Crippled Epistemologies: Conspiracy Theories, Religion, and Knowledge

PREAMBLE

Consider these four statements:

1. 1. All humans have the right to clean drinking water.

2. 2. American citizens have the right to bear arms.

3. 3. God gave his only son so that those who believe might have eternal life.

4. 4. Coronavirus is a hoax designed to allow the deep state to extend its control over the population.

Each is held to be true by large numbers of people today, and none have any empirical basis. Which of these, then, is post-truth?

Conspiracy theories are almost always presented in the context of the broader discourse on truth. They are "counterfactual," "alternative facts," or part and parcel of post-truth. Sometimes their falseness is even baked into the definition, for example, as "a subset of false beliefs in which the ultimate cause of an event is believed to be due to a plot by multiple actors working together with a clear goal in mind, often unlawfully and in secret" (Swami and Furnham 2014, 220). It is in part because conspiracy theories challenge the supposed consensual, reasoned truth upon which modern liberal democracy is based that they are taken to be de facto dangerous. Truth is based on facts, and facts are produced only through reason, the argument goes. Some go as far as to suggest that conspiracy theories mark the end of the Enlightenment project itself: "if the Great Lisbon Earthquake can be said to have inaugurated the Age of Reason, 9/11 and its consequences may yet prove to mark its end" (Kay 2009, xxiii).

Yet conspiracy theories are not the only discourse on truth in contemporary society. Despite the dominance of the scientific-materialist epistemology, there are in fact multiple epistemic modalities in operation within modernity. Some can be incorporated, whereas others must be stigmatized and suppressed. We can place religion in the former camp and conspiracy theories in the latter. Of the four claims I opened this essay with, only one is typically presented as inherently irrational and dangerous. The reasons behind this, and the implications for understanding the knowledge economy of the post-truth age, are the focus of this essay. My key concern is with how "conspiracy theory" and "religion" act as strategies for managing specific kinds of knowledge claims in the capitalist-colonial-Protestant-patriarchal order of the modern West (understood as a historical project, rather than a geographical location).

They are not conscious strategies, mind you. When we describe a certain idea as religious or as a conspiracy theory, we are not generally doing it deliberately to legitimize or delegitimize it; it is just that these are the very functions of those words and the very reason they exist. Religion (the category, not the different things people do and think that tend to be included in the category) developed during colonialism, as a way of demarcating the Other, projecting irrationality onto them and so legitimizing their domination. My core argument is that conspiracy theory is a modern example of the same dynamic. Conspiracy theory allows for the domination of one group over an uncivilized Other; as they are irrational and ruled by dangerous emotions and mere beliefs, they must be governed for their own good. I show this first by looking at some examples of the psychologization and pathologization of "primitive" religions before showing how closely these mirror contemporary writing (academic and popular) on conspiracy theories. In particular, I want to pull at the distinction between "belief" and "knowledge," inherited from colonialism and incorporated into the anthropology of religion, and how this binary functions to lionize epistemologies of the established elites while demonizing subaltern critiques. As Bruno Latour puts it, "We believe that we know. We know that the others believe" (2013, 173).

In short, conspiracy theory demarks "irrational" and "illegitimate" knowledge, while "religion" functions to domesticate certain kinds of "irrational" knowledge. Viewed together, they are therefore a revealing case study in how the boundaries of different forms of knowledge are regulated, something of particular pertinence as the dominant "truth regime" begins to fracture in the post-truth era.

A COMPLEX HISTORY OF CONTESTED IDEAS ABOUT ULTIMATE...