The New Power of Conspiracy
Today we post this fascinating commentary on contemporary conspiracy theory by Robyn Creswell, a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at NYU. Robyn's literary criticism has appeared in The Nation amongst other places, while his poetry has featured in Raritan magazine and the Yale Review. Robyn will be speaking at our showing of 'The Power of Nightmares' this Thursday.
We are living in a conspiratorial moment. Just look: the signs are all around you, from the much-too-obvious (The Da Vinci Code) to the semi-sophisticated (“The Israel Lobby”). To make things official, we now have a Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories. The genre is as venerable as the Old Testament, of course. Even God indulged in it, according to Jeremiah, who claimed the original cartel was a group of Jews (“And the Lord said unto me, A conspiracy is found among the men of Judah, and among the inhabitants of Jerusalem”), thus setting a regrettable precedent. In the modern period, great swaths of Americans have been seized with fears of Masonry, Catholics, and Communists. But today’s conspiracy theorists are a new breed.
In the first place, they have Google. Search engines have made E. M. Forester’s lofty, humanist dictum, “only connect,” into an excuse for every kind of demented fantasy. Trying to grasp the nuances of conspiratorial websites and blogs is as tedious as it is futile. The conspirator’s imagination is endlessly resourceful; when his arguments run out, he adds another link. Which is not to say that all conspiracy theories are equally unlikely. In fact, they are becoming more and more plausible. This has less to do with the quality of their ideas than with their aura of expertise, now buttressed by hi-tech. Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” explains that the difference between the McCarthyist right and its anti-Catholic, anti-Masonic forerunners, “may be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the contemporary literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective.” The Internet has made this literature richer and more circumstantial than ever.
Rereading Hofstadter points to another novelty of the present: nowadays, many conspirators are liberals. It only makes sense. First the elections were stolen; then we were blindsided by foreign terrorists; then we were blindsided by neo-cons; and finally the Democrats were shut out, for the first time in half a century, from both elected branches. Beset on one side by an ultra-secretive administration, and on the other by a revolutionary vanguard making threats in languages they didn’t understand, liberals began speculating about how things got so bad and what might be coming next. Conspiratorial thinking of the lone gunman type didn’t come naturally, though. After all, Lionel Trilling once defined liberalism as the imagination of “variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.” So the result has been a particularly high-browed kind of conspiracy theory.
A significant example is Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism (2003). Berman’s central thesis, borrowed from Bernard Lewis and then scrubbed to a higher sheen, is that Ba‘athism and Islamism are two branches of a single impulse, which he calls “Muslim totalitarianism.” The phrase, along with its near twin, “Islamo-Fascism,” has found favor among pundits and politicians. Whereas Lewis claimed that Mulsims were filled with rage at “the West”—conspiratorial thinkers always claim that the thing under attack is a way of life—Berman’s argument is more cerebral. He argues that what Baathists and Islamists have in common is a hatred of liberalism, which he calls “a state of mind,” or “a belief in the many, instead of the one.” His yoking together of Ba‘athists and the Brotherhood (along with the Bolsheviks and Brown Shirts) does not follow the logic of cynicism, in which the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but something closer to paranoia: namely, all my enemies must be friends of each other.
The point is not to minimize the size of the danger, or the challenge, faced by the left. Nor, obviously, is it that we shouldn’t try to find out what Cheney and his pals in the energy industry talked about early in 2001. We always need more information, even if it only confirms what we already suspected. Instead, the point here is stylistic. Forester’s imperative turns out to be too exclusive: it isn’t enough to make connections; making distinctions is important too.
We are living in a conspiratorial moment. Just look: the signs are all around you, from the much-too-obvious (The Da Vinci Code) to the semi-sophisticated (“The Israel Lobby”). To make things official, we now have a Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories. The genre is as venerable as the Old Testament, of course. Even God indulged in it, according to Jeremiah, who claimed the original cartel was a group of Jews (“And the Lord said unto me, A conspiracy is found among the men of Judah, and among the inhabitants of Jerusalem”), thus setting a regrettable precedent. In the modern period, great swaths of Americans have been seized with fears of Masonry, Catholics, and Communists. But today’s conspiracy theorists are a new breed.
In the first place, they have Google. Search engines have made E. M. Forester’s lofty, humanist dictum, “only connect,” into an excuse for every kind of demented fantasy. Trying to grasp the nuances of conspiratorial websites and blogs is as tedious as it is futile. The conspirator’s imagination is endlessly resourceful; when his arguments run out, he adds another link. Which is not to say that all conspiracy theories are equally unlikely. In fact, they are becoming more and more plausible. This has less to do with the quality of their ideas than with their aura of expertise, now buttressed by hi-tech. Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” explains that the difference between the McCarthyist right and its anti-Catholic, anti-Masonic forerunners, “may be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the contemporary literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective.” The Internet has made this literature richer and more circumstantial than ever.
Rereading Hofstadter points to another novelty of the present: nowadays, many conspirators are liberals. It only makes sense. First the elections were stolen; then we were blindsided by foreign terrorists; then we were blindsided by neo-cons; and finally the Democrats were shut out, for the first time in half a century, from both elected branches. Beset on one side by an ultra-secretive administration, and on the other by a revolutionary vanguard making threats in languages they didn’t understand, liberals began speculating about how things got so bad and what might be coming next. Conspiratorial thinking of the lone gunman type didn’t come naturally, though. After all, Lionel Trilling once defined liberalism as the imagination of “variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.” So the result has been a particularly high-browed kind of conspiracy theory.
A significant example is Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism (2003). Berman’s central thesis, borrowed from Bernard Lewis and then scrubbed to a higher sheen, is that Ba‘athism and Islamism are two branches of a single impulse, which he calls “Muslim totalitarianism.” The phrase, along with its near twin, “Islamo-Fascism,” has found favor among pundits and politicians. Whereas Lewis claimed that Mulsims were filled with rage at “the West”—conspiratorial thinkers always claim that the thing under attack is a way of life—Berman’s argument is more cerebral. He argues that what Baathists and Islamists have in common is a hatred of liberalism, which he calls “a state of mind,” or “a belief in the many, instead of the one.” His yoking together of Ba‘athists and the Brotherhood (along with the Bolsheviks and Brown Shirts) does not follow the logic of cynicism, in which the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but something closer to paranoia: namely, all my enemies must be friends of each other.
The point is not to minimize the size of the danger, or the challenge, faced by the left. Nor, obviously, is it that we shouldn’t try to find out what Cheney and his pals in the energy industry talked about early in 2001. We always need more information, even if it only confirms what we already suspected. Instead, the point here is stylistic. Forester’s imperative turns out to be too exclusive: it isn’t enough to make connections; making distinctions is important too.
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