Conspiracy theories used to be a
fringe obsession. Now they're mainstream
Jason Wilson
From wind farm sickness to #pizzagate to halal funding
terrorism, conspiracy theories abound, and the methods of defeating them no
longer seem adequate
Thursday 13 April 2017 03.35 BST Last modified on Thursday
13 April 2017 03.39 BST
Just over 50 years ago, when historian Richard Hofstadter
initiated the scholarly study of conspiracy theory, he claimed that the
mentality that nurtured it affected just “a modest minority of the population”.
Only occasionally, in moments of crisis and catastrophe, would this state of
mind catch on to the extent that it could be “built into mass movements or
political parties”.
Hofstadter looked at McCarthyism, the Goldwater campaign,
and the anticommunist John Birch Society as examples of what he called the
“paranoid style”. The “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial
fantasy” of the 1960s right connected them with earlier anti-Masonic,
anti-Catholic, and nativist movements.
Hofstadter was a staunch, cold war centrist liberal. His
work, Mark Fester writes, was a “means to offer and enforce a normative
definition of political belief and practice”. In other words, he wasn’t just
offering disinterested description. He thought that fringe conspiracists should
be contrasted with a “normal” politics which encompassed major parties, the
liberal-democratic state, and the liberal press. Interest groups that
negotiated within these institutions were healthy; groups exhibiting the
paranoid style were a disease.
Times have changed. Conspiracy thinking and paranoia are
highly visible, durable and institutionally sanctified in a range of liberal
democracies, not least in Australia. Hofstadter’s distinctions between
mainstream and fringe thinking are more and more difficult to maintain.
Conspiracy thinking is increasingly “normal”.
In recent years, Australia’s Senate has held inquiries which
in part considered the phantasmatic connections between Halal food
certification and terrorism, and between wind turbines and human health. (In
the latter instance, they concluded that bodies like the NHMRC “have been too
quick to judge” on the issue given the “considerable anecdotal evidence” –
evidence that flies in the face of every study conducted).
Entire parties – with considerable negotiating power within
Australia’s political system – have been erected on the basis of conspiracy
beliefs. One Nation’s policy positions encompass the Agenda 21 conspiracy
theory and the idea – apparently derived from the fringes of the US Christian
right – that Islam is not really a religion. Recently their senator, Malcolm
Roberts, claimed on Four Corners, that the ABC itself used techniques of
“Nazi-style mind control” on the issue of global warming.
The Australian newspaper – with help from ABC journalists –
has done much to popularise an idea originating on the far right: that western
values are being undermined by a “cultural Marxist” conspiracy launched by
Frankfurt School philosophers in the middle of the last century.
In the wondrous global public square of the internet,
conspiracism can be top down or bottom up. The US president first became a
properly political figure by using Twitter to promote a conspiracy theory about
his predecessor’s birth. More recently, he infamously tweeted that the Obama
administration wiretapped him.
Other conspiracies are propagated more democratically, and
frequently have a partisan dimension. The right on Twitter have #pizzagate,
echoes ideas about elite pedophile rings trafficked by newly-powerful
conspiracist celebrities like Alex Jones. Liberals have #Russiagate, which has
inspired Medium posts and MEGATHREADS offering the straight dope on Trump’s
looming impeachment, and, oddly, to Louise Mensch being enthroned as a Russia
expert.
Conspiracism now is a constant background hum, but its focus
can shift. In the last week, the greatest magnet for conspiratorial stories has
been Syria. The nationalist “alt right” (and more than a few on the left) have
been insisting that the sarin attack on Khan Sheikoun was a false flag to draw
the US further into Middle Eastern wars. A few liberals have been arguing that
Trump’s strike was mere “kabuki theatre”, and the fruit of a complex plot with
Putin to divert attention from the administration’s Russia connections.
If we want to go looking for reasons for why conspiracy
theory has become so central, we can pick from a menu. The liberal media
institutions which mid-century cultural modernists looked to as guarantors of
public truth have been weakened, and in some eyes, discredited. Because of
social media, but even more because of the fracturing media landscape, we all
increasingly inhabit partisan informational bubbles. In our polarised state, we
are less inclined to the give-and-take that Hofstadter saw as an antidote to
conspiracism, and its view of political opponents as avatars of pure evil.
Governments have not only lied to us about important things,
they no longer seem geared to serve our interests. In the absence of a strong
left which might voice a structural critique of capitalism or the state,
conspiracism flourishes as popular politics.
But perhaps, in a backwards way, Hofstadter offered the best
reason back in 1964.
“The paranoid spokesman”, he wrote, “sees the fate of
conspiracy in apocalyptic terms – he traffics in the birth and death of whole
worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always
manning the barricades of civilisation. He constantly lives at a turning
point.”
The birth and death of political orders, existential
threats, turning points – something in our present moment of environmental
catastrophe, galloping inequality, massed refugees, and our cycle of political
stasis and meltdown answers to Hofstadter’s description.
In turn, something in his prescription – patient engagement,
trade-offs, institutional faith, and rational discourse – no longer seems
adequate to our situation.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário