Daily life is a tissue of loose ends, shot through with
snarls and dropped stitches. That society nevertheless does not unravel, seems
due to the fact that most people, though in detail unpredictable, are
essentially similar and basically sane; due additionally to conservative/equilibrating
structures evolved over the centuries; and perhaps to some further,
anti-entropic factor, still obscure
but whose presence we may suspect (guardian angels would be the simplest
explanation; something equally speculative though less intuitive, concerning
negentropy or self-organizing systems, could also be alluded to). Things pretty much jog along and
usually eventually work out; but the details of any particular transaction often may not bear looking into.
One
gets a glimpse of this whenever,
by some chance, a particular circumstance must be looked into further –
something went a lot or a little bit wrong, that, for some reason, this time, needs to be corrected or
explained and not just brushed
aside as usual. One often finds,
upon turning over a rock long left undisturbed, a welter of wriggling vermin:
errors previously unsuspected, data missing or misfiled, notes contradicting
what one had previously believed (while their author has since left the company, or died
prematurely). Normally, none of
this is sinister, but simply shows, on the human level, an analog (not an effect; a metaphor, merely) of the
underlying quantum uncertainty and atomic chaos which nevertheless
ultimately manages to cohere in this coffee cup or that paperweight sitting placidly, bien sage, on
your desk. If, however, the
original affair is shady, the unexplained details which investigation
unearths lie in its shadow. Let one instance stand for all: the
celebrated “18-minute gap” in that tape, during Watergate. Personally I find it utterly plausible
that the gap resulted from the same gremlins that hide our spectacles, lose our
umbrellas, and eat óne out of each pair of laundered socks. But in context, it did look suspicious.
An
instinct not to let go of such suspicions
is buttressed by cases in which investigation of some misdeed, severe enough to catch the atte.ntion
of the media or the D.A., reveals
a pot-pourri of previously unreported malfeasance, as in the Watergate
affair. Novelists and cineasts
take the trend a satisfying step further with variations on the “Blow-Up”
motif, in which a chance following-up of some minor discrepancy, out of mere
curiosity, leads to a Vast Conspiracy.
The
problem becomes acute when the stakes are high, the affair complex, and the
discrepancies numerous (as they inevitably will be in any far-reaching affair,
even absent any sinister underpinnings).
As, the Kennedy Assassination, or 9/11.
We
are currently witnessing a whole industry, tying our current President and his
associates – both laterally (the present Administration) and longitudinally
(the Bush family, going back to Prescott) – to all manner of skullduggery. At the far fringe are the conspiracy
theorists (stronger in Europe than here) who initially maintained, and some
still maintain, that 9/11 was actually planned and carried out by a U.S. cabal,
the airplanes being remotely controlled from the ground. A tad less extreme is
the allegation, popular among some less reflective Arabs, that Israel did it. Another tad, the position that, while the op was indeed al-Qaeda’s, the
Administration knew (sub-position 1, more florid) that that attack was due on
that day, or (subposition 2, more reality-based, pointing to the August 6 memo)
knew in a general way that such a thing might happen, and deliberately did
nothing, so that they could use it as an excuse to proceed with their nefarious
plans. Certainly there have been
agents provocateurs in history; but I tend to disbelieve in any gross such
allegation concerning a present-day American administration, since every
potential conspirator must be aware that, the way things stand in America
today, no conspiracy broader than two twins in a cave can stay secret for long – people write books and go on talk
shows to expose much milder
grievances.
More
centrist – if only with respect to such as these – is the new movie,
“Fahrenheit 9/11”. To his credit,
Michael Moore does not even allude to such darker fantasies – indeed he
indirectly exonerates the Administration, or at least Bush himself, of
complicity, if only through
imputation of cluelessness. Bush’s blank look while the WTC attack vied for his
attention with the Pet Goat, is itself a piece of evidence against all but a
watered-down version of the last of the above-listed positions. (Moore himself voiceovers a plausible
thought-balloon in keeping with the last one, along the lines of: “Dang, wasn’t
there some memo about something like this? Maybe I should have spent more time
at the office and less on the golf course.”) In one of his books, Moore hints at something more
conspiratorial, but there fingers the Saudis (he really doesn’t like the
Saudis), not the Illuminati or the Carlyle Group. And in the film, he does
raise a number of other serious suspicions, none – again to his credit –
original with himself, but dramatizations of charges explored at length by
serious journalists in books.
It
has been correctly observed that the basic motivation behind some of the most
persistent of conspiracy theorists
is not mere irrationalism, but a perhaps excessive penchant for
rationality – demanding to make sense of things that, well, don’t. The distinction is hard to spot, since
any empirically competent, level-headed investigator tends to get swallowed up in a crowd of crazies.
Another
possible determinant, perhaps less often observed: in ascribing a pattern to
the welter of events, as deriving from a plot, the theorizer may be acquiescing
in a demand for personalization.
For, the confusing flux of the world often lacks palpable causes. Surely it can’t just all be random – one suspects deep dark
forces at work. A plot puts a face on it.
But usually this is an explanatory short-circuit. For indeed there are
forces, as deep and dark as those of hydrodynamics, but they are not even
rational, let alone personal.
Empirical question: Does a tendancy towards florid
conspiracy-mongering correlate
negatively with religious belief?
It is an observation due
perhaps to many, but prominently expressed in many a delightful story of Father
Brown, that superstition tends to flow into the vacuum left by an absence of
faith. Perhaps belief in a
heavenly Father – however distant, however inscrutable – leaves one less likely
to imagine that the world’s workings may be ascribed to some shave-pate villain
in a bunker somewhere, stroking a cat.
Against this, however:
the observed fixation of Book-of-Revelation-style evangelicals on the Antichrist, working through the
New World Order. They do, so they
say, believe in God; a lot of good
it’s done them.
There
is a healthy kernel to the epistemological attitude which, in its pathological
exfoliation, becomes conspiracy-mindedness: a simple stance of “Wait a
minute.” For as Locke observed,
and as subsequent scientific and historical discoveries retrospectively further buttress: that
“some (and those the most) taking things upon trust, misemploy their power of
assent, by lazily enslaving their minds, to the dictates and dominion of
others, in doctrines, which it is their duty carefully to examine.”
(Essay I.iv.22)
In
an unhealthy development, skepticism becomes not a key to inquiry, but a pose of imperviousness in the
face of counter-evidence. Michael
Rutschky, in a recent contribution to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung,
described the situation in Germany, where “Ich bleibe skeptisch” has become a
slogan – not, like that of the fabled Missouran (“You’ll have to show me”)
inviting actual demonstration, but issuing a warning that, whatever evidence you may bring, it will be dismissed as smoke and
mirrors. This sclerotic ‘tough-mindedness’ in the face of empricism is often coupled with a soft side for Verschwörungstheorie. At an extreme, this leads to political
infantilization. That the
phenomenon seems more to be met with in Europe (at least, comparing their
educated reading public with that of America, and setting aside the seething
cauldron of the Web sites and talk shows) may cohere with an objective semi-infantilization or anyhow sidelining of Europe itself, in the age of the
unilateral hyperpower.
*
The detective versus
an unnamed evil thing:
A tale of madness,
and of the uncanny --
Murphy Calls-in a Specialist
*
[Footnote May 2013:
The above was written ca. 2005;
since that time, the fragile cortices of many of our
countrymen have cracked, while paranoid fantasies sprout like weeds.
Yet the circumstances tend to
reinforce the conjecture above, that hands far from the tillers of power
are freed for idle mischief.
When in office, Republicans are
crafty and cynical; when out, they lose their moorings.]
[Sidenote] There is a quite respectable practice of trying-to-see-hidden-patterns everywhere: it's called Science. For which see:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/consilience.html
That practice too has its pathologies, which perhaps
someday time will allow us to notice in this place.
We find both kinds of nisus united in the figure of Newton. On the one hand, his scientific Principia side; on
the other, his esoteric researches (alchemical and theological), which bulked
equally large in his life. Re the
latter, David Berlinski remarks (Newton’s Gift (2000), p. 68): “Secretive natures are quite prepared
to believe that the history of human affairs is largely the history of a great many secrets."
