Tag: Book Review

So, Christmas. It’s the perfect time to catch up on all those books I’ve been meaning to read for, as they say in school, `yonks ((Admittedly, that might be Tom Brown’s school.)).’ Normally I find fiction to occupy my festive season, but given that I knew I was getting the Wii I decided on inter-loaning some thesis-related non-fiction.

Actually, a better (just made-up) reasons; one of the (unfortunate) side effects of studying Conspiracy Theories is the feeling that you are constantly reading (and, I suspect, thinking you are living in a) Len Deighton novel. Because the subject of study is so very much like (if not actually) fiction actual fiction becomes less and less of an escape.

Fact and fantasy, eh; who can tell the difference?

Gah. Anyway, over the Christmas period I have read:

Daniel Pipes’ `Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From’ (New York: Free Press, 1997).

Pipes’s book was written pre-September 11th, 2001 and it is rather odd. Good, I might add ((Unlike some of his volumes it does not appear overly, if at all, anti-arab)), but still odd. He’s oddly optimistic, claiming that, in the West, Conspiracism (the unreasonable fear of conspiracies) is on the decline. Now, Pipes was not to know that in four years time there would be a rather spectacular event and a rather unspectacular President who would (I’m avoiding the word `conspire’ here, even though it makes a kind of narrative sense) produce Conspiracy Theory after Conspiracy Theory and engender fear of the Muslim `other’ like almost no one had before.

Pipes’ book isn’t about Conspiracy Theories but rather Conspiracism. He defines a Conspiracy Theory as being a fear of a non-existent Conspiracy, so he and I are not on the same page about the epistemic status of Conspiracy Theories, but his talk about Conspiracism and its usage by both the Right and the Left is interesting and, I think, fairly well-reasoned. Pipes rather glosses over the conspiracism of the Right, rightly, I think, arguing that we’re fairly aware of its character. Instead, he spends quite some time talking about the Left’s usage of conspiracism, pointing out that Leftists ((His terminology.)) like to present Conspiracy Theories as if they were merely the best possible inference and not really Conspiracy Theories at all (and remember, Pipes defines Conspiracy Theories as baseless, so he’s saying that the Left is just as fantastical in its conspiracism as the Right). It’s fascinating stuff and whether I agree with his characterisation (and I think he’s mostly right about some Left-wing attempts to define away warranted Conspiracy Theories as being examples of some other, non-Conspiracy, theory) or not I’m going to use some of it in the next iteration of the CCE course.

`Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy,’ Springer Series in Social Psychology, edited by C. F. Graumann and S. Moscovici. New York: Springer Verlag, 1987

This was, as it turned out, a book I’ve interloaned before. It’s still as inpenetrable as ever (part of the problem is that a lot of the papers are translations and. given that I’m not a psychologist, the terminology and sometimes awkward phrasing really “did my `ead in.” Most of the work, unsurprisingly, is Social Pyschology and I got nothing more out of it on this accidental second reading. Some of the material is clearly interesting (there is a paper on how the Spanish authorities encouraged the Roman Catholic Church to characterise the (so-called) New World Indians as cannibals, for instance) and if I were a pyschologist I would be lapping this material up.

But I’m not.

`Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America,’ edited Peter Knight, New York University Press, 2002

If the last book was overloaded with Social Psychology this book had too much Lyotard. Given that it was a volume edited by Peter Knight (an American Studies professor in Manchester who has written quite a lot of good material on American attitudes to Conspiracy Theories) I had high hopes. However, Knight is the editor and the editor alone; nowhere in the list of article authors does his name appear.

Still, some interesting material worth noting. Skip William’s `Spinning Paranoia’ looks at both the Conspiracy and Cock-up Theories of the world and wisely points out that a lot of commentators who argue for one end up endorsing a version of the other. He uses a nice example from George Will’s dismissal of the claim Archduke Franz Ferdinand was killed due to the actions of a Conspiracy. Will claims the assassination was a cock-up, not seeming to realise that the assassin’s being part of the failed Conspiracy to blow up the Archduke’s car was probably a major contributory cause to the assassin deciding to shot the Archduke when he came to the café afterwards.

(He also has some nice to things to say about the Fallacy of the Free Market and it probably comes from an extreme belief in the Coincidence Theory.)

Clare Birchall’s `The Commodification of Conspiracy Theory’ talks a lot about how we can cite Conspiracy Theories without having any belief for or against them whatsoever. Part of this agnosticism seems to come out of `The X Files’ (or so she asserts, like many of the other authors in the volume) but part of it might also come out of the revelations of what the Intelligence Community has been up to. The number of wacky conspiratorial explanations of political events which turned out to be warranted have made the public a little more sceptical of official explanations and a little more likely to entertain notions of Conspiracy, even if they are only half-hearted.

I’m not quite finished with the reading; at the moment I’m working out whether I need to read past the introduction ((It’s a good introduction but its also a weighty tome and I suspect the theory side is about to become mired in a dense retelling of history.)) of `The Jesuit Myth,’ a book detailing the post-(French-)revolution Conspiracy Theories about the favourite scapegoat of the Roman Catholic Church, the Jesuits. Then, once that is done, I had Mark Fenster’s `Conspiracy Theories’ to read. It gets referenced a lot; I need to see why.

One of the core concerns with History has been, historically (oh, very witty, Mr. Ransome) getting to the heart of the characters who formed or are said to be responsible for those momentous events people feel the need to write about. The ‘Great Men of History’ theory advocated that any important historical event came down to some individual’s wants or actions; the Roman Republic fell because men like Sulla, Crassus, Pompey and Caesar wanted more and more power. It seems a sensible suggestion and, perhaps more importantly, it makes for a compelling narrative. It’s very hard to get into the mindset of a class or long-term historical process, but if you read something about a single person you both feel that you understand the actor and the results of their action.

This is all coming from my latest piece of non-thesis reading, ‘The Medici Giraffe,’ by Marina Belozerskaya. It’s a stunningly good book; easy to read, gripping and covering a lot of history (it goes from Ptolemaic Egypt to William Randolph Hearst). It also turns the ‘Great Men of History’ thesis upside down by providing the history of an individual via the common theme of the hunt for exotic animals. From Philadelphos’s search for African elephants (which, incidentally, lead to the discovery of gold mines and thus made Ptolemaic Egypt rich) to the discovery of black swans (Australia’s greatest contribution to Philosophy) and the fate of Napoleon’s wife, Josephine. Rather than give us the history of these people we are, instead, given the history of exotic animal collections which happens, by and by, to be centred around some famous individuals (who are, themselves, the end points of particular historical processes).

A lot of modern Histories do this now, in part because the ‘Great Men of History’ thesis is old hat and is not particularly popular in academic History Departments. Not because the thesis isn’t true in many cases but because it is often a mischaracterisation. Yes, Caesar’s wants did lead to the fall of the Republic, but let’s not forget the wave of popular support from the plebian class (as well as the excesses of the Senate). Often historical individuals only make sense in the wider context of their culture, class, et al.

If there is one downfall to ‘The Medici Giraffe’ it is that I didn’t discover any new Conspiracy Theories. Still, I don’t think that Belozerskaya intended to write on them at all, so it might just be that the book isn’t aimed at me (well, not the academic me; the leisure me loves this Fortean stuff). Still, it has prompted some conspiratorial thoughts on my part.

Steve Clarke, in his paper ‘Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorizing,’ published in The Philosophy of the Social Sciences, argued that one fault with the concept of the Conspiracy Theory was that we hold them to be ‘good’ because they offer us a dispositional view of the events under consideration. Clarke postulated that the Fundamental Attribution Error was largely responsible for people taking up Conspiracism (the belief that lots of things can be explained by reference to Conspiracy Theories). Let’s leave aside the fact that Clarke has put aside this hypothesis. Clarke’s original contention was that humans prefer dispositional rather than situational explanations. If we are offered an explanation that puts forward the reasons for the event’s occurrence framed in the terms of individuals wanting certain ends and this is contrasted with an explanation that offers us nothing by way of wants and desires (or frames them obliquely) then we tend to choose the explanation that is dispositonal (framed in the language of individual wants and desires). We seem to want to be able to ‘place the blame’ for an event on people wanting certain ends rather than accepting that the events in question might have been the end result of a much larger, less centred, historical process.

Take, for example, the end of the Republic. Most of the Patrician writers who covered the event focussed on Caesar because, it is often argued, it was easier to blame one man than to recognise that the politics of the Assembly and the Senate had become corrupt. Better Caesar be maligned than the State. Most of the Plebian writers blamed the Senate but tended to not take issue with the Assembly. Now, whilst it is true that the Republic was probably brought to its knees by Caesar and the power struggle that followed his assassination it is also true that the circumstances of Caesar’s up-bringing and political life are equally important to the Fall of the Republic. Had Caesar not been born another would have taken his place (I think the best example of this is found in Stephen Fry’s ‘Making History,’ a remarkably good time travel novel about what might have happened if Hitler had never been born).

We like the dispositional story of Caesar and the Fall of the Republic. It is easy to understand and easy to retell. The situational story, which some argue starts a hundred years earlier with the Gracchi, is a far more complex story and not so easy to grasp. The situational story is better, however. For one thing it explains more fully why Augustus takes a very different route to obtaining full control over Rome than that of his adopted father.

There is something to the notion of the Fundamental Attribution Error (Clarke doesn’t completely retract his view but rather limits the scope of it). History seems much simpler to understand when we write about it as the results of people doing things; we seem to like to understand History as a action-packed, person-centred, narrative (written History was, historically (there I go again), a form of fiction). Conspiracy Theories offer us such stories.

Mostly. The JFK assassination Conspiracy Theory goes the other way; we move from a story about Oswald acting alone to a shadowy cabal seeking the death of a president. This might be, in part, why Clarke no longer advocates the Fundamental Attribution Error. The Conspiracy Theory (well, one of them) version of events is far more situational (read: context-based) than dispositional. Then again, this might also explain why that story doesn’t seem to have gained as much traction as, say, the World Trade Center attacks of 2001. Conspiracy Theorists know ‘who really attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon’ whilst they have only vague suspicions about the cabal behind the 1963 shooting.

I suspect a lot of people do, at least initially, prefer dispositonal explanations to situational ones. The question in the literature surrounding the Fundamental Attribution Error turns on the issue of what dispositions are we pointing at when we say people prefer explanation A over B, and how that in many cases a lot of these so-called dispositional explanations are actually situational ones anyway. There is still a lot of theoretical work to be done here (and most of it belongs to the Psychology camp) in sorting out what we really mean by positing a Fundamental Attribution Error and I shall be keeping track of it to see how it fits into my project.

See, I can justify my non-thesis reading. Long story short: ‘The Medici Giraffe’ is excellent reading and wonderfully Fortean. Buy a copy now. Even better, buy two and gift me one of them. My copy, in actuality, belongs to the Library and I’m hesitant to give it back.