by Umberto Eco
Naturally, all neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic groups are of Jesuit inspiration. There were Jesuits behind Presidents Nixon and Clinton; the Jesuits brought about the Oklahoma City bombing; and the Jesuits inspired Cardinal Francis Spellman, who fomented the Vietnam War, which brought $220 million to the Jesuit Federal Bank. Nor, of course, can we forget the role of Opus Dei, which the Jesuits control through the Knights of Malta.
I have to pass over many other conspiracies. But you no longer need to ask why people read Dan Brown.
2008
Don’t believe in coincidences
Someone has said that Berlusconi had, and still has, two kinds of enemies—Communists and investigating magistrates—and has pointed out that the recent administrative elections have been won by a (former) Communist and a (former) investigating magistrate. Others have noted that in 1991, when the prime minister, Bettino Craxi, on the day of the referendum on electoral reform, invited Italians to go to the beach rather than going to vote, the referendum had remarkable success and marked the beginning of Craxi’s political decline. One could go on: Berlusconi gets into power in March 1994 and in November the rivers Po, Tanaro, and many other tributaries burst their banks and flood the provinces of Cuneo, Asti, and Alessandria; Berlusconi returns to power in May 2008 and within a year Aquila is struck by an earthquake.
All are amusing coincidences but have absolutely no value, except for the parallel between Berlusconi and Craxi. The game of coincidences has fascinated paranoiacs and schemers from time immemorial, but you can do anything you want with coincidences, and especially with dates.
A host of coincidences has been identified in relation to the attack on the Twin Towers, and a few years ago, in Scienza e Paranormale, Paolo Attivissimo cited a series of numerological speculations based on September 11. To quote a few: New York City has 11 letters; Afghanistan has 11 letters; Ramsin Yuseb, the terrorist who had threatened to destroy the towers, has 11 letters; George W. Bush has 11 letters; the Twin Towers form an 11; New York was the eleventh state to join the United States; the first aircraft to crash into the towers was Flight 11, which carried 92 passengers, and 9+2 = 11; Flight 77, which also crashed into the towers, carried 65 passengers, and 6+5 = 11; the date 9/11 is the same as the American emergency telephone number, 911, whose constituent numbers add up to 11. The total number of victims in all aircraft was 254, whose constituent numbers add up to 11; September 11 is the 254th day of the year, whose constituent numbers add up to 11.
Unfortunately, New York has 11 letters only if we add City; Afghanistan has 11 letters, yet the hijackers came not from there but from Saudi Arabia, which also has 11 letters, as well as Egypt, Lebanon, and the Arab Emirates, which don’t; Ramsin Yuseb has 11 letters, but if, instead of Yuseb, it is transliterated Yussef, the game wouldn’t have worked; George W. Bush has 11 letters only if we add the middle initial; the towers formed an 11 but also a 2 in roman numerals; Flight 77 didn’t crash into the towers but into the Pentagon, and it carried not 65 but 59 passengers; the total number of victims wasn’t 254 but 265. And so on.
Other coincidences circulating on the Internet? Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846, Kennedy was elected in 1946. Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960. Both had wives who lost a child while they were resident at the White House. Both were struck in the head by a southerner on a Friday. Lincoln’s secretary was called Kennedy, and Kennedy’s was called Lincoln. Lincoln’s successor was Johnson (born in 1808), while Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, was born in 1908.
John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, was born in 1838, and Lee Harvey Oswald in 1939. Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre; Kennedy was shot in a Lincoln automobile manufactured by Ford.
Lincoln was shot in a theater and his assassin went to hide in a depository; Kennedy’s assassin shot from a depository and went to hide in a theater. Both Booth and Oswald were killed before they could be brought to trial.
2011
The conspiracy on conspiracies
Massimo Polidoro, one of the more active members of CICAP (the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Pseudosciences) and of the quarterly magazine Query, has published a book titled Rivelazioni: Il libro dei segreti e dei complotti (Revelations: The Book of Secrets and Conspiracies). It is one of many books he’s written about the hoaxes that circulate around the mass media and even in the heads of people whom we generally regard as responsible. I imagine that with such an intriguing title, Polidoro hopes to attract those with a love for every kind of secret, people about whom John Chadwick, the man who deciphered the Mycenaean script called Linear B, said: “The urge to discover secrets is deeply ingrained in human nature: even the least curious mind is roused by the promise of sharing knowledge withheld from others.”
There is, of course, a certain difference between deciphering a script that had a meaning for someone in the past and imagining that the Americans didn’t land on the Moon, that September 11 was a plot by Bush and indeed the Jews, or that a Da Vinci Code exists. But it’s for the followers of this second sect that Polidoro is writing. His short chapters, with their affable tone, start off most promisingly, though in the end they tell us that the conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination, that Hitler’s true end, that the secrets of Rennes-le-Château, and that Jesus’s marriage to Mary Magdalene are or were no more than hoaxes.
Why do hoaxes work? Because they promise a knowledge that others don’t have, and for other reasons that Polidoro draws from Karl Popper’s famous essay on the conspiracy theory of society. And he cites the studies of Richard Hofstadter, according to whom the taste for conspiracies has to be interpreted by applying the categories of psychiatry to social thought. They are two aspects of paranoia. Except that someone suffering from psychiatric paranoia sees the whole world as conspiring against him, whereas the social paranoiac thinks that the persecution by hidden powers is directed against his own group or nation or religion. The social paranoiac is, I would say, more dangerous than the psychiatrically paranoid because he sees his obsessions shared by millions of other people and believes he is acting in a disinterested manner against the conspiracy. This explains much that is happening in the world today, as well as in the past.
And Polidoro also quotes Pier Paolo Pasolini, who thought conspiracy excites because it frees us from the burden of having to face the truth. Now, we might feel indifferent about the world being full of conspiracy theorists: if anyone thinks the Americans didn’t land on the Moon, then too bad for them. But recent studies by Daniel Jolley and Karen Douglas conclude that “exposure to information supporting conspiracy theories reduced participants’ intentions to engage in politics, relative to participants who were given information refuting conspiracy theories.” If people are convinced that world history is managed by secret societies, that the Bilderberg Group are Illuminati, that they are establishing a new world order, then what can I do? Give up, and despair. And so every conspiracy theory directs the public imagination to perceived dangers, distracting it from the real threats. As Noam Chomsky once suggested, imagining almost a conspiracy of conspiracy theories, those who reap the greater benefit from imaginings about a supposed conspiracy are the very institutions that the conspiracy theory seeks to damage. That is to say, by imagining it was Bush who caused the collapse of the Twin Towers to justify his intervention in Iraq, we become involved in hallucinations and stop analyzing the true methods and reasons for Bush’s intervention in Iraq, and the influence the neocons had on him and on his policies.
Which might lead us to suspect that it was George W. Bush himself who spread the news about the Bush conspiracy against the Twin Towers. But let us not be so conspiratorial.
2014
On Mass Media
Radiophonic hypnosis
In a recent article, I described my feelings as a young boy of an evening during World War II, listening on the radio to songs, to Radio London, to messages for the partisans. Those memories became impressed upon my mind, and rema
in vivid and magical. Will a child of today retain such memories of television newscasts of the Gulf War, or of Kosovo?
I asked myself these questions last week when, during the Prix Italia, we listened again to excerpts from radio broadcasts over the past seventy years. The answer came from a famous distinction made by Marshall McLuhan, anticipated by many who had written about radio, including Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard, and Rudolf Arnheim. The distinction was between hot and cold media. A hot medium occupies a single sense, and leaves no space for interaction: it has a hypnotic grip. A cold medium occupies different senses, but reaches you in fragmentary fashion, and requires your conscious involvement in order to fill in, connect up, elaborate what you receive. And so, according to McLuhan, a conference or a film, which you follow seated and passive, is hot; a debate or an evening watching television is cold; a high-definition photograph is hot, whereas a comic strip, which represents reality in a series of sketches, is cold.
When one of the very first radio plays was broadcast, the audience at home was invited to listen to it in the dark. And I recall some evening broadcasts of the weekly comedy, when my father would sit in an armchair, lights dimmed, his ear glued to the loudspeaker, and listen in silence for two hours. I sat curled up on his knee and, though I didn’t understand much of what was going on, was a part of the ritual. This was the power of radio.
Theodor Adorno was among the first to complain that music, arriving in abundance through the radio, was losing its almost liturgical role, becoming a mere commodity. But Adorno was thinking how the music lover’s taste can be corrupted, not how an adolescent first experiences music. I remember my intense pleasure when, thanks to radio, I discovered classical music and, checking the programs in the radio magazine, would tune in to one of those short interludes when a Chopin polonaise was listed, or a single movement of a symphony.
Is radio like this today, and will it be like this tomorrow? Radio is used increasingly as a background noise, comedy is watched on television, music is downloaded via the Internet. Radio no longer has a hypnotic effect on drivers who listen to it on the highway—and that’s a good thing, otherwise they’d collide with a truck. Instead, they hop from channel to channel as the signal fades and they have to search for another station. And you have to follow the prattle of Jessica from Piacenza or Salvatore from Messina.
Fortunately radios cost less by the day, and are more beautiful, looking like samurai. It’s true they’re used more for playing records or cassettes than for searching out stations in mysterious cities called Tallinn, Riga, and Hilversum, as we used to do on our shortwave radios. But the history of mass media doesn’t allow prophecies. Perhaps unforeseen technological innovations will bring radio back to the core of our experiences, and who knows if these fascinating ornaments hold in store new forms of “heat.”
2000
There are two Big Brothers
At an international conference on privacy held recently in Venice, there were several mentions of the television program Big Brother, though Stefano Rodotà, president of the Italian Personal Data Protection Authority, suggested from the outset that this program didn’t in itself violate anyone’s privacy.
There’s no doubt that it tickles the voyeuristic fancy of the viewer, who enjoys watching several individuals put into the unnatural situation of pretending they like each other, though in fact they’re at each other’s throats. People are heartless and always have been: they enjoyed the sight of Christians being torn apart by lions, or gladiators walking into the arena knowing their survival depended on the death of their companion; people paid to gape at the deformity of fat women at a carnival, to see dwarfs being kicked around by a circus clown, and watch a condemned man being executed in the public square. All things being equal, Big Brother is more respectable, and not just because nobody dies. The only risk to participants is psychological disturbance—no worse than what led them to take part in the broadcast. The fact is that Christians would have preferred to remain praying in the catacombs, the gladiator would have been happier if he’d been a Roman patrician, the dwarf if he’d had the physique of Rambo, the fat woman if she’d been Brigitte Bardot, the convict if he’d been pardoned. Yet the contestants on Big Brother take part voluntarily and would be willing to pay for what they regard as the paramount value, namely, public exposure and celebrity.
The morally harmful aspect of Big Brother lies elsewhere, in the very title that someone has dreamed up for the game. Many viewers may have failed to understand that Big Brother is an allegory invented by George Orwell in his novel 1984. Big Brother was a dictator (his name evokes the Little Father—in other words, Stalin) who, alone or with a few close comrades, could spy on all his subjects minute by minute, wherever they were. An appalling situation, reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, where prison guards could spy on inmates without their knowing.
With Orwell’s Big Brother, just a few people could spy on everyone. Whereas in the television version, it’s everyone who can spy on just a few people. And so we’ll get used to thinking of Big Brother as something democratic and entertaining. Yet in doing so we’ll forget that behind us, while we are watching the program, there is the real Big Brother, the one about whom conferences on privacy are focused. The real Big Brother is made up of the various organs of power that are watching when we click on an Internet site, when we pay by credit card in a hotel, when we buy something by mail order, when we are diagnosed with an illness in a hospital, and even when we wander around a supermarket monitored by closed-circuit television. We know that unless these practices are strictly controlled, a staggering quantity of information about us will be gathered, making us entirely transparent and depriving us of all privacy and confidentiality.
As we watch Big Brother on television, we are like a spouse innocently flirting in a bar unaware that the other spouse is involved in a seriously adulterous affair. The title Big Brother therefore helps us not to notice, or to forget, that someone at that very moment is laughing behind our backs.
2000
Roberta
Roberta and the ruling classes
To get some idea about Big Brother, it’s enough to watch it for two or three Thursday evenings, as I did. These are the days of reckoning. I tried connecting up via the Internet and saw in low definition a tattooed female in underpants, frying an egg. I held on for a while, then found something better to do. But every so often you catch glimpses of the average Italian mind, which might be of interest, at least sociologically. Take the case of the infamous Roberta, who, loudmouthed and extroverted, had been rejected by a united Italy, reducing the house to a morgue.
In her desperate attempts to make herself hateful, Roberta dared suggest she was a cut above her companions, most of them butchers, since she regularly dined with art dealers. In response, not only her companions in misadventure but also television viewers decided she belonged to the ruling classes and was therefore to be castigated. Nobody paused to think that members of the ruling classes do not dine with art dealers, unless she was referring to the president of Christie’s. Rather, they summon art dealers to their homes to examine a 1.8-meter-high Raphael or a ninth-century Russian icon.
Why we are happy to let artists take drugs
Someone recently wrote a letter to Corriere della Sera asking why we are scandalized if a cyclist or soccer player shoots up with some stimulant, whereas we’ve always been fascinated by great artists who smoked opium or sought inspiration through LSD or cocaine. At first sight the question is reasonable: if we regard an athlete’s victory as unmerited, then why should we admire a poem that comes not from the poet’s genius but from a substance taken perhaps intravenously?
Yet the difference between sporting rigor and artistic broad-mindedness conceals a deep truth, and this instinctive public attitude tells us much more than any theory of aesthetics. What stirs our admiration for sporting achievement is not a ball that goes into the goal or a bicycle that crosses the finish line before
another, since both are phenomena that physics can explain perfectly well. What we find interesting and admirable is a human being who does something better than we ever could. If soccer balls were fired into the goal by a cannon, soccer would lose all interest.
In art, on the other hand, we admire the work first, and the physical and mental state of the person who has created it is only secondary. So much so that we find great beauty in works by someone of low morality, we are touched by Achilles and Ulysses even if we don’t know whether Homer actually existed, and The Divine Comedy would still be miraculous if we were told that a monkey had chanced to type it on a computer. We even look upon certain objects produced by nature or accident as being works of art, and we are moved by ruins, which, as such, have not been created by any exceptional human being. When confronted by the magic of the work, we are prepared to ignore the way in which the artist arrived at it.