If you didn’t read “Mr Popper’s Penguins” either as a child, or to a child, perhaps you’re aware of the film by the same name which sticks, broadly, to the same story: Man has penguins in his house… this leads to hilarious and heart-warmingly lifechanging consequences. I mean, it’s a little more subtle than that, but you get the general gist.
I was thinking about those penguins when I remembered Karl Popper, the philosopher of science who offered a description of what we think of as conspiracy theories. They’re not the same person, ‘no relation’ in fact. But they did share a surname.
If you have read the book about the penguins, or watched the film, you might be thinking ‘it has nothing to do with conspiracy theories.’ This is true. But it does concern a man who was trying to make sense of the things that were happening to him.
Skip ahead if you’ve heard this one before but I was talking to an old friend a couple of years ago, we were discussing yet another old friend who had recently died. Without thinking too much about it, I said something like:
“He was one for the conspiracy theories…”
My pal responded: “I would say he saw the world as it really is.”
That’s how I found out that he, too, was a conspiracy theorist.
This conversation happened around the time of the pandemic. Covid was a good time for conspiracy theories, and indeed for conspirators.
Boris Johnson apparently conspired to send spies to raid Dutch warehouses, various people conspired to hold parties, others conspired to make a small fortune out of selling duff equipment. There were a lot of conspiracies. And lots of reasons to suspect conspiracies.
The ‘bigger’ conspiracy theories of the time, that the pandemic was in fact a ‘plandemic’, either an exercise that had got out of hand, or a deliberate attempt to kill lots of people, remain unproven. I’m not a fan of those theories, but really that is not what matters here.
I’m more interested in why we think this way.
Which is what led me to remember the Enterprise van conspiracy.
“Is it still behind us?”
“Yeah, I think so… yes, look, there.”
“I told you, they’re following me.”
For a couple of years there was a standing joke in our family that spies were following my youngest child. You could spot them because they always drove ‘Enterprise’ hire vans. Wherever we were, there seemed to be an Enterprise van just a few cars behind us. You’d think that they’d have chosen a less obvious form of transport.
“There was one outside the school today,” I’d regularly be told. Or, “they were in the Co-op car park.”
“I wonder how they found you,” I mused.
We all knew why they were following us, and it had something to do with my brother, as so many things do.
One day, when we were visiting my brother, he took the kids and I on a visit to a nearby forest, it turned out he had a key to get us through a gate which he had obtained by some sort of sketchy means.
“Ach, it’ll be alright so long as the [redacted] don’t come up there,” he declared breezily, “and that’s not very likely.”
Shortly after our arrival…
“Is that a van?”
“Errrr…”
“Time to go kids, quick, back in the car.”
There followed a comedically laboured multi point turn on a forest track, with each manoeuvre the other van got closer, the turn was followed by a slow motion chase down a track, then a dash to unlock the gate again, and eventually a clean getaway.
After that the kids were sure the owners were still after us. Even I wondered about it from time to time. True to form my brother never gave it a second thought.
And that is what led to the Enterprise van conspiracy.
“They’re still watching us,” the youngest declared, with a grin.
Reader: they were not still watching us.
What had happened was my youngest had noticed that there was a strange phenomena, a surfeit of hired vans. This noticing had led to an attempt to construct a hypothesis (spies) to explain the phenomena. This hypothesis was developed in the light of experience (slow-mo car chase).
Conspiracy theories are not new. Although Karl Popper is strongly associated with the term, it was in use long before he wrote ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’ in 1945. Newspapers a century earlier were talking about conspiracy theories, and assassinations or other high profile events created all kinds of theories about groups of people with malign intent.
The thing about conspiracy theories is that, of course, people do conspire. And they probably always have done. In that sense there is some value in being a conspiracy theorist.
But labelling someone as a conspiracy theorist, like I did, also serves a purpose. One that I had not intended. Labelling is always a problem, actually, because it sets up an ‘us and them’ paradigm. In this case it helps to enforce social norms by a subtle form of what’s called ‘informal social control’ - this is where we tell each other what the ‘right way’ to think, behave, etc. is.
The Australian philosopher David Coady points out that calling someone a conspiracy theorist makes them seem ‘outside the norm’ somehow.
“Its function, like that of the word ‘heresy’ in medieval Europe, is to stigmatise people with beliefs which conflict with officially sanctioned or orthodox beliefs of the time and place in question,” he wrote.
In other words it’s a good way of writing someone, and their concerns, off and manipulating them into conforming to the norm. We do this all the time. “You look nice,” is a way of telling someone that the way they have chosen to dress, or brush their hair, is socially acceptable. It also tells them that when they don’t look like that, they don’t look ‘nice’.
But I’m getting side-tracked.
Because what I want to say is that I think that conspiracy theories exist because we’re conditioned to try and make sense of the intrinsically nonsensical.
A pandemic arrives that wipes people out, it seems to come from nowhere, but surely it must have a reason? People are making money out of it, could they have planned the whole thing all along?
These are perfectly reasonable concerns, they reflect experience and they help to form a hypothesis. But they rely on a fundamental assumption – namely that things make sense. They rely on what the philosopher Charles Taylor called ‘The Immanent Frame’ a way of seeing the world which thinks everything can, ultimately, be explained.
In broad terms the immanent frame has been extremely helpful, we’ve come to realise that disease and illness are not, for instance, the result of demons who must be warded off by amulets, but have often preventable or curable causes like washing your hands.
The problem with seeing the world through the immanent frame is, however, that it leaves no room for anything that can’t be explained. We might be able to explain a disease, but can we explain beauty? Can we explain the feeling of sublime transcendence that an extraordinary sunrise or a piece of music can cause?
Because we’re stuck in Taylor’s immanent frame we will probably try. But what if some things are, simply, not just unknown but unknowable? A lot of the theological problems we have are, I suspect, bound up in this. Our mindset is so stuck in the world of ‘knowing’ that we can’t come to terms with the unknowable.
Sometimes the penguins aren’t plotting to kill you. Or if they are, you’ll never know.
Rejoice with me: my first Substack has been written. What do you think? Too long? Too short? Too boring? Toooooo interesting? Help me to shape my output please, you can comment on the post in Substack itself, or you can email me.
I am planning to write here something more or less weekly, sometimes it will be something like this, at others something rather different. One of the things I want to include is “QandR”, you send a question and I write a response. If you want to send a question (about anything) hit reply to email me.
Thanks for sticking with me, and if you liked this please do consider sharing it, I’d like to make new friends.
I only just got around to reading this one. My favourite conspiracy theory is the Supertramp 9/11 one. if you don't know what that is google it and prepare to fall down a deep and winding rabbit hole of nonsense