What does a modern witch-hunt look like?
One of the most striking features of contemporary academic “critical” studies is the near-total lack of self-criticism among its practitioners. The major complaint that one hears about this style of work, within the academy, is not that it is radical, dangerous or disruptive to the social order, but that it has become excessively dogmatic. (The fact that its practitioners are adept at interpreting this accusation as just more evidence of how radical, dangerous and disruptive they are is one of the major reasons that the view has become impervious to criticism.)
Because of this, I read Bruno Latour’s essay, Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?, as a breath of fresh air and a revelation. In it, he asks a series of completely obvious questions, which should have occurred spontaneously to anyone who claims to be a critical theorist. Almost the entire thing is quotable, but some parts more than others. For example:
Military experts constantly revise their strategic doctrines, their contingency plans, the size, direction and technology of their projectiles, their smart bombs, their missiles; I wonder why we, we alone, would be saved from those sorts of revisions. It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them? Would it not be rather terrible if we were still training young kids – yes, young recruits, young cadets – for wars that are no longer possible, fighting enemies long gone, conquering territories that no longer exist, leaving them ill-equipped in the face of threats we had not anticipated, for which we are so thoroughly unprepared? Generals have always been accused of being on the ready one war late… would it be so surprising, after all, if intellectuals were also one war late, one critique late?
These are good questions! He goes on to ask a series of even better questions. One of them concerns the distinction between critical theory and conspiracy theory, and whether many instances of the former are just high-brow versions of the latter. (Is it true, as Fredric Jameson once suggested, that conspiracy theory is just the poor man’s version of critical theory?) Historically at least, many critical theorists have thought they were doing a bit better than that… And yet, if you look at many of the doctrines being promulgated by conspiracy theorists, the flaws in their reasoning seem closely connected to their excessive skepticism toward authoritative information sources. How does that differ exactly from the standpoint of the ‘radical’ social critic?
I wrote a paper a while back trying to answer some of these questions. In it, I focused almost entirely on a particular type of conspiracy theory, which arises when people fail to take the null hypothesis seriously, and so find patterns in events that are not really there. This is the error in reasoning that generates the classic “witch hunt.” Witchcraft beliefs rely on two very powerful cognitive biases: apophenia and intentionality bias.
Apophenia is due to the error rate in human pattern-detection systems being biased in the direction of false positives. This makes us far more likely to see patterns where there are none than to miss patterns that are there. Because of this, we consistently underestimate the probability that what we are seeing in the world is simply randomness (or a set of independent, unconnected events). Most people, when shown a genuinely random pattern, will deny that it is random. We expect constant alternation of outcome in random sequences, and so underestimate how many “streaks” they contain. This means that absent explicit methodological constraint we fail to take the null hypothesis (or the non-explanatory explanation, that “it’s a coincidence”) seriously enough.
So the first component of a conspiracy theory of this type is “seeing the pattern.” The second component – the part that puts the literal “conspiracy” into conspiracy theory – involves treating the pattern as the outcome of some human action, and so positing intentional agency as an explanation for the pattern. When the pattern is sufficiently diffuse, this requires coordination among many individuals, and so the explanation requires a conspiracy.
Witchcraft beliefs typically have this structure, where a series of unfortunate events are explained as the product of the malevolent intentions of individuals with supernatural powers (it does not really matter whether it is a single individual or a “coven”). The ubiquity of witchcraft beliefs in different societies at different times speaks to the power of the underlying psychological biases. In some cases, these beliefs can lead to the phenomenon that we describe as a “witch hunt,” where people seek to find the person or persons responsible for some series of unfortunate events.
Historically, I should note, some of the people punished for witchcraft were actually guilty in the mens rea sense. Because people believed in witchcraft, many also tried to practice witchcraft, in order to harm their neighbours and enemies. Some got caught doing so. In many other cases, however, the search for perpetrators wound up picking out completely innocent people, who were often implicated for having engaged in some form of vaguely “suspicious” behaviour, often routine non-conformity to social norms. The impossibility of producing any evidence of guilt, however, meant that the accused were often given incentives to confess, and to accuse others, which could generate a full-blown mania (the most famous example of which are Salem witch trials).
When people talk about a “witch hunt” this is typically what they have in mind. (The “Satanic ritual abuse” craze, which was popular when I was growing up, was a classic witch-hunt, in that literally none of it was real.)
While writing about this, however, I realized that the apophenia model is a bit too restrictive, in that not all conspiracy theories involve seeing a pattern where there is none. (At the time I was strongly influenced by the example of QAnon, which was all over the news, and which does conform to the “seeing something that’s not there” model. Its central innovation lies in crowdsourcing the pattern-recognition.) In other cases, however, there is actually a pattern in events. The conspiracy theory arises, not because people neglect the null hypothesis, but because they reject the real explanation (for one reason or another), and make up a fictitious one. This is what sends them on the wild goose chase, which often then leads them to accuse innocent people of nefarious deeds.
Conspiracy theories of this sort are driven by motivated reasoning, which leads people to reject the actual explanation for a genuine pattern, coupled with intentionality bias, which leads them to posit some malevolent or nefarious agents responsible instead. A relatively uncontroversial example of this would be the moon landing conspiracy theory. Much of the “evidence” that is put forward in support of this theory points to genuinely unusual phenomena that can be seen in the photographs taken. But there is also a good explanation for these anomalies, which is that the photographs were taken on the moon! Most of our intuitions about how things are supposed to look, and how objects are supposed to behave, come from our experience, which is confined to life on planet Earth. Things look different for a person standing on a small, extraplanetary sphere, with less gravity and no atmosphere. This is why attentive observers, looking at the pictures, sense quite correctly that there is something “off” about them. There is, however, a good explanation for this. The conspiracy theory arises among those who reject the actual explanation, and instead posit a complex human deception.
This seems to me a good example of what Latour is pointing to, of misplaced skepticism (e.g. “that’s what they would like you to believe”) leading to conspiracy theory. Similar reasoning can be found in various corners of contemporary critical theory. Perhaps the most striking examples arise from the desire, on the part of progressive academics, to reject any sort of biological explanation for human behaviour. This is motivated reasoning, because they think that if something can be shown to be biological, then it follows that it can’t be changed. So if they see some pattern of behaviour that they don’t like, they are extremely reluctant to admit that it might have a biological explanation, because they consider this tantamount to admitting that we must accept it. (Whether this is correct or not is irrelevant, the point is that many people believe this, which is what motivates them to reject biological explanations.)
Despite this wishful thinking, there are an enormous number of patterns in human behaviour that have fairly straightforward biological explanations. For example, it is widely observed that men experience greater jealousy over partner sexual infidelity than women do. That there should be some asymmetry is an uncontroversial prediction of evolutionary theory (in a species in which males make significant parental investment). At the same time, a ridiculous amount of effort has had to be invested in the effort to disprove the rival hypothesis, that the difference is a product of social learning (i.e. that men are socialized to be more possessive), mainly because so many people do not want to believe the biological explanation (on the grounds that it might be used to excuse certain excesses of male behaviour).
One can see this resistance to biological explanations fairly consistently across the human sciences. Some have condemned this denial of biological influence because it leads to the production of bad science. But it’s important to observe that it produces bad critical theory as well. Specifically, it leads people to hold views about our socialization practices that are disconnected from reality. After all, if male jealously is something that is taught, then there must be someone who is doing the teaching, or modeling the behavior (and whoever is doing the teaching, it seems to be occurring at a young age). Furthermore, in order for the results to be so consistent (in every country in the world, in every cohort!), there must be a high level of coordination.
Academics typically are not inclined to believe that men get together, in some secret society, to plan these things out, so the coordination is usually attributed to “structural” forces, such as “the patriarchy.” “Culture” is often appealed to as though it were a system of comprehensive mind control. It is not difficult to see, however, that these explanations are unbelievable for precisely the same reason that conspiracy theories are unbelievable (i.e. they are either false or unfalsifiable).
Unfortunately, there is almost no biological explanation for any aspect of human behaviour that is not considered controversial. For example, I was genuinely surprised to discover that some of my colleagues do not believe that nature has equipped us with any general bias in the direction of heterosexuality. I was familiar with the use of the term “heteronormative,” but assumed that what people meant by it was just that there are various social norms that favour heterosexual preferences, or at least treat them as standard. It took me a while to realize that many people who use this term believe that heterosexuality is entirely a product of these norms, so that if society stopped requiring people to be heterosexual, they would no longer have any tendency to become that way.
Most sensible observers would be inclined to think that if we adjusted social norms to make them neutral with respect to sexual orientation, an outcome in which around 90% of the population remained heterosexual would be a perfectly reasonable expectation. Others, however, take anything less than 50%-50% in the outcome, or even a society in which most individuals maintain an exclusive sexual preference, as evidence that something nefarious is going on in the socialization system. And since sexual orientation develops at a fairly young age, interventions aimed at overthrowing heteronormativity must start early. This leads them to support school programs that strike most people as over-the-top, and some as outright indoctrination, because from their perspective they are merely engaging in counter-programming, against an all-pervasive but invisible system of compulsory heterosexuality. By ruling out the biological explanation, they wind up looking for nefarious biases in existing institutions, which they assume must be somehow be pervading early childhood education.
Incidentally, a lot of these bad ideas can be traced back to Foucault, and his radical opposition to psychoanalysis. Foucault was so annoyed by Freud that he not only rejected the idea that human beings have instincts, he denied that nature has equipped us with any psychological dispositions, biases, or development tendencies. Nature provides us only with bodies, everything else – including all desires, not to mention subjects themselves – are the product of discourse and regimes of power. (This is where the leftist fad of referring to people as “bodies” comes from.) Foucault’s view appeals to progressives because it allows them to believe that absolutely anything about human psychology can be changed, simply by challenging and transforming structures of social power. But it also has the unfortunate effect of promoting all manner of conspiracy theories about what sort of effects these regimes of social power are having on our lives.
Another area one can see this style of thinking at work is with respect to racism, which is also widely claimed to be learned behaviour. This is, in at least one important sense, false, because the basic disposition that people have toward exophobia/endophilia is part of our innate psychology. This does not inevitably result in racism, but it takes very little prompting to do so. So even though young children are often insensitive to racial differences, they later develop strong in-group biases without any special prompting. This makes them perfectly capable of inventing racism all by themselves, without any adult role modeling. And yet if one insists that children are innocent, and that racism must be taught, this can easily lead to a hunt for suspects, in order to figure out where children are learning their racism from. Is it from their parents? Is it from the school? Is it from YouTube?
The result is a very modern sort of witch-hunt, in which our institutions are castigated for producing various evils, but where no one can point to any clear examples of how they are doing it. Only isolated instances can be found, and so we make an example out of the occasional deviant, who exhibits less than total enthusiasm for the purge. In the process, however, the progressive left finds itself locked into precisely the mentality that Latour criticized, of “fighting enemies long gone,” while failing to adjust to new challenges and threats. Hence the question, “Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them?”