How distant can conspiracy theories be from democracy?

Imagine you are the leader of a democratic, liberal, prestigious, “old” party in a Western democracy of our time. We might bet that, if you held such a position, the burden of responsibility would feel particularly heavy on your shoulders: a significant portion of your former voters is flying to populist parties, and those who still vote for you are probably starting to think you are a little bit too “elitist”.

If you were a sensible leader, some of the questions tormenting you might perhaps be not just “how to stop this?” or “How can we gain more votes?”, but also “how can we do that without giving up what makes our party truly democratic ?”; we can suppose deliberation, critical thinking and care for knowledge – among other ideals – would fill in that “what” quite well. Not an easy task, for sure: if you want to gain more voters, i.e. to include those citizens who are not already supporters of yours, there is a good chance you will have to convince at least some “conspiracists” to vote for you.

Even though we all (increasingly) often hear terms as “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracism”, it takes only a few seconds to realise how difficult it is to define them. Over the last decades, much has been  written on the impact that conspiracy theories have had on democracies, digital public spheres etc. Even though it is hard to deny the relevance of conspiracism to contemporary democracy, even looking back at the 50s and 60s, scholars still debate intensely the very nature of conspiracy theories. Should we consider all conspiracism merely irrational because it is conspiracism? How can we decide whether a conspiracy theory is irrational if not by adopting a case-by-case approach? Actually, even the use of terms as “conspiracism” and conspiracy theories” is all but unanimously defined. For the sake of our experiment (and nerves), I will use these terms as synonyms. It is easy to see how research questions like these are deeply related to democracy.

Depending on how we see conspiracism a very different understanding of deliberation and knowledge takes shape before our eyes. For instance, as a political leader, you might choose (A) to fight firmly against conspiracy theories as uniformly poisonous narratives that aim at explaining how the world works through secret plans, tyrannic elites and open war against science as an institution. For instance, a way to implement such an approach might be to legally ban all Qanon, New World Order and other related posts from social media. However, this in turn might raise serious concerns about the safeguard of democracy’s constitutional essentials (e.g., freedom of speech).  Thus, another option instead might be (B) to give it a go and look whether all conspiracy theories really hide nothing but void under their masks, i.e. whether some conspiracism might reasonably be excluded from option A’s banning policy. A good way to test this could be perhaps to ask ourselves: “can I think about at least one example of conspiracism that doesn’t end up simply unevidenced or refuted as soon as I analyse it scientifically?”.  In other words, if you wanted to see whether some conspiracism is “more solid” than others, science might come in as a “certified” and fruitful tool.

This idea might not settle matters however.: If you – the leader- choose option (A) (I am thinking here of options A and B as parts of a party’s policy-line, likely to be implemented if it reaches governmental positions) conspiracists could claim your policy is unconstitutional; if you choose option (B) they could as well point out its reliance on a loose and nuanced criterion as “science”. Conspiracists might easily say that science itself is not sufficiently solid and unanimously defined to serve as a criterion at all. Nevertheless, you might not give up then and note that, while it is true that it is very difficult to come up with a well-defined notion of science, it is also very difficult to deny that the ensemble of widely recognised books, papers, professionals, institutions and methodologies that make up science exists. This definitional approach seems to offer at least two advantages:

1. it is much more difficult for conspiracy theorists to claim science “does not work” than to argue that science has also something to do with hegemony, power and trade-offs.
2. most importantly, this approach also answers conspiracists who do not question the value of science but claim that science is not done properly by official institutions and recognised professionals.

Indeed, from a normative point of view (let us remember now we are further investigating option B), objecting to how “official” science works, i.e. objecting to its paradigms and methodologies, would also mean to question its accounts of several factual achievements of humankind (planes do fly). What this all means, roughly, is that our approach to science here suffices to leave conspiracy theorists with the burden of proof insofar as they claim science is not properly done, despite methodologies, debates and paradigms that at the very least evidently amount to some factual results which can be transparently accounted for.

If we accepted scientific knowledge as a criterion for evaluating conspiracy theories, then we would notice something quite interesting. While it is very hard to find in the scientific literature something that even remotely supports interest in Qanon, things change slightly if we consider, say, conspiracism about financial plots governing the EU. To clarify things: it would be nonsense to say that some conspiracism is supported by science; all we are looking into now is whether some conspiracy theory is somehow “closer” to science than others, although always being “outside” it (our whole approach here essentially implies that conspiracism’s claims somehow diverge from conventional accepted knowledge; I specified elsewhere how such an approach can avoid the risk of circularity). Well, the fracture between labour and capital in the European Union has been a fruitful domain of social science’s inquiries for decades. From this angle, it seems arguable to say that Qanon is lightyears further from science than EU financial conspiracism is; what makes the latter closer is that it is epistemologically “identifiable” by virtue of its content and the existence of theme-related scientific literature, whereas the former is not: when analysed through the domain of science, certain forms of conspiracism seem bound to end up merely disproven or unevidenced; on the contrary, other kinds of conspiracy theories look as if their object somehow recalled that of ongoing scientific debates, however wrongly their supporters may infer their own conclusions. I have argued elsewhere we might understand the difference among these classes of conspiracism in terms of “epistemic distance”, and that it should not be understood formally, but substantively. Thus, when evaluated in terms of epistemic distance 9/11 conspiracism appears as something completely detached from science; whilst, on the contrary, some forms of NWO conspiracism satisfy some epistemological conditions such as the existence of theme-related scientific literature. This difference might encourage the adoption of different policies when considering whether to ban their dissemination on social media.

All we have said so far only suggests that it would not be so unrealistic for a party which won the elections to conceive, say, a partial banning policy for contents on social media without making an enemy of the whole conspiracist electorate (thus breaking the elite-people stereotyped image). There might be epistemological reasons supporting efforts to include (and epistemically “correct”) even parts of the conspiracist electorate into proposals like, say, deliberative reforms of traditional political parties: if a political party decided it is time to both reconnect with its own electoral basis and engage at least some “conspiracist voters”, maybe by coming up with some deliberative setting to better connect citizens and policy-design, then the notion of epistemic distance might fruitfully come into the picture. For example, it might serve as a criterion to devise the epistemic boundaries such deliberative settings reasonably would have to adopt.

Clearly, such an approach – as any approach – would face some serious objections; perhaps the hardest would be “who is to decide which conspiracy theory is epistemologically identifiable and which is not”? Evidently, we cannot settle it in few lines (I made a first attempt to answer here. In the end, what this experiment has been all about is just the chance that, as political leader, you discovered something even more relevant than the fascinating nature of epistemological dilemmas; perhaps you might have found good reasons now to at least try option (B) for your party: some conspiracy theories might actually be less distant than others from critical thinking and rigorous knowledge, thus potentially encouraging exchange among democratic citizens and institutions. However, when epistemic conditions suggest there is no ground at all to critically engage in a certain conspiracy theory and discuss it with its supporters, democracy should not hesitate at least to consider partial social media banning policies to legally defend its own constitutional essentials.

Foto di Clark Young su Unsplash