| April 26, 2008 | Saturday | Rabi-us-Sani 19, 1429 |
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Shaving with Occam’s razor
IF you type “9/11 + conspiracy” into Google, you get well over half a million websites you can visit. But enter this dark, crazed world at your own peril for it is full of wild and weird people and ideas. The one common theme is the lack of any scientific rigour or reasoned analysis.
One site, www.conspiracyplanet.com, contains scores of articles, book reviews and images. All of them lead to their own little paranoid world. It’s clear that there are a lot of people out there with a lot of time on their hands, and a lot of imagination that could be better deployed creating fiction. But in a sense, this is exactly what they are doing, except they peddle their stories as fact.
One would have thought that with the explosion of websites and books relating to the scientific explanation of natural and manmade events, most of these conspiracy theories would have been debunked long ago. But the very advances that have made the rapid spread of reason possible have facilitated the task of the conspiracy theorists.
Soon after the tsunami devastated villages and holiday resorts along the Indian Ocean over three years ago, I was startled to be told by a dinner guest in London that the catastrophe had been caused by the Americans. “You don’t think it was a natural disaster, do you?” he asked me pityingly. “We know it was triggered by an underwater nuclear device placed by the United States.” A stunned silence fell over the dining table, and somebody hastily changed the subject.
But when I researched this outlandish theory on Google a bit later, I was taken aback to discover that there were 339,000 websites dedicated to this very conspiracy. According to one version, the Americans, Indians and Israelis were behind the tsunami. Motives differ widely. In one version, Washington wanted to divert attention from the Iraq war.
According to another, a group of countries wanted to experiment with a weapon that would depopulate entire coastlines without affecting areas inland. The method of choice was a nuclear device placed between tectonic plates along the Indonesian coast.
Over the years, I have been bombarded by readers with scores of bizarre interpretations of the events of Sept 11, 2001. Perhaps my favourite one was the guy who insisted that the Japanese were behind the attacks on the Twin Towers. The reason? To get even with the Americans for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In most part, all this is harmless nonsense. However, it has its dangerous aspects: consider the propaganda in parts of our tribal areas where mullahs have gone around convincing simple people that polio vaccines will make their children infertile, and are a part of a western plot to reduce the Muslim population. As a result of this vicious lie, government vaccination teams are no longer operating in these areas, putting thousands of children at risk.
Perhaps Princess Diana’s death in Paris is a classic conspiracy theory. Here is a straightforward accident that happened a decade ago, but millions around the world still believe she died as the result of a conspiracy involving the royal family and the British secret service.
Millions have been spent on an inquest to get at the truth, and still the Internet hums with elements of the conspiracy. In part, it has been fuelled by Mohammad Fayed’s refusal to accept his own responsibility in the matter. But mostly, the affair has assumed a life of its own as millions think what really happened is too simple an explanation, and there has to be a darker cause behind the tragedy.
And this brings us to the heart of conspiracy theories. Many people are convinced of the existence of dark, malignant forces who pull the strings behind the scenes. From Da Vinci’s Code to 9/11, the simple explanation is for the naïve, the gullible. Only those with their ears to the ground and access to inside information can know what is really happening. This is the ‘counterknowledge’ brilliantly and succinctly described by Damian Thompson in his book by the same title. Here he quotes from Michael Shermer’s book Why People Believe Weird Things:
“As a culture, we seem to have trouble distinguishing science from pseudoscience; history from pseudohistory; and sense from nonsense. But I think the problem lies deeper than this. To get to it we must dig through layers of culture and society into the individual human mind and heart.”
Thompson continues: “The reasons he [Shermer] comes up with are mostly psychological: it is comforting to believe that a psychic can put you in touch with your loved ones, or that eating broccoli will prevent you getting cancer; it is oddly reassuring to know that apparent random acts of evil are being coordinated by a satanic conspiracy. The practitioners of counterknowledge teach us that the universe is not arbitrary, that things happen for a reason.”
An antidote to this kind of muddled thinking is Occam’s razor, a philosophical device popular in medieval Europe. Although it predates him, it is ascribed to William of Okham (1285-1349), a Franciscan monk who preached a philosophy of simplicity: “Plurality should not be posited without necessity.” Or in other words, all things being equal, the simplest solution is the best. Thus, by paring away the improbable, we are left with the most probable explanation for an event.
The conspiracy theories that challenge the obvious chain of events leading up to 9/11 raise many questions. For instance, people ask why were the hijacked airliners not shot down by the US Air Force after the first one had hit one of the Twin Towers. The explanation is simple: in the defence procedures then in force, only the Commander in Chief could have authorised the downing of a civilian aircraft. And as we know, George Bush was aloft and out of touch for much of the day, fearing for his own safety.
Another theory insists that the Twin Towers collapsed too neatly, and this had to be the result of thousands of explosives fixed into the buildings and simultaneously detonated. The truth is far more prosaic. In order to make the tall buildings as light as possible, the design called for each floor to be supported by the outer shell. Thus, the floors were never intended to take the weight of the upper stories. When one collapsed under the airliner’s impact, it knocked down the one below, and so on until they all crashed down vertically.
I know these simple explanations will not convince the conspiracy theorists, and I am prepared for the flood of emails that will no doubt clog my inbox. But be warned: I will defend myself with Occam’s razor.
