Belief vs. "Belief"

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?

In the New Yorker, Manvir Singh asks a much better question: how do people believe in conspiracy theories?

"Belief" is a complicated thing. Singh has been reading French philosopher Dan Sperber (born 1942), who drew a sharp line between two different kinds of belief:

Staying with the Dorze people in southern Ethiopia, Sperber noticed that they made assertaions that they seemed both to believe and not to believe. People told him, for example, that "the leopard is a Christian animal who observes the fasts of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church." Nevertheless, the average Dorze man guarded his livestock on fast days just as much as on other days. "Not because he suspects some leopards of being bad Christians," Sperber wrote, "but because he takes it as true both that leopards fast and that they are always dangerous."

Sperber concluded that there are two kinds of beliefs. The first he called "factual" beliefs. Factual beliefs – such as the belief that leopards are dangerous – guide behavior and tolerate little inconsistency; you can't believe that leopards do and do not eat livestock. The second category he called "symbolic" beliefs. These beliefs might feel genuine, but they're cordoned off from action and expectation. We are much more accepting of inconsistency when it comes to symbolic beliefs. We can believe, say, that God is all-powerful and good while allowing for the existence of evil and suffering.

A more recent writer, Neil Van Leeuwen, has extended Sperber's work. To Van Leeuwen, the two kinds of beliefs serve different purposes. We use "factual" beliefs for modeling reality, so we modify them in the face of evidence. "Symbolic beliefs, meanwhile, serve social ends, not epistemic ones, so we can hold them even in the face of contradictory evidence."

The idea that religious beliefs serve mainly a social function is old, but I have never found it convincing. I prefer the notion I associate with Weston La Barre and T.M. Luhrman, that religious beliefs exist because of the way they make us feel. Luhrman wrote an excellent book on British neo-pagans in which she gave up trying to figure out what they believed; they pursued their religious practice, she wrote, because of the way it sometimes made them feel. 

One of the constant themes of Christian practice is the difficulty even committed fundamentalists have taking their own beliefs seriously. They reguarly pray, and have been since the Gospels were written, for God to deepen their faith. Nobody has to pray for more faith in dishwashers.

Anyway it is an old idea, supported by a lot of evidence, that religious belief is something different from more everyday kinds of beliefs.

What category does belief in conspiracy theories fall into? Singh argues, to my mind persuasively, that conspiracy beliefs are like religious beliefs. Thus, they are immune to evidence, and people hold them for reasons that are social or emotional rather than reality-based.

Obviously there are shades to this, because some conspiracies are real, and others might be. Nor is there a hard line between belief in conspiracy theories and a lot of other political beliefs. But you should never be surprised that people believe things for which there is no evidence.