germanica to the worse possibility of a pax judaica’. There were calls for public inquiries and Henry Ford circulated them in his newspaper.

Evidently, there is a satire from the time of Napoleon III consisting of an imagined dialogue between Macchiavelli and Montesquieu in hell. The Protocols are abput one-third a verbatim copy of that text. Despite this, large numbers continue to believe in it. It still appears in the Hamas Covenant and is regularly referred to in Iranian broadcasting and academia. A comparison was made with the Moscow trials; it would appear that, rather than being an excuse to get rid of the Old Bolsheviks, Stalin and his immediate coterie genuinely believed in a plot to destroy the Soviet Union from within.

Aaronovitch said that one of the problems, in a similar vein, for the military in Pakistan in confronting the Taliban was that substantial numbers of people, within and without the armed forces, believed that 9/11 was an inside job.

However, not everything in the book was of the same level of severity. Aaronovitch himself admitted to having been a low-level conspiracy theorist over the assassination of JFK as everyone around him and various good and not-so-good journalists etc. wrote that there had been a conspiracy to kill the President.

He drew a parallel with a series on BBC2, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Follow the link to this Wikipedia page for background, but in essence a piece of pseudohistory, claiming that Jesus had married and impregnated Mary Magdalene, who had then moved to the south of France, her offspring down the ages being protected by a secret society as it was of the blood of Christ, was broadcast because it would achieve good ratings.

The hoax has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked – if nothing else because the number of descendants of one person a couple of millenia ago would be so large as to preclude keeping it a secret – but it is still necessary to ask why people prefer Holy Blood Holy Grail to history that is both accurate and more exciting. What is the pleasure to be had?

Moving into the psychological, Aaronovitch argued that it was because the human craving for narrative is very strong. We tend to bend reality to a better causality. For instance, people will say they caught a cold at a given time and place even though they don’t actually have a clue when and where they caught it. People desire the improved story.

A lot of conspiracy theories fall into the realm of the just plausible (although conspiracy theories about the death of Diana are not plausible at all). When ITN ran, in Aaronovitch’s opinion, a poor and one-sided documentary on the issue, some 80% of callers agreed with the proposition that Diana had been assassinated.

This was to illustrate the desire for a better explanation than reality. In fairy tales about princesses, they never just die.

After the break and a brief but interesting talk from the Open Rights Group, the floor was opened up to questions. The first question was as to why people are more willing to accept conspiracy theories than reality. Aaronovitch ventured that Lewis Wolpert might have been right in saying that our evolution as toolmakers has hardwired us for causality. Paranoia can become a guard against a worse truth: “no-one gives a shit about you”.

A question came – I believe from the inimitable Jack of Kent – as to whether, given all the misleading statements made by governments, whether the best position wasn’t to
doubt the government; wasn’t there a risk of simply slagging off those who dare to question?

Aaronovitch replied by saying that his problem with conspiracy theorists was that they were not skeptical (despite their claims to the contrary) but credulous in one direction, going through feats if imagination to discredit a government’s position only matched by their efforts to crowbar new facts into their world-view. The problem was worsened by the government, for various reasons, losing sight of doubt;
a government would no longer say ‘this is our best guess’.

Carmen D’Cruz asked whether there were parallels between antisemitism then and Islamophobia now; Aaronovitch acknowledged the validity of the point and said there was a risk of creating by your actions that which you were trying to avoid.

The next question was as to whether there was a similar underlying need behind conspiracy theories and religion. Aaronovitch had tried to avoid making that argument till now, but agreed that there was a similar process of reinforcement of pre-existing enemies etc. Jews were often the butt of this because of a fear of
cosmopolitans – rootless, stateless; familiar, and yet somehow ‘other’.

The next question was on the maliciousness of conspiracy theorists.

Aaronovitch began his answer by acknowledging that some conspiracies were deliberately started to undermine an opponent. The question was how to distinguish between good and bad sources of information.

For instance, many of the people who had tried to spread rumours about Bill Clinton’s activities in the seventies had become similarly anti-Obama. In both cases, it was because they were not ‘one of us’. As to whether they honestly believed the conspiracies or purported to for political gain, Aaronovitch felt that
the former was true because of a widespread confirmation bias. American political life is strongly polarised; despite many political tracts being published, a study by the New York Times suggested that ‘pro-liberal, anti-conservative’ books only sold to liberals, and vice versa.

Briefly answering a question about how the financial collapse had affected Conspiracy theories, he said that some people would say that the collapse had been engineered, for instance, to allow certain people to buy stocks on the cheap; thus, anyone doing well in a few years would be ‘guilty’. In a swipe at Naomi Klein,
Aaronovitch said that she peddled conspiracies about capitalism and, to that extent, her book, Shock Doctrine, was a very sophisticated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

An interesting question was asked on how to combat conspiracy theorists. Unfortunately, apart from saying that they should be ridiculed (without losing one’s temper) and that facts should be made abundantly clear, Aaronovitch didn’t really answer.

Next: What makes a good conspiracy theory?

Aaronovitch felt that times of significant social change were a factor. For instance, all sides thought they’d be home by Christmas in 1914; compare that to the reality of 1918. There is a desire to explain it by the most – or any – convenient method as the alternative is to say that I or we did it. Unsuccesful political opposition, as with ‘birthers’ and isolationists in the US of left and right, was also felt to be a possible cause.

Asked about his skepticism, if any, on climate change, Aaronovitch replied that it was a problem for time-limited non-scientists to decide. It was necessary to work out whether a balance of people who have looked at the issue have good reasons in a given direction. Consequently, it is safer to assume on the basis of arguments available that there is anthropogenic climate change. The statement and his logic
were warmly received.

Crispian Jago finished up by saying that his father-in-law was always worried that he left the door open and was prone to conspiracy theories. Aaronovitch felt that this might be the mark of a terrible past experience and declined to make a link.

Conspiracy theorists are as varied as their conspiracy theories; there seem to be some general trends that link them, but it may be that they represent a part of the human condition. Given that they are different from those who are, for whatever reason, wary of government, science and power, and given the replicating effect of the media, they seem to be a problem. I wonder how we deal with them; I increasingly
think my idea for a mandatory school class called ‘shit you need to know’, to include basic information on facts, theories, statistics and so on, is a good one.

David Aaronovitch’s book, Voodoo Histories, is published by Jonathan Cape. Next month at SitP London is biologist Jennifer Rohn on why scientists are a PR disaster.

xD.

PS – apols if this is incoherent or I’ve missed things. I’m writing this, while tired and a tad inebriated, on the 0036 from King’s X.

UPDATE 2058 – Jourdemayne weighs in.