Conspiracy Theory and the Nutritive Art of Pedagogy

Whenever there exists an explanation, especially when it exists in service of complex subject matter, it seems that it doesn't stand alone, that other explanations stand as competition. This is especially true in the scientific community and its notion of parsimony--if one explanation has simpler implications for its encompassing scientific system, it will be accepted before one that challenges the relevant system. 

Parsimony seems logical, right? After all, we do tend to feel more satisfied with clear, colored-in-the-lines accounts. And, if we've gotten it all right so far, if it works, if it's operational, what worth would we derive from changing? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," a modern-day proverb, sums up the issue, the inclination. But is this all to say that a dogmatic blanket is the ideal filter in every situation? It certainly appears to serve its purpose in the scientific realm. But does it?

Thomas Kuhn, philosophical physicist, had qualms with thinking of science as wholly comprised of such a blanket. Groundbreaking moments in the history of science have usually involved discoveries that defied the explanatory ability of the prevailing systems. Such discoveries shed light on rips in the fabric of a dogmatic blanket, rips large enough to reach through and feel out further boundaries.

This need not only apply to the world of lab-coats and research facilities, and I would like to make the case that it doesn't. In my undergraduate experience of discussion-based courses, answers to questions involving human relationships exist in the plural. Insights are broadly displayed, and sure, agreements are made, but multiplicity arises each and every time. The setup is simple and we can use any of the variety of instances when groups of humans interact to demonstrate it. But let's flash it up a bit! Let's talk about something weird. Let's talk about conspiracy theories.

Good ol' Dale Gribble from Mike Judge's animated sitcom King of the Hill never failed to develop an alternative theory for something gone wrong--a theory characterized by fault found with the federal government or some secret organization. His delivery was also always accompanied with an interesting duality of emotions: extreme paranoia with a dash of crippling anxiety. 

The philosophico-blogosphere isn't silent on the issue of conspiracy theories. JFK's assassination was topical last November 22nd, its 50th anniversary. Daniel Mullin's post over at the Unemployed Philosopher's Blog brings an interesting complaint against conspiracy theorists: if you're severely skeptical of the official account, what keeps you from calling out similar faults in the alternative theories you replace them with? True skepticism, Mullin holds, would demand that the skeptic be just as skeptical about alternative explanations or theories. 

There have been a lot of alternative theories proposed for why/how/if JFK was assassinated. But an event that evokes a similar response and is closer to public memory might be more appropriate for this discussion: 9/11. 

The philosophical community at large isn't silent on conspiracy theories either. Jodi Dean devotes a chapter to certainty and the modern day conspiracy theorist's interaction with 9/11 in her book, Democracy and other Neoliberal Fantasies. She uses psychoanalytic evaluation to paint a sociological picture of the psychotic and normal subjects. All of this to say that she claims that the conspiracy theorist rests in the former category, self-ostracized by the replacement of one significant understanding of the world with an alternative one. The psychotic subject can hardly even communicate among the normal subjects as a result of his replaced significance. 

But isn't this exactly the same sort of characteristic that qualifies for innovative science? The psychotic manifests itself in the scientist who encounters a groundbreaking discovery, one that Kuhn claimed could not be communicated by means of the prevailing scientific system. 

Dean continues to claim that the inability to communicate for psychotics is a problem fading away, thanks to communicative capitalism and the networks that similarly ostracized individuals can form with the use of social media and wide-spread information sharing. So now, not only do we have psychotic subjects, but we have psychotic communities. But I think it must be asserted that a call to caution is necessary among all of this description. After all, it does seem fairly compelling that the psychotic subject and the innovative scientist appear to match up.

So why is Dale Gribble so paranoid and anxious? At this point, I think it's fair to say that a conspiracy theorist is someone who maintains an alternative explanation for events that most people either neglect to consider or have nearly consensual explanations for. But when something ceases to be a conspiracy theory, like when the existence of an overarching, technological superpower was revealed, the NSA by name, the conspiracy theorist isn't liberated from his characterization as paranoid and anxious. Instead, the revelation makes the theory commonplace and resets the psychotic-normal relationship. The next person who holds an alternative explanation that doesn't at all align with the normal subject's understanding will be characterized like this:

even if he shows us something like this, or this.

This is where discussion of pedagogy becomes most pressing and worthwhile. We have to find interest in the methods of teaching. Just as we cannot instruct science students in how to make groundbreaking discoveries to test the dogmatic blanket, we cannot expect to be able to teach other students how to push the dogmatic blanket in fields like ethics, epistemology, logic, or aesthetics. But this doesn't put us at a complete loss. If my studies in philosophy have taught me anything so far, it would be unwise of me to ignore this obvious statement: the routes for approaching explanation are vast and number in quantities off-scale. 

No work would get done in scientific communities if nothing was taken for truth, to be built-upon, or as Kuhn says, to be "mopped up." But conversely, attachment to truth taken-for-granted sustains an ignorance of the tears in the dogmatic blanket. Skepticism of an official account, or any truth taken for granted should not be characterized by a shivering Dale Gribble or the bumbling, alcoholic father and farmer from Independence Day (although he did turn out to be right, after all!). 

Pedagogical methodology has to open itself up for internal discourses, critiques of the taken-for-granteds. This does not mean that classrooms should be overruled by "What if we're all, like, wrong about, like everything?" This only means that legitimate source-checking demands constant suspicion. When a graduate student composes a dissertation, I imagine that anxiety and paranoia take over when hoping that a source wasn't mis-cited or missing all together. Does this mean that she ought not to be meticulously tuned in to a heavy focus or worse, that we should hope to avoid such strenuous fact-checking because of the paranoia and anxiety associated with it?

Pedagogy has a real opportunity here to nurture and provide sustained conversations without the snapping elastic re-bound of the normal subject. And we have a lot to learn from conspiracy theories.