Secrecy is a major contributor to conspiracism
Plus: Life 'under capitalism,' spotted lantern flies and Carnival, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
Secrecy is a major contributor to conspiracism
The first chapter I knew I’d write for Untrustworthy was the one about conspiracism. And from those very early planning stages, I knew that chapter would need to include three important points:
That conspiracism is not the same as a conspiracy or a discrete conspiracy theory. A conspiracy is a secret plot alleged to have happened. A conspiracy theory is the allegation of that plot. It may be true or (more often) false.
But conspiracism, as Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead argue in A Lot of People Are Saying, is a mindset of belief in “conspiracy without the theory.” Allow me the insufferable author move of quoting my own book:
[C]onspiracism is always epistemic poison. This accusatory, credulous mindset, more than any individual theory, is what contributes to our epistemic crisis. It treats confirmation bias as confirmation, rumor as research, and innuendo as proof. It isolates its victims and builds their community on a foundation of sand. It falsely labels ideas and behaviors unconnected to reality as a heroic search for truth.
That conspiracies sometimes do happen, and therefore conspiracy theories are sometimes correct. I do not like the way “conspiracy theory” is used in common media parlance to mean “obviously false thing that ignorant people believe.” That’s not because I’m a conspiracy theorist myself—on the contrary, I think the vast majority of conspiracy theories are wrong (and, frankly, pretty stupid), and that we have plenty of visible, undisputed evil with which to occupy ourselves. But it’s epistemically lazy to act like every conspiracy theory is ipso facto incorrect, and it gives people who do believe in conspiracy theories an excuse to write off everything else you have to say.
That there are very understandable, even sympathetic reasons many people are attracted to both specific conspiracy theories and conspiracism as a mindset. The ones I considered were:
+ again, sometimes conspiracies do happen
+ conspiracy theories please the parts of our brains that naturally look for patterns and connections, even where there are none
+ people like to be right, and conspiracist thinking offers powerful confirmation of the rightness of our desires, beliefs, and subconscious assumptions about what the world is and what it should be
+ people like and need community, and conspiracism can provide a purpose around which real community, friendships, and tribalistic rejection of the outgroup can form
+ people like to help, and conspiracism lies to its adherents, telling them that by “researching” the “truth,” they are personally and effectively combatting evil
To that I want to add another important reason, which is not original to me but comes from an important new essay by Jon Askonas at The New Atlantis: secrecy.
Here’s the core of his argument (bolding is mine):
In discussions of online misinformation, one inevitably comes across some version of a ubiquitous quote by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” This is often mustered at the climax of some defense of “journalism” or “science” against “fake news.” But the bon mot is always tossed out without any interest in Moynihan himself. […]
Late in his political career, in the 1990s, Moynihan became deeply concerned about government secrecy. Beyond particular worries about the legal and practical consequences of an explosion of classified documents, Moynihan believed that expansive secrecy was deleterious to our form of government. The 1997 Moynihan Secrecy Commission Report warned:
The failure to ensure timely access to government information, subject to carefully delineated exceptions, risks leaving the public uninformed of decisions of great consequence. As a result, there may be a heightened degree of cynicism and distrust of government, including in contexts far removed from the area in which the secrecy was maintained.
Writing before 9/11, Moynihan was especially worried that the rise of terrorism would feed the secrecy system that had grown like a cancer during the Cold War. “Secrecy responds first of all to the fear of conspiracy…. The United States will be best served by the largest possible degree of openness as to the nature of the threats we face. To do otherwise is to invite preoccupation with passing conspiracy.” […]
Facts are statements that we accept as true because they are established by public processes that can be checked—think of the methods of science or traditional journalism. But then the opposite of a fact is not an opinion but a secret: a statement about reality that cannot, and in some cases must not, be verifiable through a public process. We can know a secret only if we’ve been initiated into an intentionally hidden social world. And if a secret’s hidden world remains inaccessible, then whether one accepts a secret as truthful depends entirely on the legitimacy of the secret-tellers, on how much we trust them.
But little can be kept secret forever. And when secrets become public, they burst into the visible realm of facts, in a display that can be profoundly unsettling.
This essay series has been arguing that one reason the American psyche is no longer in the grip of a single consensus narrative is that no single story can contain the massive number of facts that are generated and shared by automatic digital systems today. In this deluge, secrets have a special place. Trust in institutions can be drowned when corruption, incompetence, and malfeasance that were once hidden out of view inevitably become known. The most direct cause of the massive growth in American conspiracy thinking is the massive growth of bureaucratic secrecy since the start of the Cold War, together with the increasing impossibility of keeping secrets in a digital age.
I’ll refrain from quoting more—it’s a long piece, around 7,000 words, with lots of history of state secrets in the U.S.—but highly recommend you read the whole thing.
I don’t know that I’d make that final claim in the portion I quoted, that growing state secrecy is the “most direct cause” of Americans’ rising conspiracism over the last half century or so. But it’s certainly a very important cause, enough that if I ever get to do a second edition of Untrustworthy, this would be another reason to include in my list.
Beyond that, I don’t have much to add to what Askonas argues, at least not yet. It will come as no surprise that I was already on board with libertarian thinking about over-classification and unequal prosecution of those who violate secrecy rules. But I’m also thinking over a larger argument, maybe eventually the basis for a piece, about how authorities, institutions, and experts can’t demand trust from the public if they won’t risk trusting the public in turn. I’ve thought about this before in connection to noble lies and talked about that a bit in Untrustworthy. But secrecy, as Askonas persuasively argues, is part of it too.
2. What I'm reading this week
“Failure to cope ‘under capitalism,’” by Clare Coffey for Gawker in August of 2022. This piece is a year old, but I happened to return to it recently and remembered why I liked it so much. An excerpt:
Petersen’s most acute insight is perhaps in identifying a link between relentlessly optimized childhoods designed to prevent downward mobility, and the professionally competent but profoundly enervated millennials overwhelmed by the prospect of canceling plans, of keeping plans, of cooking food, of texting their mothers.
I think she is correct. I think it’s possible that for many, considering the shape of your life and then living it with vigor is so difficult because it cannot be externally validated. Unlike education and work, it offers no socially obvious meritocratic path. The moments where, like sourdough, it proves, are largely invisible — in cooking, in walking, corresponding with a friend, in chatting with a neighbor or registering to give blood. They cannot be tallied up and put on a resume. They are never “finished.”
The progress you make is spiraling rather than linear; circling steadily, slowly, around your weak points, taking two steps forward and one step back, building habits so slowly that only in retrospect can you see your life become different than it was. And there is no one who can tell you that you did it right.
But this is not the condition of life under capitalism, this is life itself. And it is a sad irony that though the fear of life may be produced by class imperatives within capitalism, the impulse to restrict it to a problem of capitalism is itself part of the same fearful rejection of the task of living.
Read the rest here, and see Coffey’s also correct take on open floor plans here.
3. A recommendation
This 50-count sampler of herbal and decaf teas. Seemingly overnight, and without apparent cause, my husband and I have become old people who drink tea right before bed on almost a daily basis. But a lot of herbal teas out there are … I dunno, too weird or too artificially flavored for me. Also, I strongly prefer ones that go well with cream, and I think a lot of rooibos tastes like dirt. So anyway, I just ordered this sampler and have been pleased with it so far.
4. Recent work
Retconning capitalism (a review of Sohrab Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc.) | The Dispatch
America’s church authority crisis didn’t start with Trump | Christianity Today
What a Twitter spat reveals about public religion in America | Christianity Today
Stick to the status quo | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
5. Miscellaneous
This is the Clare Coffey issue, I guess.
As my husband observed, it’s like Carnival, but for just one bug. (I guess this is also the “my husband” issue.)
This is a theory of Carnival which Charles Taylor proposes in A Secular Age:
[Medieval celebrations of Carnival and similar festivities] were periods in which the ordinary order of things was inverted, or ‘the world was turned upside down.’ For a while, there was a ludic interval, in which people played out a condition of reversal of the usual order. Boys wore the mitre, or fools were made kings for a day; what was ordinarily revered was mocked, people permitted themselves various forms of licence, not just sexually but also in close-to-violent acts, and the like. […]
Even at the time, the explanation was offered that people needed this safety valve. The weight of virtue and good order was so heavy, and so much steam built up under this suppression of instinct, that there had to be periodic blow-outs if the whole system was not to fly apart. Of course, they didn’t think in terms of steam at the time, but a French cleric expressed the point clearly in the technology of the day:
We do these things in jest and not in earnest, as the ancient custom is, so that once a year the foolishness innate in us can come out and evaporate. Don’t wine skins and barrels burst open very often if the air-hole is not opened from time to time? We too are old barrels …
