I'm listening. I'm very interested in this discussion, and I appreciate it.
By way of giving you all insight, let me tell you about my greatest failure to believe in a conspiracy. Maybe it colored me forever. You decide.
When I was a kid, every adult male in my town believed in the 100 mpg carburetor. Our typical American car (ours was a 1976 Olds Delta 88) had a 300-350 cubic-inch V8 engine and got about 15 mpg. Gas was volatile in price, everyone remembered the recent gas shortage, and everyone believed that a technology capable of giving average cars much better mileage existed, but was being suppressed.
The technical matter was pretty specific, and very consistent. The technology was simple enough, a new type of carburetor that would sit on any engine and give such superior control to the supply of fuel that would use only 1/4 or less of the current gas.
The politics was pretty obvious. The oil companies wanted to sell as much oil as possible at the highest price possible. In order to do this, they needed ignorant people to continue to dump huge quantities of gasoline into inefficient cars. Detroit was ripe to be bought off, and payoffs to the major auto companies from the oil companies were an excellent investment in continued huge gasoline sales.
Of course, this required a conspiracy. The auto companies received the payoffs. They agreed to keep using poor, outmoded technology that wasted gasoline. The government (now testing cars via the EPA) was in on it. Congress was in on it. Since cars were now being built in Japan, the Japanese were in on it. As European cars became more popular, it became obvious that the entire continent of Europe was in on it.
I could only presume, as a kid, that all of the adults around me were wise. They held a firm belief that some brilliant American inventor was being suppressed along with this device. Smokey Yunick and Andy Granatelli were two names commonly associated with this suppression. "Smokey Yunick built a 100mpg carburetor, but the government won't let him sell it!". Very common in my youth. Also, and this was key to me, doubters were lampooned. They were considered rubes who had not 'educated' themselves in politics, and obviously had no practical understanding of human nature.
To me, this all seemed correct. It had obvious qualities. The carburetor was a mysterious device. Even people who worked on them for a living had only the most tenuous grasp of how they functioned. They were complex. Much like a living thing, they went wrong in weird and complex ways. They were the closest thing to a 'black box' in our family car. Spark plugs were also somewhat mysterious, but not like carburetors.
The politics made total sense. No question. It is a very reasonable scenario, qui bonum, etc. Big, powerful, and mysterious organizations were involved. The profit motive, that most understandable of motives, was at its core.
So, then I went to school and decided to study engineering. Along the way, I drifted into internal combustion projects. Loved them. I used carburetion systems, and other systems. I learned about atomization, mixture ratio, swirl, thermal efficiency, mechanical efficiency...along the way it became obvious that there could never be a 100 mpg carburetor. During my junior year, I was involved in building and programming an electronic injection system, similar to what was appearing on production cars at the time. From the computer terminal, I had complete control over how much gasoline went into the engine, and via the working pressure, over the size of the droplets the gasoline was delivered in. Nothing in those parameters could convince a 1976 Delta 88 to get 100 mpg. Or 50. Or much over 15.
The problems were the mass of the car, loss of combustion heat to the engine mass and eventually radiator, thermal inefficiency and loss of heat to the exhaust...etc. It was never the carburetor, and it was never anything easily or cheaply fixed.
As carburetors disappeared from most cars, the legend went away. Now it exists only in memory. Cars continue to improve because of research done by the manufacturers, not the efforts of maverick inventors. Looking back, how many ways were there for even an average person to dispel it? Plenty. #1, diesel engines don't have carburetors and their fuel flow is easily changed by any diesel mechanic...but nobody ever made their diesel truck suddenly go 50 or 100 mpg. Unless, of course, all truckers were in on it.
And there lies the rub. In order to believe this one, a worldview had to be established which subordinated everything to the conspiracy. If presented with a new piece of evidence, the men in my town made it fit into place. Trucks not getting any better mileage? Then the trucking companies were in on it. Japanese cars getting somewhat better mileage? They must be negotiating with OPEC.
My college experience taught me that when someone subordinates all information to a prejudiced worldview, anything can be made to fit, if you try hard enough. Conspiracy theory is, it seems, a desire to make everything consistent. I'm actually proposing the exact opposite of what was proposed earlier. I think cognitive dissonance is involved, the conspiracy theory is the means by which people relieve it.
Of course, anti-Catholicism works this way. My grandmother preferred to believe that monks and nuns were performing satanic rituals in tunnels that connected their cloisters, rather than accept that they prayed and worked. Any piece of information about the Church was made to fit her worldview. Catholics opened a hospital? They must be using it to harvest bodies for horrid rites. Etc.
It struck me, years later, when I read 'Orthodoxy' by Chesterton, and he said that heresy was an attempt to fit all information into a consistent worldview, and the heretic was the most consistent of all men.
So, this is a small part of my continuing failure to have any faith in conspiracy. That's why I asked the question. If it were, in fact, necessary to have faith in human cօռspιʀαcιҽs (not the grand one, perpetrated by Satan, which is of course de fide) then I'm in big trouble.
Thoughts?
Topic: Traditional Catholicism and cօռspιʀαcιҽs (Read 16867 times)