At The Deep End: New Conspiracies, Old Messages
06/03/20
By Conrad Cheung
Conrad Cheung, Tammy Takes on the Bat-Industrial Complex, 2020. Video provided by the artist.
1. Meet Tammy. Tammy started at the Sprint Corporation in 2014. She resigned quietly in early 2020. These days, she takes to the streets with protesters — the ones against the lockdown, not the ones against police brutality — all across Kansas. Her activism emerges from a deeper place than most: in January 2020, she discovered what she believed to be several dossiers detailing the production of the COVID-19 virus by her employer in collaboration with T-Mobile, AT&T, and others. One of few privy to apparent evidence of a bioweapon conspiracy, she now sides most closely with the camp of protesters who believe that 5G is the real source of the pandemic, though she disputes the finer points. She is a maverick among mavericks: unlike her fellow conspiracists, she believes that COVID-19 is a virus, not a physiological reaction; she insists that the production of COVID-19 has much less to do with 5G than it does with the companies that peddle 5G; and she thinks that Bill Gates’s involvement in the conspiracy is not nearly as central as others imagine. Often she finds herself detailing to passersby and to radio shows the long, dark history of bat weaponization she’s found herself embroiled in, a history that draws a straight line from the CIA’s Cold-War deployment of bats against anti-Communist insurgencies to the telecom industry’s recent release of COVID-19-infected bats in Southeast Asia.
2. The epistemology of conspiracy theories confounds. On the one hand, it seems possible to account for the bad habits that fuel the production of conspiracy theories: a tendency to distrust public institutions and their official claims; a looser-than-usual model of how causation works; a preference for maverickism, especially in domains of knowledge overrun by technocrats; and the list goes on. That’s an angle from which conspiracy theories might just look like radicalized extensions of our everyday epistemic routines: accept certain hunches, doubt narratives contradictory to our own, don’t sweat too much about ascertaining causal timelines, and sleuth out spotty but satisfying paths of evidence.
On the other hand, there’s plenty that’s puzzling. Why are some people predisposed to construct and accept conspiracy theories, and some not? Are aggrieved groups more vulnerable to the influence of conspiracy theories? How do belief-related norms get prioritized by conspiracists, and why in the world do those norms sometimes matter and sometimes not — e.g., expertise isn’t valuable, unless a credentialed expert (“expert”) like Judy Mikovits comes along, peddling conspiracy-friendly falsities? Why do we have such a bad handle on how evidence and rational norms interact to make conspiracists of some people, and non-conspiracists of others? And of course, why in the world are conspiracy diagrams so messy and ugly? They’re supposed to reflect the scrappy, richly imaginative mental models of their fabricators, but what else is there, besides the fact that the lack of rigor in conspiracy-network illustrations makes them optimal for depicting sloppily constructed ideas?
3. And these days: what’s with the conspiratorial climate? Yes, we’ve got first-order assessments that I think dig in the right direction — e.g., that the anti-lockdown protests are less about conspiracy than about instrumentalizing whatever conspiracies are available to help mobilize working-class and related forms of discontent. But two bigger, more fundamental things are at work, I suspect. One is the desire to favor theories whose pragmatic effects we like (e.g., if I believe COVID-19 isn’t out there, I can feel better justified about going outside) over those theories whose veracity might be less compromised, but whose veracity makes them a bummer to believe (e.g., COVID-19 is out there, so I shouldn’t go outside). The other is the desire for explanation — specifically, coherent and unifying explanations — at a time when accurate explanations are either unacceptably bleak, too scattershot to piece together, or just not available. After all, rigorous, non-conspiratorial threads of analysis that can supply a full explanation of the pandemic’s social impact will be unwinding long after the tragedy is over; they’ve barely begun.
4. Many leftists I know casually presuppose that belief in hardcore constructionism about knowledge is a uniquely leftist thing, likely because most — but not all — figures in the Continental tradition of scrutinizing the social production of knowledge and truth leaned left. I worry about this assumption. It keeps us from examining seriously how the post-truth climate is an artifact enabled by academy-adored practitioners of critical and postmodern theory. And the assumption is anyway plain wrong: deeply influential fascists like Julius Evola, Aleksandr Dugin, and Ivan Ilyin are unmistakably constructionist about knowledge, and in certain cases could not be the sophisticated, weirdo brand of hypernationalist they are without being constructionist. More hip to our time, here’s Mike Cernovich, alt-right darling, profiled by Andrew Marantz for the New Yorker in 2016:
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Walter Cronkite lied about everything,” Cernovich said. “Before Twitter, how would you have known? Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative.” He smiled. “I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?
When conspiracy theories finally, genuinely trouble us, we seem to be confronted with the exposed frailties of both these first-order and second-order, or meta, attitudes about truth: those who spread plausible fake news are in bad need of reform, but so are those who enthusiastically push indiscriminate epistemic constructionism. It is one thing to be skeptical, or attentive to social processes, or sensitive to today’s poor co-optations of the language of “facts” and “data”. It is another thing to follow slippery attitudes — an occasionally warranted mistrust of institutions, or an inclination towards an easygoing relativism that exalts subjectivities as irreducible captures of “my truth” and “your truth”, or a wariness about the abuse of language for authority’s sake — down a path to wholesale disbelief about the terrible states of affairs the world faces.
5. Critical talk of conspiracy theories leads us quickly to a longstanding, now unsensational struggle. A familiar reactionary complaint, going all the way back to Edmund Burke, starts like this: adopting skepticism, relativism, or constructionism in certain domains, especially epistemic and moral, threatens the preservation of social virtues (for the reactionary: hierarchy, tradition, glory, purity, etc.). A standard mistake on the left has been to see the whole claim as wrong or unpalatable. Not so. If we want to reclaim a politically unfractured notion of truth, our dispute is really over which social virtues we ought to be striving for when we question the benefits of adopting one or another attitude about truth. Plenty of political arrangements don’t require — thrive in the absence of — respect for factuality and the institutions dedicated to it. But democracy, liberal or not, does. And here’s the dead horse again, beaten by so many before: public respect for factuality needs more vigorous, savvy advocates.
Conrad Cheung is an MFA candidate in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They live with their senior cat, Maeve. Before the pandemic, they were making work about institutional norms and spatial queerness; now they make work about the epistemological effects of the crisis. They have recently co-founded a virtual gallery at www.perennialspace.com. For more of their work, see www.conradcheung.com.