Conspiracy theories in general are kind of a hobby of mine - studying them, that is, not expounding them. And it seems that when a piece of pseudo-history involves either conspiracy theories, religion, or best of all, both, it really seems to take off.
Part of this, I suppose, is very basic to human nature - we want to understand how things happen, and even more important, it seems, who is responsibleand if we can't find an answer that is obvious, we make one up - or latch onto the answer that someone else has made up that best suits our worldview. And where matters of belief are concerned, it seems to be very difficult for us to step back and apply reason.
So on the one hand, these aren't really new problems. I think that what concerns me most is that in a world of increasing access to information, it really "should" be getting better, not, as I fear, worse. We actually have the tools to gather, at the very least, enough information about all of these things to decide if there is doubt, even if we can't determine what was the truth.
The Shroud of Turin is an excellent example of that - there are a number of different theories about how it came to be, including the church-sanctioned one about it really being the shroud of Jesus, who left some kind of holy watermark behind him. But there is certainly enough evidence to suggest that this is not the the most likely scenario, even though no one can, given the information that is available, really be certain. Of course, if the Church allowed more testing to confirm or disprove many of the questions on both sides or the real-or-fraud controversy, we might get closer to a definitive answer - but it hasn't yet, and so we can't. but we can be sure that their is doubt about how the thing came to be, and none of the hypotheses have incontrovertable evidence behind them, to the best of my knowledge.
What I see around me is an increasingly huge amount of random information on a vast range of subjects, some crucial, some trivial, most somewhere inbetween, being released on a populace that is unprepared to evaluate or even estimate the realtive accuracy of all these pieces of information.
And if information is power, the inability to assess information is a prescription for vulnerability to the power of others.
And now I'm sounding like a conspiracy theorist. ;-)
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2006-05-14 10:15 pm (UTC)Part of this, I suppose, is very basic to human nature - we want to understand how things happen, and even more important, it seems, who is responsibleand if we can't find an answer that is obvious, we make one up - or latch onto the answer that someone else has made up that best suits our worldview. And where matters of belief are concerned, it seems to be very difficult for us to step back and apply reason.
So on the one hand, these aren't really new problems. I think that what concerns me most is that in a world of increasing access to information, it really "should" be getting better, not, as I fear, worse. We actually have the tools to gather, at the very least, enough information about all of these things to decide if there is doubt, even if we can't determine what was the truth.
The Shroud of Turin is an excellent example of that - there are a number of different theories about how it came to be, including the church-sanctioned one about it really being the shroud of Jesus, who left some kind of holy watermark behind him. But there is certainly enough evidence to suggest that this is not the the most likely scenario, even though no one can, given the information that is available, really be certain. Of course, if the Church allowed more testing to confirm or disprove many of the questions on both sides or the real-or-fraud controversy, we might get closer to a definitive answer - but it hasn't yet, and so we can't. but we can be sure that their is doubt about how the thing came to be, and none of the hypotheses have incontrovertable evidence behind them, to the best of my knowledge.
What I see around me is an increasingly huge amount of random information on a vast range of subjects, some crucial, some trivial, most somewhere inbetween, being released on a populace that is unprepared to evaluate or even estimate the realtive accuracy of all these pieces of information.
And if information is power, the inability to assess information is a prescription for vulnerability to the power of others.
And now I'm sounding like a conspiracy theorist. ;-)