I
am old enough to remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22,
1962 – one of only half a dozen dates that are clear in my memory. Glued to the
television that night, I saw a nightclub operator named Jack Ruby murder Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald
on live TV – the first murder ever broadcast live. It was a bizarre reality for
those of us who lived it.
Kennedy’s assassination soon
became the subject of widespread debate and spawned numerous conspiracy
theories and alternative scenarios. Polls conducted from 1966 to 2004 found that
as many as 80 percent of Americans suspected a plot or cover-up. Welcome to the
strange world of zombie ideas.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman
defines a zombie idea as “a proposition that has been thoroughly refuted by
analysis and evidence and should be dead — but won’t stay dead because it
serves a political purpose, appeals to prejudices, or both.” Science
notwithstanding, there are those who believe in a flat Earth, a hollow Earth, a
geocentric universe or perhaps all three. An entry in the online Skeptic’s Dictionary offers other
examples.
Hate speech is a special case in
this range of thinking. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it
includes “communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a
group” because of “group characteristic such as race, colour, national origin,
sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation.” Most liberal democracies –
for example, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, South Africa, Australia,
and India – ban hate speech. In many ways, such countries enjoy greater freedom
when you weigh the negative liberty to express harmful thoughts against the
positive liberty a society enjoys if it disallows the intimidation of
minorities.
Some people argue that the purpose
of laws that ban hate speech is merely to avoid offending prudes. I cannot
think of a single democracy, however, that excises comment from the public
square merely because it provokes offense. Rather, hate speech has been so
widely proclaimed unlawful because it attacks the dignity of a group.
Among the world’s great
democracies, only in the United States is hate speech legal. With few exceptions,
America’s Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is constitutionally
protected by the first amendment right to free speech. There have been a few
exceptions to this. For example, in 1952 the United States Supreme Court upheld
an Illinois law making it illegal to publish or exhibit any writing or picture
portraying the “depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue of a
class of citizens of any race, color, creed or religion.” The case provided a
legal argument against hate speech by making it possible to sue some offenders
for libel. Especially in the world of social media, such a suit would be
difficult to apply.
Despite the efforts of Facebook
and other well-intentioned sites, hate speech in America now seems to be on the
boil. As evidence, Humboldt State University compiled an online visual
chart of a series of homophobic, racist, and otherwise prejudiced tweets sent
out during an 11-month period; you can take a look at it here. If you are
American, it will not make you proud.
Conspiracies: An important
offshoot of conspiracy theory is the attempt to explain ordinary events or
situations by invoking secret and unseen actions – often politically motivated –
of sinister and powerful actors. The term has a pejorative connotation,
implying that the appeal to a conspiracy is based on prejudice or insufficient
evidence. Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by
circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of
evidence for it are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth, whereby the
conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than something that can be proved
or disproved.
Conspiracy theories about moon
landings followed conspiracy theories about the assassination of JFK. There
were six crewed U.S. landings between 1969 and 1972 – unless you believe the conspiracy theorists who
believe the moon landings were hoaxes. The gist of the argument is that the
United States lacked the technology to transport humans to the moon and back.
They claim that NASA faked the landings in order to make people believe the
U.S. had fulfilled President Kennedy’s promise to land a man on the moon before
1970.
What is the evidence? Well, on the
lunar landing videos you cannot see stars in the sky. NASA says that’s because
the moon’s surface and the astronauts’ suits were so reflective that it was too
bright for the camera to pick up the comparatively faint stars. Also, while
planting the American flag in lunar soil, the flag appears to wave. With no air
in space, how is that possible? NASA says it happened because the astronauts,
wanting the flag’s pole to remain upright, moved it back and forth while
planting it in the lunar soil. The rotation of the pole caused the flag to move
back and forth as if rippling in a non-existent breeze.
Conspiracy theory is essentially
the attempt to explain harmful or tragic events by ascribing them to the
actions of small, powerful, and secretive groups. One classic example is the
one I began this commentary with, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Such
explanations reject the accepted narrative surrounding those events; indeed, the
mindset of many theorists is that the official version is further proof of the
conspiracy.
Conspiracy theories increase in
prevalence in periods of widespread anxiety, uncertainty, or hardship – for
example, during wars, economic depressions and in the aftermath of natural
disasters like tsunamis, earthquakes, and pandemics. This fact is evidenced by
the profusion of conspiracy theories that emerged in the wake of the September
11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Perhaps two thousand volumes on the JFK assassination have been
published, many of them purveying conspiracy ideas. Such notions have been
spread through countless other media as well.
Perhaps conspiratorial thinking is
driven by a strong human desire to make sense of social forces that are
self-relevant, important, and threatening. The content of conspiracy theories can
be emotionally powerful, and its alleged discovery can be gratifying to those
who hold the associated beliefs. Factual support for conspiracy theories is
typically weak, and they are usually resistant to falsification. The
survivability of conspiracy theories may be aided by psychological biases[1] and
by distrust of official sources. Such distrust did not develop in a
vacuum. Starting in 1932 and continuing for 40 years, the U.S. Public Health
Service working with the Tuskegee Institute studied the effects of
syphilis on 399 African American men. The researchers conducting the
Tuskegee syphilis study withheld treatment and allowed more than a hundred men
to die, despite the discovery of penicillin as a standard cure in 1947.
At the risk of sounding like a
conspiracy theorist myself, that does sound like government conspiring against
its own citizens.
An extraordinary commentary on
these matters can be found in Kurt Andersen’s best-selling history Fantasyland: How American Went
Haywire.
His take on the past five American centuries involves a series of skillful
deconstructions of myths and fantasies that have evolved since the country’s
foundation. He dissects such matters as the Salem witch hunts and Scientology. As
the story proceeds, he presents a picture of a country in such steep decline
that the founding fathers would have wept into their beards.
“By my reckoning,” he writes in
his introduction, reality-based people in the US “are a minority – maybe a
third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.” Only a third, he claims, “believe
with some certainty that CO2 emissions from cars and factories are
the main cause of Earth’s warming[2].
Only a third are sure the tale of creation in Genesis is not a literal,
factual account. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts.”
“A third believe that our earliest
ancestors were humans just like humans today,” he says. That percentage also
believe that government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden
evidence of “natural” cancer cures, and that extraterrestrials have recently
visited (or now reside on) Earth.
And the beat goes on. Two-thirds
of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world,” he
writes. At least half are certain Heaven exists, “ruled over by a personal God”
– not an abstract force or universal spirit “but a guy.” More than a third of Americans
believe global warming is “a hoax perpetrated by a conspiracy of scientists,
government, and journalists.”
“A quarter believe vaccines cause
autism,” he says. Twenty-five percent believe in witches. No more than a fifth believe
the Bible consists mainly of legends and fables, he says – about the same
number who believe that “the media or the government adds secret
mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals” and that U.S.
officials “were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.”
These myths are contrary to the
growth of science, which has accelerated by leaps and bounds over the centuries
of America’s settlement and growth. They will not go away, however. What can be
best described as a national paranoia within “the land of the free and the home
of the brave” is a loss to the country’s dignity, and to the integrity of the
democratic alliances that have played such important roles in the world since
the end of the Second World War.
[1]
See Gorman SE, Gorman JG: Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts that
Will Save Us. New York, Oxford University Press, 2016
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