I was having an argument recently with someone about the truth of evolution. She told me that evolution was a lot of rubbish and that there was no way that it could be true; basically because she couldn't imagine how it could be true. I kept arguing with her, trying to persuade her that evolution was the best theory that scientists had come up with so far of explaining how the natural world came to be.
I mustered up as much evidence as I could in support of this contention, but to no avail. When all was said and done she was simply unwilling to accept that a blindly random process like evolution could produce something as bewilderingly complex, as apparently beautifully designed and as comprehensively well suited to its environment, as the human body. She just couldn't imagine, indeed couldn’t picture, how the human body, or indeed any other animal’s body, could be solely the result of evolution - even taking into consideration that the mechanisms of genetic mutation and natural selection have the chance to operate over billions of years.
Now it's not that this person’s religious. She's extremely superstitious but she's in no way religious: she refuses to believe in a God, at least of the kind found in the texts of organised religions. And it's not that she's uneducated; in fact she's extremely intelligent, a university student with substantially more training in biology than I have. But in her mind she can’t make the leaps of imagination required in order to at least understand enough of what evolutionary theory entails to make a judgement on its truth; and she's unwilling to accept its truth on the basis of the consensus of practically every relevant credible scientific authority.
After our debate it struck me that a lot of people probably think this way. In other words, whether they accept the truth of evolutionary theory or not, they simply cannot imagine for themselves how a mechanism as simple as evolution can really explain life on earth. If they do accept the truth of evolution it’s probably on the basis of the near total accord of the scientific authorities allied perhaps to a thoroughgoing distrust of the proponents of creationism or organised religion. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that for a lot of those who reject evolution their inability to imagine how evolution could be true is strong enough to prompt a denial as to its plausibility as a scientific theory.
Interestingly enough, I’ve noticed that this failure that many people have to get to grips with large-scale complexity and therefore to connect with a complex and multifaceted reality has similar consequences in another context. Namely, this lack of imagination, that has a tendency to reach pathological proportions in some people, is chiefly responsible for the ongoing popularity of conspiracy theory.
Obviously conspiracy's popularity has been helped along by the fact that people are now far less credulous and far more willing to exercise their scepticism when it comes to what they receive from mainstream sources. The problem is that in a lot of cases the scepticism is unsystematic and amounts to no more than a blanket dismissal of anything that bears the stamp of mainstream authority. The Internet and satellite Television have also played their respective parts in supporting the growth of conspiracy by allowing the general public easier access to alternative viewpoints and perspectives, facilitating the widespread dissemination of information that may once been difficult to obtain.
Nature abhors a vacuum and therefore alongside this indiscriminate scepticism towards mainstream news sources, the distrust towards authority has manifested itself in the tendency to see the hidden hand of some secret society - supposedly exercising almost total control over the machinery of state, media, and industry and harbouring far from beneficent intentions - behind every single historical or current event of any significance. Everything, it turns out, from the smallest detail upwards can ultimately be explained by reference to the nefarious intentions of some clandestine agency, which must be very reassuring in a way - you can explain everything - though obviously terrifying in another, given this agency’s dastardly aims.
It's a nearly impossible for conspiracy nuts to factor in the workings of chance, randomness or even blithering incompetence; and it must be even more of a challenge to picture human society as a mind numbingly complicated, dynamic system or host of different interconnected systems, susceptible to a myriad different influences in weird, mysterious and sometimes unpredictable ways and prone to exhibiting several seemingly contradictory trends at the same time. So they don't bother.
I'm not claiming that human society is so complex that we’re left unable to say anything of any consequence about it. Just that whatever model we use, whether it tends to emphasis the role of, say corporations or even secret societies in determining the direction of history, or whether it subsumes the agency of individual actors to impersonal societal trends, there will always be important things that we can’t capture within that model, that can’t be explained by reference to it. Basically it’s best not to be too dogmatic when trying to make sense of an insane world.
However, conspiracy theory is by its very nature irrefutable: if you’ve ever been in an argument with a conspiracy theorist you know what a fundamentally pointless task it is to convince them they might be wrong. Whatever evidence you produce to contradict say someone’s conviction that the prime minister is a blood sucking reptile, the conspiracy theorist has given him or herself license to construct the most intricate justification as to why he really is (the less plausible the basis of the conspiracy theory the more liberties taken in defending its wilder claims).
So how to explain the popularity of conspiracy theory in the face of its many obvious epistemological deficiencies? Well, personally, I think that conspiracy theory tends to thrive primarily in those environments in which real scepticism is discouraged. In the UK and US, children grow up in an educational environment where if you’re not actively dissuaded from independent critical thinking (which you are) then the opportunities for developing your critical faculties are stifled by an educational system that operates almost entirely within the narrow constraints of a standardised curriculum. In practice this means that children are taught the bare minimum they need to pass their exams and no more. And although there is some emphasis on pupils developing evaluation skills again it’s only to the extent of allowing children to pass exams.
Without having a good enough grasp of how to evaluate and judge between different pieces of evidence - never dispensing with a healthy amount of cynicism - anyone dissatisfied with what they get from mainstream sources becomes even more gullible when exposed to non-mainstream sources. It's crucial that in the face of these apparently seductive arguments and the mounds of evidence supporting them, that people ask the right questions and not fall prey to various logical fallacies and probabilistic errors - and accept that there'll always be grey areas, such is the nature of existence.
How does this relate to imagination? You could say that people who are ardent followers of various branches of conspiracy theory have very active imaginations, maybe overactive ones. Yes in some sense their imaginations aren’t lacking. However the dogmatic and unquestioning acceptance of one reality constrains the imagination precisely because you don’t allow yourself to consider the possibility that things might be another way, even though your might go into creative overdrive trying to justifying your convictions.
At the end of the day we just have to learn to accept we might be wrong.
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