Vaccinations and Public Concern in History by Andrea Kitta

Author:Andrea Kitta [Kitta, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, Modern, 20th Century, World, 21st Century, General
ISBN: 9781136577086
Google: IAHJBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-01-30T01:16:17+00:00

By using this as the defining features, the variety of conspiracy narratives can be discussed by their attributes rather than opinions of truth or falsity.

Conspiracy thinking has been perceived as irrational; however, Basham notes that it might be just as irrational to assume that no one is conspiring against us as it is to assume that someone is. Basham asserts:

The conspiracy theorist has compelling cause to suspect that today’s society suffers a serious and unavoidable prior probability of conspiracy. Conspiracy is all too human. In our personal lives most all of us have encountered the existence of treacherous disloyalties, conspiratorial sexual infidelities, carefully crafted business betrayals, and life-crippling slander that, insidiously, are sometimes never revealed to the victims. (Basham 2003: 271)

It is useful to consider conspiracy thinking from another perspective, offered by Paul Farmer, which he calls the “hermeneutic of generosity”. This viewpoint asks that we “proceed as if our informants were themselves experts in a moral reading of the ills that afflict them” (Farmer 1992: 235) as a way to lead us to “an interpretive analysis accountable to history and political economy, the force fields from which the conspiracy theories initially arose” (Farmer 1992: 235). Through the use of the hermeneutic of generosity, one hopes to address the concerns of the lay public and discuss why these narratives are expressed, rather than focusing on their plausibility, which has been the focal point of much of the work done on conspiracy thinking. Turner states:

Those of us who have fielded the calls and emails from journalists know to prepare for several predictable questions. The first is always about the origins, reporters expect rumor scholars to identify the parties who were in the first exchange of the texts and when and where the conversations took place.

Most of their questions focus on plausibility. If they themselves have been taken in by a text, they are likely to ask the rumor scholar to prove it is false, to prove that one had their stomach pumped after eating a Kentucky Fried Rat. If they personally find the rumor ludicrous, they want an explanation for why any logical human being might draw a different conclusion—how could any sane, smart person believe that the government created the HIV virus as part of an experiment in biological warfare? (2005: 169)

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