On the Ontology of Conspiracy Theories

This is going to be an inappropriately brief way to tie together Hannah Arendt, US covert activity, and the militarist turn of the US since the cold war but it’s either this or nothing so let’s go!

In what has to be one of the few brilliant (yet still somehow neglected) pieces of political theory published in a book review magazine, Hannah Arendt’s 1971 “On Lying in Politics” defined secrecy as a fundamental human problem. Her official topic was the release of the Pentagon Papers, a collection of classified US government documents showing that despite its historic levels of needless bloodshed and social disruption, the US government had extensive information showing it was still losing the Vietnam war, information it suppressed. By 1969 the US knew Vietnam was a lost cause (a quick look at Wikipedia shows it remains communist today). Why, then, was our government fruitlessly sacrificing so many human lives to thwart the will of most Vietnamese overseas?

Arendt argued that secrecy itself was a big part of the underlying political problem. Secrecy, and the lying necessary to keep it, is an essential yet essentially toxic feature of political order. In large-scale societies, sooner or later people will want more power, territory, or profit than others are willing to give them. And in the face of economic and military competition, you have to make plans and act on them. This makes secrecy necessary, because letting your competitors know these plans in advance would make it more likely that they can defeat them. Whether it’s an assassination or releasing a new product, keeping certain plans secret requires lying about them: “Plans? We haven’t made any yet… And we’re definitely not going to start on Saturday morning at 4am before anyone’s awake!”

But if the impulse to secrecy has a necessary basis it also has no natural limit, tending to warp and poison its own environment. Because of the feeling of power and exclusiveness that privileged knowledge gives, it tends to take on a magical quality for its possessors, what ancient Romans called the arcana imperii. While it can give its users power, knowing the dirt nobody else is allowed to also naturally makes them unaccountable and alienates them from the people they ostensibly serve. As the historian of science Peter Galison shows, the US government has tended to classify a larger and larger portion of its documents every year, leading to the current absurd reality that because the government produces so many memos and minor documents, there is now more knowledge produced that is annually removed from the public sphere than actually made public.

This, writes Arendt, is why only the US government would have been outraged about publicizing the contents of the Pentagon papers, because that information by 1970 had already been widely circulated in the press via enterprising reporters like Sy Hersh and I.F. Stone. Who, suggested Arendt, could possibly be living in such an artificially curtailed and distorted information environment that they thought nobody but them knew this? Who else but the President?

This brings us to the ontological nature of conspiracy theories: false or unsupported, baseless beliefs about secret plans. Two facts about conspiracy theories have long been noted: first, they are very popular, with some surveys suggesting half of the US population believes in some of the more baseless and/or sinister such as QAnon or a secret UFO base at Area 51. But second, some of the beliefs dismissed as conspiracy theories turn out to be true, such as the CIA’s role in trafficking crack cocaine to black communities in the 1980s. This is why it is hard to get a grip on the concept–if they are inherently fake, what do we call the ones that are based in a suppressed reality, the actual hidden dealings of a state or other powerful group? Rather than illusions, these might represent fundamental realities.

Can we create a bigger picture about what sort of important real world actions would tend to be kept secret, the “conspiracy theories” that turn out to be true? Politically one attempt might connect Vietnam and the increasing tendency toward destructive interventionism by the United States with things like the unwillingness of most US political figures on both sides of the aisle to challenge it. This is surely not the only possible one, but we can follow it as an example. Perhaps, as a recent book on the forgotten female figures around the John F. Kennedy assassination suggests, this big picture is connected with a greater covert investment in such interventionism, and more serious warnings to political leaders who resist it, than publicly known.

Arendt’s analysis of lying in politics suggests that the very concept of the “Conspiracy Theory” involves a false ontology. Due to the inherent nature of competition and politics, government and other groups make secret plans, including audacious or disturbing ones, where available information will be either nonexistent or muddy and incomplete. And not only are the more disturbing plans more likely to be kept secret, but from Galison’s study of government records we know that secrecy tends to increase over time. Ontologically, there are no conspiracy theories, only true or false, plausible or implausible beliefs about secrets–things which by definition we don’t fully know. Our only hope to navigate these competing theories is to have a plausible bigger picture to place them in to see if they fit.

Towards a Counterhistory of the Western Canon

The “Original Fragments” of the Bible and Homer:

Friday and Saturday February 16 and 17 at UC Davis

Paper titles, presenters, and abstracts

Curious readers have long wondered how the traditions of early Greek and Hebrew literature were transformed, reinvented, and even falsified by the people who transmitted them to us. Historically informed reading between the lines and against the grain suggests that our classics had a very different past than the ones they themselves present. This emerges if you just count the number of tribes of Israel (Judah, later the most famous one, doesn’t even appear in what is probably the oldest list, Judges 5). It becomes even clearer if you look at their religious loyalties, which are complex, shifting, and polytheistic–hardly a monolith. Similar patterns appear in the diverse cultures behind the mythic narrators of the most famous Greek poetry, “Homer” and “Hesiod,” who never quite considered themselves Greek. But what can we plausibly know about the “pre-Classical” nature and origins of these Western Classics, and what can they teach us?

After immersion in Pentateuchal scholarship and the histories of ancient Near Eastern literary formation, reading Joel Christensen’s incisive overview of some analogous issues in Classics, “99 Homeric Problems,” I was intrigued and, frankly, encouraged by the realization that Homer and the Bible have raised provocatively parallel questions for scholars themselves: researchers in these two fields have long been intrigued by very similar problems. The famous “Homeric Question” corresponded to a parallel biblical “Mosaic Question” about the nature and origins of Hebrew literature.

Without artificially homogenizing two sets of ancient literature with sharply distinct literary forms (in Greek, poetic epics vs. in Hebrew a heterogenous library including narrative prose, law, and poetry) and contexts of production (a local festival at Athens vs. a spectrum of sites in the Levant including royal courts and temples and later scholarly production) I see the questions as today raising four shared issues: 1) they are inherently multicultural works, in their nature, “not the font and origin of culture; rather, they are a fossilized cross-section of intercultural change.” 2) They are inherently multi-local works, with a range of contexts and audiences being forged (in both the generic and pointed senses) into one. What puts an edge on these questions is a problem that scholarship can neither resolve nor responsibly let go of: the facts that: 3) they are both rooted in a pre-Classical period of formation that spans between about 800-300 BCE but is only available to us in glimpses and fragments and 4) in their very linguistic form they represent vernaculars being monumentalized and standardized in order to shape the cultural, spatial, and chronological diversity into a desired unity.

While both the Homeric and Mosaic or biblical questions were shaped by their environment in scholarly exchange between the 18th and 19th centuries, they originate in a profound shared problem, the fact that both come to us as Classics, things certain types of people are supposed to know. Yet the texts themselves were formed in an unevenly documented pre-Classical context, intended to speak to a type of audience that is now lost. Their monumentalization had a shaping effect on Western European self-concepts via the paradigmatic opposition between “Athens” and “Jerusalem.”

This workshop is a way to brainstorm about what sorts of things we can take from the pre-Classical phases and conceptualize in order to move forward. Are there more illuminating ways to compare and conceptualize these literatures’ stages and periodizations? What are productive new ways to think about what we can say and what we should be asking?

Parallel Homeric and Mosaic Questions:

1. Multicultural works
   Scholars agree on the internal diversity of early Greek and Hebrew literature, indicating a variety of locales and variant versions. There is agreement on the diversity of contents in these traditions including early Iron Age and even Late Bronze Age cultural material, culturally ‘impure’ in the sense that these traditions first appear in geographically and culturally distant forms: “The Homeric epics we have are products of different cultures, different audiences, and often competing linguistic, political, and class ideologies over time. They are not the font and origin of culture; rather, they are a fossilized cross-section of intercultural change.”
2. Multilocal works
   Both early Hebrew and Greek literature have local allusions being forged (in both bland and pointed sense) into unity, as in the constantly shifting tribes of Israel (with the earliest list in Judges not even including the later dominant Judah), the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah retroactively reimagined as one “Israel,” or multiple Greek sites that are later assimilated under a panhellenic “Athens.”
3. A Mostly Undocumented Formation, the period of which spans from the early to late first millennium BCE Mediterranean.
   Both within a rough 800-300 year timeframe of undocumented preclassical/precanonical (where the Judean exile and the Peisistratid period represent an early cutoff for many though not all scholars)
4. The Problem of Monumentalization and Nationalization.
   Was the Peisistratean Recension a charter myth or a historical event? By contrast what is the legacy of the once dominant, then lost and exiled kingdom of Israel in Judah’s bible, which narrates the story of a primordial people of Israel retroactively, in a language variety we know they never spoke? If the texts are inherently multicultural in origin, why do they exert such a gravitational pull after their canonization (or through it) towards homogeneity? Named after two of the prime sites of their homogenization, the contrast between ‘Athens’ vs ‘Jerusalem’ has become a rigid philosophical or theological paradigm, opposing reason to revelation and critical inquiry to religious inspiration. Can we turn this fixed paradigmatic opposition back into an open historical question?