Doing for idiotic conspiracy theories what Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science did for idiotic alternative medicine, David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories is a surgical dissection of what has unfortunately become one of the defining philosophies of the day.

Most of us have been out and about when an otherwise normal-sounding bloke – it’s always a bloke – drops his voice and puts forward an absurd but somehow plausible sounding conspiracy theory. You know the drill, depending on your generation and geographical location – JFK and Martin Luther King were murdered by the FBI; LBJ and the Mafia; Roosevelt and Churchill knew all about the attack on Pearl Harbor before it happened; Lady Di was assassinated by MI5; Mossad was behind 9/11, that kind of thing. You know it’s nonsense but through a combination of circular logic, evasiveness and downright brazen misdirection, somehow you can’t pin the bugger down. Worse in trying to do so, he implies you are thick, painfully naive, or perhaps even part of the cover-up yourself. Voodoo Histories is the counter weapon you need.

As Aaronovitch points out, real conspiracies do exist, but they are usually “dogged by failure and discovery”: President Nixon couldn’t even order a break-in without being caught out, despite being the most powerful man in the world at the time. What Aaronovitch does is to point out the gaping holes in some of the most widely believed conspiracies of the past hundred years one by one. As with Goldacre’s book, the results are very, very funny indeed. His chapter on the theories that inspired The Da Vinci Code, entitled “Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Holy Shit”, is particularly funny…and we all know someone who could do with reading that before being allowed out on their own again.

No level of debunking seems enough to put hardcore proponents off though. They simply move the goalposts and it is this flexibility to change the story that sees conspiracy theories adapt to the age in which they are propagated. It is the Keyser Soze defence,  ie “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled off was to convince the world he doesn’t exist”. You simply can’t pin these people down. In the Holy Shit chapter, we find the authors openly declaring that in order to prove their theories they needed to go “beyond normal scholarship”, i.e. beyond the need for mere evidence and into the world of speculation. And they said it with a straight face. And people bought it. All it needs is one puff of evidence for the house of cards to come tumbling down – unless you are academically utterly shameless, which these people patently are.

As well as neatly and comprehensively puncturing some dearly held conspiracies Voodoo Histories also explores reasons why people want to believe them in the first place. These include living in a less ordered society where any train of thought or belief system goes; the fear of a loss of control over one’s own life in an ever more arbitrary world; plus a bit of conscious mischief making and a desire to come across as more worldly than all the other “sheeple”

Conspiracy theories are “theology disguised as investigation”. It can be painful to accept “that life is chaotic and random and nobody is in charge. Drive into a wall, and you will die, even if you are a princess”. Some seem to find it “more soothing to fantasise that there is a force controlling the universe, even if that force is demonic”. Aaronovitch argues persuasively that conspiracy theories are a psychological defence against the indifference of others, a psychological need by some to believe we still live in an ordered world rather than a random, chaotic one. The alternative to dark forces controlling our lives is that no-one actually cares about you and bad things happen for no reason. To them Dark Forces are preferable to no forces.

So far so funny, but as with the debunking of hokey alternative medicine in Bad Science there is a serious and seriously detrimental side to this rubbish. Conspiracy theories are not always harmless: the Protocols of The Elders of Zion provided the Nazis with a warrant for genocide, and are still taken as gospel in much of the Middle East today. The western, (mostly left leaning unfortunately) peddlars of 9/11 and 7/7 myths are also guilty of serious racism. As Aaronovitch observes, what is interesting about these theories is their holders’ “absolute contempt” for the idea that Arabs might have brought the Twin Towers on their own. Occidentalism is thus paradoxically reinforced by those nominally opposed to it.  In the same way that the idiotic quackery of alternative medicine provides cover for horrendous people to prey on developing world tragedies such as the HIV crisis in South Africa, so peurile behaviour in the West covers for monstrous uses and abuses of pseudo history all over the world.

The book is not a call for total belief in the word of government and unquestioning acceptance of what we are told. It is precisely the opposite of those things, it is a call to examine all evidence with a genuinely open and rigourously analytical mind. Voodoo Histories is a plea for rationality over woolly thinking and credulity and Aaronovitch deserves his place alongside such varied luminaries as Ben Goldacre, Nick Cohen, Andrew Anthony, Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as proponents of the Enlightenment as it fights a rearguard action against nonsense. Very entertaining.

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