What does Richard Hofstadter mean by, "the paranoid style?" Discuss with reference to the examples used by Hofstadter and at least one other example of your own choosing.
Back in 1964, social scientist Richard Hofstadter published an article in Harper's Magazine with the title "The paranoid style in American politics." In it, Hofstadter was describing what he saw as a clearly distinctive sub-culture characteristic of American political discourse, and one that was in danger of undermining the effectiveness of democracy in the US. He may as well have been talking about the rise (and recent partial fall) of the Republicans from the mid-1990s to the first decade of the 21st century.
According to Hofstadter, the paranoid style "has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content," and in the essay he quotes examples from a Texas newspaper article of 1855 to a manifesto of the Populist Party in 1895, to a speech delivered by infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1951. Were Hofstadter to write today he could have easily added quotes from George W., Rummy, Dick C. and Karl Rove, to mention a few.
It is astounding to see from Hofstadter's essay how deep the historical roots of American intolerance and bigotry really are. He chronicles the campaign against the "Illuminati" (an offshoot of the Enlightenment movement) during the 18th century, the anti-Masonic rhetoric emanating from pulpits all over the country at about the same time, the "Jesuit threat" popular among paranoids of the first half of the 19th century, and the anti-Catholic sentiments connected to the depression of 1893.
The style of attack is always the same, mixing faux patriotism and religious fervor. Here is a quote from an article in the San Francisco Chronicle of 31 July 1964, where an official of the John Birch Society rails against United Air Lines because the company dared to put a U.N. emblem on their airplanes (they don't anymore): "We hate to see a corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist Conspiracy." (Incidentally, if you find yourself agreeing with this statement, you may be reading the wrong blog.)
S.B.F. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, is quoted by Hofstadter as saying (back in 1835) that "A conspiracy exists ... we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, our armies." He wasn't talking about Islamic terrorists, he was referring to the all-powerful Jesuits and their covert projects to undermine The American Way of Life. During the previous century, the Illuminati had been accused of making tea that caused abortion, while in the 1890s the American Protective Association alleged an international Catholic conspiracy and went so far as circulating a bogus papal encyclical that called on American Catholics to exterminate "all heretics" by a certain date in 1893 (it didn't happen). That sounds a lot like The Protocols of Zion, another bogus tract used to attack yet another minority using the same paranoid "arguments." History truly does repeat itself.
Hofstadter identified the success of the paranoid style in politics with the exploitation of a feeling of being dispossessed that some people apparently retain even when they are the majority and control the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government. The paranoid rhetoric is often cast in apocalyptic terms, us-vs-them and the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it. For example, Hofstadter cites candy manufacturer Robert H. Welch Jr., who took over McCarthy's mantle, as saying in 1951 that "Time is running out ... Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack." Needless to say, October 1952 came and went, and the world is still here. Though that hasn't stopped countless other similar predictions by religious and political fanatics, one of the most recent ones focusing on 6 June 2006 (you know, 6-6-6, the mark of the Beast!).
Hofstadter's essay may also contain the explanation for the very recent Republican debacle in this week's elections: "Since the enemy is being thought of as totally evil ... he must be totally eliminated ... This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began." This is why George W. Bush's base - incredibly - felt alienated recently, because the President-and-Savior-of-the-World has been unable to deliver on his promises of banning abortion, passing a constitutional amendment against gay marriage, and generally rid the world of infidels, atheists, terrorists and anybody else who wishes to undermine the project of America as a Christian nation.
That is why common sense, finally, prevailed the other day, and American voters told their elected representatives that they have had enough of paranoid politics - at least for a while.
2.Apply Jameson's use of, "cognitive mapping," to a conspiracy theory of your choosing. How convincing is Jameson's explanation of conspiracy theories?.
Residents of Hattatba, Algeria examine blood-stained clothes after armed attackers killed six people in their village in March 1999.
Since 1992, the civil war ravaging Algeria has claimed at least 100,000 lives. Through armed raids, village massacres, terrorist bombings and weekly kidnappings and assassinations, the war has victimized Algerian society as a whole, from the urban elites to the village poor. While the body count continues to rise, the war remains shrouded in a haze of uncertainty and lack of information. The violence, which has often targeted intellectuals and foreigners, has largely driven the international press out of the country. The military government exercises strict control over the local media, routinely censoring and suspending private newspapers in the name of state security. As a result, Algerian citizens at home and abroad must rely on either official press releases or informal accounts, both of which are of dubious accuracy.
Given this informational opacity, the proliferation of violence has generated a proliferation of conspiracy theories that seek to explain the violence by pointing a finger at one or another known agents. While the putative actors in the war--the state military and insurgent Islamist forces--are acknowledged, their motives and true identities are widely questioned. Circulating across the globe by word-of-mouth, scholarly journals and Internet list-serves, conspiracy theories question "Qui tue?" (or "Who is really killing?") and respond with answers as diverse as the Algerian government itself, the global Islamic fundamentalist terrorist network, French neo-colonial interests and, of course, the ever-present Central Intelligence Agency.
This article examines how such totalizing theories seek to provide transparent accounts of the opaque military actions and legal operations of the civil war. In particular, it explores how the multimedia circulation of conspiracy rhetoric creates a transnational space of vernacular knowledge production that challenges, and yet paradoxically legitimates, official information networks.
The Logic of Conspiracy
"A good conspiracy is an unprovable one....If you can prove it, they must have screwed up somewhere along the line."(1)
Conspiracy theories rely upon a particular narrative form that prioritizes internal consistency and coherence over perfect correspondence to some referential, observable truth. Since they do not operate according to a scientific method, dictums of falsifiability by external verification (a la Karl Popper) do not apply.(2) Instead, conspiracy theories can only be disproved through the demonstration of their logical inconsistency or through the elaboration of a further conspiracy theory that encompasses the original. Conspiracy paradigms tend to reproduce themselves in ever-expanding, grand unified theories.(3)
Conspiracy theories thus dovetail with a number of other communicative practices, including rumor,(4) folklore(5) and witchcraft accusations.(6) However, in making these connections, I am not implying that conspiracy thinking constitutes some pre-modern survival or anti-rational atavism.(7) Rather, as Evans-Pritchard showed for Azande witchcraft accusations, conspiracy theories do not question the fact that trees fall and that people are killed; they speculate only on why that particular tree fell or why this particular village was massacred. Indeed, the conspiracy genre presupposes and even fetishizes highly "modern" categories of causality and agency. It searches incessantly for causal chains linking the actions of intentional agents. It denies structural indeterminacy and inscrutability. As such, the conspiracy genre represents a completely modern phenomenon with a hypertrophied, rather than atrophied, rational structure.
As a contemporary hermeneutic, however, conspiracy theories remain profoundly ambivalent: They desire final truth while questioning its very possibility; they seek ultimate agency and intentionality while doubting others' credibility and search for unmanipulated knowledge (chunks of the "really real") while wondering if its very existence is not fabricated.(8) Or, to use an all too familiar trope: The truth is out there; we just can't quite get it. Lacking any such unmediated knowledge, conspiracy theories attempt to map an over-profusion of information into a coherent narrative web or master plot--what S. Paige Baty refers to as a "cartographic mode of remembering."(9) Viewed from a functionalist perspective, they represent, in Frederic Jameson's words, "the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age...a desperate attempt to represent the late capitalist system" by those marginalized from it.(10) This restores an illusion of agency and control: "Conspiracies can be thwarted, earthquakes cannot."(11) In this sense, they should be seen as a completely reasonable and socially relevant response to the uncertainties of late modernity.
Given the circulation of conspiracy knowledge through elite circles (and back to those accused of the conspiracy itself), it seems inappropriate to reduce such a hermeneutic simply to the realm of economic, political and social marginalization. In the context of contemporary Algeria, conspiracy theories are the primary means through which information is exchanged and personal posturing accomplished in a "game of hermeneutic one-upmanship."(12) Though a game, it has serious implications. Conspiracy theories' legitimacy in Algeria derives largely from the tactical manipulation of knowledge and secrecy by the government and the military. The occlusion of state power and restriction of "democratic" scrutiny (including censorship of the media and the interruption of multi-party elections) have contributed directly to the popularization of conspiracy theorizing as vernacular knowledge production. And such theorizing, by attributing government intentionality to the various processes of the civil war, reinforces state power at the very moment of its greatest challenge. While conspiracy theories may function as a marginalized critique, they can also serve as a prop for existing structures of political and economic inequality.(13)
The Paranoid Style of Algerian Politics
Until the late 1980s, scholarship on conspiracy focused almost exclusively on the American context. Drawing on the seminal 1964 essay by Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style of American Politics," studies emerging from the fields of history and sociology primarily approached conspiracy theories as a marginalized, right-wing extremist phenomenon.(14) Decrying the hermeneutic as "paranoia" or "unreason," scholars tended to treat conspiracy theories as anti-rational, un-democratic and, in the end, incompatible with a pluralist vision of American society.(15) Only recently, works in anthropology and cultural studies have sought to unseat this position, viewing the paranoia as being largely "within reason,"(16) if still likely "hysterical," often pathological, and potentially inimical both to those scapegoated and to society in general.(17) Since the 1960s, conspiracy thought has entered the mainstream as a response to the breakdown in consensus politics accompanying post-Fordist structural transformations. In the resulting mainstream conspiracy culture, rather than a minority group threatening the normative social order, it is the social order itself (generally embodied by the government or some aspect of it) that threatens the well-being of citizens generally.(18) In other words, if the previous paradigm of conspiracy was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the new model is The X Files.
Algerian politics, however, does not so easily mimic its American counterpart. For one thing, the Algerian State has consistently utilized conspiracy theories to underwrite its authority. During the 1954-62 war of independence, for example, the revolutionary National Liberation Front (FLN) accused its various rivals, including certain urban economic elites, emigrant reformers, ethnic minorities and rival political parties, of being traitors (harkis)--colonial enemies within. However, except perhaps for a brief, 20-year period between the late 1950s and late 1970s, it would be difficult to isolate a moment of national consensus in which paranoid thought was directed primarily at internal minorities. Indeed, Algerians have generally regarded the central state itself as suspect, realizing soon after independence that the party elite had merely stepped into the positions of power left vacant by the colonial officials. While Algeria's post-independence hydrocarbon boom, successful agrarian reform and leadership in the Non-Aligned Movement produced a degree of political pride, such a national consciousness proved to be quite tenuous given the country's radical decline in economic and political prosperity in the mid-1970s. By the 1980s, an increasing number of Algerians were no longer simply suspicious of the government's motives, but had also become convinced that it was working against them.(19)
Algeria's current civil war has only exacerbated the climate of political mistrust that nurture conspiracy theories. The 1988 student demonstrations in Algiers signaled the transition from the generation who fought in the war for independence (and for whom the FLN represented Algeria), to one that came of age in a post-war period of increasing economic and social insecurity. The military crackdown on the demonstrations and the subsequent declaration of martial law in 1992 served to reinforce for this younger generation the perceived identity between a corrupt FLN government (decried as apparatchiks), and a repressive military. Given this assumed congruence, it is little wonder that young Algerians now hold the government--multiparty or not--as primarily responsible for the last eight years of bloodshed, regardless of the fact that the international media has attributed most of the violence to Islamist para-military groups.
In part, this "plague of paranoia" can be attributed to the hazy character of the war's events and participants. The tactics and appearances of both military and Islamist forces have been strikingly similar. Military personnel in urban areas, known popularly as "ninjas," mask themselves in order to hide their identities and prevent reprisals. While presenting their actions as police (rather than military) procedures, their conduct does not comply with legal scrutiny. For instance, no "terrorist" has ever been publicly tried.(20) Meanwhile, the Islamist militias tend to act like state forces, dressing up in military garb, stopping cars at "false" roadblocks, searching the vehicles and demanding the occupants' identification papers. Before the violence began in 1992, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) had actually taken over a number of governmental roles, providing working-class neighborhoods like Bab El-Oued with local policing, affordable markets and a de facto welfare system.
Both the military and the Islamist militants also rely on similar narratives of authority. Each traces their genealogy to the revolutionary maquis who battled the French colonial forces during the war of independence.(21) While the military can trace these ties bureaucratically--in that the FLN party structure and leadership remains largely intact (the recently-elected president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, for instance, was foreign minister during the 1965-79 Boumedienne regime)--the Islamists can do so ideologically, claiming to represent an unfinished jihad against economic and cultural (read: Western Christian) colonialism. Likewise, each seeks to undermine the other's fictive lineage strategies with similar accusations of external origins. While the Islamists accuse Algeria's bureaucratic and intellectual elites of constituting a hizb fransa (or "French party") and further, of being toadies to the IMF and the World Bank, those so accused treat the Islamists (whose leaders they call "Afghanis") as agents of a global terrorist network stretching from Bosnia to Sudan to Afghanistan and financed by petro-dollars from the Gulf. Invoking conspiracy narratives in the process of out-legitimation encourages the vernacular circulation of countless other such theories that undermine and blur official media presentations of the war. While some of these attempt to trace the Islamist groups to the agendas of France and/or the United States, viewing the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) as a creation of the American CIA or the French GIGN in an effort to de-stabilize the Algerian state, others point the finger directly at the military, emphasizing that the latter has benefited from the civil war. They question how, in spite of heavy military presence and frequent claims of government victories, Islamist militants continue to operate with near impunity, perform sensational attacks in close proximity to military and police bases, and yet manage to flee without any casualties.(22) They wonder why no prominent government or military figure (with the exception of the liberalizing interim president Mohammed Boudiaf) has been killed during the conflict--why the assassinations have targeted the foreign and intellectual middle class rather than those in power. Others go further, interjecting into the on-going debate over "Qui tue?" a sense of certainty about the military's creation and direct operation of the GIA, either (as alternate theories attest) as a means to discredit more mainstream Islamist parties (e.g., the FIS), or to maintain the state of emergency required to legitimate military rule on the international scene.(23) According to one theory particularly popular in expatriate circles, the military actually orchestrated recent village massacres, not simply to create a climate of fear, but to clear private landowners from the fertile lands in the Blida and Medea regions south of Algiers.(24)
Such conspiracy theories operate by highlighting certain truisms--that the government and the military are closely related, or that the military benefits from a state of war--and then takes them to their logical extreme: The Algerian government is killing its own citizens. This "paranoia," rather than representing an irrational pathology, instead bespeaks a particularly savvy understanding of the intimate relationship between truth and power in Algerian society. Proponents of conspiracy tend to take such a Foucauldian insight to an absolute end, however: If knowledge and power are linked, then access to knowledge confers power, and thus power tends to protect "true" knowledge. In the absence of other flows of information, such conspiracy thinking itself ironically takes on the characteristics of a new "regime of truth" possessing its own discursive rules, institutions, political economic stakes, diffusion networks and ideological struggles.(25) In this sense, conspiracy theorizing can be viewed as a powerful, counter-hegemonic communicative practice for the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge in and about Algeria.
Transnational Circulation, State Power
Before concluding, it is instructive to highlight two aspects of this communicative practice that limit its functioning as a counter-hegemonic truth regime in contemporary Algeria. First, conspiracy theorists have little or no access to the national or private media in a country where even cellular phones are forbidden to all but the highest state officials and where outspoken critics of the government are routinely censored and imprisoned. Given such pronounced surveillance, conspiracy theories proliferate and circulate primarily through the various media of the Algerian diaspora, from low-budget newspapers and radio stations to various Internet list-serves.(26) With their centers of production in Paris, London and Montreal, these alternate media maintain networks of close, informal contacts (primarily consisting of friends and family) in Algeria, and are thus able to bypass official information channels. Such reports are often subsequently picked up by French or American newspapers or television, and are then circulated back to Algeria via satellite links.(27) For instance, during the 1988 riots in Algiers, the sole source of news coverage on either side of the Mediterranean was Radio-Beur, a Paris-based immigrant radio station that received telephone reports from witnesses and participants in Algiers, and then re-transmitted them via satellite to Algerian listeners throughout France and Algeria.(28) In this sense, conspiracy theorizing, as vernacular knowledge production, tends to foster a transnational, rather than simply a national, imagination, and thus operates in a parallel, rather than oppositional, fashion to the official truth regime.
Secondly, contemporary Algerian conspiracy theories, while severely critical of the state's role in the civil war, paradoxically reinforce state power. Alleging that the military government is "pulling the strings of the war" fosters the belief that the military remains the sole, true power base in Algeria, regardless of the religious and ethnic challenges levied against it. As such, whether understood as the lone hope against fundamentalism and anarchy or as the actual instigator of the civil war, the military regime can present itself as a viable international actor with a monopoly on legitimate violence.(29) Seen from this admittedly conspiratorial point of view, the Algerian state can deploy those conspiracy theories against itself to underwrite its own truth regime and thereby increase internal militarization and surveillance. So, once again, conspiracy theories become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Conspiracy narratives in Algeria should not be viewed as merely functional responses to the instability of the Algerian civil war, but rather as constituting a potent ingredient of the conflict itself. Neither necessarily hegemonic nor counter-hegemonic, conspiracy represents a modality of vernacular knowledge production that confers power on the accuser and the accused simultaneously. If scholars scorn conspiracy as a mode of explanation, they do so not out of an exaggerated commitment to scientific rationality, but because it threatens their ascribed roles as distant observers and critics. When truth is power, we all become responsible agents in the violence that surrounds us, and the Ivory Tower comes crashing down.
3.To what extent are narratives of apocalypse and conspiracy co-dependent? Answer with reference to at least one apocalyptic movement.
"Some currents in both Christianity and Islam hold that Judaism represents a mortal enemy to their religion. These same people are particularly susceptible to cosmic conspiracy theories. The forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion describes a 3000-year-old conspiracy of the Jews to enslave mankind.
"The Protocols are a fabricated, imaginary report of the first Zionist Congress in 1897. Released in the opening years of the 20th century, they claimed to be the minutes of the Elders of Zion discussing their secret plan to enslave all mankind. It was published in 1905 with a preface by the Russian Orthodox mystic, Sergei Nilus, sounding an apocalyptic warning about the ravages of modernity and the advent of a Jewish Antichrist. Later, the Russian revolution in 1917 was interpreted by anti-Semites as a dramatic proof of the text's authenticity - the plot had entered a still more open phase that climaxed with the Depression. No proofs of its forgery, no matter how telling, could silence this text.
"In appealing to apocalyptic fears of an imminent global battle between good and evil, the Protocols mobilized a total response. It inspired a willingness to sacrifice all to defeat the evil Jewish enemy. The main manipulators of this text have common characteristics. They aim for authoritarian power; they resort to violence whenever it suits them; and they seek to suppress all dissent. And if they think they can get away with it, they will enslave anyone else they can. In other words, they resemble the 'Jews' depicted in the Protocols. As Hitler screamed about Jewish plots to conquer the world and enslave mankind, he was hatching precisely those plans.
"Since its inception this has been the Judeophobe's favored text. Norman Cohn called it the Nazi Warrant for Genocide.1 After World War II, among its most enthusiastic 'believers' have been Arab intellectuals and political elites. Those who believe in this forgery claim that the conspiracy, silent for millennia, is now about to burst into the open. Thus they must act ruthlessly against their merciless enemy, or be destroyed."
4. Assess the importance of visions of 'Utopia' for millennial movements. To what extent are these utopias defined by their historical context?
Since Aaron Wildavsky proposed in 1987 that cultural orientations such as egalitarianism and individualism frame public perceptions of technological risks, a body of empirical research has grown to affirm the risk-framing effects of personality and culture (Dake, 1991; Gastil et al., 2005; Kahan, 2008). Most of these studies have focused on relatively mundane risks, however, such as handguns, nuclear power, genetically modified food, and cellphone radiation. In the contemplation of truly catastrophic risks, risks to the future of the species from technology or natural threats, a different and deeper set of cognitive biases come into play, the millennial, utopian or apocalyptic psycho-cultural bundle, a characteristic dynamic of eschatological beliefs and behaviors. This essay is an attempt to outline the characteristic forms millennialism has taken, and how it biases assessment of catastrophic risks and the courses of action necessary to address them.
Millennialism is the expectation that the world as it is will be destroyed and replaced with a perfect world, that a redeemer will come to cast down the evil and raise up the righteous (Cohn, 1970; Barkun, 1974).
Millennialism is closely tied to other historical phenomena, utopianism, apocalypticism, messianism and millenarian violence. Western historians of millenialism have focused the most attention on the emergence of Christianity out of the messianic expectations of subjugated Jewry, and subsequent Christian movements based on exegesis of the Book of Revelations expecting imminent return of Christ. But the millennial impulse is pancultural, found in many guises and with many common tropes from Europe to India to China, across the last several thousand years. When Chinese peasants followed religio-political revolutionaries claiming the mantle of the Coming Buddha, and when Mohammed birthed Islam preaching that the Last Judgment was imminent, they exhibited many similar features to medieval French peasants leaving their fields to follow would-be John the Baptists. Nor is the millennial impulse restricted to religious movements and beliefs in magical or supernatural agency. Revolutionary socialism and fascism embodied the same impulses and promises, although purporting to be based on science, das Volk and the secular state instead of prophecy, the body of believers and the Kingdom of Heaven (Rhodes, 1980; Rowley, 1983).
Utopianism and apocalypticism are defined here as the millennial impulse with, respectively, an optimistic and pessimistic eschatological expectation. By utopianism I mean the belief that historical trends are inevitably leading to a wonderful millennial outcome (Manuel and Manuel, 1979), including the Enlightenment narrative of inevitable human progress (Tuveson, 1949; Nash, 2000). By apocalypticism I don't mean simply the belief that something very bad may happen, since very bad events are simply a prelude to very good events for most millennialists, but that the bad event will be cataclysmic, or even the end of history.
In that sense, utopianism is the default setting of most millennial movements, even if the Tribulations are expected to be severe and indeterminately long. The promise of something better, at least for the righteous, is far more motivating than a guaranteed bad end. Even the most depressing religious eschatology, the Norse Ragnarok - at which humans and gods are defeated, and Earth and the heavens are destroyed -holds out a millennial promise that a new earth and Sun will emerge, and the few surviving gods and humans with live in peace and prosperity (Crossley-Holland, 1981).
Millennial expectations of better times have not only been a comfort to people with hard, sad lives, an "opium for the masses," but also, because of their mobilizing capacity, an essential catalyst of social change and political reform (Hobsbawm, 1959; Lanternari, 1965; Jacoby, 2005). From Moses' mobilization of enslaved Jewry with a promise of a land of milk and honey, to medieval millenarian peasant revolts, to the Sioux Ghost Dance, to the integrationist millennialism of the African-American civil rights movement, millenarian leaders have arisen out of repressive conditions to preach that they could lead their people to a new Zion. Sometimes the millennial movements are disastrously unsuccessful when they rely on supernatural methods for achieving their ends, as with the Ghost Dance (Mooney, 1991). Sometimes utopian and millennial currents contribute to social reform even in their defeat, as they did from the medieval peasant revolts through the rise of revolutionary socialism (Jacoby, 2005). Although movements for utopian social change were most successful when they focused on temporal, rather than millennial, goals through human, rather than supernatural, agency, expectations of utopian outcomes helped motivate participants to take risks on collective action against large odds.
Although there have been few truly apocalyptic movements or faiths, those which foretell an absolute, unpleasant and unredeemed end of history, there have been points in history with widespread apocalyptic expectation. The stories of the Biblical flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah alerted Christians to the idea that God was quite willing to destroy almost all of humanity for our persistent sinfulness, well before the clock starts on the Tribulation-Millennium timeline. Although most mythic beliefs include apocalyptic periods in the past and future, as with Ragnarok or the Hindu-Buddhist view of a cyclical destruction-recreation of the universe, most myths make apocalypse a transient stage in human history.
It remained for more secular times for the idea of a truly cataclysmic end of history, with no redeeming Millennium, to become a truly popular current of thought (Wagar, 1982; Heard, 1999; Wojcik, 1997, 1999). Since the advent of the Nuclear Age, one apocalyptic threat after another, natural and man-made, has been added to the menu of ways that human history could end, from environmental destruction and weapons of mass destruction, to plague and asteroid strikes (Leslie, 1998; Halpern, 2001; Rees, 2004). In a sense, long-term apocalypticism is also now the dominant scientific worldview, insofar as most scientists see no possibility for intelligent life to continue after the Heat Death of the Universe (2002, Ellis; see also the chapter by Adams in this book).
5.With reference to at least one 'apocalyptic group' demonstrate the relationship between that group and its social and cultural context.
6. Millennial beliefs are often associated with marginalized groups - to what extent can millennialism be understood as a generalized theme in contemporary culture?
7. Barkun describes conspiracy theories as "stigmatized knowledge". Assess the implications of this statement.
Why did Timothy McVeigh visit Area 51, the alleged flying-saucer test range, and view the film "Contact" on death row? Why did the harmless-looking phrase, "New World Order," take on a sinister connotation as soon as the first President Bush uttered it? Why does the acronym FEMA send chills down the spines of a substantial number of Americans? We cannot dismiss these facts as unrelated coincidences. No: they are all evidences of a strange mutation that occurred in American popular culture in the 1990s, when formerly obscure forms of esotericism and conspiracy theory fused with traditional millennialism and popular pseudo-science. The result was not a movement, but a worldview that threatens to undermine trust in public institutions, and maybe even consensus reality.
Such is the argument of this useful book by political scientist Michael Barkun of Syracuse University, one of the leading authorities on the political implications of contemporary millennialism. The literature of conspiracy theory is vast and rarely a pleasure to read, so there is something to be said for any survey that shrinks the Illuminati, the Men in Black, and the Hollow Earth itself to manageable dimensions. The chief merit of this book, though, is the description of a dynamic in contemporary conspiracy theory, one that turns ordinary popular culture into a venue for the propagation of ideas that the consensus culture has not just dismissed, but condemned. This model may exaggerate certain features of the popular mind, but it clearly does have some applications.
The chief sources of the culture of conspiracy are the tradition of conspiracy theory, conventional millennialism, and what must be called "ufology," or the belief in the existence and importance of Unidentified Flying Objects and other extraterrestrial influences. The place where these sources meet is the realm of "stigmatized knowledge."
Some stigmatized knowledge is just obsolete knowledge, like alchemy or astrology, that the academic establishment no longer takes seriously on its own terms. Some of it is folklore and urban legends. Some of it is political ideas that have lost their bid for dominance in the wide world, but survive in niches and sects. The stigmatization of knowledge does not necessarily mean it is worthless: acupuncture, for instance, has risen from subcultural disrepute to the status of a recognized treatment. Whatever the merits of stigmatized ideas, people who accept stigmatized knowledge about one subject are likely to be more open to entertaining it in others. This leads to an attitude that views esoteric and unpopular ideas favorably, simply because they are stigmatized. Any official or consensus explanation is viewed with suspicion.
If you think that what most people believe about important aspects of the world is consistently wrong, the most economical hypothesis is that those people are being systematically deceived. This implies a deceiver, who must have confederates. The larger the conspiracy, the more a theory about it can explain: hence the attractiveness of conspiracy theories. "A Culture of Conspiracy" does not address the question of whether there is a perennial Western tradition of conspiracy theories, one that might include the legends about Rosicrucians, witches, Brethren of the Free Spirit, and similar shady characters. Rather, the book focuses on the well-known tradition of secular conspiracy theories, whose best-known originator is the Abbé Barruel. This tradition began in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Barruel's account sought to explain the Revolution as the work of groups of a generally Masonic character, of whom the most famous were the Illuminati of late 18th-century Bavaria.
There were indeed Illuminati, and the revolutionary phase of the Enlightenment was often organized through lodges and secret societies. However, conspiracy theorists tend to view secret and underground societies, not as vehicles for political activity, but as its cause. They see the public acts of statesmen and political groups as a mere smokescreen. For conspiracists, is it not necessary that the puppet-masters be altogether secret. Financial institutions and private associations will do nicely, as they did in conspiratorial accounts of politics that appeared as the 19th century progressed. (Barkun mentions Ignatius Donnelly for his popularization of Atlantis, by the way, but Donnelly also had the Jewish-Corporate Government connection down pat as early as the 1880s.) Around 1900, the Czarist secret police produced the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which ascribed a plot for world domination to the early Zionist movement. By about 1920, there was a standard superconspiracy model. The model linked international bankers, the central banks, the Masons, the Jews, and other groups in a long-running project, always almost complete, to establish a worldwide atheist tyranny.
In one form or another, this model has been remarkably durable. People with all kinds of perspectives can adapt it to fit any historical circumstance and any set of characters. Theorists with little interest in Jewish conspiracies, for instance, might read "Illuminist" in the "Protocols" wherever the text reads "Jew." So great is the explanatory power of superconspiracies, however, that they threaten to engulf in despair those who believe in them. Conspiracy theorists often think that little stands between them and an intolerable future, brought about by forces that are invisible to the general public and yet nearly omnipotent.
The forces of evil are happily less omnipotent in millennialism, which is the general term that "A Culture of Conspiracy" uses for endtime belief. One of the chief factors in conspiracy thinking in the early 21st century comes from the revival of premillennialism in the first half of the 19th century. Premillennialists generally often believe the advent of the Millennium to be near, but expect it to be preceded by "apocalypse" proper, the period when God's wrath will be poured out on the world. During this time, the world will be ruled by Antichrist. Identifying the Antichrist, and more important, his future collaborators, is an activity very close to what secular conspiracy theorists do. Premillennialists with an interest in current events borrowed the Illuminati and the cabal of international bankers, often adding their own traditional villains, such as the Vatican. Versions of eschatological conspiracy became widespread during the 20th century, but did not begin to join the general popular culture until the 1970s.
The bridge between the land of stigmatized knowledge and the world at large was the UFO phenomenon. UFOs made their way into millennialism as part of the great deception of the endtime; the aliens became demons who pretended to be angels of light. There was also some tendency for premillennialists to reinterpret their eschatology in physicalist terms, so that the pretribulation rapture sometimes becomes a rescue by spaceship. Michael Barkun has coined the term "improvisational millennialism" to describe this syncretism of motifs. Secular superconspiracists, for their part, had no trouble adding UFOs to their list of things that the powers-that-be were covering up. In some versions, the Great Conspiracy is in league with the aliens. In others, there were no aliens, but UFOs were being faked to cow the public.
In the 1980s, some quite new motifs appeared. There were the black helicopters, which served the conspiracy in a way that varied from theorist to theorist. There were the concentration camps that were said to be being prepared for dissident citizens for when the Day came. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was supposed to lead the effort to impose martial law. When disaster struck, either real or staged, FEMA would become the government. Then there was mind control, which government agencies were alleged to have perfected in the 1950s and '60s.
As is often the way with urban legends, there were sometimes thin threads of fact in these Persian carpets of fantasy. Yes, police tactical helicopters sometimes are black. The CIA really did experiment with mind-altering drugs. For that matter, there were even contingency plans around 1970 to create temporary camps if civil disorders got out of hand. However, the structures that placed these fragments in a greater whole could never be verified, or even tested.
There were also fascinating adaptations of older ideas. For instance, the notion that the Earth might be hollow, and the seat of one or more advanced civilizations, has an old pedigree. In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, it sometimes figured in fiction. When UFOs entered the popular consciousness, these subterranean realms became alternative or supplementary points of origin for these vessels. Admirers of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith will be interested to learn that many of their story devices reappeared as bald assertions of fact in later conspiracist literature. (I might mention H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," not specifically cited in the book. That novella has as many subterranean aliens as a reasonable man could ask for, as well as an Antarctic locale, which is also important in many conspiracy theories.) The malevolent reptile-people who play such a key role in the conspiracy theories of David Icke seem to have slithered right out of the stories of Robert Howard, the creator of "Conan the Barbarian."
Much of 19th-century theosophy came straight from popular fiction, so the 20th-century adaptations simply continue the tradition. A tongue-in-cheek British documentary broadcast in 1977, "Alternative 3," described a conspiracy of elites to flee Earth before ecological catastrophe struck the planet. As happened in other contexts, some people immediately interpreted the fiction as an encoded account of the facts. And, of course, conspiracy theories form the basis for later fiction, such as the once fashionable "X-Files" television series. I would also note John Carpenter's film from 1988, They Live. In that story, certain people are enabled to see our reptile overlords as they really are, consorting with ordinary upper-class humans who know the aliens' identity. ("They Live" should not be confused with "Them," an older and much better film about giant ants.)
The culture of stigmatized knowledge has facilitated other revivals. The channeling of extraterrestrials by New Agers looks like nothing so much as communication with the Ascended Masters whom Madame Blavatsky used to consult. Similarly, the allegations that the conspiracy sometimes captures people for sexual slavery bear more than a few points of resemblance to the 19th century stories that purported to expose what really goes on in Catholic nunneries.
Historical and technological developments gave a boost to the culture of conspiracy. Conspiracy theory had been an activity conducted through small newsletters and pamphlets before the assassination of John F. Kennedy; within a decade, it was an industry. Just as important was the growth of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, which made even the most obscure materials available to virtually anyone, virtually anywhere. Accessibility was not the only important factor; so was the lack of authoritative criticism. For that matter, "authority" was increasingly in short supply offline, too. The academy, during the postmodernist episode, undermined the assumption that consensus reality was more than a mere construct. The distinction between stigmatized and consensus knowledge did not quite collapse, but it became far more porous.
Michael Barkun is not happy about these developments. He notes that antisemitic motifs had formerly been wholly excluded from popular culture. Now they are reemerging, often in scarcely altered form, as elements of widely disseminated superconspiracies. He also points out that the culture of conspiracy responds badly to emergencies. Conspiracists reacted to 911 by demonstrating how it fit into their preexisting explanation for what is wrong with the world. The same might also be said of other people, perhaps, but the conspiracists' explanations made them suspicious of collective efforts to deal with the situation.
For my part, I think that any discussion of conspiracism should acknowledge those contexts where the conspiracists are onto something. When evangelical Christians perceive a New Age conspiracy to extirpate Christianity, they often are quite right about the biases of some elements of the academy and the media. When opponents of the New World Order say that international organizations are plotting to subvert the sovereignty of the United States, they are sometimes just citing the law journals. About the gay agenda we need not speak. Conspiracists are not delusional when they say that important people often collaborate to bring about appalling results. The Great Conspiracy has two weaknesses, however. First: no cabal small enough to be hidden could have the leverage to control the world, or even to guide the public life of a single nation. Second: no cabal at all could survive with its agenda unchanged for generation after generation. Real conspirators are people just like you and me. They don't have a clue, either.
