161. THE GREAT CONSPIRACY - On Philosophy Classes and Dangerous Thought
Recently I have been reading Pulitzer Prize winner, James Ball’s, book about the spread of QAnon and similar all-encompassing conspiracy theories, The Other Pandemic. It’s been making me think about knowledge, critical thinking, and the role of philosophy in schools.
One of the incredibly interesting things about conspiracy theories is that they are more often than not felt than thought. By that I mean that they are not usually subject to reasoned counter-argument. Although they often begin with reasons and argument, once locked in you can throw confirmed facts, reliable evidence and clear contradiction at conspiracy believers and it will not only be unlikely to change a mind, but will frequently be consumed up into the conspiracy itself: your attempts to disprove it just becoming a further part of the conspiracy’s evidence that there is an attempt to silence those trying to share the “truth”.
Hence such theories are felt rather than thought: at some point the arguments transcend the intellectual faculties and end up being an emotional attachment to a particular worldview. A belief which makes sense of an unpredictable existence, even if it brings this “explanation” at great psychic cost, plunging the believer into paranoia and terror about sinister cabals of imagined organisers of world events who pose some existential threat. We can see a parallel here with religion: believe in God, with faith transcending potential counter-evidence, and gain hope and a sense of purpose at the cost of fear of possible eternal suffering in the afterlife if you step out of line.
The reason this makes me think about philosophy in schools is that conspiracy thinking - the initial pathway that leads to conspiracy answers - trades on many of the motivating assumptions of philosophy as an activity: a desire to get to some underlying hidden truth beyond the superficial understanding of everyday life.
In my classroom over the years I have used, for example, the classic scene from The Matrix, when Neo is offered a red pill or a blue pill (red allowing him to access the truth and blue returning him to comfortable ignorance) to get students thinking about Plato’s famous cave analogy. According to Plato, the state of human life is to be like prisoners in a cave, staring at shadows on the wall and mistaking them for reality, with only the special few - philosophers - able to break their restraints and see the truth of objects by leaving the cave and its illusions. When Plato’s freed prisoner returns to the cave, however, their former fellow prisoners don’t believe the truths they try to share. They believe the journey out of the cave has distorted their senses or sent them mad rather than gifted them with knowledge. They ignore the philosopher, or try to kill them. So, showing the analogy between Plato’s cave and The Matrix, I ask students if they would want to be freed from their comfortable delusions and shown the truth if either hypothesis about the world was right. Given the possibility that everything you think you know is a lie, would you take the red pill or the blue pill?
This lesson seemed uncontroversial for the bulk of my career. Most students picked the red pill and a fruitful discussion was always born from asking those who would take the blue pill why untruths were better than truths sometimes, and from seeing how much those who took the red pill would be prepared to sacrifice for the sake of truths which might turn out to be unbearable. We would also discuss the possibility of further illusion: if we were fooled before, how do we know once out of Plato’s cave or The Matrix there isn’t a further exit to be found? A cave within a cave. A second Morpheus to offer now in this second illusion a real red pill that would show me the real truth?
But these days the red pill/blue pill example has been used by QAnon conspiracists online as a common way of referring to those “asleep” to the conspiracy (blue pill) and those “awake” to it (red pill). To align the metaphor with Plato’s quest for philosophical truth is, perhaps, to therefore appear to validate potentially dangerous rhetoric our students may hear on some of the more questionable corners of the internet. By lazily using that standard film clip and example we’ve always used, now that it has been co-opted by a truly dangerous conspiratorial ideology online are we accidentally implying to students that the conspiracists might, in fact, be modern day philosopher kings when we offer them the same choice in our classrooms? Is the message we end up sending them the idea that true philosophers should endorse the conspiracy?
Philosophy is often about analysing and unpacking assumptions, norms, arguments and practices of our everyday life and society and showing where we might be in error. When meeting my new classes for the year last week and introducing them to philosophy as a subject, the idea that philosophy might interrogate their most fundamental beliefs and make them question everything they know was definitely part of how I sold the next year to them. It is, after all, true. I experienced it myself when I was their age and started studying philosophy. A carnist, I ate meat merrily back then, but exposure to Peter Singer’s ideas of ‘speciesism’ and various animal rights philosophies made me unable to continue killing animals for food. I’ve been a vegetarian ever since. Part of that vegetarianism was a complete change of worldview that made me look around at the basic norms of my society and, from my new perspective, see that something we did everyday without thinking was, in fact, terribly, terribly wrong. One might be similarly transformed today with arguments from environmental ethics which make many of our fossil-fuelled current life practices appear to be morally reprehensible: looking back at one’s own waste and carbon footprint, one might, after the slightest philosophy, wonder how they could have acted so monstrously and not even noticed for so long!
Philosophy can often appear very similar to a conspiracy theory, claiming something everyone else assumes to be true is, in fact, a terrible lie. Or at least an error. John Mackie, for example, made this claim about all of our ethical language. We think we are making meaningful statements about right and wrong when, in actual fact, there is simply no such thing. We don’t know what we’re on about. Atheists do something similar with ideas about God: the holy book you believe to be divinely revealed is, they say, actually some sort of scam. The God you worship a fanciful and comforting fiction, but not actually real. The theist, the ethicist, on these readings, are stuck in the cave or taking the blue pill according to certain philosophers. I, myself, have said something similar in my book on anarchism, Authentic Democracy. My argument is (and remains) that the justifications we give for democracy as an ethically justifiable political system on do not justify the current so-called “democratic” systems we actually see around the world because, on closer analyses, such systems are not actually democracies. Instead, what they do justify (and all they can justify) is a form of federated, small-scale, anarchism which we do not have. In other words: if you think you know what democracy is, you actually don’t. You’ve been lied to; here’s what reality - in this case democratic reality - actually is.
Conspiracy theories are so powerful because they draw on something fundamental about the human experience: our desire to find truth in a world of illusion. There is no doubting the need we have as inquisitive human beings to ask questions about the world as it is presented to us because the facts are plato was right. The world is not as it appears. On the basic level of fundamental physics what appear as solid objects to us (including ourselves) are, in fact, made of billions of tiny little buzzing atoms, molecules and electrons. Our consciousness may merely be constructed from the same sort of electricity that powers our kettles. What appears like an uncontroversial perception of the room we are currently sitting in is, in fact, a projected representation of that room in our minds, cobbled together by our brains from the sense-data it receives from a range of sense-organs all deeply susceptible to error or distortion. You and I have never seen the same object, even if it is presented before us inside the same room. I see my brain’s construction of it and you see yours. We can never compare notes. The world simply isn’t as it appears - how it appears is always a construction. From the bodies we inhabit to the concepts we live by. It is a fantasy. Either a personal one or a collective one. So of course we become suspicious of everything else that presents itself as “the truth”. Somewhere deep in our evolutionary history we have learnt repeatedly that truth means undoing everything we think we know to be true and discovering reality is very different indeed.
Philosophers have long recognised this about truth. This is why they are not afraid to discuss radically different ways of looking at the world and the ideas that inhabit it. The underlying assumption of all philosophy is: just because we currently think this way and always have, doesn’t meant that we necessarily should. When philosophers analyse a concept and suggest what we believe means one thing, in fact, could mean something else, they are merely doing with language and ideas what science has done with matter. They remind us that the more we think we know, the less we actually do.
Another instinctive urge human beings have is the urge to find patterns and enforce order on unpatterned and disordered chaos. We look at the arbitrary shadows on the moon and see a face. We happen to experience good things every time we wear the same things on our feet and believe we have lucky socks. A friend dies suddenly and we seek a reason it happened rather than face up to the possibility that there is no reason at all, it just is. Philosophers do this too, systematically attempting to organise our ideas into coherent frameworks of thought even though every attempt has had its holes pointed out by other philosophers working on different flawed frameworks of their own. Consider, for example, the possibility that there simply is no way of coherently describing a set of ethical rules, or the criteria for meaningful language. This possibility has yet to stop the philosophy community from trying.
What worries me as I start the new year with my philosophy classes is recognising that some of the very urges we promote and nurture in the philosophy classroom - thinking deeper, going beyond the obvious, trying to escape the cave and getting students to think for themselves as well as the idea that there may be some all-encompassing and systematic answers out there if we are only clever enough to figure them out - is more and more happening in the context of a world that has become epistemologically unstuck. In the “post-truth” world of “alternative facts” and rampant unfounded yet deeply-believed conspiracy, the red pill/blue pill rhetoric has eroded trust in traditionally shared frames of reference and sources of knowledge. When no website, no social media, no mainstream media, no book, no person can be trusted anymore as a reliable source then then we are left with nothing but rabbit holes to fall down as we engage in our unavoidable human urge to ask questions and look beneath the surface of received wisdom and conventional answers to seek wisdom. We are left easily vulnerable to the version of “truth” which we find most appealing, and which perhaps best satisfies our unmet needs for certainty and explanation in a world which can be crushingly uncertain and random. And appealing - yet dangerous - ideas are out there like honeytraps just waiting to pull people in.
Of course, when we teach philosophy to students we do so by promoting the intellectual virtues that we hope will make their inquiries fruitful, hopefully arming our students against bad thinking and giving them the tools to reason clearly. But I do wonder how much, by doing so in the current context, we also legitimate some of the very rhetoric that is undoing our shared understanding of the world and driving epistemological rifts across society? I wonder if perhaps it might be more appropriate in 2023 to, instead of stressing all the ways in which philosophy might expose us to truths which have been hitherto kept hidden from us, we ought to make more of an effort in these dark and dangerous times to show more of the ways in which philosophy can lead to stronger confirmation of that which we already know, or deeper uncertainty and a distrust of simplistic answers. Illustrate to students that often intellectual journeys down rabbit holes can simply waste a lot of time playing around with ideas that eventually get rejected, leaving us ultimately right back where we started. That there might be value in using philosophy to reaffirm, rather than tear down, some of our more fundamental assumptions? Or at least recognise that in a world of uncertainty and choice, we have an obligation to make better choices and a freedom to choose kindly. Using ethics as an example again - if no ethical theory is perfect our choice doesn’t have to be moral nihilism, we can choose instead to protect others from harm and work towards a better life for all anyway, even if there is no compelling normative force that says that we must.
An important lesson to impart, and one which can certainly counter the necessarily individualistic rhetoric of conspiracy theorists seeking the isolated and intellectually vulnerable is a reminder that “thinking for oneself”, and “doing your own research”, does not have to entail a commitment to every individual having their own version of reality and their own set of facts. Thinking for myself and doing my own research ought to rely on the best thoughts and information already thought and generated by others. A shared venture of knowledge construction and mutual creation. Philosophy, like science, has always been a collaborative endeavour. A conversation rather than a monologue. When we ask questions about truth it ought to be to contribute to our shared, collective knowledge of the world so that we can all flourish as best we can in an existence in which access to knowledge has so many barriers, not simply so that I can flourish. We should be questioning in order to seek agreement ultimately, not disagreement. When our investigations lead to an archipelago of individual epistemological islands, separated by churning, treacherous seas, we have stopped doing philosophy and entered into a form of intellectual self-harm.
It is such an archipelago the internet seems to have been busily creating in the background for the current generation of student philosophers. This is the context in which our current students are learning philosophy and it is our job as philosophers, therefore, whilst not denying the need for critical thought, to work also on constructively building more bridges across these islands in our collective thinking if we want to contribute to continuing meaningful philosophical conversation into the future and using philosophy as a tool for intellectual good. For without a firm foundation of shared epistemological assumptions about reality and truth, the philosophy we do in our classrooms may simply become further reason for our students to fall down rabbit holes from which they, and society, might never return.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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