Practical Wisdom in a Conspiratorial Age

• In Event: Ancient Concepts in Contemporary Political Thought

Abstract

Among the threats to democracy today is the use of misinformation by anti-democratic elites as a means of securing and retaining power. These tactics depend upon some significant portion of the citizenry accepting and spreading this misinformation. This is not a new challenge; indeed, as far back as The Republic, Plato warned of the potential of democracies to devolve into tyrannies through demagogues’ use of flattery, fear, and lies. However, new communication technologies combined with significant polarization have helped manifest this old threat in new and especially challenging ways. This paper turns to the hermeneutical tradition’s twentieth-century revival of phronesis as a potential resource against the threat of misinformation, especially as seen in the spread of conspiracy theories.

This paper argues that meeting the challenge of misinformation and conspiracy theories requires, among other things, fostering phronesis (practical wisdom) as a civic capacity of making contextualized judgments about ends and means. Practical wisdom so conceptualized equips citizens to be comfortable in situations of uncertainty and complexity and so to resist fear-mongering, melodramatic narratives, and reputational pressures, thereby bolstering their immunity to the appeal of conspiracy theories. I make this case by: first, turning to the literature on conspiracy theories to gain insights on how and why they spread; second, examining the twentieth-century revival of the Aristotelian tradition of practical wisdom by Hans Georg Gadamer; and finally, extending and revising this tradition to meet the new challenges of conspiracy theories today.

Author

• Darren Walhof, Grand Valley State University