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In conversation with Ginna Husting and Martin Orr
27 Plays3 years ago
Josh discovers that M has uploaded yet another interview; this time with Ginna Husting and Martin Orr of Boise State.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Introduction by Josh and Dr. M. Denton
00:00:08
Speaker
the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton. Hello, you're listening to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy here in Auckland, New Zealand. I'm Josh Addison, and... Sorry, are we still doing the thing where we're pretending like we don't know where M is and they've disappeared off the face of the Earth?
00:00:34
Speaker
Okay. I mean, like, even though anyone who knows him personally, or follows him on Twitter, or anyone who has listened to this podcast around the start of the year is gonna have a good idea of exactly where M is, we're still, okay, no, no, no, that's fine, if that's the decision,
Interview with Sociologists Martin Orr and Jenna Hosting
00:00:52
Speaker
I'll go with it. I just, I mean, are we, yeah, no, no, no, okay.
00:00:56
Speaker
Dr. M. Denteth, though, who knows where they might be after disappearing mysteriously following a walk in North Head. We've just still been receiving these sporadic communications, which all seem to involve interviews with academic colleagues. So this week is more of the same Eames left for me, an interview with Martin Orr and Jenna Hosting, both of Boise, Idaho, who we've heard from in this podcast before.
00:01:25
Speaker
Talk of a hotel room, talk of quarantine, makes one suspect that ends sort of sequestered somewhere, hiding out from who knows what. Quarantine's an interesting word to hear in these COVID ravaged times, but I don't know. Maybe we're looking too much into things by trying to dig too much meaning out of these stray comments. Maybe we should just listen into this interview and see what we can learn.
00:02:00
Speaker
It's the 30th of June and I'm talking with Jennifer Sting and Martin Orr, sociologists both from Boise State University and two people we haven't heard from jointly since the end of 2017, when I spent time in their delightful company in Boise, Idaho. Hello, Jenna and Marty. Hello, hello.
00:02:17
Speaker
Hello, Em. So let's ask the really obvious question. How has the pandemic affected you personally? Marty, I'm one of those annoying people that that is not prevented. You know, I mean, you know, it's not like I go to the movies all the time at this point. So but it's mostly it's just mostly about not not seeing people. We've had we have a family member in long term care and
00:02:44
Speaker
And that's been totally locked down. So all of that, the general frustration of the response to the whole thing, one would have hoped for, if there were ever a time where people might kind of come together, this would have been it, but not so much.
00:03:06
Speaker
So that frustration carries into a lot of stuff, I think, for many people. But yeah, we're muddling through. I'm more or less fully functional. Yeah, so I've had it better than most people.
00:03:26
Speaker
So you've basically been able to use the pandemic to justify a little bit of introversion. Yeah, it does make it. I'm well prepared for some of that. So yeah, having books around and Netflix.
00:03:45
Speaker
We do live in a wonderful age of streaming now in that even I, who are stuck in a hotel room for the last 11 days, have been able to keep myself occupied with an awful lot of media, while I think even going back 10 years ago, bringing enough books to spend three weeks in quarantine would have been a substantial part of my luggage only a decade ago.
00:04:12
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. So, Jina, how are you coping with the pandemic? It's a really good question. The question is so big that it's really hard to wrap one's answers around, I think, in some ways. But how has it affected me and how am I coping are probably two questions. One of the interesting things about, when I think back to the beginning,
00:04:40
Speaker
of the pandemic when we were all not sure what was going on from that moment, from March a year and a half ago, I guess. It feels like I've been really sort of, it's been a weird way in which like academic concerns about conspiracy theorizing have melded with personal experience because I don't know anyone who hasn't,
00:05:07
Speaker
been put in the position of trying to figure out what's true and false week to week, right? Now it's not so dramatic, but what we robustly know or think we know and how we think we know it, right? And what is most likely fact, distinguishing that from
00:05:26
Speaker
what might not be probably isn't and what the levels of risk are in terms of medical knowledge, but also political right action in the United States, for example, and sort of with implications for one's own safety, it seems like all of that has become really personal in a weird way.
Contrasting Pandemic Responses: New Zealand vs US
00:05:48
Speaker
And so thinking back through that and thinking back to the first couple of months of trying to figure out what was going on in all those ways has really made me think twice about facile assumptions about what we know to be true and how we know it to be true, what I guess we would call epistemology.
00:06:11
Speaker
Yes, I like how you've moved our discussion on here into the second question I was going to ask, which is, how has the pandemic been affecting our work? Yeah, I guess, same answer. Yeah.
00:06:24
Speaker
Because I mean, what's quite interesting, I think, from our perspective is, of course, we come from two very different countries that have dealt with the pandemic in very different ways. And this has been both dealing with it politically, and also dealing with it in a kind of social epistemic way, in that
00:06:44
Speaker
New Zealand's kind of been world-class with respect to very effective science communication about why we're doing things at particular points in time during the pandemic, what the science behind these claims are, why we should act in particular ways, why views about masks have changed over time.
00:07:05
Speaker
And it seems that there hasn't been an equivalent effective science communication, let alone good political governance from the US during the course of the pandemic, at least during the Trump regime. Maybe things are different under Biden.
00:07:22
Speaker
It's hard, Marty, what do you think? I'm finding it hard to sort of distinguish because with a vaccine in particular, things started to get clear and snap into place. The Biden presidency happened at the same time, and it's hard for me to know what the causal relationship was, although we did even, you know, the CDC was having such difficulty, I think, under
00:07:47
Speaker
under Trump that a lot of what they wanted to say was oppressed. Some of what they wanted to say was probably what was obviously problematic at the beginning about masks. Right. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think I mean, I think so. The the you know, the CDC is a political entity and, you know, they were they've been pretty clear since that they were worried about people snapping up masks away from. Right.
00:08:15
Speaker
Right. Even though it certainly couldn't have hurt, until we knew more, why not, had we the supply. But yeah, as far as the work goes here, there's the
00:08:35
Speaker
the more communitarian side, and on that end, the impact on faculty with young children, I think, especially women faculty, was devastating. And students across the board were beyond belief.
00:08:59
Speaker
just sort of the worst student nightmare you've been across in your career and then that's basically half the class. So that that's been the weirdest part on the work and of course all of that.
00:09:14
Speaker
I don't know how far from the more egoistic side is set back our professional agendas and things like that. Our department chair was supposed to be teaching abroad and I thought it would be easy duty to act as interim chair and all this went down about
00:09:40
Speaker
what, four weeks in general or something like that? Yeah. The rest of that semester was just a blur. Nobody knew what to do, of course. I think people are starting to feel like they do now, but I think there will probably still be surprises. What post-pandemic higher ed in the US looks like I think is still
00:10:06
Speaker
bit of an open question. Well, naturally, I mean, that's that's a really interesting point, because there is a worry, of course, that university administrations are going to use the changes that occurred due to coping with teaching during a pandemic.
00:10:23
Speaker
and then bid those changes in. So there's a university in Aotearoa, New Zealand, who I won't name, which brought in a scaling mechanism to deal with how student marks work during the pandemic, which was at a point where, because of lockdowns, we could teach in person. We, of course, have gone back to teaching in person throughout this year, apart from one or two breaks where we thought there was COVID in the community.
00:10:49
Speaker
and yet this university is continuing to use a scaling mechanism that was designed to cope with a locked down student population that couldn't be in classes and they're using it throughout this year and people are going this now seems to be policy that we're going to be scaling marks all the time but we brought in the scaling to deal with the fact that there was a crisis and we knew that students weren't coping particularly well
00:11:16
Speaker
We're actually back to where we were over a year ago, teaching wise. So why is the scaling still in effect? Because the cause for why we brought the policy in isn't there anymore. Why is the university continuing down this path? Yeah, it is a problem, or it is potentially a problem.
00:11:37
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I think the push is going to be to get people back in the classroom and reestablish the old normal. I think a lot of students are going to be more interested in remote learning than were pre-pandemic and the balance is going to have to shift in that direction. I mean, people discovered that
00:12:02
Speaker
learning remotely solves some daycare problems. And it solves some, you know, saved me a couple hundred bucks on parking this year and things like that. So I don't, I think reestablishing, you know, post pandemic campus life will be interesting.
00:12:22
Speaker
We were talking about these conferences that you can sort of go to that, you know, I mean, Jenna, could you have gone to a conference in Ireland pre-pandemic very easily or? No, exactly. It's kind of cool in some ways. There are some opportunities for doing things in a better, different way. Plus, it does mean we can now pivot to a pre-GU style way of delivering content online. Well, yee-haw.
00:12:51
Speaker
Uh, yeah. So, um, I mean, that's, you know, I, it's interesting cause I don't know, I don't know what the, what the data are anecdotally or just on the subject. You know, I had students who, who thrived, um, online and I did remote synchronous teaching because I, that's what I, I still wanted to have, um, sort of, you know, co-presence in time.
00:13:19
Speaker
and they were surprised and that they were uh thriving or at least finding it okay to be uh on being on zoom and and doing you know sort of i also did a fair bit of self-directed sort of asynchronous parts of that because of the way that zoom creates fatigue but i also had students that i hadn't expected um to feel
00:13:49
Speaker
upset and never really adjust to being on Zoom. Very good students. And so it wasn't really predictable in the way that I thought. I think it's, you know, it's just like everything else about teaching and learning. It's like, you know, it suits some people, it doesn't, others in it. And there are different reasons, right? Economic reasons for needing
00:14:13
Speaker
to be, say, on Zoom or asynchronous. But there are some economically, sort of ultimately, economic reasons for appreciating having a time away in the classroom. You can say to your boss, I need to be in class now. And then you're in class. You're not also trying to take care of your kids because you're in the classroom. So you've got some, you know, some wolfie in a room of your own.
00:14:37
Speaker
Now it's not of your own completely because it's a learning space, but as an educator, I want to argue that's a good space for, you know.
00:14:45
Speaker
self-development, et cetera, et cetera, like the mind. All right, I just babbled on there. So I don't know though, but I think Marta, your points are really good. And I also just want to point out that the pandemic really hit. We could see it in higher education classrooms, which you could see it everywhere in the United States. The people who are already struggling, whether it was economically, psychologically, culturally, or more than one of those ways, right?
00:15:15
Speaker
were the first to really just go all the way into, you know, this is traumatic, I can't cope, what is going on here? And so it hit unevenly and partly it's, I would love to have simultaneously been teaching in New Zealand and the United States to see how that differed, the level of trauma and the level of
00:15:45
Speaker
fear, uncertainty, and difficulty adjusting.
Conspiracy Theories During the Pandemic
00:15:48
Speaker
No, and around here too, all this was playing out against the backdrop of- Black Lives Matter. Yeah, Black Lives Matter. Having to respond to more shootings, more murders. Yeah, sorry. I didn't mean to argue. No, you're right. The mass mandates and the capital invasions at the state level.
00:16:08
Speaker
And I think there's a, Marty, maybe this gets us closer to conspiracy theory the way, and in the United States, there's a real sense, I think, that, well, in Idaho, I think there was a real sense of every moment, what's gonna happen here. This is, people were scared, and literally moment to moment, it wasn't clear whether social order and political order would hold. And that was,
00:16:35
Speaker
I could see it on Facebook, I could see it in the news, I could see it in people's tones of voice when they would explain what happens when people invaded stores refusing to wear masks and basically en masse.
00:16:51
Speaker
invaded local stores in Boise and then refused to leave, forcing store owners to shut those places down on some of the most important days of the year for them economically. Does that make sense? The days before holidays, the last shopping day, the biggest shopping day before holidays.
00:17:10
Speaker
And this was strategically done. And so the feeling that things were in chaos made me think about moral panics and conspiracy, conspiracy theorizing, all that stuff more. And in terms of like my own approach to conspiracy theory theories and conspiracy theories, I really had a sort of a
00:17:32
Speaker
Well, your recent paper on COVID and its title kind of gets, and the premise gets at like, wait a minute, was I wrong about all of this? If I'm a particularist, maybe this is a threat to the social order as such. Maybe conspiracy theorizing as such is a problem as such for the social order, which we're sociologists is a crazy thing to think. And I came down back off of that.
00:17:56
Speaker
But I've never seen so much concern about what we might call social order, the idea that things were going to be predictable and relatively safe. Well yes, I do think that talking about conspiracy theories in the midst of a pandemic where belief in certain conspiracy theories has drastic public health output is the kind of thing that particulars do need to think about because
00:18:25
Speaker
we may have been a little blase with respect to the social cost of conspiracy theorizing in that we've always said, look, because conspiracies occur and we should be vigilant about the existence of conspiracies, we should treat conspiracy theories seriously and investigate them. But there is also the additional worry there that, right, how do we engage in these investigations to ensure that we're also not
00:18:52
Speaker
engaging in damage to the police at the same time, because as we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic, sometimes just openly discussing the origin and purpose of COVID-19. So talking about those conspiracy theories might have the danger. And I'm going to stress might there, because it's still an open question as to whether this does occur.
00:19:14
Speaker
but it might have the danger of introducing people to views that they haven't heard before, which they find intuitively plausible, which then might once again, I use that word, might have the effect of making them less inclined to wear a mask, or less inclined to engage in social distancing, or now less inclined to take the vaccine.
00:19:37
Speaker
And I think we can square that circle, I think we can solve whatever this apparent problem of particularism might be, but it is the kind of thing that as particulars I think we need to grapple with, which is it's all fine and good to be talking about conspiracy theories outside of a major disaster.
00:19:56
Speaker
But when you're in the middle of that disaster, negotiating how we talk about the conspiracy theories and how we advocate for their investigation, I think is slightly more complex than maybe we've ever given it credit for. Yeah, this is a really important point. And I think that an interesting, I want to add to that, because so. Well, let me let me interject, because I, you know, the
00:20:24
Speaker
Of all the conspiracy theories, and I'm not sure this, this is probably more of a conspiracy hypothesis, I guess, but the idea that the government forcing people to wear masks was an attempt to muzzle them, an attempt to limit their freedom of speech.
00:20:44
Speaker
And it's just talk louder so people can hear you through the map. What's to investigate here? It's one of those things where you can go, well, okay, that's a theory, let's investigate. And then about five seconds later, you go, how is that possibly an infringement on your
00:21:08
Speaker
First Amendment rights of any kind, I don't understand. So, you know, and short of, I mean, the hearing impaired, I mean, people, you know, things like this, there are reasonable grounds to not want to wear a mask, but the fact that it's a denial of your First Amendment right to free speech seems a bit of a stretch.
00:21:28
Speaker
So here's a yeah, Marty, I think that's I think that the more speech argument is reasonable there, although the question is worth asking. But I also think one of the thing I in the first semester of the pandemic.
00:21:46
Speaker
I had students who came to class and they were frankly concerned about YouTube videos that they had been sent, that they had watched, that ostensibly that they had watched showing New York hospitals with nobody coming in and out, with miles of empty corridors, yada, yada, yada, yada.
00:22:11
Speaker
And those, of course, then saying, this might be a conspiracy theory. I think it's just made up stuff. And having to, you know, these students were intelligent. They had been critical. They know how to be critical. And yet there's a way in which
00:22:31
Speaker
those kinds of images. Part of the problem here is that those kinds of images are designed, right? They didn't just happen. They didn't just end up in students' hands or hands. They were designed to create these sorts of problems. And so I want to go back to Em's point, at least I hope I'm going to connect with Em's point here. So the sociology of social movements, which also is in between the disciplines of sociology and political science,
00:23:03
Speaker
I think it developed originally in sociology, that's where most of the early work was, until at least probably mid-90s and then political science started getting involved as well.
00:23:16
Speaker
It's a really deep literature, and it's got some real big divisions and polarizations, which is a good thing in an academic area. And one of the reasons that I really distrust the psychology of conspiracy theory work, because there are almost no conflicts about method, about results, about theoretical frameworks, and that's scary.
00:23:35
Speaker
But back to my main point, the sociology of social movements has long tried to identify out of the welter of things that happened before, say, an invasion of a capital building occurs. What motivates people? What needs to be in place? Am I making sense? What resources need to be mobilized? What political structures and opportunities are in place or open or closed for people? And then the techniques that they know or learn
00:24:04
Speaker
or are taught, right? Because these things don't happen and they're not, like it's not obvious. What happened at the Capitol, for example, is not obvious to people. It wouldn't be obvious to us.
00:24:15
Speaker
what to do, quote unquote. Does that make sense? Or to anybody? People are taught this stuff. And so my point here is that it's not just a simple learning about an idea like COVID is a hoax, or the election has been stolen, right, that make people act in these ways.
00:24:39
Speaker
there's a it's almost like the tip of an iceberg and there's a huge amount of of ice under the water and it's historical ice it's built up over time so now I'm mixing metaphors but still I'm gonna stick with my weird mixed iceberg metaphor and so the the conditions that create that
00:24:57
Speaker
all the stuff that enable a particular kind of, say, concern about hoaxes or 5G, right, COVID stuff to happen, that's all laid in place well before the thing happens. And so I don't think there's a one-to-one correspondence between, you know, we say these ideas, I could be wrong, though, and I think that this pandemic has made me worry about this and think about it much more deeply, right?
00:25:27
Speaker
but there's not a one-to-one correspondence between ideology, say, repertoires of collective action, like refusal to get a vaccine or the spread of information about a vaccine being an attempt of the government to spy on you through nanoparticles and the whatever, whatever. Does that make sense? It does to me. And the stuff that wasn't,
00:25:57
Speaker
It wasn't conspiracy theories so much, but part of this that has amazed me, and I'm just picking up on the anti-vaccine thing, are the number of healthcare workers in this country who say they want to do some more research, which for anyone who isn't a virologist, largely consists of Googling something. And if it's not on the first page, we generally stop. So this is what people in this country, they want to do their own research about.
00:26:31
Speaker
And I guess the annoying thing is that, well, given that you're only going to spend about 45 seconds doing said research, why don't you go ahead and get on with that? And then you get back to me and we'll have a conversation about whatever. Yeah, doesn't that confirm him's concern precisely that, look, somebody reads the abstract of a particularist argument and then says, I mean, I know particularist arguments have been taken up in precisely these ways.
00:26:54
Speaker
everything and and it's just it it's
Trust and Expertise in Pandemic Responses
00:26:59
Speaker
by people who believe things that I think are not good and not true, more to the point, because good is a separate question. I'm not as interested in that. Does it? Yeah. Well, I guess it's sort of a tangent, but the problem of expertise that I know you've talked about. Well, yes. No, no, it is a problem.
00:27:22
Speaker
I mean, it's different. We're so accustomed to going on Yelp or whatever to find out how people rate auto mechanics. It's like with virologists has four stars or whatever.
00:27:37
Speaker
I don't know. Did that make any sense at all? It did. In New Zealand, I'm guessing, though, the context in which knowledge could be taken to be probably true, at least true for now, as best we can do, and having been vetted for precisely the collective good or public safety overall, right?
00:27:57
Speaker
was much higher. I mean, it's not to say that we haven't had similar issues. They just don't seem to have been as persuasive in our polities. So we have a prominent epidemiologist who works at the University of Auckland, who advocates for a Swedish style model with respect to COVID-19. And he
00:28:25
Speaker
He continues to maintain that even though the Swedish model has been shown to be a complete and absolute failure and is now associating with anti-vaccination groups around COVID-19. This group called Voices for Freedom. So we have, you know,
00:28:41
Speaker
the educated academics who are doing exactly this kind of thing. We have health care workers who are resistant towards taking vaccines. We have purported doctors, always purported there, because often when you start looking into their credentials, you find out they're not really doctors at all, who are talking about the dangers of vaccination regimes and the like. It's just that these have remained incredibly fringe views.
00:29:07
Speaker
in our community. And that's in part because, as I said at the front of the show, we kind of had a world class response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We had a government that gave briefings every day.
00:29:23
Speaker
We continued to have official information access requests being made about what's going on with the pandemic. So news would come out about failures in the system. The government would need to front on that and discuss it. We had expert science communicators, people like Susie Wiles and the like, who were on a day by day basis engaging in advocacy for explaining why the state of the science was this at this particular point in time.
00:29:52
Speaker
We had this great example that Susie Wiles, who is a scientist who works at the University of Auckland, was engaging in a lot of public outreach over COVID-19. At the beginning of the pandemic, she was going, look, masks aren't particularly important. They're not going to do much for preventing the transmission of COVID-19. Six months later, she changed to a tune
00:30:15
Speaker
And she explained why she had changed her tune. She said, look, the science has changed on masking since the first time I talked about it. So I do think when I talked about masking at the beginning of the pandemic and how masks really weren't going to be useful, based on what we knew at the time, that was good advice. In retrospect, that was terrible advice.
00:30:37
Speaker
But that's because the science has changed and I've updated my views. And so by having these kind of frank discussions in public, we kind of engendered trust in the police that, look, they they seem to know what they're doing because they're explaining why they're doing it all the time. You know, it's interesting because size and what might call sort of
00:31:07
Speaker
I want to say that the size of the New Zealand population, probably education levels and homogeneity, even given a panoply of kinds of difference within New Zealand,
00:31:25
Speaker
might all help also explain that, especially given that you did have some deniers and prominent ones, it sounds like. I mean, it's a little bit hard to tell. I mean, I think one thing which
00:31:40
Speaker
kind of did benefit our local response is our relatively small population. I mean, so it turns out land-wise, we're bigger than the UK. So actually land-wise, we're actually fairly large as countries go. But population-wise, we are less than a central suburb in London. So we're bigger than the UK, but
00:32:05
Speaker
If all the people in London came to live there, our population would just explode dramatically.
00:32:12
Speaker
And so it is a case that we're a small population where a lot of people know other people. Most of us have had some interaction with a senior government minister at some point during our lives, whether a PM to B stole your shopping cart at a supermarket, or you dropped into the pub and the finance minister happened to be there that particular night.
00:32:37
Speaker
And so I think there's slightly more trust in our political system, just for the sheer fact that it's so small, it actually might be slightly harder to get away with malfeasance, given just the tiny nature of the population and the well connected nature of the population.
Gun Control Reactions: New Zealand vs US
00:32:55
Speaker
So I think that does play a role.
00:32:58
Speaker
And you reminded me that I think that the UK in general and England in particular looks a lot more like the US than New Zealand in terms of suspicion that COVID is a hoax and all the other kinds of things related to those conspiracy theories. Can you confirm denial?
00:33:20
Speaker
Well, I was going to interject, and I may be overstating this, Sam, but if I remember more or less correctly, after the Christchurch massacre, it was like, okay, we need to finally rein in these assault weapons.
00:33:40
Speaker
In this country, of course, it would have spawned conspiracy theories and uprisings and everything. But if I remember right, a lot of gun owners were like, yeah, I think this is probably a good time to rein these in. And it was a very different reaction, I think, that points to a more, we're all in this together spirit in New Zealand in which we don't have that here.
00:34:07
Speaker
Yes, I mean, it is true that when the gun buyback occurred, there was a high level of compliance by gun owners who go, yeah, in retrospect, I probably actually don't need the semi assault rifle after all. And I mean, there were there were some people who were outliers who were making claims, oh, but you're taking away my guns, but it didn't have any particular resonance.
00:34:32
Speaker
in part because, and I think this is also important to note, most people in this country thought that we had stricter gun control than we actually did. So when it turned out actually we had slightly lesser gun control than the US in some areas. People were going,
00:34:51
Speaker
Oh, I didn't realize we were like that. I thought things were stricter. And actually, given that we all assumed gun laws were tighter instructor, why don't we just bring in those tighter stricter gun laws, which will then fit out intuitions. And people going, yeah, well, actually, that seems like a great idea. And I'll give up my gun. Pretty nice.
00:35:10
Speaker
Oh, yeah, no, it turned out to be turned out to be a quite pleasant reaction, because after a crisis, we've we've seen what happens overseas when crises of this particular type occur. So and I do want to just interject that that gun ownership and in the United States is inextricably twined with projects of racialization go back to the beginning of the NRA and white supremacy. So
00:35:37
Speaker
It's such a different cultural context and political one and it's actually, there's somebody just wrote who likes guns and is a historian in the United States, just wrote a pretty nice history of the NRA and guns. And I wish I could remember his name off, of course it'll come to me after we end the podcast.
00:36:03
Speaker
There's been stuff done about the cowboy movie was, in a lot of ways, advertising for Winchester rifles and things like that, pre-World War II in this country.
Moral Panic and Conspiracy Beliefs
00:36:23
Speaker
It's been the same ever since. It's a manufacturing lobby. Let's get real.
00:36:34
Speaker
That's where the money comes from. Can I try to stumble back towards something that I keep thinking, well, I'll try it and then we'll edit this part out, right? Okay, so I've been thinking for the past day about a conversation that we all had, actually, with some other conspiracy theory theorists about this problem, right? The problem of what
00:37:05
Speaker
How dangerous are conspiracy theories, right? And that notion of danger, that notion of threat to an open society, threat to a democratic polity, threat to a way of life, threat to public health and personal health, those are all claims that have been made about
00:37:35
Speaker
conspiracy theorizing. And again, with COVID and also given the kinds of, in the United States, kinds of other political phenomena that have happened over the past year, both the literature on conspiracy theories and the concerns about that or the linking of
00:38:04
Speaker
arguments about the conspiracy theorist as a kind of person or with a disordered kind of thinking or reason as something that must be identified
00:38:19
Speaker
The literature has exploded, and that kind of argument for why we need more work on conspiracy theorizing is more common. And that frightens me because it does create, and I use this phrase very carefully, a kind of moral panic around conspiracy theorizing, and that's intensifying now.
00:38:44
Speaker
And yet, I wonder the extent to which when those kinds of concerns are expressed among conspiracy theory researchers, we're not actually looking at that very carefully anymore. We have a kind of a dumbed down or oversimplified model of the way that people get ideas and then act collectively.
00:39:06
Speaker
And I'm worried about that because I don't think it is a one-to-one correspondence. There are other mechanisms probably and structural opportunities or lacks of opportunity that can tamp down or make possible the acting on certain kinds of ideas. Does that make sense?
00:39:31
Speaker
Yeah, because I mean, this is something which I've been thinking about with respect to the way that we talk about belief in conspiracy theories. I think there's a very simplistic model operating in some of the social sciences as to what constitutes belief in a conspiracy theory, which is
00:39:48
Speaker
if you believe a conspiracy theory, you believe a conspiracy theory was I actually think the model is probably slightly more nuanced in that I think some people entertain conspiracy theories. So let's say they have a kind of weak belief in conspiracy theories, they find them vaguely plausible. So they're willing to entertain them as hypotheses.
00:40:11
Speaker
But they're actually not committed to them in that they sincerely believe them to be absolutely true. It's simply something that they think about. So maybe they entertain thoughts that there's something suspicious about the way that the pharmaceutical industry works, or maybe there's something suspicious about modern medicine.
00:40:32
Speaker
But they're actually not, they're still the kind of people who, if they fall sick, will go to the doctor. They'll just be a little, they'll just give the doctor a side eye when they go to their consult.
00:40:43
Speaker
And those people are different from the people who aren't just entertaining conspiracy theories, they sincerely believe those conspiracy theories. And I often think we don't talk about that distinction, the way that you can entertain a belief without being committed to it versus people who are committed to those beliefs. And we might be concerned about people who are committed to those beliefs.
00:41:22
Speaker
Yeah, Tachino, yeah, there you go. Yeah, Tachino and Raika, right, and non-doxastic conspiracy theories do take that up, and I think that's really good. Unfortunately, I think they also entrain some really pathologizing characterizations of those who quote unquote support versus believe conspiracy theories, and I think that there's some slippage there, but I think that you're right, you know,
00:41:34
Speaker
Because maybe that's the kind of thing that then leads to further action. I think it's an important one.
00:41:52
Speaker
I also though, as a sociologist, you know, different from the people who makes me concerned because I don't think it's, I don't, I'm going to say yes and I think you're right. I think that's really important. And figuring that out, figuring out what those sort of
00:42:14
Speaker
different ways of believing something, holding something as possible, being critical of something. Yeah, there's something really interesting in thinking about the sort of people's relative investment in certain kinds of ideas. But that's actually, and that's important. And it's actually different from what I was trying to gesture at. And I don't think I'm doing it very well, but
00:42:42
Speaker
It's that ideation doesn't, in any simple way, lead to action.
00:42:49
Speaker
And a lot of the literature, especially the psychology literature, social psychology literature, which narrowly focuses in on certain kinds of beliefs or people, the characteristics of people who believe those things, right, has this really oversimplified and impoverished model of how it is that we come to act in the world individually and even more so collectively. It's complicated and not all of the,
00:43:16
Speaker
at Will Springs for action are in what we believe and how strongly we believe it. Very strong belief.
00:43:24
Speaker
doesn't necessarily lead to action. Does that make sense? No, I
Scientific Misconceptions and Scientism
00:43:28
Speaker
agree. I think there's something quite interesting to say about the kind of impoverished model we often find in the social sciences with respect to how we're talking about beliefs and things. Can we just stop that? I can see the motivation. So to move it away from conspiracy theories to another domain that possibly we should be concerned about, which is scientific views. So you have
00:43:51
Speaker
There are people out there who have very naive scientific views of the world, what often gets labeled as scientistic or scientism views, where they believe something is scientific, even though it's not.
00:44:07
Speaker
And this can also lead towards people acting in ways which end up being deleterious because they think they're acting upon a scientific belief. They're actually acting on a rather naive portrayal or something which is actually completely wrong. And we should be concerned about that particular type of thing. But for some reason,
00:44:28
Speaker
our entire focus is on this really bad class of beliefs called conspiracy theories, and probably not this much more common bad class of scientific or scientism beliefs.
00:44:42
Speaker
Do you have an example of, say, bad scientism? Well, I mean, the person who believes that climate change isn't real, not because they believe there's a conspiracy going on by climatologists, but because they think the climate can't be changed by human endeavor ends up being a kind of scientistic belief. So that gets scientism of that particular type.
00:45:10
Speaker
So they'll believe that the ecosystem is so robust that
00:45:17
Speaker
anthropocentric activity in no way can change it, which turned out to be scientism, because scientists don't believe that, but people go, no, no, no, the science is pretty clear on this case. No, actually, the science is not clear on this at all. In fact, the science is actually quite clearly against your view. But you're trying to make your views seem scientific. And that seems like a bit of a problem.
00:45:45
Speaker
It's been going on a long time, though. I was just going to point to the way back in the 50s or whatever, four out of five doctors smoke camels. Lacking on to the prestige of science
00:46:02
Speaker
Anyway, similar, maybe, maybe not. A lot of cigarette ads of those days are going to be great examples of scientific advertising. Although I think it's quite interesting if you look at those ads, they're not necessarily saying that smoking is healthy. They're just pointing out that doctors also smoke and their preferred brand of their cancer sticks is this particular brand here.
Interdisciplinary Views on Conspiracy Theories
00:46:27
Speaker
It's a masterclass in advertising, because people go, well, if a doctor smokes them, they must be healthy. And everybody's going, yeah, I never said that last part. I mean, you might assume that, and we're going to hope you're making that assumption, but can't actually be drawn on that particular point. Well, these days, though, if Anthony Falke said, I smoke Campbell's, people will go, no, don't smoke those.
00:46:50
Speaker
I mean, actually, that is a good reason for him to take up smoking. Good science communication. Yeah, okay. So look, if they're going to do the opposite of everything I do, then I need to start doing things the wrong way, and thus inspire people to act against me. Yeah.
00:47:08
Speaker
I think one thing we want to do is be really careful about how, so I've noticed sometimes that philosophers like to generalize about social science of conspiracy theory by looking at the social, yes, by looking at the social psychologists and they don't stand, this is a cynical error that's really important and shouldn't be happening because they don't get to stand for social science or the social science perspective. They're really problematic.
00:47:45
Speaker
edit out what I just said about problematic. So I don't want to insult this. Well, no, it's neither social nor, I mean, it isn't, it's a psychology isn't a social science. I mean, and most of it, it's behavioral science, and there's there's something quite different about it. And you're, you're basically trying to explain social phenomena by making reference to individual attributes. And it, it doesn't work, it doesn't work that way.
00:48:03
Speaker
Not all of it, some of it's brilliant, but a lot of it is...
00:48:12
Speaker
I mean, I guess in a kind of qualified defense of philosophers here, when we talk about the social science distinction, we take it that what is actual science is physics, chemistry, and biology.
00:48:29
Speaker
And anything else which goes around measuring things that isn't part of the hard sciences will go, well, that's just a social science. If you go around measuring things, whether you're a psychologist or a linguist, then you're engaging what we call social science. So it's a, it's a brute's divide. It's not actually doing anything particularly interesting other than doing a demarcation between the hard sciences and anything which isn't a hard science, but goes around measuring things.
00:48:59
Speaker
I think that's fair, and I think from our side, we're gonna cut finer distinctions. But I also think that, you know, if a social scientist, for example, were to say, oh, the philosophical perspective on conspiracy theories is a generalist one, right? You'd have some problem with that. And I see some philosophers, not you, doing that. And I get worried about it, just because of the kinds of
00:49:28
Speaker
pathologizing discourses that are coming from psychology, not just psychology, right? They come from political science, for example. There's some communications fellowship that's buying into that currently, although most of it is not.
00:49:40
Speaker
In political science, there's a psychological wing to it in a lot of ways. There are people that do it a little more sociologically. There's, of course, political philosophy that usually political science departments don't want anything to do with.
00:50:00
Speaker
But I wasn't objecting to the natural social science division so much as when psychology, I think, is bigger than the social sciences. At Boise State, they're calling it psychological science to really
00:50:21
Speaker
To make it clear, we're talking about gray matter and neurons. We're not talking about hierarchies of meat or the id or anything like that. The psychology here, Elise, has really been pushed into the – it's basically biochemistry.
00:50:45
Speaker
And the cultural dimensions are, I don't know, maybe our campus is an outlier, but I think the cultural dimensions tend to be kind of set aside. And I think the psychologists looking at conspiracy theories tend to do that a little bit.
00:51:01
Speaker
The problem is what's wrong with these individuals that lead them to believe this instead of us normal people that don't believe in conspiracies except for when they're official ones like the Downing Street memos or whatever.
00:51:18
Speaker
has just arrived, so I should probably start chowing down to start the day properly with the right level of energy to get me through yet another day of quarantine. But before we go, where do you think we should be heading academically in the study of these things called conspiracy theories? What's next, do you think, on the agenda for conspiracy theory theory? I'll start with you first, Jenna.
00:51:44
Speaker
Well, I guess I'd like to sort of aim that back at you. What do you think? No, I asked you. Yeah, but then I asked you back. Then we'll cross over to Marty whilst we both think of answers to that question. Marty, you've now had enough cogitation time to allow Jenna and I to come up with answers. Well, I think if you kind of look at the landscape,
00:52:12
Speaker
Part of it is, how do we... I think there's started to be a consensus that, yeah, we do need to investigate conspiracy theories, at least in principle. There's been some effort among the particularists to say, it does make some sense to figure out how do we prioritize these investigations.
00:52:38
Speaker
I think that may be important practically and some important bridge building. Not being a fully-fledged philosopher, a fellow traveler, a tourist, a wannabe, but I wonder, when I look at a lot of conspiracy theories, I think that they have logical flaws that really mean that
00:53:08
Speaker
The evidential issue is moot. You can make claims that are so logically flawed and some conspiracy theories are. The problem is not their conspiracy theories. The problem is they're logically flawed. There may be some things we can identify that say, well, because when we're doing a research project,
00:53:30
Speaker
We want to make sure we have our concepts straight and we're operationalizing soundly. For me, I think a flaw that a lot of conspiracy theories make is reification in the very general sense of we're treating an abstraction as if it had some kind of concrete existence. We're saying the government did something.
00:53:52
Speaker
And that doesn't really tell us anything meaningful. The government's covering up the existence of UFOs. Well, is this the Department of Transportation that's involved? Let's be specific.
00:54:05
Speaker
But anyway, I don't know. That was one thing that's come to mind. I know there are ethical arguments. We can set this one aside because it's problematic. But I don't know. That's probably more a job for you than I. But maybe there are some kind of signals of flawed
00:54:30
Speaker
conceptualization that we can say, well, let's look at this. The problem is not that it's a conspiracy theory. The problem is that it treats society as the sort of thing with needs and desires and plans and hopes and wishes when in fact it's just
00:54:50
Speaker
an abstract concept we use for a group of people with certain culture, certain boundaries, whatever. I mean, there's a number of ways you might do that, but you can't hit a society with a stick. I mean, it's not something that's out there.
00:55:07
Speaker
I believe that was what Margaret Thatcher said, there's no such thing as society, because you can't hit it with a stick. Oh, is that her phrase? Well, I mean, there's a truth to that. I mean, it's not, it's not to say there's not a collective good. But usually when it's a problem is that, you know, society, society is demanding that we get tough on crime. Well, that's, that's just you that wants us to get tough on crime. That is a society demanding this. And and that kind of that,
00:55:34
Speaker
I think that's that can be a problem with some conspiracy theories and you know the conspiracy academics are trying to indoctrinate students you know it's like well you know all of them I mean the engineers the you know the the people teaching you know marketing maybe but I mean it's you know it's a it's a silly it's it's silly on other levels I mean we could look at the evidence that'd be fine but but it doesn't make sense to
00:56:03
Speaker
I don't know, a bit of a ramble, but some of the things you've been writing and I think others have been talking about in response that there's not enough time of the day to investigate flat earth theories. How do we prioritize? Perhaps one way is that
00:56:25
Speaker
There are logical flaws to many theories and conspiracy theories, non-conspiracy theories, and we maybe should spend some time on that a little bit.
00:56:40
Speaker
And maybe this animal called conspiracy theory shares some common flaws, and I think a sort of reification or personification of groups of people. I mean, if you start a sentence by saying the Jews are conspiring to acts,
00:56:58
Speaker
There's a problem with that because there are no the Jews, right? I mean, does this include Mel Brooks? Are we including, you know, how many people are involved here, right? Are these Hasidic Jews? Are these, you know,
00:57:12
Speaker
I think we can do blood quantum there, Marty. Yeah, well, you know what I'm saying, though. It's like when you say the government, right? Let's call Mr. Rick that again. Right. I mean, when we attribute some outcome to a group that doesn't exist, I think that's maybe where we might start to go.
Citizen Assemblies as Solutions to Conspiracy Theories
00:57:35
Speaker
Let's set this one aside and focus on the 5G issue first.
00:57:40
Speaker
Okay, so my pitch, so as has been fairly obvious in some of the work that I've been doing recently, I'm quite interested in how we go around generating communities that investigate these things called conspiracy theories. And so I want to spend a bit of time either later this year or the beginning of next year, looking at the Irish model of their citizen dissemblies and the way that they've been negotiating things like
00:58:10
Speaker
abortion, gay marriage, trans rights, in the like, in the Republic of Ireland. Because Ireland is a great example of a country which you would ostensibly would think would have a fairly conservative political culture, given the role of Catholicism in the Republic's history.
00:58:33
Speaker
and views they've had around a whole bunch of things such as aforementioned abortion, gay rights, trans rights and the like. And yet the Citizens Assembly system seems to have been able to not only negotiate what you might take to be the conservative Catholic character of the Irish Republic, but also make policy recommendations which have completely changed the way the world looks.
00:58:58
Speaker
at the Irish political situation, going actually Ireland's a much more liberal society than maybe we ever gave it credit for. And in part that is because their standing assemblies of investigating contentious issues has done a really good job of getting buy-in by everyone in the Republic.
00:59:18
Speaker
and then producing quite convincing reports as to, you might think this thing, but actually it's better to go in this direction here. And so I want to look at the way that they've been modeling those inquiries and go, could we have standing citizens assemblies which are engaging in these investigations of what we might take to be the contentious conspiracy theories we're being confronted by?
00:59:44
Speaker
And is that actually going to work? So can you resolve a conspiracy theory in the same way you can resolve a political issue such as should group X have rights or not have rights? Or
Creativity and Productivity in Quarantine
01:00:00
Speaker
Is this a false errand that maybe, yes, sure, citizen assemblies can work on some particular issues, but that doesn't necessarily translate out to sorting out knowledge claims, such as whether we think a conspiracy has or has not occurred. So that's something I would like to look at later on this year or the beginning of next. But really what I should be doing is finishing that book. Well, finish the book, for sure.
01:00:28
Speaker
Well, yes, there is a contract, I should probably probably do something about that. I thought I'd get a lot more work done in quarantine. It turns out it's very hard to inspire yourself to get work done when there's nothing else to do during a day. I mean, isn't that been the story of the pandemic, though? It's like, there's all this time available, but it just it just doesn't flow the same. So
01:00:53
Speaker
No. Yeah, time. I mean, I've only been in this room. I've said only been in this room for 11 days. It feels like it feels like I left Auckland months ago. You're not you're not scratching tallies into the wall yet. Not yet. But soon. But my worries about scratching tallies into the wall. It's going to go. Why is there 36 scratch marks?
01:01:18
Speaker
How long have I actually been in here? For what turns out to be either a great or mediocre episode of a science fiction series, the person who thinks they've been in a room for a certain amount of time. And then when they start investigating their environment, realize that at least somebody's been in this room for a very long time indeed.
01:01:43
Speaker
Which all sounds rather ominous. Any final thoughts before we go? I would watch that episode.
01:01:49
Speaker
Well, then maybe I shall use my time and do that. Now, of course, Jina and I will be appearing at a conference in Dublin in just a few days time, which is all rather exciting. And I'm sure there will be some action reports about how that conference went down. But otherwise, I will bid you both adieu for your various locations in the continental United States. I hope that the situation in America continues to improve.
01:02:19
Speaker
I certainly can't think it's going to get any worse at this stage, but none of us predicted 2019 or 2020, let alone 2021.
Reflections on Cultural Responses to COVID
01:02:29
Speaker
So maybe I shouldn't have said anything at all. Maybe not. So yes, until next time, I'm going to say tootily pip. Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Tom.
01:02:45
Speaker
Well, I suppose that's about what we expected, a very interesting and educational talk from a trio of academics. Interesting that sort of the discussions around COVID and gun reform, the talk of sort of the New Zealand character, the possibly cultural differences that affect how we've responded to things.
01:03:08
Speaker
reminded me a few weeks ago I went to a comedy show by James Nokise who's a New Zealand Samoan comedian who's usually based in London but got stuck here thanks to Covid and lockdowns and what have you.
01:03:24
Speaker
And he was talking about how he was very impressed by Jacinda Ardern, not because she listened to scientists and took their advice. That he was saying is basically should have just been basic competence for all world leaders. And it only seems remarkable because so many other leaders didn't do that.
01:03:46
Speaker
But he was quite impressed with, I think the communication, the sort of stuff that he was talking about, the way she was able to get to the country onside by appealing to very ingrained aspects of the New Zealand culture. As he put it, she tapped into the spirit of, oi, you're being a dick, stop being a dick.
01:04:07
Speaker
which resonates basically, got people to acknowledge, you know, this is serious, time to stop messing around, let's do what we've got to do. He is, in fact, he put it best by saying, and this will only make sense if you grew up in New Zealand, that Jacinda Ardern went to the entire country. I could explain the reference, but I won't. So yeah, there did seem to be
01:04:31
Speaker
an aspect of, I don't know, it's not like people talk about conformism with other countries around sort of, you know, they're told what to do and they do it, but it didn't seem to be that so much as just, I don't know, almost more pragmatic. Once it had been communicated and we had accepted the idea that, yes, this is a serious thing and this is what we got to do. And fortunately, as things went on,
01:04:59
Speaker
looking at other countries who tried to sort of do half measures and partial lockdowns and kept trying to find ways out of doing this painful, boring, difficult thing that nobody wanted to do. Yeah, I think it became easy for us to say, okay, yep, no, we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it right.
01:05:22
Speaker
It would ideally do it once, do it right, although there have been a couple of smaller lockdowns after the first one. I think you can certainly point to cultural differences, but the New Zealand experience did seem fairly singular.
01:05:39
Speaker
And yes, the point that he made regarding the gun culture, the fact that there was very little resistance, you know, there obviously, and the same with COVID, there were sort of small pockets of vocal resistance, but by and large,
01:05:57
Speaker
people were fine with it and people were fine with the gun law changes to gun laws because basically we thought that's how the gun laws already were when they said okay we're going to make these sorts of guns illegal i think most people like thought you mean they're not i just assumed but um there you go so who knows where we'll be at next week uh will em still be ensconced in this mysterious hotel room who knows where wink wink
01:06:21
Speaker
Or will we finally actually be able to converse once more? I should note, and you should note, if you've been listening to this podcast for any longer length of time, that next week, sorry, when I say next week, I mean tomorrow, as at the time as I'm recording, is Em's birthday.
01:06:43
Speaker
So maybe, maybe, fingers crossed, we'll be able to get in touch for some sort of birthday wishes. Maybe that will tempt Em to come out of hiding from wherever they might be. But until then, it is simply I, Josh Addison, bidding you a fond farewell from the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. And I, and maybe someone else, will talk to you next week. Goodbye. The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R.X.Denter.
01:07:13
Speaker
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