I adore my dog-eared Hofstadter books as much as the next self-important pundit, but I'm done worrying about the paranoid style in American politics. More pernicious, I'm starting to think, is anti-paranoid punditry in American politics, in which scary-but-plausible theories are dismissed I adore my dog-eared Hofstadter books as much as the next self-important pundit, but I'm done worrying about the paranoid style in American politics. More pernicious, I'm starting to think, is anti-paranoid punditry in American politics, in which scary-but-plausible theories are dismissed simply by calling them conspiratorial. Because we all know the ancient Latin logical fallacy reductio ad conspiratorium that eliminates theories assuming collusion between actors in service of complicated ends. Nothing so unlikely could ever occur in this reality, pal.
An excellent example of this shoddy analytical work came in The New Yorker this week, where Nicholas Lemann devoted a feature piece to paranoia in the our post-9/11 polity. I'd tell you what it was about, but there was no thesis, just a disjointed series of sneers at various conspiracy-theorists, from 9/11 doubters to those dumb enough to think that "big defense contractors [gave] the determining push for the war in Iraq" to those wild-eyed enough to think financial incentives matter in pharmaceutical research. An example:
Journalism, which seeks to explain the world to people, is a perfect vehicle for theories about conspiracies by the powerful, and this year has brought an efflorescence of them. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in Rolling Stone, recently wrote, "After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004," and that John Kerry would have won if the voting had been conducted fairly. Kennedy devoted most of his article to Ohio, where, for example, he says that, before the election, one Republican county government "invented a nonexistent terrorist threat" in order to prevent press scrutiny of the vote count. Celia Farber, writing last spring in Harper's about an AIDS drug that she says was dangerous and should not have been put on the market, abruptly switched gears and offered this generalization about the state of drug research in America: "Today's scientists are almost wholly dependent upon the goodwill of government researchers and powerful peerreview boards, who control a financial network binding together the National Institutes of Health, academia, and the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. Many scientists live in fear of losing their funding. 'Nobody is safe,' one N.I.H.-funded researcher told me."
The Celia Farber article, which focused on a heterodox researcher who doubts the validity of AIDS, was horseshit. What Lemann managed to do here, however, was extract the single true, even banal element of her piece and discredit it, not through contrary evidence or counterargument, but by labeling it "conspiracy." As for Kennedy's article, I've got my doubts about his evidence, but Lemann does nothing to affirm them. Indeed, he does nothing to argue the facts of any of these theories at all. He just mocks, laments, and muses over their existence. Were I a conspiracy-theorist, seeing my ideas plastered across the New Yorker, derided by the chin-stroking author who nonetheless appears unable to muster a single scrap of counterevidence against them, I'd be affixing a new 3x5 card to my Wall o' Truth.
Most of these theories are, to be sure, bull. Salon has convincingly debunked many of Kennedy's claims. Popular Science did a demolition job on 9/11 paranoia. The bulk of the evidence argues that Iraq was the fault of ideologues, not contractors. But like many arguments, if they're wrong, it's because they're wrong, not because they lurk on the margins of acceptable discourse and vaguely unsettle those who come into contact with them. If The New Yorker wants to ignore them -- that's fine, magazines have a limited number of pages and an unlimited number of topics. But to devote a feature to them without, at any juncture or instant, seriously addressing their claims? It's enough to leave the reader wondering what so scared the usually-analytical Lemann into fashioning such an uncharacteristic hackjob. My guess? The CIA planted a mind control chip in his naval cavity when he was a young man, surreptitiously helped him achieve his current position, and then hit the remote when they needed his cooperation.
