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An Interview with Kurtis Hagen
30 Plays2 years ago
M talks with Kurtis Hagen about his new book, "Conspiracy Theories and the Failure of Intellectual Critique" which is about to be published by the University of Michigan Press.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
New Patron John: A Humorous Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Right, the interview with Curtis. This time I'm all studied up and I'm ready to contribute in a learned and respectable manner. So, should I ask the first question or do you want to? Actually, I have a more important job for you, one that will take all your cunning and your analytical skills.
00:00:20
Speaker
Okay, and then the interview? No, I'm afraid this task is of such importance, of such grandiose majesty and such enormity that you just won't have time for anything else for a long time to come. I'll have to tackle Curtis on my own, I'm afraid.
00:00:38
Speaker
Can't say I'm not disappointed, so what's this job then? What could be that crucial? Josh, your task, your labour, Joshua, the thing that you must devote your life to, the thing that must become the sole essence of your existence, is to find out everything you can about our new patron.
00:01:00
Speaker
John. John? John. Everything? Everything! Oh no, John is more than just a regular patron, he's a producer. No mere member of the conspiracy to keep this podcast afloat. He's actively causing it to happen, moment to moment, staring us like a cosmic vessel towards points unknown. So we're still talking about John? Yes, who else are we talking about?
00:01:28
Speaker
Well, no, it's just that it's John. You know, he's the one who first taught the cephalopods about Christmas and armed them for our war against it. He's the one who warmed the polar ice caps on behalf of the lizard people. And we're almost certain that he sent Julius Caesar Ford in tying to do 9-11.
00:01:45
Speaker
we already know all there is to know about his part in all of this ah well that's good well done good job fantastic work marvelous thrilling stuff stupendous the finest of research fripperies so i can be part of the interview now no
Introducing Curtis Hagen and His Book
00:02:13
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Imdante.
00:02:21
Speaker
This week I'm interviewing Curtis Hagen, who for a while Josh and I were erroneously calling Curtis Hagen. This is one of those embarrassing situations where it turns out you know someone by first name, but not it turns out by surname. So with the emphasis on Hagen and not Hagen, today we're going to talk about Curtis's new book, Conspiracy Theories and the Failure of Intellectual Critique, which is about to be published by the University of Michigan-Presh.
00:02:49
Speaker
Now, I should point out that I'm not an unbiased person when it comes to this book. Not only did I read some early drafts of the text, but I was one of the expert reviewers recuted by the University of Michigan to say yay or nay to the text. So I guess really, if there are any problems with the text, Curtis can end up blaming me and say, well, why didn't you stop me from saying that? Anyway, hello, Curtis, and welcome to the podcast.
00:03:15
Speaker
Hello, thank you for having me. So you're in Florida. Dear I ask, how are things in the United States at the moment? Gosh, last I checked, I guess they're okay. I don't get out much. Probably wise, given the, well...
00:03:31
Speaker
all the stuff that's going on there, although I must say, I was glued this morning to the frick art that's going on in the British parliamentary system. You may be aware that almost every single member of Boris Johnson's cabinet has either resigned or is in the process of resigning. So across the Atlantic, there are there are other issues going on as well.
Curtis Hagen's Philosophical Background
00:03:53
Speaker
All right, so we're here to talk about your new book, Conspiracy Theories and the Failure of Intellectual Critique, but we should probably talk about your origin story as a conspiracy theory theorist. So you're a retired academic, you were a former associate professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at SUNY, that's the State University of New York in Plattsburgh. Actually, where is Plattsburgh?
00:04:17
Speaker
It's way up north. It's an hour south of Montreal and just across Lake Champlain from Burlington, Vermont. So it's way up in the north part of
00:04:31
Speaker
of New York State almost in Canada. Yeah, this is one of these things where I don't think people outside the United States or indeed outside the state of New York realize that New York is not just New York City, but also the state of New York is actually, it's quite lengthy in the way it kind of goes north. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:04:51
Speaker
Now, you've written previous books, you wrote Lead Them with Virtue, a Confucian alternative to war, Philosophers of the Warring State, a source book in Chinese philosophy, and the philosophy of, and I'm probably going to pronounce this wrong, even though I live in China and I'm meant to be learning Mandarin,
00:05:09
Speaker
the philosophy of Sun Tzi, a reconstruction, and at least on the surface these are quite different in topic and scope than conspiracy theories and the failure of intellectual critique. So what is your origin story when it comes to conspiracy theory theory and philosophy?
Journey into Conspiracy Theories
00:05:28
Speaker
Well it's true that in graduate school I kind of focused on Confucianism and so that's why these other books were on Confucianism. I started teaching in Plattsburgh in 2005 and in 2006 I became interested in conspiracy theories surrounding 9-11 and began familiarizing myself with those theories and the kind of the back and forth between supporters and
00:05:58
Speaker
critics. And then a couple years later, I think this is around 2008-ish, I encountered David Cote's book, Conspiracy Theories, The Philosophical Debate. I'm not 100% sure that that was the first thing on this topic that I encountered.
00:06:19
Speaker
but it was probably one of the first and that's what I remember reading that. And then shortly thereafter reading the special issue of Epstein, which had a bunch of, and so that was basically all of the work in the philosophy of conspiracy theories at that time. And I thought I could, you know,
00:06:44
Speaker
contribute to that. I was quite impressed with, in particular, Charles Bigdon's work and David Cote in those two collections. And I more or less agreed with them and more or less disagreed with some of the other articles, but Cote and Bigdon had pretty much
00:07:09
Speaker
already criticized those other articles. So I was kind of looking for something to some entry point. And along comes Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeerle with their paper.
00:07:26
Speaker
And so I started to write a, well, I reviewed it critically and started to write a paper responding to it. And so that was my first paper in the area.
00:07:47
Speaker
It was kind of, I was never sure if it was gonna get published, right? I wasn't sure. I mean, Cody and Pigdon had kind of established that it's possible to write papers of this nature, but still, I wasn't sure. And I got desk rejected from the,
00:08:11
Speaker
Journal of Political Philosophy, which is where Sunstein's paper was published. And I really thought that that's where my paper should be published. And at least if it's not good enough, that's fine. But it should be reviewed. And if it's not good enough, then the reviewers will say that it's not good enough or whatever. But instead, it was just rejected out of hand. So I decided to
00:08:42
Speaker
I published it elsewhere and I decided to write another shorter paper to have a second shot at getting published at the same journal, the Journal of Political Philosophy. And that too was desk rejected and I kind of pleaded with them to at least have it considered and sent out for review and they
00:09:04
Speaker
They wouldn't do that. So that's why I ended up with two papers both criticizing Sunstein and Vermule's paper. So that's where I think started. Yeah. Yes, and we'll be we'll be talking more about Sunstein and Vermule later on in this discussion because it said it's a central part of conspiracy theories and the failure of intellectual critique. I'm actually interested in
00:09:32
Speaker
submitting that work to the journal that Sunstein and Vermeule were published in because you're not the only person to have taken a punt at criticising Sunstein and Vermeule. It seems to be a fairly common kicking horse we have in the philosophy of conspiracy theories to go look
00:09:49
Speaker
there's this really really bad paper that was published in a fairly decent journal and there are there are questions about not just the content but also presumably also what kind of peer review went on there so it is a little bit disheartening to find out that you can write a reply to such a paper and the journal's just not going to consider it at all.
Defending Conspiracy Theories: Not Inherently False
00:10:14
Speaker
Right.
00:10:14
Speaker
And Adrian Vermeule is on the editorial board of that journal, which is, I would think, an additional reason to think, you know, we shouldn't just block anything that criticizes one of our editorial board members. So I would think that's even more of a reason to have it reviewed and make sure everything is on the up and up, you know, and we're not playing favorites here.
00:10:40
Speaker
Yes, but we also have to remember Adrian Vermeule is now the libertarian who would like to restrict voting rights to only people who agree with him. So I suspect rejecting criticisms of his work is indeed very consistent with his worldview. Perhaps. All right. So why don't you give us a brief synopsis of conspiracy theories and the failure of intellectual critique?
00:11:03
Speaker
Well, as I say in the very beginning of the preface, my goal is to make serious consideration of conspiracy theories respectable among the sophisticated. And
00:11:26
Speaker
What I do essentially is I defend conspiracy theories, not as true, but as sort of unscathed by the critiques coming from academics, especially the generalist critiques, and I'm sure we'll talk about particularism versus generalism, but critiques that
00:11:47
Speaker
try to give a blanket reason for dismissing all conspiracy theories. And so I basically argue that none of those work, even for examples like the 9-11 conspiracy theory or JFK conspiracy theory, which I take to be two of the most paradigmatic conspiracy theories. Yeah, so what are those things where I now wonder
00:12:14
Speaker
What's going to be the next paradigmatic conspiracy theory that makes up the literature? Because we both kind of came of age in the philosophy of conspiracy theories, with 9-11 being the kind of common one that everybody talks about, was if you look at the pre-9-11 work, we're looking at Charles's work and Brian's work,
00:12:34
Speaker
I mean, Brian makes a big thing about the Oklahoma City bombing as his paradigmatic example. Charles is much more interested in kind of historical conspiracy theories, particularly within the Anglophone world. And I do wonder what is going to be the next paradigmatic one?
00:12:53
Speaker
Is JFK and 9-11 going to be replaced eventually? And if so, is it going to be replaced with recurrent discussion of things like QAnon and the like? Or are these just going to be flashes in the pans and we'll be going back to the classics again and again and again? I don't know, but I suspect we'll be building. Like I think that 9-11 and JFK will remain
00:13:18
Speaker
paradigmatic cases, but we'll add to them. That's just a guess. And I think there's something involving COVID-19, but it's not clear yet which one that will be.
00:13:41
Speaker
And the whole QAnon thing, I hope that doesn't become a paradigmatic case. Just because you have conspiracy theories that, at least to my mind, are interesting and hard to really adjudicate. And then you have some that are just sort of wacky.
00:14:09
Speaker
And some people like to focus on those. I like to focus on the ones that, to my mind, have some plausibility. Yes, I mean, the QAnon thing always makes me think of David Icke and his alien shapeshifting reptiles, which is, it's a view which is held by some, it's a remarkably persistent view in certain communities, but it doesn't seem like it's a paradigmatic
00:14:35
Speaker
version of a conspiracy theory, and that it's held by, and I'll use that terrible term, by a fringe view. And they're persistent in holding that fringe view. But it's actually, it's a view that not many people know about what you can say 911 or JFK, and people can immediately come up with conspiracy theories around them.
00:14:57
Speaker
If you mention alien shapeshifting reptiles, you have to do a lot of work to scaffold exactly what you're going to do with that kind of analysis. And I think QAnon's going to be the same way, but I think it is interesting the media have glommed on to QAnon in a way that they've never really glommed on to things like alien shapeshifting reptiles. Yeah.
00:15:22
Speaker
Now, we should probably get from you a definition of conspiracy theory before we start getting into the weeds about exactly what your work does.
Defining Conspiracy Theories and Appalling Behavior
00:15:30
Speaker
So could you tell us what is your take on what a conspiracy theory is? Well, first of all,
00:15:40
Speaker
I don't think that there is a platonic form. So I'm not trying to find out what the truth is. And I think thinking about paradigmatic cases can help us think about family resemblances between theories and that way of thinking about it rather than strict necessary and sufficient conditions. That having been said,
00:16:14
Speaker
What I'm trying to do, as I said earlier, is defend conspiracy theories in a certain sense. And so what is it that I'm defending when I say I'm defending conspiracy theories? I'm defending not just theories about conspiracies or that involve conspiracies, but theories that involve conspiracies even when
00:16:41
Speaker
they run counter to an official story. And even when they imply appalling behavior on the part of elites. So for the purposes of my book, that sort of serves as the definition. There is about conspiracies where they are also contrary to official accounts.
00:17:10
Speaker
and imply some kind of appalling behavior. But I do at the same time make a distinction there between, you know, appalling behavior and being evil or nefarious because I think those words are too strong.
00:17:30
Speaker
If you say something is evil, it's like you're making a judgment from a privileged perspective. That's evil. Or even nefarious. It sort of comes down like that's an objective. Whereas appalling, just that's subjective from somebody's perspective. Some people are appalled. So for example,
00:17:56
Speaker
9-11, the idea that Cheney orchestrated that would certainly be appalling to the most relevant population of people of the United States. If they thought that, they would find that appalling behavior.
00:18:15
Speaker
If somebody were to were were actually to conduct a false flag operation like that, they would have a reason for doing it and it wouldn't it would be justified by the, you know, some utilitarian calculation, perhaps. And so it might not be
00:18:32
Speaker
evil objectively but it would still be appalling and because it's appalling it has to be kept a secret. So that explains why you can have a conspiracy theory that is
00:18:46
Speaker
not evil, but needs to be kept secret. Almost sounds as if you're defending Dick Cheney. I'd be quite happy to say that Dick Cheney's an evil, evil man, but this is my own personal political pre-
00:19:05
Speaker
preference there. But no, you're right. One of the things which I've always talked about is that if we believe these conspiracies occur, most of the time, and I'll emphasize most, because I think there might be some cases of people engaging in appalling behavior they know is morally wrong.
00:19:21
Speaker
But most of the time, they're not mustachioed pantomime or vaudevillian villains who are twirling their mustaches as they laugh maniacally. I will pull this lever and destroy the world. As you say, they normally have some rhyme or reason as to why they're doing this event. And they're going, well,
00:19:41
Speaker
The public can't know I am responsible. Actually, so I just finished watching the HBO sequel series to Watchmen. Do you know the Ellen Moore graphic novel Watchmen? I know it from vaguely from when I was a kid. I had one of the episodes. But yeah, I haven't seen the movie or anything.
00:20:03
Speaker
So because the whole premise of Watchmen is it turns out that there is a former costume vigilante by the name of Ozymandias, who has realized that the world is on the brink of nuclear annihilation in the late 80s.
00:20:18
Speaker
And so he creates a false flag event, he sets his scientists up to genetically engineer what appears to be a giant alien psychopath, sorry, telepathic octopus, and he teleports it into the middle of New York.
00:20:34
Speaker
killing three million people on the notion that this will make people start looking outwards rather than inwards, and they will decide that they'll join together to fight off this external force rather than annihilate themselves with nuclear weapons. So Ozymandias does not consider himself to be a villain. He thinks he's saving the world, but at the sacrifice of three million people and selling a big lie.
00:21:03
Speaker
And that's one of those things where if you talk to Alan Moore about Watchmen, he kind of vacillates as to whether he thinks Ozymandias is really the hero or is an actual villain of the piece, because an awful lot ends up being kind of decided on whether you think the intention to do good using perverse means actually ends justifying the means.
00:21:29
Speaker
So I'm with you on the, we should focus on the appalling because the appalling gives us the kind of salient relevance class for how people react to things being done in secret without necessarily having to say that the people doing these things are engaged in evil or sinister acts. That's a kind of, that's another issue that can be dealt with in a slightly different way.
00:21:57
Speaker
Right.
Philosophical Debate: Generalists vs. Particularists
00:21:58
Speaker
And I would also distinguish between evil and merely greedy or whatever. And so you can have a selfish interest and then sort of rationalize it. And that's probably a lot of what goes on. Yes, rationalization is a terrible human activity and explains an awful lot of what people do on a day by day basis.
00:22:25
Speaker
Now, I do want to come back to the official theory part, because this is one of the big things in the philosophical discussion about conspiracy theories as to whether we should be defining conspiracy theories in reference to official theories. Now, as you've said, your task here is not necessarily to give us a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for what counts as a conspiracy theory. You're interested in a particular kind of conspiracy theory that, let's say, the sophisticated
00:22:55
Speaker
tend to turn their nose up as. Right, right. And that I want to defend, right? And so part of what's influencing my definition for my purposes is the kinds of generalist arguments that I'm up against, one of which is that we should believe what the epistemic authorities tell us.
00:23:24
Speaker
Right? And so that's why we should leave official accounts. And so if I'm going to respond to that, it's just useful to have that be part of what I mean by conspiracy theory.
00:23:35
Speaker
So it gives us a kind of salience class. These are the conspiracy theories we're interested for this particular kind of analysis. So let's get into the weeds of this. So the book's broken up into three parts. Part one deals with the philosophical aspect of conspiracy theory theory and the debate between, as you've mentioned, generalists and particulars. Part two focuses on Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, who we've already touched upon briefly, but
00:24:03
Speaker
We'll get back to them. And then part three takes to task the work in some of the social sciences regarding conspiracy theory theory. So let's take each part in turn. So part one recaps a debate, which long term listeners of this podcast will be well aware of. But let's talk about some of the specifics.
00:24:21
Speaker
of that debate, which is the debate between generalists and particularists. So what's your take on the distinction between what makes it you have a generalist view about conspiracy theories versus a particularist view on the same topic? Well, I think it's easier to start with the particularists. The particularists
00:24:44
Speaker
think that each particular conspiracy theory ought to be judged on its own particular merits and faults. And it's easy to identify particularists because I'm a particularist and you're a particularist and actually
00:25:07
Speaker
Most of the people who have published multiple articles on this topic are particularists, David Cody and Charles Pigdon and Lee Basham. And I think we can say Brian Keeley and, um, Waveringly, perhaps, uh, Yoo Ha Rika. Um, and, um,
00:25:31
Speaker
And so it's pretty clear what the particularist position is and who is defending that position. The generalists are a little bit harder to define, partly because nobody wants to admit to being a generalist. And that is because I think that is because particularism is so obviously correct.
00:26:01
Speaker
that ultimately it has to be the particulars that matter because we know that some conspiracy theories have turned out to be true, so we can't just dismiss them. So generalists, I talk about generalists or generalism in spirit kind of rather than
00:26:27
Speaker
strict generalist. Like a strict generalist would come up with some reason to say based on this all conspiracy theories can be dismissed as unwarranted. So nobody's willing to quite go that far and yet they want to make some kind of an argument that will give us a shortcut
00:26:50
Speaker
so that we don't have to bother with all the evidence for each conspiracy theory that we can have some way of writing them off. And so examples of that are the somebody would have talked kind of line or we can just trust the epistemic authorities therefore official accounts are
00:27:20
Speaker
to be believed or conspiracy theories have certain features which make them unlikely to be true and therefore we shouldn't believe shouldn't believe them and so all of these sort of strategies are at least generalist in spirit and
00:27:42
Speaker
I've argued and most of us have argued in one way or another that this, that, and the other of these generalist arguments don't work. And I keep saying, making the general statement that these generalist arguments have all failed. All of them that have been put forward in the literature have failed.
00:28:07
Speaker
And it's not surprising that they failed because particularism is obviously right. So what distinguishes generalism in the sense that we're saying they've got bad arguments from our earlier discussion of going, well, you know, QAnon conspiracy theories, they seem a bit weird. They seem like the kind of thing that we can safely dismiss. So what makes that kind of move on our part not
00:28:34
Speaker
a little bit of a little bit of generalism. Right, right. So I guess I would say that we can concede that there are some subsets of conspiracy theories that can be
00:28:59
Speaker
dismissed on general terms. For example, conspiracy theories that involve important logical contradictions that are central to the theory. Conspiracy theories that involve entities that we have really no reason to believe exist.
00:29:27
Speaker
And some of these categories might have still some tiny, tiny glimmer of possibility left in them or whatever, but, you know, time is finite. But whenever we're dealing with a conspiracy theory where there is an analogy,
00:29:51
Speaker
to a real conspiracy, then that can't be simply dismissed in a general way. We have to look at, okay, is that one
00:30:04
Speaker
well-evidented or not. Yeah, so this is the argument that, sure, there are some conspiracy theories with suspicious features. I'm now plugging my own paper here. Suspicious conspiracy theories recently available open access in synthase. But even if they've got those suspicious features, there's still a small possibility they might be true, because our understanding of the world actually might be wrong or
00:30:31
Speaker
So when we're not committed from the claim that we can dismiss some conspiracy theories because we don't have the time or energy to investigate them to the bigger claim that they must be unwarranted, which seems to be the move that generalists want to make. They want to go, well, look, these are bad conspiracy theories. We can then generalize from that and go, when you encounter a conspiracy theory, you should think of them in exactly the same way. Right.
00:31:00
Speaker
Yes, so when you say that it makes me think so we are arguing Kind of the opposite that some conspiracy theories are true So it's possible that another conspiracy theory might be true and they're arguing that some conspiracy theories are wacky Therefore conspiracy theories are wacky
00:31:22
Speaker
if they had made an exactly analogous move, therefore some conspiracy theories are wacky, and so possibly this other conspiracy theory is wacky, then that actually would have been valid, but it wouldn't tell us for sure that all conspiracy theories are wacky. Yeah, so this is actually a point, because I've been in conversation with Brian Alkely recently about a paper I'm working on, and he talks about this with respect to the way that Daniel Dennett talks about burden tennis.
00:31:52
Speaker
the idea that sometimes you're engaging in a game of saying, who shoulders the burden of proof in the situation? And Brian's going, well, the problem with when we start talking about the sum, some conspiracy theories are warranted.
00:32:07
Speaker
And we characterize the generalists as saying, well, they also admit some conspiracy theories are warranted. They just think the sum is small, whilst we think the sum is large. And then we're basically like a game of tennis. We're kind of lobbing the word sum back and forth across the court. And to an outside observer, the question is, yeah, but how big is that sum? Because if we could have some empirical data there, that actually might tell us an awful lot about where the burden sits.
00:32:38
Speaker
Interestingly, so I just was finishing reading a paper today, which makes the point that actually, even if the chances are very, very small, prima facie,
00:32:59
Speaker
that can be overcome by actual evidence. So you have to, even if the prior probability is very small, you still have to look at the evidence. If somebody says they have evidence, well then you can't rule it out before listening to the evidence.
00:33:21
Speaker
The example is the lottery. The chances that you won the lottery are very, very small. But you could have evidence that you did, in fact, win the lottery. Yeah. And you might also argue that we should also be engaging some kind of precautionary principle as well. You might go, well, look, maybe we do literally live in a world where conspiracies are incredibly rare and even rarer still when they're successful.
00:33:46
Speaker
But at the same time, we still don't want to live in a world where appalling behaviour is able to be undertaken, even if it is rare. At least someone should be vigilant and checking these things out. So even if the sum is small, you might go, well, the precautionary principle says we still should engage in it in the same respect that, you know,
00:34:07
Speaker
We wear seatbelts in cars, even though we know that dying in a car crash is a relatively rare event. But of course, you don't know when that event is going to occur. Because if you did know when that event was going to occur, you'd put the seatbelt on just before the accident was about to hurt. But of course, no one knows when an accident is about to hurt in the same respect in a society where even conspiracies are rare and successful conspiracy
00:34:33
Speaker
conspiracies are rarer still you don't know when they're going to occur so you should just be vigilant about any claim there is a conspiracy going on on there even if you want to admit that some of those theories are probably prima facie unlikely just because they have wacky characteristics fantastic characteristics and the like yeah good point yeah
00:34:57
Speaker
So, I mean, part one of the book is kind of recapping the philosophical discussion and long-term listeners of the podcast will be very aware of exactly what's been going on there.
Philosophical Consensus on Particularism
00:35:09
Speaker
Is there any particular point about the philosophical debate that you think is kind of worth emphasising, the kind of the work we've done, or is there any lacuna in the work that's been done that you feel that we should be looking at moving forward?
00:35:26
Speaker
I guess I don't really have a good answer to that. I sort of feel like the particularists have won the debate, but yet arguments still get generalist. Arguments, generalist, and spirit keep being raised, you know, and people keep saying, yeah, but particularism is
00:35:54
Speaker
And so that's where things seem headed now is just people trying to continue to find some way of undermining the particulars.
00:36:10
Speaker
perspective. I worry that we're going to end up in a kind of game of whack-a-mole in the short term, where, as you say, it seems it seems there is a consensus now amongst philosophers who regularly write on conspiracy theory theory, that particularism is the right way to go. Occasionally, you'll get a in the spirit of generalism reply going on, but these conspiracy theories are obviously unwarranted.
00:36:37
Speaker
that justifies our suspicion of them. And then we have to reply to those particular pieces. And I worry that we're going to end up in a kind of holding pattern of some kind where we're having to go, no, that was discussed back in 1995. Brian mentioned that or Charles mentioned that in 2007.
00:36:59
Speaker
Or this is a resurgence of Neil Levy's view on epistemic authority, which was replied to by David Coady, Lee Basham, and myself in these particular places. We've had these debates before. Why are you bringing it up again? Or even if it's a new idea, but it's just a new idea that then we have to go and whack that mold down to because that's not, it's not, it might be interesting, but it doesn't actually work.
00:37:27
Speaker
Yeah, and I suspect we'll be coming back to this when we talk about part three and exactly what's going on with what's going on in the social sciences around conspiracy theory. But let's talk about the perennial
00:37:43
Speaker
issue in the literature Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule who you deal with in part two.
Critique of Sunstein and Vermeule's Paper
00:37:50
Speaker
Now co-host Josh continues to be astounded by just how much pushback there has been to this one paper by Adrian Vermeule and Cass Sunstein which was then revised into a solo piece by Cass Sunstein himself in a latter book which is also a fairly interesting state of affairs in that it's basically the same text
00:38:12
Speaker
with very little difference minus one author which does make you wonder how much did Adrian Vermeule actually contribute to this particular pace? Maybe we can touch upon that. So can you give us a gloss as to what they said and why we have to keep on pushing back on what they said?
00:38:37
Speaker
OK, so there's two aspects of what they said. In fact, in one version of the paper, it's called conspiracy theories, causes, and cures. And so there's the cause aspect and the cure aspect. The cure aspect is what got the most attention. And the cure is cognitive infiltration that agents and allies of the government
00:39:08
Speaker
would infiltrate groups espousing conspiracy theories both in real space and in cyberspace and seek to... So it's a kind of a cognitive infiltration in the sense that you are trying to introduce into the group cognitive diversity by
00:39:38
Speaker
I suppose sort of undermining the conspiracy theory are saying, you know, why? Sort of debunking, but from inside as though you are a conspiracy theorist yourself. Because the premise is that the conspiracy theorists just don't trust anybody who isn't one of them. So you infiltrate the group and then try to undermine it from within.
00:40:07
Speaker
And importantly, I think importantly, he or they mention that if you get caught as an infiltrator or if you're suspected
00:40:27
Speaker
So that's better than getting caught, just being suspected, right? And then people start suspecting other people and suspicion arises and that's all for the good, right? Because after all, and this kind of shows that this is after all an attempt to try to undermine these groups, not necessarily because of reason,
00:40:55
Speaker
But you've, you are not necessarily convincing them with reason, but because you've decided that their theories are false, and you'll undermine them any way you can. I mean, it sounds like they want a conspiracy against conspiracy theorists, which seems like the kind of thing that would then encourage conspiracy theorists to believe there is a conspiracy against them, thus proving the existence of some conspiracy.
00:41:24
Speaker
It seems so obviously wrong. It's hard to imagine that someone who was... Cass Sunstein was... I can't remember which Czar he was within your American system. I still can't get over the fact you have Czars, let alone he was a Czar.
00:41:42
Speaker
Well, he was referred to as a czar. He was the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which you think about, it does sound like the Ministry of Truth. So it is kind of an Orwellian title and it is very seemingly very relevant to this whole idea of undermining conspiracy theories.
00:42:07
Speaker
And yes, it's got this terrible irony in it. And he's espousing, or both of them are espousing, the virtues of an open society while they're at the same time undermining it. So it's got all these problems. Some of you could call them political problems, I guess, or moral problems.
00:42:33
Speaker
In addition, there are epistemic problems, and that goes to the causes part. And the causes part of the article is that they're trying to explain the persistence of conspiracy theories by appealing to informational and reputational cascades.
00:43:03
Speaker
So one person says, oh, I believe this conspiracy theory. And the other person maybe doesn't have a strong opinion, so they kind of go along with it. And then another person comes over, and they don't believe it initially, but both of these two guys are saying they believe it. And so they go along with it. Those are informational cascades. And then the reputational cascades is people say that they believe in a conspiracy theory because they don't want
00:43:32
Speaker
Well, somehow it's better for their reputation among their peers. Now, one of the points I make is that's not plausible as an explanation, at least for some of the academics who exist out there. When you think of the
00:43:53
Speaker
the sort of the leaders of a conspiracy theory movement, think of 9-11, you think of Jones, what's his name? Stephen Jones, and you think of David Ray Griffin, and you think of other people like that. And the idea that their reputation
00:44:17
Speaker
is enhanced by espousing this theory, it's just not really supportable. Yeah, there's something very interesting about this move because we actually see it in a lot of other reactionary spaces.
00:44:33
Speaker
Person X identifies with Y because it gives them social cache and that's what makes them cool. So one of the recurrent features we find around the trans panic happening both in the UK and the US being, oh, there are only a lot of trans people around now because it's called to be trans, you know, there's a lot of social cache. And then when you talk to the members of those communities ago, well, actually,
00:44:58
Speaker
No, I mean, we're routinely oppressed and marginalized. I mean, you and your ivory tower might go, oh, they look cool. They look like they're having a great time. We're really not. And you talk to members of pejoratively labeled conspiracy theory communities. And sure, there might be some cachet within the small section of the community of kind of mutual support.
00:45:23
Speaker
But from an outside perspective, no, they're being looked down upon, they're being chastised, they're being made fun of. There's no cascade in the way that Sunstein and Vermeule seem to characterize it as. Right. And in the paper, I give examples of actual professors who have raised the issue and then the governor calls for their
00:45:49
Speaker
resignation and they come under fire. It's clearly not the environment where their reputation is enhanced.
00:46:01
Speaker
Now, one thing you noted, so I noted in the introduction to the section that there's a different version of this Sunstein and Vermeer piece published by Sunstein alone. But you noted that there's actually two versions of the original paper. Do you want to say something about that? Well, the first version of their paper was published online
00:46:28
Speaker
I think that was more than a year before the, um, the published version or the, the, the journal of political philosophy version. And the, the original version is longer and, um, and, and, and actually even more problematic than the, um, the public published version, the journal version.
00:46:53
Speaker
And but I criticize both versions. And then when Sunstein does his revision in his book, he brings back in some of the stuff he cut out of that original version and some of the problematic stuff that I had criticized him for.
00:47:22
Speaker
that wasn't criticized before in the online version, that wasn't actually in the journal version, but then is now reintroduced in the book version. So yeah, so there's three different versions. And my last chapter in this section is on this revised version, the book version of Sunstein's article.
00:47:53
Speaker
And there he says, well, there and in the preface to that book, he suggests that he's been misunderstood and that really when he was advocating these cognitive infiltrations,
00:48:19
Speaker
he was only talking about foreign conspiracy theory groups, not US domestic conspiracy theory groups. And so I look at his article with that question in mind. Is that a reasonable interpretation of what he says, even in the revised version?
00:48:47
Speaker
He's got so many examples of what could only be domestic or at least include US domestic conspiracy theory groups. So I find it implausible that he met his infiltrations to occur only in foreign contexts.
00:49:15
Speaker
And does it make it any better that he's going, oh no, we're not going to target Americans. It's going to be non-Americans we target. Does that actually, because I'm thinking of the situation, let's assume for the purpose of argument that the official theory of 9-11 is correct. That Al-Qaeda committed the terror attacks in New York.
00:49:34
Speaker
Because of American interference overseas, it was a strike back against the kind of destructive work the US has done in the Middle East. If Sunstein
00:49:49
Speaker
if he's to be believed, because we'll just play around with those conspiracy theory groups over there. If the groups who were responsible for 9-11 in this version of the story, then find out that elements of the US state post 9-11 are still engaging in infiltrating and trying to change hearts and minds through covert means. That's going to make them go well.
00:50:12
Speaker
We were justified in that first attack because they're still doing it. And they've even ramped it up now by doing PSYOPs against us. I don't see how going, oh, we're not going to do it against Americans is any way of making the prescription any less appalling. Yeah. Well, it's less appalling to Americans. And I think like some of the objections were constitutional.
00:50:39
Speaker
And so the constitution is going to apply in some cases strictly to Americans. So there are some reasons that this move on his part makes it less objectionable, at least from certain perspectives. But you raise a good point. I mean, it does introduce, it still introduces problems or still has problems, even if it's in a foreign context.
00:51:08
Speaker
Yeah, it makes me think of our former Minister of Finance back in New Zealand once defended an illegal action taken by the national party who are in government at the time as being pretty legal. And as legal scholars pointed out, you know, there is no there is no category of the pretty legal something's either legal or it's not.
00:51:31
Speaker
And in the same respect, you might go, well, you know, maybe what Sunstein's doing here is going, well, look, legally, this is what we're allowed to do because we're not dealing with Americans here. So that gets rid of all the objections. Well, you know, I mean, that might be pretty legal, but it's still not defensible. Yeah.
00:51:53
Speaker
Now, part three deals with the social sciences, and I think this is where the failure of intellectual critique, the second half of the title of your book, really comes in
Critiquing Social Science Approaches
00:52:07
Speaker
here. So there's been, you might say, two parallel projects going on in conspiracy theory theory.
00:52:14
Speaker
There's the work in the social sciences, which is largely predicated on trying to diagnose what is wrong with conspiracy theory belief and what can we do about it. And then the kind of work that's going on in the humanities, including philosophy. We want to put philosophy under humanities banner. I'm aware there's a huge debate there as to exactly where philosophy exists and the category of philosophical of academic disciplines. But for the sake of argument, we'll be humanitarians.
00:52:44
Speaker
and that project has been well you know we should actually be asking the basic question is belief in conspiracy theories prima facie irrational and what does that say once we operationalize that so what's been going on in the social sciences that you take it is kind of emblematic of a failure of intellectual critique um well it seems like there's uh an effort to um
00:53:13
Speaker
pathologize conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. Some of the psychology goes under the rubric of anomalistic psychology, I think is what they call it, is that right?
00:53:37
Speaker
It's suggesting that there's something sort of grouped together with thinking about superstition and stuff like that. So there's sort of a presumption or bias against conspiracy theories, it seems. And then they do these experiments.
00:53:58
Speaker
where they, you know, sort of purport to be just doing objective science. And yet, at the same time, it's part of a effort to fight conspiracy theories effectively, to quote a piece that appeared in the Le Monde. And
00:54:26
Speaker
There's, well, I uncover quite a few problems with many of the papers. The one that is I think most striking is a paper in 2012 called Dead and Alive.
00:54:52
Speaker
in which the authors purport to show that conspiracy theorists do not shy away from endorsing even mutually contradictory theories.
00:55:15
Speaker
And that, by the way, is cited by many people, including Sunstein. He makes some hay about that repeatedly. And it's described as a watershed moment in the psychology literature on conspiracy theories.
00:55:37
Speaker
And the problem with that paper is the data just doesn't establish that conclusion because
00:55:49
Speaker
what they measure is not belief. So they conclude that conspiracy theories, the more likely you are to believe, for example, that Osama bin Laden is still alive, the more likely you are to believe that he was already dead before the raid on his compound. But they didn't study belief.
00:56:15
Speaker
That wasn't, they were studying, what they were measuring was people's response in terms of,
00:56:24
Speaker
and it was a scale, how plausible or how convincing or how worth considering or how coherent these theories are. And so you can think that a theory is relatively plausible, relatively, compared to somebody who doesn't think it's plausible at all, right? Relatively more plausible than somebody else does. And at the same time, think,
00:56:52
Speaker
a mutually inconsistent theory is also relatively more plausible than somebody who dismisses both of those theories, right? And there's nothing irrational about that. So basically, the conclusion of the paper makes it sound as if conspiracy theorists are irrational, but they haven't actually documented any irrational
00:57:17
Speaker
thought. Yeah, so this is a paper by Karen Douglas and Mike Wood. And I remember, so at the Miami conference that Lee Basham and myself were at all the way back, I think, in the heady days of 2016, which seems like such a long time ago now, Lee actually went talking with a general audience about these things. Well, look,
00:57:44
Speaker
In a situation where I go, I've lost my keys, I don't know where they're, I happen to know the keys are not on my person. So either they're in the front door, or they're beside the fridge. Now those two things are mutually inconsistent. If the keys are in the front door, they can't be beside the fridge, they're beside the fridge, they can't be in the front door. And Lee's going, look, I'm entertaining both ideas at the same time, because I know the keys are not on my person.
00:58:10
Speaker
So I now think there are two live possibilities in the same respect. If you doubt the official theory about the death of Osama bin Laden, you might go, well, look, I know he didn't die on this date, which means he might have died five years beforehand, or he might be in disguise in Plattsburgh. I don't know. But I'm simply going, I don't believe the official theory. And here are two relative alternatives.
00:58:39
Speaker
which I can go away and test. And as you point out, all they're doing is pointing out that this is how people make decisions based upon limited information and what you might call the realm of possibility space of I know X isn't true. And that then means there are some live possibilities which might be true. And I'll endorse those until such time I know exactly which one of them I'm going to say is true.
00:59:05
Speaker
Yeah, and yet this was the basis of much mockery of conspiracy theorists. And the irony is, of course, that it's the authors of the study that have made the intellectual error. And what's maybe a little surprising is how few social scientists noticed
00:59:31
Speaker
Lee and I, it turns out, Lee Basham and I were working on what was substantially the same critique at the same time. And he found I had contacted Wood, and then he had contacted Wood, and then Wood had mentioned to him that I had already talked to him, or not talked to him, but emailed with him. And so then Lee contacted me and said, looks like we're working on the same project here.
00:59:58
Speaker
and we were. Yeah, and that seems to be a kind of recurrent feature for some of the social science work, particularly in social psychology, isn't it? Studies which don't necessarily contain what they say on the tin, and yet get
01:00:14
Speaker
repeated ad nauseam in the rest of the social psychological literature, as if it's absolute proof that conspiracy theorists suffer from this epistemic vice, this era of probabilistic reasoning and the like. Right, right, right. Right. So that was the most striking case, I guess. But, but yeah, I discussed many cases like that, both for the
01:00:45
Speaker
Well, that article is discussed in the chapter on monological belief systems, but the next chapter is on the paranoid style. And once again, there you've got, it's almost like a ritual.
01:01:04
Speaker
social science paper on conspiracy theories has to describe the paranoid style as if that defines what a conspiracy theory is, specifically that they are vast, evil, and protonaturally effective conspirators, basically controlling everything. And it just doesn't characterize, accurately characterize
01:01:32
Speaker
many conspiracy theories. I mean, some perhaps, but not the interesting ones. And not the ones that they even go on to talk about themselves in their own paper. Yeah, what always gets me about Hofstadter and the paranoid style is that people quite happily cite Hofstadter
01:01:53
Speaker
and often get him wrong at the same time by going with the... Paranoid style is a form of paranoia. And for all of Hofstadter's faults in the paranoid style, at least he's very clear he's not making a kind of clinical diagnosis of paranoid ideation. It's something which is similar to and a lot like paranoia, but even he admits because conspiracies occur, you can have a paranoid style without being paranoid.
01:02:22
Speaker
But the thing is, people responded to Hofstadter in the decade following the publication of that work, pointing out many of the limitations of that work. And so people like Gordon S. Wood, who went, you know, actually, Hofstadter isn't quite saying what he thinks he is saying because his examples aren't very good.
01:02:43
Speaker
None of that ever seems to be incorporated into the literature. It's as if, I mean, we have a similar issue in philosophy. You get Popper back in the mid 20th century saying the conspiracy theory of society is obviously an unwarranted stance to have.
01:03:01
Speaker
And that explains why conspiracy theorists are banned, and people to the say, well, you know, Papa said conspiracy theorists are bad. If so, in fact, I mean, really, that's the last word we need on that issue. Right. Right. And, and maybe we should say, you've probably said this many times on your
01:03:22
Speaker
podcast already but the problem with the conspiracy theory of society is that that is such an extreme view that most conspiracy theories don't don't posit such an extreme view so it's really very similar to the the paranoid style yeah and yet somehow somehow it turns out if you're if you're one of the great men of intellectual history you get to have the last word even if
01:03:51
Speaker
decades pass and people go, I don't think your last word was very good. And yet somehow, somehow those last words remain or everything else kind of just turns to dust. So do you have, so, and I realize we're now moving into the realm of folk psychology here, but do you have a theory as to why there's a kind of, this kind of endemic issue in the social psychological literature, why this continues to be a thing?
01:04:20
Speaker
um no other than just in in in the academy in general i guess this is a theory in the academy in general there's a there's a bias against conspiracy theories um and i you know i think you can um
01:04:38
Speaker
kind of understand why that would be and then the question becomes why is philosophy exceptional?
Philosophy's Unique Engagement with Conspiracy Theories
01:04:47
Speaker
I think maybe that's the question and that I think there's an answer to philosophy is exceptional because well what is philosophy and
01:04:56
Speaker
You know, William James, I like his definition of philosophy as the uncommonly stubborn attempt to think clearly, right? And philosophers are willing to even question the very existence of the external world, right? And so we're not embarrassed to, you know,
01:05:18
Speaker
ask something bizarre and ask, well, you know, can this hold up maybe? And so for us, we pressed a little harder and came to the conclusion, well, you know, some conspiracy theories actually
01:05:37
Speaker
turned out to be true. So, you know, and then this particular position got articulated and other people said, no, I can't possibly be right. And then wrote some other essays and we said, no, it's still right. And so, and enough of us, you know, we're willing to chime in that we've got a consensus in our little domain. But most of the rest of the Academy is
01:06:09
Speaker
frankly not as rigorous. Now I want to focus on that in our little domain thing here because whilst like you I think particularism is the best view to have about these things called conspiracy theories and I think we've been very successful in defending particularism against generous attacks.
01:06:29
Speaker
But I kind of worry about maybe the overly idealized view of philosophy here, because certainly my experience of philosophers who don't deal with the philosophy of conspiracy theory is that they tend to lean generalist.
01:06:48
Speaker
So is there intellectual failure going on within our broader discipline of the philosophers? Well, I think it's just a matter of focus. I mean, I'm just guessing again, you know, but so people who haven't philosophers who haven't looked carefully at this issue, by definition, haven't looked carefully at it yet. Were they to
01:07:17
Speaker
I like, let's take Brian Healy, for example. He starts off his essay under the assumption, well, he's trying a generalist project, but he's intellectually honest enough to recognize in that very article that the generalism that he thought might work doesn't. And
01:07:47
Speaker
Of course there's going to be variations among philosophers and some are, you know, not going to be convinced by the particular arguments, but
01:08:02
Speaker
I don't know, maybe I'm just, I've got a rose colored glasses when I think about my fellow philosophers, but I just suspect that it's easier to convince a philosopher of something when you've got an actual better argument.
01:08:21
Speaker
than convincing other people. If you don't want to answer this question, that's fine, but what do you think of the new generalist?
01:08:33
Speaker
That's the new generalists who are appearing in the philosophy of conspiracy theories. So the kind of work we're seeing from M. Julian Napolitano, Kevin Rutter, Keith Harris, and of course, Qassam Qassam, whose name I will probably never pronounce correctly, because I always get the first and last name the wrong way round.
01:08:56
Speaker
Right. So I guess I see what you're saying. I mean, these are intelligent people, and they don't get it yet. So is that the point? Yeah. So right. And again, so there's going to be variations. And some people's biases are such that they're just not going to ever get it.
01:09:26
Speaker
And so I don't have much hope for Kasam. But yeah, it's a good question. And of course, I'm being arrogant here, obviously. But
01:09:45
Speaker
It does seem to me that the particularist position is pretty strong and the debate has been a rout. That's just my view of it and maybe in essays to come I'll be proven wrong but
01:10:11
Speaker
It doesn't look that way from here. Actually, so this is a question which I ask myself from time to time.
From Particularist to Generalist: What Would It Take?
01:10:17
Speaker
Could you imagine an argument that would turn you generalist? So a kind of argument where actually there is a good reason to have a dismissive attitude towards conspiracy theories. I think where you were pressing me earlier on
01:10:37
Speaker
with the exceptions and the subsets or whatever, and then just sort of encroach upon the area of particularism that remains defensible. So that's possible. How far can you encroach on that and picking off areas where, okay, this subset, we can be
01:11:01
Speaker
relatively dismissive about, maybe not absolutely dismissive, but... So yeah, but as long as there's a strong analogy to actual cases, I think you have to take them seriously. And certainly we don't seem to live in a world yet where conspiracies don't occur.
01:11:29
Speaker
And there's, you know, there's an entire investigation going on by your government at the moment about exactly who knew what and who covered up what on January 6 of last year. So, you know, there's been some fairly major events and doesn't really matter where you sit on the spectrum of what you think happened on January 6. Either you think that the congressional investigation is legitimate and they're uncovering a conspiracy by members of the White House and their aides.
01:11:58
Speaker
to enact some kind of insurgency or coup, or, and this is a kind of Charles Pigton argument, you think that the congressional investigation is based upon a conspiracy itself to tar poor old Donald J. Trump with crimes he never committed. But it seems either way, you're going to believe that there's some level of conspiracy operating in the American government, no matter what branch.
01:12:25
Speaker
which means that we still live in a world where it seems like we at least know there is a conspiracy that went on whether we know which one it is. Yeah, and also I'd like to mention that one thing that I think sets me apart from most of the other particularists, except perhaps Lee Basham,
01:12:51
Speaker
is the degree to which I'm willing to defend the controversial cases. And when we look at the prior probability of conspiracy, we look at established cases.
01:13:12
Speaker
And there's a tendency, I think, among a lot of people to weigh the controversial cases on the side of untrue or unwarranted rather than as uncertain, right? And these are still, it's possible that these are actually theories that should be weighing on the,
01:13:40
Speaker
um on the side of yeah this is how conspiratorial we are because it's not clear whether that was a real conspiracy theory or not because it's real conspiracy or not yeah and the controversial cases are probably the more interesting ones because they're the ones which often challenge the official theory in a fairly radical way
01:14:06
Speaker
And usually, if they're controversial, they've got some evidence base. Now, you know, there'd be critique of the evidence base and so on, but there is, like with JFK, there's this huge pile of mutually conflicting, you know,
01:14:28
Speaker
lines of evidence and that's what makes it so interesting is it's hard to sort out and there's various ways you could weigh the different strands and different things you could focus on. And numerous at this stage inconsistent deathbed confessions.
01:14:47
Speaker
Right, right, right, right. To the point where I maintain that if I know I'm on my deathbed, I'm also going to claim that I helped assassinate JFK, which will be very confusing because I wasn't even born when JFK was alive. Are you going to claim to be just a benchwarmer? I made the fatal bullet, the magic bullet. That was me, my magic bullet.
01:15:17
Speaker
Yeah. The controversial cases kind of always fascinate me because I think as you're hinting at part of the issue about talking about controversial cases is there's a worry that even being seen to even conditionally engage or support these things.
01:15:38
Speaker
put you into the label of being a crank. So it's very easy to talk about historical cases where we know a conspiracy has occurred. No one doubts the Moscow show trials. Virtually, no one dealt Watergate, although there are, as it all turns out, some Nixon defenders out there who maintain he did nothing wrong. And it was a conspiracy by the Democrats to tar a really, really good man.
01:16:03
Speaker
But when you start talking about controversial cases, people go, oh, but you must be a bit of a crank to even want to entertain that kind of thing. Right. Right. And so I'm trying to argue that actually those cases should be looked at, that sophisticated people, or back to the beginning of the interview here, that sophisticated people should take those cases seriously.
01:16:29
Speaker
Yeah, they at least should be part of the calculus that we have, whether or not we end up believing them. They're the kind of things that at least should be analysed. And I mean to go back right to the beginning again as well, I mean I always maintain that I don't believe alien shape-shifting reptiles exist.
01:16:49
Speaker
At the same time, I think somebody should be investigating David Eich's claims because if it turns out he's correct and we really are controlled by a historic lineage of alien shape-shifting reptiles that eat babies and drink human blood, we probably want to put a stop to that because it's startling news and also it's definitely not good news. Yeah.
01:17:17
Speaker
So when does the book come out?
Book Release Details and Academic Pricing
01:17:20
Speaker
What is the official unveiling slash publication date? I believe the official date is July 20th. Oh, so about 12 days away. Yeah. Or actually one week away since broadcast and this will be going out next week. OK. And do you know what the recommended retail price is?
01:17:42
Speaker
too high. Unfortunately, that's true for every academic book. It's maybe maybe $90 or $95. My previous book on Confucianism was $95, I think. So yeah, I had hoped that it would be less. Actually, your book was not too bad. Not the first one, but the collection.
01:18:10
Speaker
That was to say only like $36 or something. Yeah. So somehow Roman and Littlefield are able to produce enough copies en masse to actually bring the price down. But academic presses by and large go, no, we're publishing only in hardback and we're only publishing at a price point which libraries can afford to buy or possibly Elon Musk. You could always get Elon Musk to buy a few copies to give out to friends.
01:18:38
Speaker
But yes, publication prices are horrendous, which is why I always recommend ask your library to bring in a copy, because if you can't afford it, your library probably can.
01:18:54
Speaker
Right. Although I do think that there's a Kindle version which might be something half the price. Still not cheap, but a little more reasonable. And if only we could produce audiobooks.
01:19:11
Speaker
Although that being said, if you were to cast an audiobook, who would you get to be the person reading? So assuming it's not you, which celebrity would you like to read your book out? I don't know. I don't know. Tom Cruise is the word name that comes to mind, but that's not really well thought out. I have a feeling he might be a little bit outside your price range.
01:19:40
Speaker
He should, but he has to read it while he's on one of his famous runs, so he'd breathlessly read it. Keanu Reeves, I think, would actually be quite good for that. So Keanu Reeves is very big into Shakespeare, wasn't Shakespeare, conspiracy theories. He believes Edward Devere wrote The Shakespearean Canon. I think he'd be the kind of person who'd quite happily read your book out loud and probably for a fairly decent price.
01:20:10
Speaker
Get your people to contact Keanu Reeves, that's what I'm saying. Now is there anything else you'd like to promote, given you've got a platform here?
Future Projects: Sequel and Chinese Philosophy
01:20:21
Speaker
Oh, well, I guess people could check out my website, which is just my name, CurtisHagan.com. That's Curtis with a K. And that just has abstracts and summaries and excerpts and some links to my articles and some other stuff. So if people want to
01:20:45
Speaker
get a overview of the kind of stuff that I've been writing about, that's a good place to look. And are you still doing any Chinese philosophy? Yes, let's see. I'm planning to. I had been planning to get back to that
01:21:08
Speaker
sooner. But when COVID came along, I've been sort of more focused on following what's going on with that and finishing off some conspiracy theory articles. And so I just keep postponing. But I do plan to get another book, kind of a sequel to my first book, actually, on the philosophy of
01:21:36
Speaker
Um, planning to do that at some point. It's a much better pronunciation of that than I, than I, than I attempted. And I'm trying to learn Mandarin, but that th sound at the end is so hard to do. Think of like suds, the end of the word suds.
01:21:56
Speaker
Yeah. It's the tonality of Mandarin I'm finding particularly difficult too. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're just not used to trying to keep track of that. Should my voice be going up or down? I mean, as I like to joke with my Mandarin teacher, New Zealanders basically talk in a monotone and then go up.
01:22:22
Speaker
at the end of every sentence and that's basically we we have two tones and and we only use one of those tones to end a sentence we don't use it for anything else
01:22:33
Speaker
Well, thank you Curtis.
Conclusion and Pleasantries
01:22:35
Speaker
It has been a most enlightening discussion about your new book. That's Conspiracy Theories and the Failure of Intellectual Critique, published later this month by the University of Michigan Press. And I would urge people to go out and buy a copy, but as we've discussed here, it is going to be fairly expensive. So maybe ask your library, or if you've got a loved one, ask for a copy for your birthday, or maybe even Christmas.
01:23:01
Speaker
Good idea. Yes, I mean, I mean, we're never going to make a large amount of money from royalties from books, but it would be nice to be able to afford a decent bottle of whiskey from time to time based on a royalty check. Well, thank you very much, Curtis. Hopefully we'll talk again soon. Great. Thank you.
01:23:45
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.