The Mad, Mad World of the 'Unexplained', Paranoia and Conspiracy
We will start by getting rid of the worst book. The translated tome on Fulcanelli the alchemist is dreadful - poorly written, obscure, poorly translated, poorly edited, pompous, deeply incoherent and providing no context or analysis. It contains some interesting photographs and some less interesting but at least accurately photographed documentation. You are left with an impression of a set of more than a little nutty marginalised figures living from hand to mouth on their eccentricities - and this may not be entirely fair to them. What we want is a hypothesis on why 'Fulcanelli' appeared at that time (interwar France) and what he meant to the person who created him or was him. Given the phenomanon that was Pierre Plantard in the 1950s, there is something here about French culture and its relationship to the ludibrium to be explored. But this is not the book to help with that. Indeed, why am I spending so much time even reviewing it!
The Mammoth compilations, on the other hand, are usually good value. This is no exception. Authored by the redoubtable Colin & Damon
Wilson, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unexplained is the merging of the bulk of two earlier works, pulling some
63 'unsolved mysteries' together from A (King Arthur and Merlin) to Z
(Zombies). It is not sensationalist although the subject matter is
certainly sensational. It provides a reasoned first stab at assessing these
mysteries - nearly all of some cultural importance - so that you can, by
the end of the book, have your own opinion whether there is 'something
in them' or they are just hoaxes or utter nonsense based on the
credulousness of the dim-witted.
I had some fun systematically
assessing each 'mystery' as it was presented by the Wilsons - in
relation to the persuasiveness of any possible argument that there was
something in the mystery that could be taken at face value, whether I
thought they were relevant to life as we live it today and their
imaginative or mythic value. Top of the list for further investigation on these terms were the following:-
- What precisely was Philip K. Dick 'possessed' by that gave him such imaginative power? (probably psychosis)
- How did the Dogon of Africa know what they appeared to know about the stars?
- What is the true story of Homer and the Fall of Troy?
- How does hypnosis work?
- What is the provenance of the Oera Linda book and its relationship to the legend of Atlantis?
- Did 'hidden masters' ever actually exist?
- Rennes-le-Chateau (naturally either as con trick, elaborate hoax or 'truth').
- The Piri Re'is Map (another tale of Atlantis).
- The existence of sea monsters.
- Time slips.
- Vortices as bridges between natural and 'supernatural'.
- Zombies.
- The phenomenon of synchronicity.
At the other extreme, we have the probable nonsense or trivia of Agatha Christie's disappearance, the stories of the Devil's Footprints, the Glozel mystery, the 'real' Mona Lisa and the Joan Norkot mystery - entertaining enough but really the stuff of folk legend, eminently explicable or tales spun out of lack of information and a rich imagination. But the book is immensely entertaining. The care taken to tell each story as canonically as possible make it an invaluable reference tool that should be in any library of popular culture.
If the vast bulk of the book presents mysteries that are only mysterious because information of importance is missing, occasionally the Wilsons go into territory where Arthur C. Clarke's dictum that magic is undiscovered science really might apply. Some 'mysteries' are still not adequately explained by current scientific knowledge. Although they may fully be explained eventually, until then we may rightfully be respectful of those who continue to ensure that anomalous events are not swept under the positivist carpet because of their inconvenience. We owe a great debt to Charles Fort's refusal to do this a century ago and a lesser one to the Wilsons and others who keep 'problems' before our eyes for eventual solution by means yet to be discovered.
As to Lynn Picknett's The Secret History of Lucifer (our bridge in this review from the 'unexplained' to conspiracy theory) you should only read this as entertainment because it
sure ain't coherent history. It is part of a peculiar genre that mixes
an author's ideological commitment to seeing the world in a different
and subversive way with elaborate and largely unsustainable claims about
history. This is a shame because the subversive intent is not a
bad idea. Unfortunately, the technique of piling up notes from entirely
separate incidents in history into a narrative with a weak evidential
basis merely discredits the intent. The book offers some catharsis for
the powerless (especially women) and no doubt is moderately profitable
for the author but it is no call for action and adds little to understanding.
The
central early claim of this potboiler appears to be that power
struggles within the very early Christian Church were lost, by a
sexually open spiritual tradition, to the sexually repressed Pauline
Church. The original practice of Christ was a form of sexual
spirituality led by St. John the Baptist who was nothing like the
picture presented by the Church in subsequent centuries. The
book then meanders into the highways and byways of history until it ends
with praise of Lucifer and a condemnation of those who dabble with the
Satanic. This, of course, refers to Lucifer the Light-Bringer (who must
definitely not be confused with Satan) positioned as the positive force
behind science, sexual freedom, tolerance and the Enlightenment.
The
meandering takes us from ancient times through the usual tales of
ancient spirituality, Cathar-Templar suffering, witch-burning, John Dee
and Edward Kelley (why? we ask, as we are reading it), masonic lore,
gobbets from the history of spiritualism and, of course, Crowley and
LaVey, to become yet another chapter in the attempt to create an
alternative historical reality. There is certainly no necessary
connection between one tale and the next - or even between components
within each narrative. As entertainment this is all amusing
enough but as a factual basis for understanding history, forget it. A
cursory reading of the useful Wikipedia entries on the persecution of
'witches' and the Inquisition, studied alongside the relevant chapter in
the book, will tell you that it is not reliable. The book is
riddled with polemic, selective facts, lots of 'mays' and 'could it be
thats', odd etymologies, conflation of events from different times and
circumstances and extremely doubtful 'evidence' (though we have no doubt
this is due to weak judgement rather than malice aforethought).
The
claims about the Johannite tradition in the West and the 'secret'
messages in the art of a subversive Leonardo Da Vinci may excite Dan
Brown enthusiasts - and may even be 'true' up to a point - but they are
not adequately evidenced or contextualised here. We, who do
believe that 'resistance' to elites and prevailing culture has been much
more widespread in the past than we have been allowed to believe, must,
nevertheless, accept the fact that the victors write the history of
past times. As we have noted elsewhere, gaps in history are important and need taking seriously. And yet, just because no evidence exists of (say) our 'resistance
proposition', this does not mean that we can make something up out of
the gaps to prove our proposition in a way that has no basis in reason or experience and certainly not to make excessively massive deductive leaps from what does exist as attested fact.
The
best approach is a degree of scepticism about all authorities' framing of the past rather than to make attempts to prove our own expectations by reframing the shared facts in an equally uncertain way.
Better still perhaps we should decide not to make any claims for current liberation based on the past but concentrate our demands on the present (our
current condition) and on the future (how we believe we should be
allowed to live our lives). Yes, the book is footnoted. Yes, the
authors have read widely. But, no, the sources are not considered
contextually or critically. This is a shame because the passion in the
polemic does hit its target sometimes.
The underlying message of
the book is about the intrinsic evil of institutionalised religion in
its effects on Western culture over nearly two thousand years (Picknett
is not alone in this but a better book in this respect might be Reay
Tannahill's Sex in History). This
proposition bears serious consideration when, as just one example of perfidy, the Church of
Rome in Ireland finally was forced to admit not only that child abuse
was rampant in its organisation but that successive prelates had covered
it up deliberately in order to protect the reputation of their morally
questionable institution. There is a genuine and righteous anger
in the book about how the human race can develop a collective will to
malice, often manipulated by sick psychopaths under cover of religion. I
like her for this. It makes her somewhat more worthy as passionate
myth-spreader than the dry truth-telling academic who refuses to take a
moral stand and who seeks to objectify us out of our anger by suggesting
that 'that was then and this is now'. It is what we do with the anger that counts.
We must not look on past crimes as if they mean
nothing in judging the conduct today of modern successor organisations,
whether Crown or Church but we cannot be trapped into making moral judgements that mean nothing now because the past is what it is. Or, rather, the current institution may not be guilty of the crime but it can be guilty of covering up or perpetuating the crime. There is little we can do about the British Empire's lack of action in stopping colonial slaughter of peoples within its jurisdiction but we can be concerned at a refusal to recognise that it happened and be angered at our Government if it tried to do it again. It does not, however, mean we need to get stuck in the groove of reparations, self-flagellation and rewriting history to satisfy the outraged. There is a middle way of learning from the past to live well now and shape the future. Myth-making about the past is not going to be helpful. We need to know what happened and why but then move on to a better world.
Picknett is also trying to make an
important point about the sexual oppression of women (as a sex-positive
feminist, no doubt) not by men in general (as less sex-positive
feminists try to do) but by the institutions of men who oppress all
equally. Here, she is pushing at an open door with this reader. It
is quite possible that she will drive many women to righteous anger not
only at 'authority' but at a culture that denies full female sexual
expression - but what a shame that this matter cannot be argued on its
merits based on a considered assessment of the facts rather than through
a mythic narrative that is no more reliable than the nonsense
perpetrated by her opponents. A war of myths is not what we need at this
time in our history. So unless you just want an entertainment
from within the now widely published genre of pseudo-history (and, why not, if it whiles
away a train journey or two without lasting harm), don't bother with this book at all ... just
say to yourself that you don't need to be told how to run your life by
anyone and, if you are one of those people who like to spiritualise your
sexuality, don't get angry about how people were treated in the past,
just go do what you want today and shape the future.
Published by Conspiracy Books, an opportunistic
publishing brand created by Collins & Brown, in 2005 at the height
of the post-9/11 conspiracy hysteria, you would think that Who Are The Illuminati? would be hokum. It is not. Lindsay Porter provides
a sober history of the idea of the Illuminati and its influence,
showing that it did indeed exist as a rather rum extremist (by the
standards of the day) intellectual cult in Southern Germany in the
1780s. What is more interesting is how this short-lived
phenomenon became a potent idea of dark conspiratorial forces (in
direct opposition to the later left wing trope of ineluctable economic
forces) that fuelled the paranoia underlying both populism and the
periodic witch-hunts by authorities faced with social phenomena for
which they had no explanation. Who Are The Illuminati? gives us the narrative
of that process from the intellectual white terror that saw the arrest
of Cagliostro and fear throughout clerical and dynastic Europe of
'Masons under the bed', through its emergence as nervous populism in the
early years of the American Republic (where it seeded today's vigorous
political paranoia) to the rise of its anti-semitic half-brother that,
in turn, played such a major role in Slavic and Germanic resistance to
modernisation.
The second half of the book concentrates on the
meme's role in modern American history - as cousin to fear of communism (giving
us that Bolshevik-Jewish-Masonic plot that underpinned much of the
paranoid Mid-Western and Far Western populism that gave Nixon and Reagan
their electoral base and now supports Trump), as partner of the Christian Right and as close
associate of New Age irrationalism from ufology to pyramidology. There
are better books on the detailed history of any of the particular
groups, movements and themes of this book and we still need better
accounts of the phemonenon from a political science perspective. The
editing is also occasionally sloppy (errors such as 1798 for 1789 for
Cagliostro's arrest slip in and confuse the subsequent narrative) yet
this is a level-headed book that we can strongly recommend to those starting on the conspiracy journey.
The
tendency of academics, especially centre-left academics, understandably
worried that populist obsession with conspiracy will create an anomic,
defeated, suspicious, inactive and irrational mass on which the elite
can feed like political vampires, is to be so dismissive of conspiracy
theory as to miss the point. In fact, conspiracy theory is
generally false theory to try and explain a deeper truth. Most people's
destinies are guided by surprisingly small groups of wholly
unaccountable persons who are highly clubbable and who bludgeon each
other into group-think about what is right and wrong for the rest of us,
often using dodgy science and theory themselves. Chomsky was good on this in his Propaganda Model of society.
In this
context, a conspiracy generally looks more like the bumbling High Command of New
Labour or the dodgy world of security and NGO collaboration in
international affairs than anything so extreme as the Illuminati. The
populist masses have grasped at a truth but the Academy in general does
its best to deflect them from enquiring further by trying to prove that
there are no conspiracies which, of course, is utter nonsense. There are conspiracies "but not as we know them, Jim". I should know - I have organised one or two myself. But we
are moving too far away from the book. In fact, 2005 seemed like
a high point in one of those periodic waves of political paranoia that
rise and subside, moving from fringe to mainstream and back again.
Nurtured by the growing New Age interest in the esoteric and the
irrational (ably documented in several books by Gary Lahman), becoming
mainstream with the massive popularity of the X-Files and appearing to
become real with the psychological assault of America on 9/11 and the
conduct of the industrial-political lobby that captured foreign policy
in America under Bush II, the movement then subsided to re-form itself in the wake of 2008 and 2016 as Qanon and other politicised conspiracy movements.
Part
of the subsidence was down to some successful re-assertion of simple common sense,
part to the public's mature appreciation of much conspiracy theory as
an entertainment phenomenon, part to the maturing of the internet as a
source of information, part to the realisation that some nonsense is
delivered to our minds by the very people who are said to be the
antidote to the conspirators (the media) for commercial reasons, part to the growing
realisation that conspiracies are much more basic, less competent and
less well organised than the fantasists would like to believe and part
because the election of Obama and the credit crunch temporarily shifted the
balance of opinion back to movements and blind forces as the motors of
history. All these factors then shifted into reverse to encourage conspiracy theory (as much on the Left as the Right). Now, economic conditions seem to suggest a return to the blind forces of history. Always with us, these blind forces. Scheming human intervention and public fear of the connection between the scheming and forces that may seem not so blind when you watch the big wigs making their pronunciamentos at Davos oscillate our fears and constantly shift the terms of trade in political life.
Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear is, on the other hand, a mere potboiler! Goodreads always asks 'what did you learn from this book? and I have to say, in this case, 'very little'. Worse,
the book is a symptom of the very disease that it is allegedly trying
to cure - promoting what might be called an hysteria of normalisation
within an ideology of 'expert' progressivism that is probably at the
root of why some people are becoming paranoid in the first place. What
is one of the most logical reasons for not trusting other persons?
Almost certainly the fact that control over your own thoughts, ideas,
even behaviours, is embedded in a social reality over which you feel you
have little control and in which you have no stake.
This thin
(in quality) book is based on often unconvincing research that mixes the
usual offerings from the Institute of the Bleeding Obvious with some
gross assumptions about the link between human psychology and society
that have the last decade of governance by managers and experts written
all over them. There is also a slightly more sinister, if
unintended, quality to the book - it starts with the now obsessive trope
promoted by a certain type of metropolitan intellectual-expert with a
stake in the existing system to the effect that conspiracy theory is the
problem rather than the society in which conspiracy theory flourishes.
Elsewhere,
we have pointed out the social function of conspiracy theory as a form
of psychological protest against rule by elites who set the terms of
their own dominance. This is the modern equivalent of, say, the use of
grimoires and magic against the claims of the priestly class. They may
not be 'true' but there is not much more 'truth' in the claims of those
who try to tell people what is right behaviour and right language and,
eventually, right thought. This book stands at the ideological
peak of that worst aspect of the Enlightenment project - the demand that
people choose normality and rationality and be guided in this matter by
people whose dessicated vision of humanity is purely material and
scientific.
I really cannot take this book very seriously. I am
still waiting for the book that truly explores the relationship between the
sheer variety of brain structures available to humanity (though Trimble on the neurology of belief has moved us in the right direction), their rights to
self determination and the good society that is centred on relieving
distress, ensuring personal security and permitting maximum creativity
without promoting the value of normality or variation from the norm as
disease. This is certainly not that book.
As for the authors' 'solutions' -
they fall into three types: the problem of the media (where they have
no solution); a vague wishy-washy 'third way' social and economic
progressivism, overseen as rule by managers and therapists, one that we
have kicked out of office in the UK in 2019 precisely because it made us so
miserable; and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which has serious merit
so long as the will to use it comes from the person (not a 'patient')
rather than be imposed by the community as a whole demanding our health as a
social duty.
The inability to understand how society really
works is the worst flaw of this book. Paranoia simply fills an
information gap. Although unhelpful and distracting fus rom the real
issues involved in improving one's life and environment, it does bring us back to
considering such issues as the basis for trust when we cannot know
other minds, when volatility is the normal state of social interaction
and when there really is clear evidence (and this is not paranoia) that
self interest and greed do result in effective small scale endemic
'conspiracies' against the public interest.
The creation of New
Labour which ruled this land for twelve years was a conspiracy of sorts
in this sense. Lazy collusion between inspectors and oil companies in
North America is a form of collusive conspiracy. And the informal
dialogue between academics looking for funding in their dialogues with politicians and
civil servants who want quick fix solutions to intractable problems is
yet another. It is not paranoid to say that society actually
runs on collusive co-operation between self-defined 'experts' who find
it difficult to separate their personal interests from the public
interest and that this intermeshing of soft conspiracy as a means of
doing business is something that the wider public notes and, without
understanding the mechanisms involved, resents.
The ideological
normalisers (such as the Freemans) want us to trust 'authority' when
authority is inherently untrustworthy precisely because it is human-all-too-human
and is no better in its ability to judge and model the world accurately
than its subjects. Conspiracy theory is absurd but the actual exercise of power
in contemporary society is equally absurd. As for the media, if it behaves irresponsibly
in the arbitrage of information in society (and it does), it is because
power refuses to provide full information to the public more directly and treats its
constituents like objects for management. The population at large are
looking for narratives that will express their growing 'ressentiment' at
being pulled from pillar to post by people who quite clearly are not as
clever as they are cracked up to be and are not as disinterested
either.
When it comes to the evidence for some of the claims in the book,
they remind me of similar books making vast claims on human nature from a
surprisingly small number of experiments on animal behaviour using
theories of human nature that treat all persons as automata. The very fact of an experiment creates an anomalous
circumstance in the minds of participants. There quite simply is no
ethical scientific way of producing sufficient psychological data
regarding minds in social contexts that can be anything more than
suggestive. All attempts to promote a career in 'science' make the 'scientist' prone
to claims that are overplayed. Certain behaviours are given value
simply because most people seem to do such-and-such on most observable
occasions but such work can never tell us what any one person will do on
any one particular occasion nor the effect of awareness of the effect of observation on
consequent behaviour nor what value to put on the behaviour.
Milgram's
famour experiments probably do demonstrate a default position of
humanity in accepting the idiot commands of men in white coats or black
uniforms but not all men accepted the idiot commands. The idiot commands
were placed in an ideological environment which over-valued science as a
matter of trust. A proportion of persons, faced with the presentation
of the default position, can and have reacted by becoming rightfully
more suspicious of men in white coats and men in black uniforms. But at
least now some of these latter will know that if they do an evil act
and are not forced into it, they can enjoy their own sadism as 'chosen' instead of
slinking into the position of transferring responsibility to
'authority' - they made me do it! This book is filled with assertions of claimed knowledge
based on the Great God Science that have nothing of the relative
certainty that we can get from physics or metallurgy.
A great
deal of social scientific 'judgement' presupposes that default positions
and the normal are somehow reflective of what should be or, if morally
upsetting, that they require intervention to change normality, with a gross
confusion of categories between issues of mental health,
self-determination, social and economic organisation and the nature of
power - precisely the same confusion of categories that is currently bringing our culture to its knees. There is no attempt
here to ask what the functional purpose of mental states are to the
person experiencing them or to investigate the right of persons to
construct non-rational misperceptions of objective reality in order to
maintain their selves in otherwise intolerable environments. There is no understanding of the existential survival value of cognitive bias and non-dominant hemispherical corrections to the supposedly rational mind.
This
is not to argue against liberation from internal mental constraints constructed by brain chemistry and structure by any
means but, except in cases of real psychic distress (most people get
along fine most of the time despite the attempts to medicalise humanity
by special interests), there is no value in replacing a slavery to the
weaknesses of one's own mind or an existing slavery to the a traditional social
construction of reality by other minds with a new slavery to a new
social construction of reality by experts who demand certain thought
patterns as the price of 'happiness' This is the soma world of Huxley by
the back door.
The Freemans, to be fair, do understand the
social and economic preconditions for real individuation (whose
character is really one of permitting choices and escape from bonds that
no longer function for the psyche) but they end up with a utopian
social democratic model that looks set to create precisely those bonds
for the psyche that it wants to escape. The crack at Thatcher near the
end (and I am no supporter of hers) is simply unnecessary and reveals
the prejudice of the writers. More to the point, there are now no
resources left for this material paradise thanks to decades of neoliberal administrative mismanagement so effort should go on liberating
persons to make their own informed choices in their own psychic interest - and perhaps enabling wider knowledge and
availability of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to individuals who wish to
transform themselves on their own terms.
The story of Robert
Chapman's willed determination to work out his extreme (and clinical)
paranoia is very interesting but it is anomalous and it presupposes an
inherent quality of will in the man. If the Freemans had spent more time
on the issues surrounding the will and the re-evaluation of paranoid
thinking as existentially useful to the person rather than padding out the book
with social psychological assertions and wish lists, this might have
remained in my library. In fact, socially, we may have a new
problem emerging which is that the work of the Freemans and others have
created such a 'snobbisme' about conspiracy that 'normal' (actually
quite abnormal) 'haute-bourgeois' intellectuals, journalists and
politicians feel that they will be ridiculed if they do not take at face
value some of the self-serving explanations of the rest of the elite of
which they are a part.
I am not in the slightest paranoid but I
do, professionally, deal in conspiracies in the sense that, sometimes, I
have clients in business who are the subject of direct, malicious
attack for reasons that are not always apparent. They are subject to
'conspiracies' and, once you know this, you can take measures to
deal with the matter yet it is still sometimes difficult to get normal,
rational, highly educated people to understand that there are people out
there whose profession is to manipulate memes and public information
for special interest reasons. They will say that this is 'conspiracy
thinking' as if some small-time shark placing dirt in the media is to be
positioned alongside the idea that lizards from Sirius have taken over
Windsor Castle.
The denial of the surprising degree of social
and political manipulation, using the willing dupes of the media, by
states, political interests and commercial lobbyists is as absurd as the
promotion of the lizards from Sirius inhabiting positions of earthly
power. The paranoid mentality (condemned since Hoftstadter's
somewhat patrician East Coast extended sneer at the populism of the
ordinary man struggling to make sense of his crumbling world) has its
survival benefits against conservative elites and left-wing
intellectuals alike.
To their credit, the Freemans see the
connection between poverty, deprivation and paranoid thinking but they
do not understand it. Their complaint is that of all left-wing urban
intellectuals. It is wrong because it is not 'rational' without
comprehending that their own rationality is a weapon of power against
the self-determination of others - and that it acts to ensure that they
are 'servitors' of a system that is flawed and is seen to be flawed by
its victims. Social democracy and expert-led universalist ideology is
just not enough any more ...
By the time we get to the conclusion
of the book, the authors are admitting that they really do not know a
great deal about paranoia after all ... "... sadly we simply don't have
the data to say for certain whether paranoia is increasing." Er, yes,
well! But the claim is certainly that "paranoia is much more prevalent
in society than most of us, including the scientific and medical
establishment, had suspected." Sorry but not proven! The authors
certainly need a healthy dose of M. Foucault at this point since I am
sure that they are not entirely aware of their own complicity in
redefining the terms of their subject in order to redefine humanity.
Paranoia,
in the end, is just stupidity but its harm depends on where you sit -
what is a stupid analysis about society (for example, the nonsense about
terrorist threats against us individuals when the real threat is
against the structures of power of the elite) may be a survival
mechanism for the person while a stupid understanding by the person may
be what society needs to function properly. The cat is let out of
the bag on the final page. Yes, say, the Freemans, paranoia can be
beaten but "to do so requires measures targeted at society as a whole,
and at individuals. Governments must play the major role with the
former. We need a range of policies to raise public awareness of
paranoia; train therapists; and tackle the effects of potentially
damaging social and economic trends."
Oh, bugger! State
intervention to manage the conditions of our minds, a
Psychological-Bureaucratic Complex to compete for our taxes with the
Military-Industrial one - but certainly lots of jobs for the
psychological 'profession'. Yes, that's just what we need, more
expenditures on exhortatory behaviour modification, more therapists and
more bureaucrats to oversee the process. Nudged into happiness by
experts. What a depressing little tome. However, I hope that we never lose our interest in the
phenomenon of conspiracy both as an instrument of the powerless which
the market cynically serves (covered below) or in the
actual fact of conspiracy against the public interest that is implicit
in self-appointed unaccountable elites. Washington, Brussels and London
are riddled with such networks.
It must be a major project for the
future to get researchers and the academy to stop fretting about
restoring 'pure reason' to politics and start getting anxious about the
practical and moral competencies of our ruling castes. Until this is
done, the public will always want their conspiracy theory. Their need
for it is a standing challenge to those who purport to represent their
interests. Invented Knowledge adds to this mix. It is a solid, if occasionally unnecessarily
polemical, account of what Professor Ronald Fritze, clearly an heir to
the liberal Enlightenment, considers to be unacceptable versions of
history and of those constructed versions of science and religion that
have no basis in the reality in which certainly he and probably most of
the rest of us lives. Fritze believes in 'facts' and that the world
views of minds should conform to those 'facts' as far as possible.
The
book deals successively with that old warhorse, the existence of
Atlantis and then with the mythic modern narratives of the discovery and
settlement of America. From there, Fritze looks at the use of
pseudo-history to sustain extremist models of American politics - first
Christian Identity and then the Nation of Islam. He moves on to
the pseudo-science and the pseudo-archaeology of a number of well-known
characters in modern popular culture: Velikovsky, Von Daniken, Hapgood
and Hancock. He closes with an evisceration of Martin Bernal's 'Black
Athena' hypothesis where he finally lets himself down with an onslaught
on post-modernism that loses the book some credibility. Frankly, the rest of us
actually want a solid argument based on (ironically) the facts and not
yet another air strike in the Culture Wars.
Nevertheless, this
book has its virtues - not least the amount of background detail on
extremist political movements and some very good material on how writers
respond to the market. The notes at the book are a mine of useful
references. What this book teaches most (to the extent that one
heartily wishes that Fritze had spent more time on the mechanics of
meme-marketing and less on bursts of prissy outrage) is how writers
weaken before the blandishments of cynical publishers and how, once a
theme proves profitable, a sort of conspiracy of need and pleasure
develops between the writer (rarely a member of the formal academic
establishment) and a public hungry for sensation. This is brokered by
the real villain of the piece, the publisher keen to sell books. It is
all rather grubby with the public being by far the least villainous in
the author-publisher-public nexus.
The section within the book in
which he forensically unravels the marketing operation behind the
nonsensical '1421' thesis of Gavin Menzies (which postulates global
voyaging by the late-medieval Chinese empire) is well judged. The writer
and the public are not the villains here, the publishers are - although
if you consider this sort of pseudo-history as a form of popular
fiction then maybe we should all loosen up and just enjoy it. We
are aware of a version of the Necronomicon being published as
non-fiction (for sales purposes) when its original authors were determined on its
fictional status. In the same way, the publishers of '1421' must have
been fully aware of the thesis' dodgy status as peer-reviewed history
and should have had the decency and honesty to publish it as a
hypothesis that was questionable at best and openly as pseudo-history at
worst. The point is that the publishing industry, like the media in
general, marketing and politics, have institutionalised fiction as fact
with the effect that we no longer believe what does pass for fact any
more.
Fritze is rightfully concerned (actually, he seems outraged) by this culture of lies
though it is the business side and not the writers who are really at
fault here because it should know better. However, he fails to see that it is
culturally systemic and cannot, as the good liberal often does, be laid
at the door of a few individuals who push things to the limit. The
writers that he castigates are merely the eccentric extreme of a culture
that supplies disinformation and misinformation right from its very
heart - churches, states, political parties and businesses (although it
has to be said that modern business is by far the most ethical of this
miserable quadrumvirate of purveyors of absurdity).
There is a point here easily lost in the rush to outrage. This popular fiction is enjoyable because it is imaginative and takes us away from the quotidien. Most of it does not lead to extremist lunacy and certainly not to terrorism and mayhem. The outrage of political liberals is really outrage at the temerity of ordinary people having narratives that are more meaningful to them in their powerlessness than the given narratives of elites who manage and manipulate social narratives that are, often, frankly as dodgy as the nonsense in the pseudo-world Fritze is concerned about. The rubbish appearing on all sides in the current Ukrainian situation is not really an issue of facts so much as the framing of facts and facts are no less problematic than non-facts when the framing is corrupted. Most socially accepted narratives are seriously compromised and even corrupted at this 'framing' level. Just watch the BBC disgrace itself periodically and you will know what I mean.
This is why the book irritates on three separate grounds - it patronises the
public's love of sensation, it takes such a rigid position on the
question of 'what is truth' that it loses the argument and it makes
little attempt to understand the mechanics of these phenomena. In
particular, Fritxe, in his outrage, fails to question why disempowered
people choose to lose themselves in fantasy, how it functions as a
political tool and why the 'truth' as Enlightenment liberals understand
it means bugger all when you are in a vulnerable dead-end job at the
mercy of forces that you do not control.
His po-faced rectitude
is that of intellectuals for intellectuals. This cuts little ice -
especially as the academic world comes out of this story none too well.
The story of how academics attempted to censor Velikovsky through some
pretty foul means is an object lesson in why we should be wary of any
Establishment's claims to truth. If the public want this material
and the market is willing to supply it, then the real question
(unanswered by Fritze and by all the liberal tomes expressing shock and
horror at irrationalism) is WHY they want it. The implicit suggestion is
that the mob is stupid and ignorant and needs to be brought into the
light, but the truth is that a choice of the irrational, of
pseudo-history, of extremist narratives, of conspiracy and of fantasy is
a very rational choice where ordinary people are not given full
information and, above all, are powerless.
What information they do receive is filtered,
laundered, censored and manipulated by an editorial and intellectual
class whose first duty is to the order created by those who pay them. The publishers want it both ways - liberal nostrums at their dinner parties and pseudo-culture for the masses for the profits to pay for the claret. Information is little but top-down narration in which reason
has become a tool for control and where only 'the best and the brightest' of
the disempowered (and less and less of these since the introduction of
neo-liberal economics) are let into the kraal through their payment of the right tolls - essentially compliance with the given narratives. The mass of those left behind have not merely a right
to their irrationalism, they almost have a duty to consider the fantastic
as an act of resistance and insurgency against a system that has forgotten
them, that uses and abuses them and then expects them to be grateful for
the exploitation.
There is one other complaint. Fritze asserts that Martin Bernal's
thesis of the Egyptian origins of Greek civilisation does not stand up
in its radical version to reasonable peer scrutiny. He may have a point in this. It has become
ridiculously politicised by some dim-witted or manipulative identity
politicians but the attack here is excessive and almost, at times,
silly. Without going into the ins and outs of Fritze's argument,
he is far too dismissive of Bernal's assessment (which I oversimplify)
that the 'silences' in history are as important as the noise left behind
by the victors. We have seen how this argument can go horribly wrong in Lynn Picknett's book but the argument need not be wholly wrong if the approach to the gaps is disciplined and connections are considered critically as possibilities and probabilities in their appropriate context. The whole notion of fact in history is not problematic
because there are no facts - of course there are facts - but because not
all the facts are there. They have already been pre-selected, then get selected again by the observer and then are framed.
This
parallels the problem with facts in political or social life. For example, Chomsky's expectation that we can understand the world through an insistent exploration of facts presumes huge amounts of labour and, frankly, intelligence and a so-called free society that allows snippets for dedicated radicals to reveal. This leads to the reasons why Chomskian radicalism is so problematic in practice but that is another debate for another review and another time. I have
also written on the issue of gaps in the record in relation to political analysis and 'conspiracy'
in Lobster 50 but Bernal is right to consider possibility as reasonable
alongside probability where the probability has been skewed by the way
that facts have been left in the record and the way that past
interpretations have accumulated into a sort of group-think that has
permitted 'given' ways of seeing the past that may be a little more
unstable than academics like Fritze think.
Chomsky is good at recognising the group-think and manipulation but less good on creative sufficiently fact-based action frameworking designed to change the world and not create an equally bad world in its place. History, in short, is not and cannot be science or be subject to pure reason but it can be honest with the tools at its disposal. To counter the pseudo-history rightly castigated by Fritze, we need a drive to release more facts from the elites who control them, open up those facts to many frameworks to fit them together and develop more ways to present competing frameworks to the world to be judged. To counter pseudo-history is also to counter elite narratives even when they suit our own interest. That's enough to be said now - in case this review becomes a counter-polemic. This book is one for the library and is useful but it is, ultimately, a disappointment because of its ideologically-driven lack of imagination.