Lazy soft conspiracism

I call it cheap cynicism; Jamie Bartlett calls it faux intellectualism. It's the same deal:

I was speaking recently to a school governor who told me he was shocked by just how many students he encounters buy into a sort of lazy soft conspiracism driven by online material. It can be summarised as follows: there’s a "they" and a "them". Someone, some group, somewhere, is controlling things to some undisclosed and unclear end, and we the people are losing out. Corporations, governments, the rich and the powerful – there are all in it together. The West are the oppressors and the baddies, seeking to destroy Islam. Blame everything on America. Anything the establishment says is a lie; anything that criticises the establishment is probably correct.

This sort of faux intellectualism – don’t trust what the powers that be tell you, but do trust anyone that criticises them no matter what the evidence – really is the death of independent critical thought and I think it inches people towards what is the core of Isil ideology: us versus them. The West versus Islam. (It doesn’t help of course when well-meaning left liberal commentators validate this narrative by saying, yes, Tony Blair is a war criminal, yes, the Tory party is Islamophobic, yes, the police are racist, yes, the West is morally bankrupt.)

Naturally enough, all this stuff is rather more compelling when you’re young....

Bartlett is suggesting that the internet and the growth of new forms of online social media are playing to this disillusionment, peddling all kinds of conspiracist thinking. What needs to be done is to teach - to encourage - critical thinking. 

We need people to reject extremism of their own volition; anything else is pyrrhic. That will only happen if people are able to encounter extreme ideas and still have the critical faculties to make up their own mind.

Which is fine, of course. Except it's not just on the fringes of the internet that you find this kind of thinking. Many prominent Muslim speakers and institutions appeal to the same conspiratorial (the West or the Jews) mindset. In Islam, at the moment, it seems more the rule than the exception.

Comments

[brian]

Not to mention dimwits like Owen Jones and Russell Brand.

[Barry Sheridan]

You cannot teach critical thinking in isolation from having an understanding of the facts. This is one of the main problems of today's world, what makes it so is the lack of credible news reporting. Yes you can find it, here for example, but this is not what the majority of people read, watch or listen to.

[Mick H]

And, of course, it's difficult to encourage the use of critical thinking in a Muslim culture whose highest virtue is submission.