An effect of sense

When I reviewed Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories earlier this week I mentioned the pattern-finding processes built into our minds, the necessary, natural, and helpful instincts that can also lead us into error unless we carefully discipline our thinking. As it happens, I’ve run across two good examples of this kind of aberrant pattern-finding in the last few days (Coincidence??? Yes!), which I’ve decided to supplement with one more that I’ve personally encountered several times.

An ambiguous provocation

One of the pitfalls of writing fiction is the possibility of mistakes creeping in during revision, the stage when you’re supposed to be fixing mistakes. (I generate more typos in my own work during revision than at any other point of the process.)

This week I finally started reading The Name of the Rose, the great historical novel by Umberto Eco in which William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar, investigates a series of murders in an Italian monastery. Assisting him is Adso of Melk, a young German Benedictine, and opposing him is Bernard Gui, a real-life Dominican inquisitor. In his lengthy postscript to the novel, Eco relates the following anecdote:

As I read the reviews of the novel, I felt a thrill of satisfaction when I found a critic . . . who quoted a remark of William's made at the end of the trial . . . “What terrifies you most in purity?” Adso asks. And William answers: “Haste.” I loved, and still love, these two lines very much. But then a reader pointed out to me that on the following page, Bernard Gui, threatening the cellarer with torture, says: “Justice is not inspired by haste, as the Pseudo Apostles believe, and the justice of God has centuries at its disposal.” And the reader rightly asked me what connection I had meant to establish between the haste feared by William and the absence of haste extolled by Bernard. At that point I realized that a disturbing thing had happened. The exchange between Adso and William does not exist in the manuscript. I added this brief dialogue in the galleys, for reasons of concinnity: I needed to insert another scansion before giving Bernard the floor again. And naturally, as I was making William loathe haste . . . I completely forgot that, a little later, Bernard speaks of haste. If you reread Bernard’s speech without William’s, it becomes simply a stereotyped expression, the sort of thing we would expect from a judge, a commonplace on the order of “All are equal before the law.” Alas, when juxtaposed with the haste mentioned by William, the haste mentioned by Bernard literally creates an effect of sense; and the reader is justified in wondering if the two men are saying the same thing, or if the loathing of haste expressed by William is not imperceptibly different from the loathing of haste expressed by Bernard. The text is there, and produces its own effects. Whether I wanted it this way or not, we are now faced with a question, an ambiguous provocation; and I myself feel embarrassment in interpreting this conflict, though I realize a meaning lurks there (perhaps many meanings do).

Here, the accidental repetition of a distinctive word creates “an effect of sense” in the reader, the feeling that there is some significant linkage between the two characters. And because its meaning is not immediately clear, it provokes the reader, who feels intuitively that there is something here that must be investigated and uncovered. Its very ambiguity suggests significance, so much so that a reader went to the trouble of asking Eco for an explanation.

It turns out there is no such linkage at all, but the feeling remains. Not a bad parallel to the kind of suspicions, arising seemingly out of nowhere, that commonly lead to conspiracy theories.

Cui bono?

I decided to follow up Suspicious Minds by reading the new revised edition of Conspiracy Theories: A Primer, by Joseph Uscinski and Adam Enders, a short academic study of conspiracy theories and other “anomalous beliefs.” In its chapter on the psychology and sociology of conspiracism, the authors introduce intentionality bias, which Brotherton covers well in Suspicious Minds, as well as a concept the authors call cheater detectors: “the willingness to suspect others of cheating,” especially when those others are perceived to benefit from an event. This can lead to “a tendency . . . to make an inferential leap from incentive to conspiracy.”

They continue:

For a real-world example, we could look to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Scalia's passing gave then-president Barack Obama the opportunity to shift the balance of the Court in his favor. Since he and his party had something to gain, some (including former president Trump) jumped to the conclusion that Obama had Scalia murdered. A more sober interpretation might be that an overweight, seventy-nine-year-old smoker with diabetes and heart problems isn’t exactly unlikely to die from natural (i.e., non-homicidal) causes. If we assumed that every time a grandmother passed away the grandchildren expecting to receive an inheritance murdered her, then every grandchild who inherits money must be a murderer! Such a view is obviously untenable.

That last example is a good takedown of one of the most annoying hermeneutical principles in modern popular discourse: the cui bono? (Who benefits?) principle. The question of cui bono? is staple of conspiracist thinking, which is a problem because of its simplifying, reductivist effect. Just because someone benefits in some relative way from an event does not mean that they intended or even wanted it to happen.

Kingfish

I’ve taught both halves of US History for eleven years now, and still use, with occasional updates and modifications, the PowerPoint slideshows I designed for my lectures during my first year. When I teach the Great Depression and introduce left-wing critics of the New Deal, one of the major figures I describe is Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana and eventually one of its two US senators. Long, a populist autocrat and vocal proponent of public spending and wealth redistribution, viewed FDR and the New Deal as insufficiently left-wing and vocally criticized both the policy program and the president himself.

I include some photos and usually take a detour to YouTube to show clips of Long giving speeches, but here are the points on my one slide about Long in a subsection I call “New Deal Backlash”:

• Huey Long of Louisiana

• Radical democratic populist

• “Share the Wealth” plan to make “every man a king”

• Popularity a challenge to FDR

• Possibility of presidential campaign, but assassinated

I’ve been meaning to modify these last two points for years, because do you know what a consistent minority of students immediately suspect when this information is presented in this way? Again—the effect is instantaneous. Such patterns seem to suggest themselves.

As it happens, Long’s assassination also offers a good example for how to discipline this kind of thinking: by simply delving into the details. In the last few years I’ve shown my classes an “Unsolved Mysteries” segment on the Long assassination from 1992. It’s as fun and sensationalistic as you’d expect (I vividly remember watching Long’s bodyguards blow the assassin away as an eight-year old), but it does a good enough job of conveying the complexity in the lives of Long and his aggrieved assassin, Dr Carl Weiss, to put a hypothetical FDR hitman firmly out of mind.

To me, one of the most fascinating aspects of two fruitful fields for conspiracy theories—the JFK assassination and Hitler’s suicide—is the way the very possibility of conspiracy dissolves the more specifically you look at the details. Each event involved not only the major names but hundreds of other people, all of whom can be studied and charted individually and all of whose stories interact with each other’s and hundreds more. And there are tons of documentation. It’s often possible to know, minute by minute, who is in which room of the Führerbunker at any given time in the days surrounding Hitler’s death, and the same is true of the people inside the Texas Schoolbook Depository on the day Oswald shot Kennedy. (Here’s an excellent recent video on precisely this topic.)

All of which shows that conspiracy theories are easier to formulate and to believe—these dots are easier to connect—when you forget that the figures involved in them are people with lives and attachments living in complex communities, not game pieces.

Conclusion

In all three of these cases you have patterns naturally detected and suggested by the mind. Merely noticing them is not enough. A pattern is not evidence of the truth of any conclusions you may draw from them—the pattern may not even exist. Our thinking has to be subject to standards of truth outside its own natural processes.

More if you’re interested

Definitely check out that Lemmino documentary on the people inside and near by the Texas Schoolbook Depository on November 22, 1963. It’s excellently done, and if it weren’t so long I would certainly show it to my students. Here’s one I always show them, about one of the individuals whose behavior on that day never could have been predicted. I especially like the interviewee’s macro vs micro view of history. For what really happened in Hitler’s busy, crowded bunker in April and May of 1945, I always recommend the sixth edition of The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the more up-to-date Hitler’s Death, by Luke Daly-Groves, which I reviewed here long ago. If you’d like to hear from one of the many people present, Heinz Linge’s memoir is a worthwhile read. And Umberto Eco was no stranger to conspiracy theories. His satirical novel Foucault’s Pendulum concerns academics who invent a wild conspiracy theory for fun, only to have the theory start coming true.

Finally, I can’t pass over the actor playing Huey Long in the “Unsolved Mysteries” reenactment. This is Coen brothers veteran John McConnell (“And stay out of the Woolsworth!”), who also originated the role of Ignatius J Reilly in a stage version of A Confederacy of Dunces.

Suspicious Minds

Rob Brotherton’s book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories had been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read, for just over four years when I ran across an Instagram reel in which a smirking mom wrote about how proud she was of her homeschooled child questioning the reality of the moon landing “and other dubious historical events.” When people in the comments asked, as I had wondered the moment I saw this video, whether this was really the kind of result homeschoolers would want to advertise, she and a posse of supporters aggressively doubled down, lobbing buzzwords like grenades. I think the very first reply included the loathsome term “critical thinking.”

Silly, but unsurprising for the internet—especially the world of women mugging silently into phone cameras while text appears onscreen—right? But I had not seen this video at random. Several trusted friends, people whose intellects and character I respect, had shared it on multiple social media platforms. I started reading Suspicious Minds that afternoon.

Brotherton is a psychologist, and in Suspicious Minds he sets out not to debunk or disprove any particular conspiracy theory—though he uses many as examples—but to explain how and why people come to believe and even take pride in believing such theories in the first place. He undertakes this with an explicit desire not to stigmatize or demean conspiracy theorists and criticizes authors whose books on conspiracism have used titles like Voodoo Histories and How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. He also, crucially, dispels many common assumptions surrounding conspiracist thinking.

First among the misconceptions is the idea that conspiracy theories are a symptom of “paranoid” thinking. The term paranoid, which became strongly associated with conspiracism thanks to Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” is inappropriate as a descriptor because of its hint of mental imbalance and indiscriminate fear. Most conspiracy theorists, Brotherton points out, believe in one or a small number of mundane theories that are untrue but not especially consequential, much less worthy of anxiety. A second, related misconception—and by far the more important one—is that conspiracy theories are a phenomenon of the “fringe” of society: of basement dwellers, militia types, and street preachers in sandwich signs. In a word, obsessives. As Eric Ambler puts it in A Coffin for Dimitrios, “‘Obsession’ was an ugly word. It conjured up visions of bright stupid eyes and proofs that the world was flat.”

The idea of conspiracy theories as fringe is not only false, Brotherton argues, it is the exact opposite of the truth. In terms of pure numbers, repeated polls have found that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe in at least one major conspiracy theory—the most common by far being the belief that JFK was killed by someone other than or in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald—and often more than one. Conspiracist thinking is mainstream. It is the norm. This cannot be emphasized enough.

But why is this? Is it, as I must confess I used to think, that those numbers just provide evidence for how stupid the majority of people are? Brotherton argues that this conclusion is incorrect, too. There is no meaningful difference in how often or how much educated and uneducated people (which is not the same thing as smart and dumb people) adhere to conspiracy theories. Conspiracism is rooted deeper, not in a kernel of paranoia and fear but in the natural and normal way we see and think about the world.

Conspiracy theories, Brotherton argues, originate in the human mind’s own truth-detecting processes. They are a feature, not a bug. The bulk of Suspicious Minds book examines, in detail, how both the conscious and unconscious workings of the mind not only make conspiracist beliefs possible, but strengthen them. In addition to obvious problems like confirmation bias, which distorts thinking by overemphasizing information we already believe and agree with, and the Dunning–Kruger Effect, which causes us to overestimate our expertise and understanding of how things work, there are subtler ways our own thinking trips us up.

Proportionality bias, for example, causes disbelief that something significant could happen for insignificant reasons. As an example, Brotherton describes the freakish luck of Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian assassin who thought he had missed his target, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, until the Archduke’s car pulled up a few feet in front of him and stalled out as the driver changed gears. This farcical murder of an unpopular royal by an inept assassin caused a war that killed over twenty million people. That people after the war—on both the winning and losing sides—sought an explanation more commensurate with the effect of the war is only natural. And the classic example is JFK himself, as many of the conspiracy theories surrounding him inevitably circle back to disbelief that a loser like Oswald could have killed the leader of the free world.

Similarly, intentionality bias suggests to us that everything that happens was intended by someone—they did it on purpose— especially bad things, so that famines, epidemics, stock market crashes, and wars become not tragedies native to our fallen condition but the fruit of sinister plots. Further, our many pattern-finding and simplifying instincts, heuristics that help us quickly grasp complex information, will also incline us to find cause and effect relationships in random events. We’re wired to disbelieve in accident or happenstance, so much so that we stubbornly connect dots when there is no design to be revealed.

That’s because we’re storytelling creatures. In perhaps the most important and crucial chapter in the book, “(Official) Stories,” Brotherton examines the way our built-in need for narrative affects our perceptions and understanding. Coincidence, accident, and simply not knowing are narratively unsatisfying, as any internet neckbeard complaining about “plot holes” will make sure you understand. So when outrageous Fortune, with her slings and arrows, throws catastrophe at us, it is natural to seek an explanation that makes sense of the story—an explanation with clear cause and effect, an identifiable antagonist, and understandable, often personal, motives.

Why does any of this matter? As I heard it put once, in an excellent video essay about the technical reasons the moon landing couldn’t have been faked, what is at stake is “the ultimate fate of knowing.” The same mental tools that help us understand and make quick decisions in a chaotic world can just as easily mislead and prejudice us.

This is why Brotherton’s insistence that conspiracy theories are, strictly speaking, rational is so important. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve quoted many times, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Merely thinking is not enough to lead us to the truth. Brotherton’s book is a much-needed reminder that finding the truth requires discipline, hard work, and no small measure of humility.

On lunatics and cranks

Last week a friend shared a screenshot of an interesting theory propounded, as all world-changing theories are, in someone’s Instagram comments. You know the Vikings? The old Norse raiders who terrorized all of Europe from the Baltic and the North Sea to the Mediterranean, laid the foundations of Russia, served generations of Byzantine emperors, and traded as far away as Baghdad and the Caspian Sea? Made up. Totally made up. A fictional scapegoat for the crimes of Christians. The Vikings were invented, you see, to cover up for the Knights Templar everywhere the Templars went a-pillaging.

It shouldn’t be hard to see problems with an idea like this—which shouldn’t even really be dignified with the name “theory.” In addition to all the basic factual stuff like when these groups lived and were active and where they lived and were active, it neglects the veritable Himalayas of evidence supporting the existence of the Vikings: letters, chronicles, charters, linguistic evidence, archaeological evidence on three continents… Name a field of historical investigation and there is a branch dedicated to the Viking Age. Just to deal with texts alone, Michael Livingston’s recent study of one battle between the Anglo-Saxons and a Viking coalition, Brunanburh, used sources in Old English, Latin, Irish, Old Norse, and Welsh to reconstruct what we can know about it. Was all of this manufactured and planted later?

Whatever. Anyone proposing an idea like this doesn’t know how we know what happened in the past; they don’t know how history works. Perhaps they should get into filmmaking.

But the hypothetical culprit behind Viking violence in this particular theory reminded me of a favorite line from Umberto Eco that I once shared here many years ago. This passage comes from Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum:

“A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”

— Umberto Eco

“[E]verything proves everything else” should be a recognizable pattern nowadays. A theory like the one above is lunacy.

Revisiting Eco’s diagnostic passage also brings to mind one in which Joseph Bottum defines the crank, a type similar to but with important differences from the lunatic. Here’s Bottum with his useful working definition that manages to nail three common crank fixations, all of which have gotten plenty of play recently:

“There are three infallible signs of the crank—that oddball, goofball sort of person who mutters, as he walks along, about how he’s grasped the key to everything. The first is that he has a theory about the Jews. The second is that he has a theory about money. And the third is that he has a theory about Shakespeare.”

— Joseph Bottum

To put the distinction another way, there’s no arguing with a lunatic, but a crank will argue you under the table. Not that a crank is any nearer the truth than the lunatic, but whatever fixation a crank has will lend itself to tabulation, nitpicking, and a kind of big-data hairsplitting that feels like thought in a way the world-bestriding historical revisions of the lunatic do not. That guy you know who thinks the CIA shot down Flight 370 in order to cover up the fake moon landing on behalf of Satan-worshiping lizard people is a lunatic. That guy you know who posts three times a day about crypto—or the Fed, or the Mossad, or “the Zionists,” or, yes, Shakespeare—is a crank. And there’s a reason you avoid engaging.

For a case study in anti-Shakespeare crankery, see Jonathan Kay at the National Post here. (And I would recommend Kay’s book Among the Truthers for a broad and insightful study of lunatics, cranks, and other similar species.) And here’s a short reflection from Sonny Bunch, inspired by Bottum’s line about cranks and overlapping somewhat with Chesterton’s observations, about how conspiracy theories can reveal a lot—just not about the subject of the theory.

I posted that Eco quotation in the early days of this blog as an addendum to a long passage from Chesterton about the biased of motivated thinking of cranks. You can read that here. For crank-on-crank combat, see the world-class observer of the scene, Charles Portis, in Gringos, here.