Experts 3: Conspiracy Theories and Cranks

We have seen how vulnerable we are to the cult of expertise. Whose interests do experts serve? Are they practicing groupthink, or blinded by their narrowness? Why should I trust them? We don’t like the feeling of having to accept received opinion, either. 

And expert knowledge has in the past been overturned by outsiders and crackpots – people who weren’t considered experts by the experts. Whatever impression they might give, experts are not infallible. There are gaps in all knowledge. There are unexplained phenomena, statistical oddities, theoretical impossibilities and unexplored fields. 

There are three common temptations that flow from the evident limitations of expert knowledge. The first of these is to foster a stubborn skepticism towards all expert knowledge. This is the temptation of the climate-change denier. Admittedly, the smugness of climate-change scientists regarding their claims can be galling to the ordinary person. Likewise, it is sometimes easy to associate them with ideological and political interests which may have a distorting effect on their science. It is epistemologically right to hold the claims being made for the science of climate change at arm’s length, for, like all human knowledge there is room for error. 

But the persistent skeptic points to the fact that there are holes in the theory in question and to the incompleteness or the complexity of the available knowledge and claims that this means that the whole theory must be bunk. Where there is not 100% certainty, there is room for doubt. But that room may be a very small alcove in which you can barely fit a pot-plant. Indeed: where there is a claim for 100% certainty, we should be skeptical of the maths involved! 

The second temptation– which is not unrelated – is to cling to conspiracy theories. If expert opinion is slanted in one direction, then the conspiracy theorist claims that the slant is due to some secret agenda or bias. Expert knowledge is extremely difficult to outflank, especially if there is a strong consensus. This leads to the disempowerment of those not in the know. The conspiracy theory is an attempt to subvert the power of expertise by claiming that the pose of ‘expert’ knowledge has been assumed in order to mask the real truth. It may be claimed, for example, that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center never occurred, and that a conspiracy of government agencies pulled off an extraordinary fraud on the American public in front of the eyes of the world in order to provide a pretext for military action in the Middle East. Or, a young earth creationist may claim that the scientists who claim that the earth is old do so under the influence of a set of ideological assumptions that lead them to bracket out the real evidence – and that the worldwide scientific community, because of its bias towards atheism, places strong pressure on those who disagree. Perhaps this is better described as a ‘mass delusion’ theory, or a ‘mass ideological bias’ theory. Nevertheless, both are attempts to account for the way in which expert knowledge is weighted overwhelmingly against their view.

The fascinating thing about conspiracy theorists is the way in which they mimic the forms of expert knowledge that they are seeking to question. So, we find young earth creation ‘scientists’ parading their PhDs, and 9/11 conspiracy theorists consulting ‘experts’ and providing very detailed accounts of their ideas, complete with apparently plausible statistics and scientific information. Thus, conspiracy theorists both play the game of expert knowledge and at the same time seek to undermine it. If you’ve claimed that the whole guild of scientific experts is corrupt or fundamentally self-deceived, then why does having one of their qualifications matter a jot? 

The third epistemological temptation that is worth describing is the phenomenon of the ‘crank’. The crank is a person who holds stubbornly to their belief despite the overwhelming consensus of his or her contemporaries. The classic crank will spend years researching a theory that most experts in the field consider to be spurious or nonsense – becoming, in effect an expert in nonsense. Cranks are often oblivious to their misunderstandings of fundamental concepts in their chosen fields, but highly resistant to any attempt to clear these up. 

The trouble is, sometimes the cranks are right. Modern-day cranks love to compare themselves to Copernicus or Galileo as examples of scientists who were independent spirits in their own times, and were considered cranks by their contemporaries. There are more recent examples, too. One of these is J. Haren Bretz. In the 1920s, Bretz began to present evidence which challenged the prevailing view of geologists that the Earth’s features had been carved out by a gradual process of erosion and rock-forming over a vast span of time. What Bretz argued was that there were some significant events in geological history that could have an impact over a very short time. Volcanic eruptions or meteoric collisions could have dramatic, relatively instant effects on the Earth’s geological features. Bretz came to his conclusions after studying the Scablands in North-West America and determining that only a massive deluge of water could have accomplished the things he observed there. 

Now, Bretz did have a PhD in geology; but his original training had been in biology. When he first published his ideas, he was dismissed out of hand by the leaders in the field. Furthermore, when another geologist, Joseph Pardee, decided that Bretz was right, he was put under enormous pressure not to support him publically. Here was an egregious instance of groupthink at work. At a public forum of the Geological Society in Washington, Bretz was invited to present his theory. But he was opposed by an organized opposition of six expert, Ivy League geologists. It was an ambush, designed to humiliate Bretz and drive him from the field. It wasn’t until the 1950s, once the impact of the Ice Age had become more widely understood, that Bretz’s views were fully vindicated. When he was finally recognized for his contribution to geology in 1979 when he was 96, he rather ruefully commented: ‘my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over.’

Bretz was a crank who turned out to be right, because sometimes cranks are right. The experts sought to bully him and to censor his views. The trouble is that examples like that of Bretz, do not give us warrant to believe cranks (and not experts) simply because they, like Bretz, stand against prevailing orthodoxy. The reason Bretz was right was that he studied the evidence more carefully than his opponents. That the crank is sometimes right doesn’t mean the crank is always right.