‘It’s a conspiracy’

ONE of the most popular conspiracy theories of all time - that Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed were murdered by the Establishment in a car crash ten years ago - should have been quashed for good by the inquest jury's verdict of unlawful killing by her driver Henri Paul and the paparazzi.

But doubtless the idea that MI6 was indeed responsible for the fatal car crash will live on in the minds of Mohamed al Fayed and countless others, perhaps for all time.

The death of Princess Diana is just one conspiracy theory in a universe of many, where parallel worlds exist in which Mary Magdalene was actually Jesus's wife, the CIA invented AIDS and the American government was behind 9/11.

For journalist Damian Thompson, rumours like these have spawned a global generation of idiots'', whose tongue-wagging and finger-pointing stokes the danger of creating new political, social and economic disasters.

In a full investigation of the theories and ideas behind many of the world's major conspiracy theories, Thompson looks into pseudo-history, bad science and wacky religion in his book, Counterknowledge - and what he finds is actually quite scary.

I was being driven absolutely bananas by intelligent people talking nonsense at dinner parties,'' explains Thompson, a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph.

I was horrified that people were interested in and spouting off things like 9/11 conspiracy theories, when they hadn't done more than read a book or watch an internet documentary. And I started trying to draw the dots between the lunacy that leads people to believe these preposterous theories and the demise of investigating the science of it all.

And I came up with a label for this pandemic of incredulous thinking - counterknowledge, misinformation packaged to look like fact - which is working its way from the margin of society, where it's flourished forever, to the centre, encouraged by greedy entrepreneurs, politically correct politicians and major institutions, which should know better.'' He blames society's augmenting distrust in scientific method as the source of all this hocus pocus, and worries that we will soon develop a Middle Ages mentality towards the world.

One of the distinguishing features of counterknowledge is a casual approach to the truth,'' he says. It encourages and takes advantage of a significant lowering of the standards of proof in society in general.'' Blaming the 1960s for their wayward ways, when knowledge was called into question, along with the hierarchical institutions that underpinned that knowledge'', the decade's rejection of religious, political, social and scientific academic authority has not only taken away the methodological tools made by the Enlightenment that scientists toiled over for 200 years,'' Thompson argues, it's also helped to rob people of the ability to distinguish between fantasy and fact.'' If there's one thing Thompson takes particular issue with, it's alternative medicine. Lambasting it as quackery'', the simple truth is that most such medicine is alternative' for a reason,'' he says. It doesn't work.'' The classic consumers of complementary and alternative medicine would appear to be middleclass hypochondriacs,'' he states. Many of us have lost confidence in the safety net of conventional medicine, because although people in the West are actually healthier than ever before, their expectations of good health are rising faster than the ability of scientists, doctors or politicians to deliver it.

But there's no such thing as alternative medicine, there's just medicine,'' he concludes.

Sometimes it has roots in the natural world and has been used for generations, other times it's been painstakingly made in laboratories. If it works, it's medicine. If it doesn't, it's not.'' Thanks to books like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, many people have been reduced into believing a thriving pseudo-history, in which history is redesigned to entertain and flatter people rather than tell them what actually happened in the past,'' Thompson says, quoting a survey showing 40 per cent of Americans believe that the Church has covered up the truth' about Jesus.

It's books like Brown's - a novel with a supposedly true historical narrative - that have propelled readers into the realm of alternative' history. And the danger in that, says Thompson, is that such books are often modelled on a hatred or mistrust, representative of old-fashioned, age-old conflicts.

One example is the rise of Afrocentric history, demonstrated by Molefi Kete Asante, professor of African-American studies at Temple University, Philadelphia, and author of The History Of Africa.

Asante makes all sorts of Africa-centric claims in his text, Thompson says, including theories that black Egyptians founded Atlantis or that Africa is the birthplace of civilisation.

Intended as a standard book for university undergraduates on either side of the Atlantic, the book pits whites against blacks and, Thompson concludes, seems only to exist so that the publisher wouldn't be accused of racism.

Thompson argues powerfully with no let up. Try to disagree and, in his eyes, you've become one of the idiots'' he talks about.

His arguments about religion extend to cover creationists and all those who support Intelligent Design'.

If you refuse to acknowledge the theory of evolution, you can never properly understand astronomy, anthropology, biology, geology, palaeontology, physics or zoology,'' he concludes. And a society that does not breed specialists in most or all of these fields cannot expect to evolve into a competitive economy.'' The repercussions of believing all these bogus'' theories, according to Thompson, are endless.

People have become very accustomed to designing their lifestyle and choosing precisely how they're going to live their lives,'' he explains. Along with that freedom of consumer choice comes freedom of intellectual choice that instructs people to believe what they want to believe, to choose what they want to believe.

Warning others of counterknowledge is good.

But I'm not sure the tide can be reversed.'' ■ Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered To Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science And Fake History, by Damian Thompson (Atlantic Books, £12.99)