This analysis is as sweeping as it is specific. It had its counterpart in the arguments of the American feminist academic Jodi Dean, concerning the widespread suspicion of official science, which was evident in the alien abduction craze of the 1990s. According to Dean, given the “political and politicized position of science today, funded by corporations and by the military, itself discriminatory and elitist, this attitude toward scientific authority makes sense.” This idea of an alternative truth was strengthened, in Dean’s view, not by the official suppression of information but by its historically unparalleled availability. In the modern world, she argued, “voters, consumers, viewers, and witnesses have no criteria for choosing among policies and verdicts, treatments and claims.”22 As ever, one would be more convinced by Dean’s analysis if one thought that there was any real chance of her living her own life according to such relativist precepts. Perhaps one may imagine her standing stock-still for hours in the middle of a supermarket, paralyzed by her own incapacity for making rational judgments between the thousands of goods on display. And perhaps not.
Arguments like those of Dean and some of the crossovers in conspiracist thinking led the British writer Damian Thompson to suggest the existence in modern society of a trend toward what he labeled counter-knowledge—knowledge in which the proper use of scientific method in the collection and evaluation of evidence is simply absent. This counter-knowledge might be expressed in terms of a belief in bogus therapies, in suffering from nonexistent illnesses, or in embracing unlikely historical theories. “People,” he wrote, “who share a muddled, careless, or deceitful attitude toward gathering evidence often find themselves drawn to each other’s fantasies. If you believe one wrong or strange thing, you are more likely to believe another.”23 This trend was, in Thompson’s view, exacerbated by the moral cowardice of some intellectuals. He recounted a seminar he had attended at Boston University in 1999, at which there was some discussion of the rumor that the American government had devised the AIDS epidemic as a weapon against black Americans. Thompson asked each panelist whether they believed this theory or not. “One of the speakers, Professor Glenn Loury, currently director of the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University,” Thompson reported, “explained that he didn’t want to be ‘disrespectful’ to his own African-American community by giving his real opinion.”24
“Good” and “Bad” Conspiracism
Such relativism is fine (for the relativist) as long as the conspiracist fantasy is concocted by the “right” side and aimed, more or less, at people of whom you disapprove. It becomes much more problematic when the theorist is someone who is seen as being repulsive or dangerous and/or whose targets are people like yourself. Sometimes this difficulty is dealt with by suggesting that the other side’s theories are somehow not quite as well grounded and somehow not quite as true. Mark Fenster, the Florida law professor, worries about just this point. It is slightly mystifying to him, he told an interviewer, that there should have been “at least as many wild conspiracy theories” about the Clinton administration as surfaced about his more right-wing successor George W. Bush. But, he reflected, the Bush accusations seemed “more grounded in logic and fact than those about Clinton, which often seemed so utterly beside the point.”25 The question is, of course, whose point? It is also difficult to see why the idea that Bush should have connived at the 9/11 attacks is “more grounded in logic” than the notion that Bill Clinton used murder to cover up a series of financial scandals.
In fact, as we’ve seen, some of the essential ingredients of conspiracism are common between political factions and over time. Take, for example, brainwashing. Professor Timothy Melley, author of Empire of Conspiracy, has shown how “agency panic”—the fear that individuals can be controlled against their wills by omnipotent outside forces—features in work by both left- and right-wing theorists. In 1957, the American journalist Vance Packard published his massive bestseller The Hidden Persuaders, which purported to show how advertisers and the media were manipulating the American people into having desires and leading lives that they would otherwise have shunned. The following year, the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, wrote Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It [sic], suggesting that Communists were pulling very much the same kind of trick. Hoover’s account, writes Melley, is “remarkably similar to Packard’s.” But, Melley reminds us, “there is a striking political difference between the two texts, and this difference makes their structural resemblance all the more odd.”26
Some of the more politically sensitive conspiracists have been keenly aware of the dangers and anxious to distinguish between their own correct conspiracism and the unjustified theories of the other side. Robin Ramsay, British editor of the long-running journal of conspiracy theory, the Lobster, considers implausible the idea of a “Left-Right fusion . . . an ideologically neutral conspiracy mindset.”27 In his view, “bad” conspiracism is essentially aimed at scapegoats, such as Jews and Communists, while the target of “good” conspiracism is almost invariably authority: the state itself. “The Right,” says Ramsay, “is interested in conspiracies . . . against the state . . . The liberal Left, on the other hand, is chiefly interested in conspiracies committed by the state.”28
Ramsay’s distinction does not survive scrutiny. John T. Flynn’s right-wing conspiracism was aimed at the state as represented by the treacherous Roosevelt, and at Owen Lattimore, the supposedly infiltrating pro-Mao Communist. Right-wing U.S. militia movements are both antistate and anti-minority. Liberal-left defenders of the Soviet Union (and there were many) swallowed the idea of an international gang of infinitely wicked Trotskyites attempting to subvert the world’s first socialist state.
What we might call Ramsay’s Problem is deliciously evident in his musings on banking and Judaism. The radical leftist is impatient with the anti-Semite’s attempt to bring the Jews into the equation, not least because it muddies the waters. “The ‘Jewish conspiracy’ nonsense,” writes Ramsay, “has served for half a century in this country to make people nervous about researching the power of finance capital in this society,” presumably lest they be associated with the far right.29 Ramsay continues, “There are bankers ripping us off, but few of them are Jewish.” This is a flimsy objection to someone else’s theory. What if many of the bankers—a third, say, or a half—were indeed Jewish? Would that constitute prima facie evidence that, in addition to the bankers being part of a conspiracy, their Judaism was a significant aspect of their quest for money and power? Attitudes may have changed since Ramsay’s hopeful distinction was made. Ten years later, substitute “Zionist” or “pro-Israeli” for “Jewish” and you will create a banking conspiracy that almost every modern-day conspiracist can agree upon.
But Ramsay’s desire to avoid contamination hints at an important conclusion. You may argue, as some do, that “understanding why normal people believe weird things is harder but ultimately more fruitful than trying to disprove these weird beliefs by dogmatic insistence on the proper events”30 and this book certainly seeks to understand. But without the “dogmatic insistence,” it is hard to see why the beliefs are “weird.” Aren’t they just alternative narratives, in a world full of blind alleys, spin, and disinformation? The trouble here, of course, is that it means taking the appalling rough with the playful smooth, the professional anti-Semite with the recreational Templarist.
It is worth remembering, too, that almost every conspiracy theory, if believed, has a victim. The Duke of Edinburgh may be rich and grumpy, but that doesn’t mean that the repeated charge that he was responsible for ordering the murder of his son’s ex-wife is any less painful or damaging. Whether or not the charges are true will matter to him, to the people close to him, and to history itself. The accusations against Leon Trotsky and his followers still reverberated around the global left forty years later.
If all narratives are relative, then we are lost. Widespread anti-Semitic fantasies may have reflected the plight
of Germans, may even have been their “soul’s version of the truth” in the post-1918 period, but they were still fantasies, and the failure to counter them, or to see the fantasies as themselves creating terrible political realities, proved totally catastrophic. Relativism doesn’t care to distinguish between the scholarly and the slap-dash, the committed researcher and the careless loudmouth, the scrupulous and the demagogic. For that reason, it is hard to see how an insistence on “proper events” can ever be said to be dogmatic, or a refusal to insist can be anything other than treacherous. Spike Lee is entirely wrong.
Hysteria
This book has, I hope, dogmatically insisted, and now arrives at the point where it seeks finally to account for the phenomenon of conspiracism. The examples used in the book, which were not chosen for their similarities but for their outward differences, suggest that the answer does not lie entirely in power relations, the abundance or scarcity of information, or the experience of disenfranchisement—a word which has become ubiquitous in recent years, and seems now merely to mean not getting your way.
In what sense were or are Connecticut professionals, West Country hippies, Liberal Democrat MPs, the middle-class members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, BBC TV drama producers, Senator Joe McCarthy, Dan Brown, Dudley Collard QC, Mohamed Al Fayed, and Alfred Rosenberg disenfranchised? In what way does their own experience of powerless-ness inform those who believe, no matter what, that the British royal family executes its more awkward members, that Robert Kennedy had a poisoned suppository inserted into Marilyn Monroe before being assassinated by a Manchurian Candidate, or that the Catholic Church has for two millennia been suppressing the truth about the secret bloodline of Christ?
It isn’t dispossession or capitalism. State ownership in Russia was no guarantee against the most fabulous of conspiracy theories. As to Mark Fenster’s “withering civil society,” it must be recognized that conspiracism flourishes in notoriously unwithered civil societies. Arab countries, beloved by many in the West for their unspoiled and therefore more authentic social relations, are rife with popular conspiracism. This isn’t to say that such factors are unimportant. We’ve seen how, at certain times, conspiracy theories become particularly attractive to the losers in any process of political or social change. But from their similarities, it does look as though conspiracy theories somehow fill a need that societies, groups, or individuals feel more or less intensely at different moments.
In Oxford in 1963, days before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, American historian Richard Hofstadter gave a lecture titled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Hofstadter’s immediate target was the American right of post-McCarthyites, who seemed still to see a Red under every bed. Hofstadter called their style paranoid because “no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”31 The same psychological property, he argued, was present in Moscow in the 1930s, where the trials demonstrated “a wildly imaginative and devastating exercise in the paranoid style.”32 Overall, Hofstadter concluded, “the feeling of persecution is central.”33
That conspiracism is, at bottom, a symptom of paranoia subsequently became an anti-conspiracist cliché, and it’s easy to see why. In modern society, paranoia seems omnipresent. Most journalists and many writers will have received letters from members of the public, often long and containing diagrams, detailing how this or that agency or relative has been interfering with their brainwaves. It is hard not to be reminded of these communications when reading about the queen’s supposed remarks to Princess Diana’s butler Paul Burrell to the effect that there were “powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge” (as if Her Majesty would deliver herself of such an obvious contradiction), or when looking at the reaction to Dr. David Kelly’s final e-mails, sent hours before his death, in which he wrote of “many dark actors playing games.” Someone is trying to get us.
The idea that supposedly rational arguments about how big bad things happen originate not in the real world but in our internal selves—that they are the outer expression of inner problems—was explored by Elaine Showalter in her 1997 book Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. Showalter looked at a series of moral and health panics that had erupted at various times in Britain and America, including ritual child abuse, Gulf War syndrome, and CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome). In them, she discerned common patterns.
Skeptical about all these phenomena, Showalter argues that what we are in fact looking at is hysteria, the external manifestation of repressed feelings. “Hysteria has not died,” she writes. “It has simply been relabeled for a new era . . . Contemporary hysterical patients blame external sources—a virus, sexual molestation, chemical warfare, satanic conspiracy, alien infiltration—for psychic problems.”34 In the era of mass media and instant communication, these hysterias find traction with other people looking for explanations for their feelings and symptoms and “multiply rapidly and uncontrollably.”35
One of Showalter’s pieces of evidence may cast some light on an under-remarked aspect of conspiracism—its gender. She points out that a Harvard Medical School study discovered that 80 percent of chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers were women, as were 90 percent of those who, usually under hypnosis, supposedly recovered hidden memories of sexual abuse, and two-thirds of those reporting alien abduction.36 This, together with the number of times I have been told “My husband/boyfriend will be very interested in your book” prompts the thought that conspiracy theories may be hysterias for men.
Unsurprisingly, Showalter’s analysis was unpopular. In nonclinical usage, “hysteria” connotes a somewhat ridiculous lack of control rather than a genuine psychological condition. Furthermore, to the person who believes that her son’s all-too-real autism must be explicable, and that the explanation must be external interference in the shape of a state-sponsored measles jab, Showalter will seem insulting. Such psychologizing didn’t find favor among sociologists either. To Peter Knight, Showalter’s thesis was something of a conspiracy theory itself. “The figuration of the spread of paranoid thinking as an ‘epidemic’ or a ‘plague,’ ” he charged, “likewise renders it an inscrutable and virtually unstoppable force that infiltrates innocent minds.”37 This, it seems to me, is a misreading of Showalter’s attempt to explain how we create or borrow stories for ourselves. In fact, Showalter was concerned to argue that this impulse to grasp half-baked and damaging but attractive notions of why the world is as it is could be replaced through emotional literacy. “Men and women, therapists and patients,” she concluded, “will need courage to face the hidden fantasies, myths, and anxieties that make up the current hysterical crucible; we must look into our own psyches rather than to invisible enemies, devils, and alien invaders for the answers.”38
About Fashion
In her work on hysteria, Showalter argues that “like all narratives,” her mass hysterias have “their own conventions, stereotypes, and structures.”39 The more the specific thesis is talked about, the more people feel that they have had the same experience or are suffering the same symptoms, the more voluminous the literature becomes, the more aggressive in defense of their illness the victims become, and the more the idea is accepted into the mainstream. Eventually, however, the panic dies down, to be replaced fairly soon by another, similar outbreak, though with a completely different focus. The same is true of conspiracy theories. The set of charges and allegations surrounding the 1984 Hilda Murrell death were, as we’ve seen, highly specific in type to the period between 1980 and 1987. During that time, a large number of theories, or beliefs, or dramas, focused precisely on a supposed matrix composed of the nuclear industry, American and British intelligence, and semi-corrupt politicians. After Mikhail Gorbachev’s summit with Ronald Reagan in Iceland in late 1986, the nuclear-matrix conspiracy all but ended.
Based, as they supposedly are, on the uncovering of hidden truths, conspiracy theories should not be subject to fashion, and yet the
y clearly are. As a result, one suspects that conspiracy theories also have a social function and that they could be classic examples of what the biologist Richard Dawkins has called “memes”: ideas that replicate themselves because of the utility of sharing notions but that are genuinely felt. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it was extremely rare to find someone outside the Arab press arguing that there had been a cover-up. That had changed by 2006, and what had altered was not, I would argue, the presentation of any new facts but the widespread social acceptability of blaming the U.S. administration.
The Triumph of Narrative
While I was writing this book, I went on a visit to the University of Winchester to give a talk about conspiracism and The Da Vinci Code. At dinner, I found myself sitting with a senior member of the drama department. I told him that one of the things I found interesting about conspiracy theories was the need for a narrative that they suggested. “Ah, yes,” he said. “You should read Mamet.”
This was excellent advice. The American playwright and screenwriter’s fourth collection of essays almost starts with the words, “It is in our nature to dramatize.” By this, Mamet doesn’t mean that we are all a bit histrionic sometimes, but rather that we need to construct, or have constructed, dramas and stories for ourselves. Therapists and psychoanalysts know the truth of this. Their patients, like the rest of us, invariably have a story about inexplicable or mundane aspects of their lives. Our illnesses are due to stress or genetics or that day we went out for a walk and it was cold. Adopted children very often create a backstory of their real parents, and unadopted children have fantasies of their “real” mothers and fathers. As Mamet points out, we will have a story even if it means giving characteristics to the elemental. So “the weather is impersonal, and we both understand it and exploit it as dramatic, i.e., having a plot, in order to understand its meaning for the hero, which is to say, for ourselves.”40
Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History Page 41