One of the interesting questions that I have received from students recently has to do with the daVinci Code – particularly its truth, or lack thereof, and the problem of the Opus Dei conspiracy theory. I have also noticed in the news an amazing (to my mind) discussion within the Christian community regarding the potential for damage or benefit to Christians resulting from the release of the movie.
I will hold my tongue, anD say only once, THE DAVINCI CODE IS FICTION.
But this discussion of such a popular work that has its basis in a conspiracy theory does bring up a truly interesting question that I have been confronted with before but never really wrestled with. That is, how does a history teacher deal with conspiracy theories in class, and out of class with individual students? It is both rude, and unhelpful, to scoff at a student’s questions about a conspiracy theory. It belittle’s the student, and I think it is a waste of a great opportunity to help the student learn.
Usually, what I have tried to do in the past has been to examine the conspiracy theory in question by putting its major assumptions into historical context, then using evidence to slowly pare down the fishbowl view that is necessary to believe in such a conspiracy. This, however, seems to amount to little more than a nice way to scoff and demolish the theory that I said was rude above.
In the last few days, though, I suppose inspired by the high gross box office receipts of the daVinci Code, and the recognition that they bring to me that I will receive numerous questions on Opus Dei and the Catholics in the Fall, I have been trying to find a better way to deal with this problem.
It seems to me that the best way to steer students away from conspiracy theories is to find a way to point out, concisely and in clear language, the vast number of possible chains of cause and effect that surround any given act or decision within its own present. To show how so many possibilities exist, and then to show the liklihood that one set of events leading to a predetermined outcome can be decided upon by one or more people, and then events manipulated such that they actually make the choices that lead to that outcome, and that this can be done for all of the people and events that need to be influenced over all of the years during which this influence needs to occur and be adjusted. . .
So I need to look for the way to do this. Tonight, though, I have had my wisdom tooth out, and my body is exhasted, my mind tired and drugged up, so I will stop here, now that I have the idea down. I hope to take it further in another post soon.
A thorny subject. It’s easy to scoff at the way-out-there conspiracy theories, but what about the ones where “conspiracy theory” shades over into legitimate political viewpoints? It makes me think of my 1980s history classes at Berkeley: everything was filtered through the lenses of colonialism and imperialism and Marxist theory. These days that’s considered solid scholarship, but how would it have been viewed fifty years ago? Or, to take a less acceptable (to modern Western minds) example, what of the claims in the Islamic world that European and American politics is secretly controlled by the Jewish Zionists? In some parts of the world, this idea is not to be scoffed at.
Are there shadowy organizations in the world that work behind the scenes to pull the strings? Sure there are — secret operations are the bread and butter of the CIA, the NSA, the old KGB, parts of the military, and so on. And undoubtedly the big corporations are working quietly on their own private projects, too. But nobody can keep secrets very long. It’s hard enough keeping things secret while they’re happening, let alone after the fact. With the perspective of decades and centuries, the truth almost inevitably comes out.
I think you are right – that the difference between conspiracy theories and more legitimate systems of analysis are shady. One difference I think does exist has to do with flexibility. Marxism, for example, or colonial/post colonial theory, is less specific than a conspiracy theory or the ideas of someone like Nostradamus. For example, frequently when I talk to students or friends about Nostradamus, a number of very specific predictions come up (notably, most people rarely agree on the specific prediction) – I’ve been told that Nostradamus predicted the World Trade Center attack on 9-11-2001. This kind of specificity is just impossible – there is not enough of a margin of error in this kind of prediction for the sort of minor or major course-changing events that occur so regularly in history. What if, for example, Mohammed Atta had become a less militant person, started his own business, or liked flying enough that he decided to become a real pilot. These might seem far-fetched as possibilities, but they are within the range of believable possibilities. Had one or more of them occurred, there may have been no World Trade Center bombing. So can we say that Nostradamus’ prediction of that singular event rests on the inevitable chain of events in the life of one persion out of 2 billion, 500 years after Nostradamus “predicted” this? That is absurd. Therefore, the possibility of predicting specifically the World Trade Center attack is also absurd.
Marxism, on the other hand, can be incorrect in its ultimate predictions, and still have useful methods for analysis. While Marx was predictive, he did not predict a single specific event at a specific point in the future. Instead, his analysis, and especially as it has been used by historians since, depended on a certain kind of analysis of social trends as causes and effects in a historical pattern, which, it was assumed, would hold true in the future. The specific time, place, and actual events and operators were not predicted.
To go further, the difference between Marx and conspiracy theories is greatest in terms of the degree of redaction. Marx played fast and loose with the past in order to make his analysis work, yet its very lack of specificity made a pattern visible, and that helped to look at other events and times based on a pattern and with an attempt to discern cause and effect relationships.
The controversies over the Kennedy assassination, for example, go further. They take a specific event in a frozen present (the way the Kennedy assassination is looked at is as if under glass. The rereading of that present never really takes place – it is frozen like a dead cell on a microscope slide) and then the events leading up to it are subjected to an endless analysis that redacts the past to such a degree that each event means what the analyst needs it to mean in order for the meaning of the event to be what the analyst has predetermined it to be. This leads to connections between events that are at once more concrete and more tenuous than most historical analytical systems will claim.
Marxism, again, looks for, and to be fair, finds (intentionally) patterns – this does entail over-generalization that functions as redaction, and that is why I am personally suspicious of all ideologically grounded historical works. The more closely a historian adheres to an analytical system, and the more predictive one becomes, the more suspicious I get.
Still, systems like Marxism, which do exist close to conspiracy theories, are not the same as them because they don’t redact the past to the degree of specificity which is required by the conspiracy theory – almost always an absurd degree of events must fall, or must have fallen, in line for events to work out to the single instance a conspiracy theorist is bent on proving.