Cutting through conspiracies with Occam’s Razor
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Watched a fascinating History Channel program last night on the Kennedy assassination and the flurry of conspiracies that have persisted about it. I found this interesting, because I did get a little caught up in the study of the inconsistencies — courtesy of a silly little do-it-yourself JFK conspiracy “kit” I came across in the library one afternoon — and had figured, in the end, that there were some real problems with the idea of Lee Harvey Oswald as the only shooter, but that we’d probably never really know what happened. I was content to leave it at that, and hadn’t really thought about it for years.
This History Channel show — “The JFK Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy Theories” — takes on on the issues that I remembered from that “investigation”: The so-called magic bullet, the time-frame, Oswald’s marksmanship and so on. And, not to give spoilers, but they creditably lay each of them to rest and leave us with the very clear conclusion that, after all’s said and done, the simple answer is the most likely — that the president was shot down by one lonely and unbalanced young man.
So score one for Occam’s Razor. That short maxim, loosely attributed to Franciscan friar William of Ockham, simply says that you shouldn’t “multiply entities needlessly.” Or, in its homespun paraphrasing, “The simplest answer is usually the best.”
I love this kind of everyman philosophy — it’s about the only kind I can handle. But of course, it’s a law that’s bound to be broken over and over. Not because it’s that difficult to keep to the simple path; by definition, it’s not. But because we’re fallen human beings, and those entities we multiply sometimes have all kinds of attractive qualities for us.
Take the Kennedy assassination, for example. Towards the end of the History Channel show, they criticized the 1991 Oliver Stone movie “JFK” for resurrecting the conspiracy, and offered the psychological explanations about people preferring to invent crazy scenarios about Soviet and mafia plots because it gave more gravitas to Kennedy’s death than the truth.
But I think there’s a regrettable human failing that plays a part — boredom. I remember in my youth how the “Paul McCartney is dead” rumors were swirling around, which in retrospect are bizarre and wildly implausible. At the time, I was ripe for this kind of nonsense. I was young, fairly idle, inclined toward bad science and lacking very structured beliefs or life experience. I don’t say I fell for the thing hook, line and sinker. In fact, if you’ve have forced me to, I would’ve admitted that I didn’t believe that the Beatles singer had died in a car crash and been secretly replaced by a lookalike. Because it’s just dumb to think that he did. But … it was more FUN to think it was true, because then you could go on poring over lyrics and album covers. Similarly, it’s so much more INTERESTING if Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t just a lone shooter, because then you can delve endlessly into a lot of morbid details, feel smarter than everyone else and let your mind wander into all kinds of weird places.
That’s the problem with Occam’s Razor — it doesn’t take into account the enormous draw that fantasy has for us, and how much we want to sculpt the truth so that it captures that salacious, self-centered quality, even if it means believing in wildly improbable things.
Take for example, the whole “DaVinci Code” brush-up a few years ago. I think that Christians were right to be alarmed at it all, and I was one of the crowd that couldn’t believe anyone would fall for such an idiotic mash-up of unrelated facts and complete supposition as thinking that Leonardo DaVinci was leaving secret codes in his paintings to hint to all that Jesus Christ had had children with Mary Magdalene and the descendents still survived. Of course it’s all blasphemous, but it’s also just crazy. But I think that’s why so many people did go for it. It was a way to believe in Jesus but not believe in Him at the same time. It was a way to tick off all the boring Christians but somehow leave the door open to the whole interesting possibility of the miraculous.
It may be pitiful to reflect on our inability to keep things simple, but this is how we are. So often, I’ve seen God extend His mercy to me when I was hopelessly off-track with what I had in mind. Sometimes, there’s a flash epiphany to show me the error of my ways, but more often, I am led along in baby steps until I’m ready to look back and realize the horrors of my own errors. I multiply entities so often, when God is, as St. John of Kronstadt so often puts it, an Incomplex Being.
Well, I’ve wandered from non-Orthodox to Orthodox considerations, as I tend to do. But I may not be totally off-topic here. I thought it was interesting to note in this Wikipedia entry about Occam’s Razor that William of Ockham thought there was only one fact that we needed to keep in mind:
For Ockham, the only truly necessary entity is God; everything else, the whole of creation, is radically contingent through and through.
Well, there’s a bit more simple theology that we can chew on over the holiday.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
Related posts:
- The Crunchy Con is a Crunchy Convert
- For the love of God
- Forgiveness again
- We’ll be right back, after this brief word from St. Anthony the Great
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