The Truth is out There
Michael Butter - The Nature of Conspiracy Theories
The Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2021 (March 2, 2021 issue)
In the age of QAnon, it is of little comfort to learn in Michael Butter’s “The Nature of Conspiracy Theories” that such malevolent fables have been around for some time. Cicero devised one. Winston Churchill, at least once, passed along another. What’s different now, claims Mr. Butter, is who believes them, who spreads them and how they are disseminated. Once common among the elites, conspiracy theories were stigmatized, in the West anyway, during the postwar years. “We used to be afraid of conspiracies,” the author relates. “We are now more afraid of conspiracy theories,” a fear that helps account for the attention they attract.
But only partly: Ideas that might once have been confined to a pamphlet are now easily available on the internet, a space where anyone can be an expert and where conspiracy theories can provide a splendid living for those who peddle them. The internet has “largely nullified” the media’s “traditional watchdog role,” a change that Mr. Butter, who writes from a leftish-establishment point of view, mourns more than is entirely healthy.
Perhaps inevitably in these times, Mr. Butter examines the connection between populism and conspiracy theories. The connection is real enough, although support for the former does not have to mean succumbing to the latter. Nevertheless it’s no coincidence that susceptibility to conspiracism is associated with feeling powerless or (something obviously relevant to the rise of populism) “the fear of becoming so.”
But the underlying appetite for conspiracy theories stems from something far deeper than social and/or political disaffection. It arises, Mr. Butter suggests, from the way “evolution has trained the human brain to make connections and recognize patterns.” We are delighted to “find” these connections, even when there are none—so great, I suspect, is our reluctance to accept a random and indifferent universe. There is a decent argument to be made that conspiracy theories helped fill the psychological gap left by religion’s retreat, even if, as Mr. Butter records, they long predated the Enlightenment’s revolt against God.
“Conspiracy theories,” writes Mr. Butter, “create meaning, reduce complexity and uncertainty, and emphasize human agency.” This is why so many are based on strange coincidences, incongruous facts or even slips of the tongue. To the conspiracist’s mind, “there is no room for chance or contradictions . . . there must be something else behind” what Mr. Butter describes as “errant data.”
Conspiracy theories can also be fun, something the author plays down. Though many of the foundational conspiracist texts favor “an arid style accompanied by multiple footnotes, references and appendices”—a style intended to convey seriousness—this may, for fans, be less dull than Mr. Butter imagines. Labyrinths have their charms. For others, the conviction that they are watching immense, hidden conspiracies unfold is a good way to cheer up an otherwise humdrum existence. This may be heightened by what Mr. Butter calls the “optimistic dimension of conspiracy theories”: “In conspiracy theories . . . it is nearly always ‘five minutes to midnight’ . . . . There is always still just enough time to stop the conspiracy.” And Mr. Butter clearly appreciates the pride that comes with discovering a secret that the “sheeple” could not—a pride reinforced by the notion that, thanks to the stigmatization of conspiracy theories, being (supposedly) in the know is to wear the mantle of the dissident.
Mr. Butter, a professor of American studies at the University of Tübingen in Germany, sketches out quite a few conspiracy theories—I was shocked to learn, for instance, of Beyoncé’s supernatural powers. But he also offers a useful perspective on the presentation of these narratives, whether it be in those multiple footnotes or, in the case of documentaries such as the “Loose Change” series on 9/11, the use of aesthetic techniques such as “rhythmic montage,” a “domineering” voiceover and “a consistent soundtrack throughout a sequence”—to give a sense of coherence that such confections do not deserve.
The author examines the shape and form that many conspiracy theories take—their Manicheanism, say, or whether they are top-down (a government plot), bottom-up (a plot against the government) or event-driven (JFK’s assassination, the moon landing). Another frequent marker of conspiracy theories is the way they sprawl over the centuries and feature a vast cast of malefactors who are formidable yet, in their habit of scattering clues for the diligent to unearth, curiously incompetent. By contrast, genuine conspiracies usually involve a limited number of participants and narrowly defined, precise objectives.
Mr. Butter’s book, translated by Sharon Howe, can operate as a general introduction to the strange world of conspiracy theories but, closely argued and scholarly, it is better suited to specialist readers already familiar with much of this material—especially, perhaps, for some of its unexpected insights. These include the extent to which the paranoid style has taken over the social sciences in the universities, even if the author prefers to refer, considerably more gently, to “a rhetoric and argumentative structure” that is often “strikingly similar to that of conspiracy theories.” That this intellectual discourse is focused on “abstract forces” such as the power structure within a society rather than on the machinations of specific conspirators is less of a distinction than Mr. Butter would have us believe. There is also the small matter of the long-running academic assault on objective reality, which has also seeped into the outside world. A society where people talk, unchallenged, about “their” truths is not best suited to take on the nonsense of conspiracism.