Natalie Wynn (NW) just uploaded her latest video on conspiracy theories,1 which reminded me that I had written something about this in earlier iterations of the functionalism paper (TFP).
This was motivated by two loose ideas.
Sociology has a little conspiracy thinking problem in the way we market ourselves to undergraduates.
This is not something unique to left-wing theorists embarking on some unmasking project; even conservative sociologist Peter Berger once said that “the first wisdom of sociology is that things are not what they seem” (cf. Baehr 2019).
Many influential arguments against “functionalism”—teleological explanations, to be more precise—were really arguments against conspiracy theories and “just-so stories” (e.g., Gould and Lewontin 1979; Elster 1983).
Ultimately we dropped this idea from TFP because conspiracy thinking is not typically published in major sociology outlets, and so it seemed like an unnecessary rant.
Briefly, a teleological explanation seeks to explain the presence, shape, or behavior of some phenomena by making reference to its purpose (Ruse 2017; Tugby 2024). This is a style of explanation that goes all the way back to Aristotle’s discussions of “final cause” (Leunissen 2010). Less ambiguous forms of teleological explanation appear whenever people replace the word “purpose” with either function or goal, which still carry the connotation that there is some form of “design” lying in the background, whether intentional or not.
Biologists don’t like to talk about purpose, since it implies some form of “intelligent design.” But Charles Darwin made purpose safe for biologists by transforming it into the blind mechanistic process known as natural selection.2 Social scientists, however, cannot do without intentionality. Our world is filled with all sorts of designers in pursuit of their own goals, interests, and values. We wrote TFP because we cannot get rid of teleological explanations—intentional or not—and so we better come up with standards that distinguish the good ones from the bad ones.
Evolution and Domination
The accusation of conspiracy thinking has been leveled more forcefully at two very different kinds of scholars: evolutionary theorists and Marxists.
Stephen Jay Gould gave us the term “just-so story” in reference to the “adaptationist research program” in evolutionary science. This refers to speculations about the “fitness” of this or that phenomenon without much evidence to back them up. It is the kind of conspiracy thinking that’s typically associated with its own adjective, “Panglossian.”
…the rejection of one adaptive story usually leads to its replacement by another, rather than to a suspicion that a different kind of explanation might be required. Since the range of adaptive stories is as wide as our minds are fertile, new stories can always be postulated.
Gould and Lewontin (1979, p. 153)
On the Marxist side, it was Jon Elster, another insider, who took over the charge against teleology. Except that it wasn’t directed at “natural selection” but rather against the idea that powerful elites are behind most social phenomena.
The main problem with teleological explanations—he called them all “functionalist” (Elster 1982, 1983)—is that they are very easy to fabricate. It is easy to imagine ways in which some phenomena is “beneficial” (whatever that means) to at least some subset of the population and then convince yourself—via leap of faith, the conviction that “nothing happens by accident”—that this is a tremendous display of critical thinking on your part. It is easy to speculate that these “beneficiaries” may be following some hidden agenda or that they are being directed towards a “goal” that they rather keep secret.
This problem only gets compounded by the uncontroversial fact that people with shared interests tend to form alliance and act in a somewhat coordinated fashion. This is something that G.A. Cohen liked to point out.
Conspiracy is a natural effect when men of like insight into the requirements of continued class domination get together, and such men do get together. But sentences beginning ‘The ruling class have decided…’ do not entail the convocation of an assembly. Ruling class persons meet and instruct one another in overlapping milieux of government, recreation, and practical affairs, and a collective policy emerges even when they were never all in one place at one time.
Cohen (2000, p. 290)
The purpose of Teleology, or Conspiracy as Meaning-Making
Natalie ends her video (02:23:21) with some speculations about why conspiracy thinking is so widespread. The idea is that we may all share a psychological predisposition to “make sense” of unintended or accidental phenomena; in this case, attributing “meaning” to something means attributing purpose to it.
This is essentially what Jon Elster argues.
The attraction stems, I believe, from the implicit assumption that all social and psychological phenomena must have a meaning, i.e., that there must be some sense, some perspective in which they are beneficial for someone or something; and that furthermore these beneficial effects are what explain the phenomena in question. This mode of thought is wholly foreign to the idea that there may be elements of sound and fury in social life, unintended and accidental consequences that have no meaning whatsoever.
Elster (1983, p. 55)
Yes, this is the point in which we apply teleological explanations to teleology itself. The argument is that conspiracy thinking allegedly satisfies some deep psychological “need.” In one version, conspiracies are like the Trobriander rituals described by Malinowski, whose purpose is to reduce the anxiety linked to dangerous and uncertain fishing expeditions.
In another version of this argument, conspiracies are like the psychoanalytic self-defense mechanism of displacement. This is exactly the argument that Judith Butler (2024) makes with regard to the Right Wing obsession with “gender ideology.” In her view, “gender” serves the psychoanalytic “function” of absorbing the fear, trauma, and anxiety created by neoliberal economies (whatever that means).
When the word “gender” absorbs an array of fears and becomes a catchall phantasm for the contemporary Right, the various conditions that actually give rise to those fears lose their names. “Gender” both collects and incites those fears, keeping us from thinking more clearly about what there is to fear, and how the currently imperiled sense of the world came about in the first place.
Butler (2024, p. 6)
So is this conspiracy thinking about conspiracy theories?
Maybe it is. Or maybe it points to an important research question that deserves further scrutiny. Regardless, teleological explanations seem unavoidable.
We should at least try and do a good job when we rely on them.
I recommend the functionalism paper.
References
Footnotes
The idea of “teleology without intention” sometimes goes by awkward term of teleonomy. Google it.↩︎