UFO

I’m going to start this review in an odd place—with online criticism. As I read Garrett Graff’s UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There I looked through the one- and two-star reviews on Goodreads and saw lots of complaints that UFO doesn’t cover a specific sighting or incident, or doesn’t cover it in enough detail, or leaves out a reader’s favorite “researcher” (or skeptic), or—at the extreme end—that Graff is in the pocket of the CIA and his book is a psyop.

Leaving that last tinfoil hat line of criticism aside, the other disappointed or angry reviewers missed a crucial detail about a book like UFO: it is a survey.

When I introduce my courses at the beginning of every semester—I’m set to repeat this speech bright and early Wednesday morning—I explain what I mean by “survey” by talking about hiking back home. From the top of a mountain, as one surveys the view, one does not examine every tree, climb every peak, or dip into every hollow, one simply takes in a literal overview. Surveying the view provides context. This, in a metaphorical sense, is what makes a class like my Western Civ I or US History II or a book like Graff’s UFO useful—it gives an overall shape to the thicket of specifics in which it is easy to get lost.

From saucers to Tic Tacs

Graff narrates the history of UFO sightings and the many attempts to research and understand them from the immediate post-war world of the mid-1940s through the recent past. UFOs and aliens—two topics that we tend to forget don’t necessarily overlap—have become such an archetypal staple of our culture that we tend to forget how different the world was when they emerged.

Beginning with the Roswell incident in 1947, Graff tells the story through three major interweaving narrative threads. First are major incidents that shaped and directed the UFO phenomenon, including the initial Arnold sightings; the Mantell incident, in which a P-51 pilot crashed in pursuit of a high-altitude object; the Lonnie Zamora incident in Socorro, New Mexico; the Betty and Barney Hill and Pascagoula abductions; the Phoenix lights; and the Flying Tic Tac. The second thread, the one most clearly indicated in the book’s subtitle, consists of the various often halfhearted attempts by the US military and federal government to assess and understand UFOs.

The last thread of the story, interweaving with the previous two, consists of the researchers, a wide and colorful cast including Project Blue Book’s J Allen Hynek, celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan, Jacques Vallée, former intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, and a host of enthusiasts and cranks and shysters who sought to profit from the various phases of the UFO craze. Graff gives good attention to the rifts between these individuals and groups, especially those who, like Hynek, sought a genuinely scientific approach and viewed the feel-good peacenik messaging of people like George Adamski’s “contactees” as a distraction from real research and who was, in his turn, looked down upon by figures like Sagan.

These three aspects—the institutional, the personal, and the incidents themselves—and the decades-long perspective Graff offers are especially helpful in seeing how the phenomenon unfolded, first as flying saucers, then as UFOs, and recently as UAPs. The postwar context also helps explain the US military’s initial keen interest and later apathy. Once the military had determined UFOs were not Soviet weaponry or an intergalactic threat, they lost interest and ceded the field to the enthusiasts—who had been itching to take control anyway.

The historical perspective the book offers also demonstrates clearly how the mythology evolved and just how much time it had to do so. Hynek and the Air Force’s investigations went on in fits and starts and the long, slow process of declassification of projects like Mogul, the nuclear-monitoring balloons responsible for some early sighting and the Roswell debris, also fed speculation. Notably, Roswell was forgotten until its reemergence in the lore during the 1980s, when it was recontextualized as an important event—with lots of suspicious new testimonial—by UFO hobbyists.

Surprises and sympathies

That point about mythology brings me to the two surprises UFO gave me. First, early in the book, Graff quotes Carl Jung, who lived long enough to see flying saucer enthusiasm through its earliest phases and who viewed the mania—whatever the reality behind it—as the genesis in real time of a new world mythology.

This insight may not explain the entire phenomenon but is clearly correct. Viewed in chronological order, without the cross-pollination of details from different stories and the projection of later elements of the mythology backward onto earlier parts,* it is easy to see the UFO phenomenon evolving and growing in intensity and complexity—from sightings to encounters to abductions to speculation about government treaties with aliens and underground bases full of reverse-engineered alien tech. UFOs, which are ambiguous enough to mean different things to almost everyone, provide a decentralized, do-it-yourself mythology for an age of disenchantment and materialistic science.**

The second great surprise for me stems directly from the narrative shape UFO’s survey offers, and that is the sympathies I developed for different groups of researchers. UFO includes a number of cads and frauds, the kind of “flying saucer people” Charles Portis’s Gringos so sharply parodies, but beyond these low-hanging fruit are two different groups of genuine scientists who engaged with the UFO phenomenon.

The first include people like Hynek, who worked for decades with the Air Force and then on his own to understand what people were seeing and—increasingly from the early 1960s—encountering and even boarding. Men like Hynek did actual field work—when they had the funding and the manpower, anyway—visiting sites, talking to witnesses, and making a good-faith effort to sort genuine unidentified objects from those that had clear this-worldly causes. Further, they were open-minded enough to change their minds and acknowledge mistakes, which became a key part of Hynek’s story specifically.

Meanwhile, the second group are those like Carl Sagan, who dabbled in UFO research before contenting themselves with ivory tower activities—gazing deep into the navel of the Fermi paradox, fussing with the arbitrary numbers in the Drake Equation, hypothesizing about Dyson spheres as a measure of civilizational progress, fretting over the best ways to encode stick figures in signals to be transmitted to distant stars, opining on the insignificance of earth and its human inhabitants, begging for more and more taxpayer money, and occasionally abandoning spouses. For all their posture of superiority to men like Hynek, it was the latter who seemed to have his feet more firmly planted in the real world, who most directly engaged with the real, particular mysteries of the phenomenon. Not all UFO researchers are created equal.

UFO therefore does what it sets out to do: provide an overview of the history of UFO sightings and abduction stories from the perspective of researchers, both military- and government-affiliated and private enthusiasts. The book covers about eighty years of an complex and controversial topic in just over 400 pages and even manages to work in lots of odd side stories—the men in black, UFO cultists, the Majestic 12 documents, and the attitudes of various presidents to UFOs among them. Graff simplifies and excludes of necessity, but what he includes is very good, and he proves remarkably evenhanded in his treatment of ambiguous evidence.

Caveats

That said, UFO does have flaws.

The first I’d point out is a matter of emphasis. Given that Graff’s focus on the noteworthy “unexplained” cases from the early Air Force investigations, it is easy to miss that the overwhelming majority of UFO reports were and are “explained”: misidentifications, panics, and fakes. The noise-to-signal ratio is lopsidedly noise. This fact is present in UFO, between the lines—the wearying quality of UFO investigation, at least for a sincere, scientific mind, comes through clearly—but could have used closer attention.

Second, UFO has numerous puzzling footnotes, many of which have little to do with the passage they annotate. Others seem to be there to take potshots at figures like J Edgar Hoover or to work in information Graff presumably turned up for his previous book on Watergate. Most of them could be cut.

A third flaw is thematic. Graff makes much of the openness of non-Western religions and Mormons like Harry Reid to life on “other worlds.” He implies more than once that scientific resistance to extraterrestrial life stems, directly or indirectly, from Christianity, which in his telling limits intelligent life to earth and would be threatened by its existence elsewhere. This is a myth reinforced by the pronouncements of the irreligious. Here, contra that idea, are the evangelical Michael Heiser and Catholic Jimmy Akin on actual Christian approaches to life on other planets. This is a minor point but an annoying one.

The fourth flaw has more to do with the subject itself. As UFO folklore spread and evolved it grew enormous. A survey like this must be selective, and Graff mostly selects well. But the later chapters, covering the 1980s to the present, felt rushed compared to the earlier sections, and it is here that there is some merit to accusations that Graff has omitted crucial material. The most obvious example is Bob Lazar, a man I take to be a fraud but whose testimony has had a death grip on UFO enthusiasts for decades. He is not even mentioned. Given Lazar’s purported background at Area 51, this material is firmly within the book’s subject area and could have been useful in conveying how the phenomenon has evolved in the recent past, especially considering how often he comes up in UFO discussions now. Again, not everything can—or should—make it into a book like this, but bringing in Lazar and emphasizing the increasing influence of Erich von Däniken’s ancient astronauts theories, among other recent aspects of the movement, could have strengthened the later passages of the narrative.

The final flaw with UFO is something I rarely bring up, but that is presentation. UFO has the most typos, misspellings, and syntactical mistakes of any professionally published book I’ve ever read. Every chapter has multiple errors. I don’t take this to be Graff’s fault, but it’s so pervasive it’s worth mentioning. If Graff ever produces a second edition, I hope the publisher will take more care over this.

Conclusion

Even with those quibbles in mind, UFO is a timely, useful, and enjoyable book, covering a vast amount of material from numerous perspectives. With new if inconsequential UFO revelations every year and more and more rampant speculation, especially in the podcasting world, where the last eighty years of material can frantically crossbreed newer and more powerful conspiracy theories, having a survey view of how this all began should prove helpful to anyone interested in the topic. UFO may not cover everything, but it offers a detailed and nuanced look at the people and events that gave rise to our present obsessions with the little green men.

* “Greys,” for example, which come into the mythology relatively late with later versions of Betty and Barney Hill’s story before being heavily popularized by Whitley Strieber (whom Graff writes about) in the 1980s, are often inserted into modern visual interpretations of earlier incidents like the Eagle River “pancakes from outer space” incident (which Graff does not include), in which a Wisconsin farmer encountered the occupants of a UFO and afterward described them in entirely humanoid terms. Later depictions frequently substitute greys for what he described.

** As I have theorized here recently, UFOs and aliens offer the thrill of the gothic within non-threatening materialistic modern parameters.

Not mincing words, words, words

Every once in a while the YouTube algorithm gets one right. A few days ago it recommended a recent video called “The truth about Shakespeare” (thumbnail blurb: “You’re being LIED TO about Shakespeare”) from the RobWords channel. This wouldn’t usually entice me but for some reason it piqued my interest in just the right way, and I gave it a chance.

I’m glad I did. It’s a good short video concerned primarily with the commonly repeated factoid that Shakespeare himself coined 1,700 words—or perhaps 3,500, or perhaps 20,000. I’ve even seen this presented as an important reason to read Shakespeare, or at least learn about him in school. I’ve been skeptical about both claims for a long time.

Rob does a good job interrogating just what these figures are supposed to mean, pointing out the difference between coining a word, modifying a word, or simply being the first known person to write a word down. He also notes that some of the words credited to Shakespeare either mean different things the way he used them (bedroom being an instructive example) or are attested years before Shakespeare in other writers like his earlier contemporary Marlowe or the much earlier William Caxton.

All this alone makes it a worthwhile video. But near the end, Rob raises the question of authorship—and rightly doesn’t spend much time on it. Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. The theories that he didn’t arise suspiciously late, being popularized in the late-19th and early 20th centuries by colorful cranks like Atlantis enthusiast and sometime vice-presidential candidate Ignatius Donnelly or—you can’t make names like this up—J Thomas Looney.

If it took more than two hundred years for people to question Shakespeare’s authorship, why did they eventually start at all? And they do some people keep questioning it? Rob has a suggestion: “To my eyes the main argument is essentially classist.”

The editors’ introduction to the Pelican Shakespeare editions of the plays, which I’ve had since college, put it even more bluntly. Regardless of which alternate author an anti-Stratfordian puts forward as the “real” playwright behind Shakespeare, the conspiracy theorists all “have one trait in common—they are snobs”:

“The Baconians, the Oxfordians, and supporters of other candidates have one trait in common—they are snobs.”

Every pro-Bacon or pro-Oxford tract sooner or later claims that the historical William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could not have written the plays because he could not have had the training, the university education, the experience, and indeed the imagination or background their author supposedly possessed. Only a learned genius like Bacon or an aristocrat like Oxford could have written such fine plays. (As it happens, lucky male children of the middle class had access to better education than most aristocrats in Elizabethan England—and Oxford was not particularly well educated.) Shakespeare received in the Stratford grammar school a formal education that would daunt many college graduates today; and popular rival playwrights such as the very learned Ben Jonson and George Chapman, both of whom also lacked university training, achieved great artistic success, without being taken as Bacon or Oxford.

Curt, to the point, and inescapably true. There is, in fact, at least one inattentive person in the comments of RobWords’s videos making exactly this argument.

Western literature is replete with geniuses who came from nowhere—blind (or at least illiterate) bards, failed politicians, school teachers, orphans who turned to journalism, whole armies of anonymous monks and clerics, and, yes, even the son of a glovemaker. Genius is neither rational nor dependent on resources, and it would mean nothing if it were distributed only to the people we would expect to have it. To argue otherwise is not just crankery, but snobbery.

If you’re interested in this question, Stanley Wells’s William Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction and Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The Worlds as Stage both offer accessible, well-argued short introductions and responses to these theories. And be sure to give RobWords’s video a watch, especially if you’ve ever been told Shakespeare’s value is in his coinages rather than his stories.

Wanting to believe

Back before the hurricane, Micah Mattix’s Prufrock Substack quoted a recent essay by Clare Coffey in the The New Atlantis, “Who Wants to Believe in UFOs?” It’s an excellent essay, making the case that the rinse-repeat pattern of UFO revelations—purported new evidence, new whistleblowers, new openness on the part of the government and media, and new excitement followed by… nothing much—indicates a turn toward “something much older and weirder” in the way the public thinks of this phenomenon.

That Coffey also brings in two works on our changing views of the cosmos over time, CS Lewis’s Discarded Image and his close friend Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances, as well as the work of the late Michael Heiser, an expert ancient Semiticist with a sideline in “anything old and weird,” only makes it that much better. It’s well worth your time.

Two specific aspects of Coffey’s essay gave me a lot to think about. First, her informal taxonomy of attitudes toward UFOs etc. If mentioning Lewis and Barfield is bait, giving my wannabe Aristotelian mind a set of categories to sort things into is setting the hook. Coffey gives us three basic groups:

• Disinformation non-enjoyers—aggressive skeptics who “do not merely disbelieve in aliens; they see public discussion of UFOs as an embarrassing social scourge foisted by hucksters on an ever-gullible populace.”

And among believers:

• Explorers—adherents of the more scientifically- and technologically-oriented and, until recently, culturally predominant vision of UFOs as evidence of intelligent life “over there,” elsewhere in the same universe we inhabit and bound by the same laws. Hence the emphasis on technology.

• Esotericists—the burgeoning newer view, a vision of UFOs as evidence of deeper hidden truths “in here,” which naturally lends itself to theory-of-everything mix-and-match worldviews in which everything is evidence of everything else though, seemingly paradoxically, they “are both profoundly open and restlessly systematizing.”

Both types of believer have specific fundamental assumptions and hopes. Both also have shadow forms or “negating modes”:

• Negating explorers believe the evidence but interpret it as part of some kind of purely terrestrial psyop.

• Negating esotericists are the folks who interpret aliens as demons in disguise.

As Coffey herself points out, these are loose categories with fuzzy boundaries and significant overlap. I’ll add that, even if the esotericists in the form of the Graham Hancock and Missing 411 and Joe Rogan types are gaining the upper hand, they are not new. Charles Portis, a sharp-eyed observer of the UFO scene circa 1975, just after von Däniken made the ancient astronauts thesis popular, portrays the type realistically in Gringos, as I’ve noted here before.

To lay my cards on the table, especially since I’ve written about this stuff several times and don’t want to be misunderstood, I’m probably about 15% negating explorer and 85% solid disinformation non-enjoyer. I’m simply never impressed with the purported evidence, its interpretation, and the fact that new whistleblowers inevitably turn out to be frauds. Not that I’m a killjoy. My attitude is basically that of Jimmy Burns in Gringos, one of amused observation and even enjoyment without a bit of belief: “[T]he flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.”

Which brings me to what I think is the one weakness of this taxonomy: its inability to account for what I’ll call aestheticists. These are people for whom the actual existence of UFOs is immaterial; their interest is purely in the atmosphere, the vibe of UFOs and aliens.

My recently developed pet theory is that UFOs and UFO lore have, for modern people, filled the hole left by the gothic. Where the Romantics, when in search of a tingly spine, went to windswept moors under the light of the full moon, relict beasts of bygone ages, decaying houses full of dark family secrets, and the inexplicable power of the supernatural—to the otherworldly of the past—if we want the same sensations in the present we go to the strange lights in the night sky, the disappearance, the abduction, cold intelligences from the future, decaying governments full of secrets, and the inexplicable power of interstellar technology.

I suspect a significant subset of interest is based on this appeal. Add this as a third-dimensional Z-axis to the X and Y axes of the explorers and esotericists and I might be able to plot myself more accurately. I’ve always gotten a similar kind of thrill from both Baskerville Hall at night and the atmospheric dramatizations of “Unsolved Mysteries.”

That’s a quibble, but I think a potentially fruitful one since Coffey does not discount the human need for the uncanny. (Her section on the flaws in the argument that UFO obsession is a substitute religion, something I’ve suggested here myself, is especially good and probably mostly right. The religious impulse is real but better fulfilled elsewhere, though I still think that the religious overtones of much UFO lore is not accidental.)

The other thing that I found particularly thought-provoking is, in a reconsideration of the “roundelay discourse” on UFOs, the endless cycles of approach to new knowledge that never actually reveal anything, Coffey’s argument that the “meta-discourse” of the phenomenon—talking about what the enthusiasm about UFOs and aliens means in and of itself—is “the only productive line of inquiry.” She goes through five possible explanations and repercussions based on which of the groups in her taxonomy turns out to be right. I won’t recap it here in the interests of space, but it’s excellent—another good reason to read the essay.

And it leads into Coffey’s concluding thoughts on the reason the UFO phenomenon is impossible to “culturally metabolize”—cosmology or worldview. Reductivist, mechanistic materialism has ingrained itself so deeply in our culture that it shows up in our unthinking turns of phrase, even among the religious:

The biggest development seems the elevation of chemical and electrical mechanisms within the machine universe: we love to talk about love as “a chemical reaction,” and our Twitter compulsions as “dopamine hits,” as if we were actually clearing obfuscation by speaking in these terms. We love to discuss thinking as “our synapses firing” and our world as a tiny rock hurtling along its orbit through space.

UFOs, at least as interpreted by esotericists, flout this conception of the world, and the esotericists know this. “[T]hey are tired of the machine universe,” Coffey writes. “They want out.”

I do not think, as Coffey seems to suggest, that the disinformation non-enjoyers feel threatened or that they need to defend a materialist, mechanistic universe. Far from seeing earnest UFO obsession as a threat, I’m usually simply grieved by it, and Lord knows I am no materialist. But this essay is an excellent examination of much of what is going on in popular enthusiasm for UFOs and I recommend it heartily.

On the fine art of insinuation

Eric Idle and Terry Jones in Monty Python's "Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge" (1969)

Earlier this week, in my notes on a recent historical controversy, I mentioned some of the “dark insinuations” that were one part of the furor. That particular aspect of the controversy wasn’t the point of my post, but I did want to revisit it in general terms—especially since I was working on a post on the same topic last year, a post I eventually abandoned.

Since facts and sound historical interpretation prove dangerously prone to turn back on them, conspiracists rely heavily upon insinuation—the “you know what I mean,” “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” implications of whatever factual information they do put forward. This approach allows them to present information in what seems to be a purely factual way, but with a tone that implies the conclusion they want you to reach. It’s a technique used in what David Hackett Fischer called “the furtive fallacy” in historical research.

The fine art of insinuation crossed my mind again just before the interview that prompted my previous post when I watched a recent short video on the Cash-Landrum incident, a genuinely weird and interesting—and genuinely unexplained—UFO sighting in Texas in 1980. Briefly, during a late night drive on a remote East Texas highway, two ladies and a child spotted a glowing, white-hot, fire-spewing object that hovered in their path for some time before drifting away, apparently escorted by US Army helicopters. The ladies subsequently developed severe illnesses related to radiation poisoning.

It’s a decent enough video, so please do watch it, but the YouTuber behind it provides a few textbook examples of insinuation. After describing the ladies’ attempts to get compensation from the military and the government following the incident, the narrator relates the first formal third-party research into the incident this way:

[Aerospace engineer and MUFON co-founder John] Schuessler agreed to investigate the case and was taken by Betty and Vickie to the site where they claimed it had happened. When they arrived, they found a large circular burn mark on the road where the UFO has supposedly been levitating, cementing more credibility to their claims. However, several weeks later, when Schuessler returned to the spot, the road had been dug up and replaced, with witnesses claiming that unmarked trucks came by and took the burnt tarmac away.

This is already a UFO story, and now we have unmarked trucks destroying evidence! The story autopopulates in your mind, doesn’t it? But this part of the story, as presented for maximum insinuation, is vague—which points toward the best tool for combating the use of insinuation: specific questions. For instance:

• What’s so unusual about a damaged road being repaired?

• Did Texas DOT vehicles have uniform paint schemes or other markings in 1980?

• Who were the witnesses who saw these unmarked trucks?

And, granting for a moment the conclusion that the narrator is trying to imply:

• If some powerful agency was trying to cover up what had happened, why did it take “several weeks”? And why did they allow witnesses to watch them?

Insinuation relies on context, especially our preconceptions and prejudices, to do its work. It’s a mode of storytelling that invites the listener to complete the story for you by automatically filling in details. Questioning the vague prompts and implications that start this process can bring the discussion back down to earth and the basic level of fact and source. And, perhaps more importantly in this kind of discussion, specific questions can force people to say what they mean rather than letting them get away with insinuations or implication.

A 44-year old UFO sighting offers a pretty harmless test case for interrogating this technique, but pressing for clearly stated details might have proven more helpful to everyone—as well as more revealing—during that interview last week.

The Cash-Landrum incident was memorably dramatized in a 1991 episode of “Unsolved Mysteries,” which you can watch here. It’s worth noting that the ladies involved always assumed the UFO was purely terrestrial and that they were the victims of some kind of government or military test gone wrong.

Master of the petty indignity

This week on my commute I took a break from podcasts to revisit Charles Portis’s oddest novel, Masters of Atlantis. Though I love and enjoy all of Portis’s books and Masters of Atlantis has much of what make his others so good, it has gradually sifted to the bottom for me. One of these days I might write a full review if only to sort out exactly what it is that doesn’t work for me.

In the meantime, one of the things that works brilliantly throughout Masters of Atlantis is Portis’s use of the “petty indignity.” Character after character is embarrassed and deflated in minor ways.

The funniest instances involve the main character, Lamar Jimmerson, perhaps the most passive protagonist of any novel I’ve read. After being duped into founding a secret society based on purported Atlantean arcana, Jimmerson spends most of the book in a state of gentle obliviousness, pottering around the Gnomon Society’s headquarters in Indiana, book in hand, and ballooning in size like Ignatius J Reilly at 1/100 speed. Every few decades, some shady type ropes Jimmerson into a scheme to bring Gnomon wisdom into the spotlight and establish it in its rightful place of influence.

These schemes usually involve politics. In 1942, Jimmerson is convinced to visit Washington, DC, where he believes he’ll give an important speech about America’s path to victory—following the esoteric geometric principles in the Gnomons’ Codex Pappus—and visit important leaders for one-on-one consultation. Jimmerson dutifully dresses in his ceremonial robes and poma, a goatskin dunce cap that signifies his office as master, and sets out.

The trip turns into a conga line of petty indignities. An overcrowded train means he has no berth to sleep in and he arrives in Washington already fatigued. As it turns out, his assistant has not actually contacted Congress or national broadcasters about hosting Jimmerson’s speech, and during their search for someone important to whom Jimmerson can impart his secret knowledge he gets lost. He wanders Washington until his robes are soaked in sweat and his flimsy sandals disintegrate. Everyone in the city gawks at him.

Portis captures the mood perfectly. Upon Jimmerson’s arrival:

Hotel rooms were all but impossible to get. At the last minute their congressman was able to secure them one small room at an older downtown hotel called the Borger. It was a threadbare place near the bus station. The trip was hot and tiring. At the Borger a midget bellboy called Mr. Jimmerson a “guy.”

“Is that guy with you?” he said, in his quacking midget voice, as Mr. Jimmerson, a little dizzy from his long train ride, veered off course in crossing the lobby.

“Yes, he is,” said Popper.

“Hey! Hey! Hey! Yeah, you! Where do you think you’re going? The elevator’s over here!”

And later, after getting lost:

At the zoo a bum called Mr. Jimmerson a “schmo.” The bum was reclining on the grass with a friend and said, “I wonder who that schmo is.” The other bum ventured no guess. Mr. Jimmerson passed the rest of the day there admiring the great cats and looking into the queer dark eyes of the higher apes. There was reckoning behind those eyes but the elegance of the triangle would forever escape them. In the lion house he found a dime. His corset would not allow him to bend over far enough to pick it up. He pushed it along with his foot while trying to form a recovery plan, and then a boy came along and grabbed it.

When Jimmerson finally arrives back at the hotel, he finds that his mission to pass his wisdom to the Federal government has been superseded. His assistant has met an even bigger crank, an ambidextrous Romanian alchemist, and the whole trip has been for nothing—the crowning indignity. Jimmerson ends the chapter a broken man, lying in bed thinking about picking up chocolate for his wife while his assistants natter about gold all night. A later run for the governorship of Indiana and a state senate hearing in Texas go about as well as you’d think.

What Portis does brilliantly is to prepare you to feel the offense of being called a “guy” or a “schmo” by strangers. Jimmerson feels constantly put on the spot. He is so tense, so anxious to complete his exalted mission, that every petty indignity finds its mark. His self-consciousness is his undoing.

But this is about as self-conscious as Jimmerson ever gets. As I mentioned, he spends most of the novel unaware of anything. Here, for contrast, is Ray Midge, narrator of Portis’s previous novel, The Dog of the South:

I ordered a glass of beer and arranged my coins before me on the bar in columns according to value. When the beer came, I dipped a finger in it and wet down each corner of the paper napkin to anchor it, so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous.

I’ll admit here that this level of detail-oriented self-consciousness is uncomfortably familiar.

But what Ray Midge has that Lamar Jimmerson does not is self-regard. He’s self-deprecating about it throughout The Dog of the South but he can’t resist mentioning his many skills and talents. Jimmerson hardly thinks of himself, or much of anything but Gnomon triangles. Couple self-consciousness and self-regard and you’ve got a volatile mix. The petty indignity can embarrass a character like Jimmerson—who is motivated, when he has any motivation at all, by a pious sense of duty—but self-serving characters like Austin Popper, his assistant and general shyster, or Sir Sidney Hen, Jimmerson’s brother-in-law and chief rival, can be destroyed by it.

After all, destruction follows after pride, which is what we’re really talking about here.

And Portis exploits pride really well. He peopled all of his novels with blowhards, arrogant cranks, self-appointed grandees, and at least one false Messiah—all people who live permanently on their high horse—and all of his novels feature the humbling comeuppance. In that way Portis’s novels, in addition to picaresques, sharply observed local color tales, and comic shaggy dog stories, are also morality plays.

On tunnels

Nada and Frank discover the alien tunnels under Los Angeles in They Live (1988)

Over the weekend I finally got a chance to watch They Live, John Carpenter’s 1988 action-comedy-thriller about a working man unmasking the alien domination of the world. It was a delight. Carpenter presented his vision of the concealment of the true nature of the world by a powerful malevolence exploiting the ignorant masses brilliantly, and made it funny, creepy, and exciting in equal measure. It was also deeply paranoid.

That’s the point, of course. Rowdy Roddy Piper’s famous bank heist—a heist in which he steals no money—and the film’s climactic TV station shooting spree wouldn’t be nearly so enjoyable had the film not made the aliens’ domination so palpably real in the first half. But two things in particular struck me about They Live’s paranoid view of the world.

First, its vision of manipulative elites and passive, cattle-like masses is broadly applicable. They Live provides a template for just about any critique of the way society is run. The obvious target, and the one Carpenter intended, is the consumerism and haves-and-have-nots dynamic of 1980s America. But one could apply it to just about any menace you care to pick. In fact, the image of a hidden, rich minority of foreigners using the media to control the masses for profit suggested itself strongly enough to certain groups that Carpenter himself spoke up against the misuse of his story.

For myself, the aliens of They Live reminded me of nothing so much as latter-day tech CEOs: manipulating people, selling garbage, flogging unrealistic standards of luxury and beauty, clouding minds with useless information and busywork, justifying their existence through convenience, and—just occasionally—suppressing people they don’t want talking too much.

Second, and even more striking to me, were the tunnels. Following our hero Nada’s epiphany and initial, impulsive shooting spree, he falls in with a more organized resistance which is almost immediately destroyed by the foot soldiers of the alien overlords. Nada and his only friend, Frank, manage to escape using one of the aliens’ own wristwatches, which allow them to disappear in emergencies. Nada and Frank find themselves in a maze of tunnels under Los Angeles, the secret infrastructure supporting the aliens’ domination.

The tunnels are an interesting feature of the plot because they pop up in so many other paranoid visions of the world. Pizzagate, QAnon, the Satanic panic—all feature tunnel systems as prominent parts of their narratives. Even the rescue of twelve soccer players from a cave in Thailand has been spun in conspiratorial directions.

And this isn’t limited to recent theories: the anti-Catholic paranoia of the 1830s included fraudulent stories like that of Maria Monk, who claimed that tunnels permitted priests access to nunneries at night and convenient burial places for the children born of these unions, who were strangled at birth. Like its more recent counterparts, this hoax prompted investigations. Like those more recent investigations, it found no evidence that the stories were true.

So I’ve wondered more than once: what is it with tunnels?

If I were a Jungian—and I’m not, for reasons I intend to unfold here at some point—I might suggest that tunnels have some subconscious archetypal power that forces them to recur in our fears and anxieties and, inevitably, our stories. A little closer to reality, I find it interesting that tunnels make common conspiratorial metaphors literal. The image of the underground, the underworld, the subterranean, the hidden is always ready to hand in conspiracist rhetoric.

More to the point, I think tunnels keep popping up in paranoid narratives for two practical reasons.

First, tunnel systems really exist, and they’re not hard to find. Major cities, theme parks, malls, factories, and public works often have elaborate underground infrastructure, and that’s not even taking account of things like mining and military use. Even my undergrad college campus had a legendary tunnel network that was the subject of much rumor in the early 2000s. (One wonders how the rumors have morphed since.) These often vast systems are real, but they’re there for maintenance or logistics.

Not that the mundane has stopped paranoid speculation in the past. Look at any “abandoned places” video on YouTube and you will see two sets of people in the comments: people who have worked in maintenance tunnels and know what they’re for and try to explain it, and people who think all underground spaces are used solely for human trafficking and won’t change their minds.

Second, and perhaps more important psychologically, if something happens out of sight it is not falsifiable in the way something is that happens out in the open, potentially under observation. Conspiracy theories need tunnels because tunnels allow the conspiracy to unfold both here and somewhere else at the same time. And a good paranoid vision needs that, not just for atmosphere but so that the theory can perpetuate, unproven and impossible to disprove. Just look at all these tunnels!

John Carpenter used those trappings brilliantly in They Live. But in real life, living like Nada and looking for their tunnels will only lead you further away from reality.

Credential envy

I’m currently reading Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History, by Carl R Trueman, a good introduction to the historiographical traps laid in the way of students of the past.

In his first full chapter, which covers Holocaust denial (“HD” below), Trueman briefly explores a side-topic he calls “the aesthetic fallacy”—the assumption that if something looks scholarly and scientific (by some subjective image of what “scholarly” and “scientific” should look like) it must be. This, Trueman notes, is more a fallacy of the reader of history than the historian, but bad historians often tailor their work and images with this in mind.

Trueman looks specifically at the case of Fred Leuchter, who undertook a chemical study of one gas chamber at Auschwitz and claimed to have found little or no evidence of Zyklon-B residues in the bricks. After picking apart Leuchter’s study, which was methodologically unsound but provided a seemingly scientific talking point for certain audiences, Trueman makes an important side observation:

On close examination, we can easily see that his method is so flawed that it is not really scientific at all, but it has all the appearance of being scientific. He uses all the right words, even down to his claim in the title that he is an engineer. In fact, he is not; he is a designer of execution machines. Indeed, he has been barred from using the title “engineer” with reference to himself because of his lack of formal qualifications. The title gave him weight and plausibility; he presumably hoped that it would provide him with the credibility to have a seat at the table and be taken seriously in discussions. One could say that the scientific form of his writing, or perhaps better (though slightly more pretentiously), the scientific aesthetics of his work gave his arguments credibility. For this reason, I am always suspicious of books that print “PhD” on the cover after the author’s name. Why do they need to do this? The person has written a book, so surely her competence can be judged by the volume’s contents? Perhaps, after all, many books are judged at least somewhat by their covers as well as what is printed on the inside.

The phenomenon Trueman describes here is common across self-published crank literature (just look through the Goodreads giveaways sometime) but is felt apparently instinctively by a lot of people. I call it “credential envy.” It has a few iterations:

• Insisting on a title that is irrelevant to the topic under discussion

• Claiming a title one is not legitimately entitled to

• A version of both the former and the latter: insisting on being called doctor for an unearned doctorate

• Pure fraud

The fundamental quality of credential envy is a craving for legitimacy—or, per Trueman’s “aesthetic fallacy,” the appearance of legitimacy. There’s a defensive, chip-on-the-shoulder aspect to credential envy. People who insist on impressive titles want to preempt criticism through intimidation or grandeur. And this attitude only becomes more apparent when the credentials are false or irrelevant or when they’re being used to mislead, as Leuchter’s appropriation of “engineer” was.

Credentials and qualifications matter enormously. But like Trueman, the more someone insists on their credentials and titles, the more wary I become. Real expertise is effortlessly confident and worn lightly. Or should be. Perhaps the behavior of some real experts today is part of the reason the broader public increasingly finds it hard to distinguish them from the cranks.

Spring reading 2024

As I hinted at last month, this has been a tough semester, with a lot of illness in the middle and plenty of simple busyness throughout. For a good part of it my reading felt almost as lifeless as I did. Being wrung out by work, the babies, my commute, and many, many trips to the doctor (all good problems to have), I read more fiction than history or other non-fiction this spring, and much of that I didn’t feel too strongly about. Even the disappointing books were only disappointing, not outright bad. Everything felt grey. But looking back several weeks after final grades were in and I could rest for a moment—mentally if not physically—there was actually quite a lot of good reading packed in with the mediocre stuff.

Here are the highlights: my favorite fiction, non-fiction, and kids’ books as well as the handful of books I revisited. For the purposes of this blog, “spring” is defined as everything from New Year’s Day to the end of my first week of summer classes, which was last Friday.

Favorite fiction

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, trans. William Weaver—Two monks, a widely-read Franciscan scholar and his young Benedictine assistant, investigate a series of strange, seemingly symbolic murders in a remote Italian monastery ahead of a conference of monastic leaders. This is one of the great literary historical novels even if Eco takes the wrong side in the medieval disputes over Ockham’s Nominalist theories and perpetuates some medieval stereotypes along the way, which is frustrating given how well he knows the era. But those a niggles. Erudite and richly detailed but fun, engrossing, and, above all, atmospheric, I greatly enjoyed it.

Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers—A wide-ranging collection of more than twenty stories that deal with ghosts, vampires, used books, time travel, custom-edited Bibles, revenge in the afterlife, the sacrament of confession, tomato plants under siege by pests, the grave of HP Lovecraft, and, yes, Purgatory. As with any 700-page collection of short fiction, these are of mixed quality, but all range from good to excellent, with plenty of the creativity, surprises, and wry humor of Powers’s novels. Personal favorites included “The Better Boy,” “The Bible Repair Man,” “Through and Through,” “Fifty Cents,” “A Time to Cast Away Stones,” and the title story, “Down and Out in Purgatory.”

A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler—An English writer in Istanbul, his curiosity piqued by the discovery of the body of a notorious gangster, investigates the gangster’s life and discovers there’s no bottom to interwar Europe’s dark underworld. Evocative and atmospheric, this is a detective story and crime thriller wrapped up in the globetrotting of a spy novel. Full review here.

Medusa’s Web, by Tim Powers—An intriguing supernatural tale of the last remaining members of a cursed family living in their ramshackle old mansion, ominously named Caveat, in the Hollywood Hills. Scott and sister Madeline return to the family manse following the death of their aunt but their cousins, wheelchair-bound Claimayne and angry, standoffish Ariel, make it clear to Scott and Madeline that the siblings are unwelcome and the house rightly belongs to them. We soon learn that the members of this family can travel through time by staring at eerie, abstract, spider-like illustrations on slips of paper. The downside is that using the spiders is addictive and can cause permanent physical and mental damage. In the course of the family drama, trips into the past involve the characters in unsolved mysteries from Hollywood’s silent era, and an unexpected love story blossoms between one of them and a long-dead film star. It also becomes clear that a fabled über-spider, a drawing that contains the visions of all the others and guarantees lethal insanity if even glanced at, may not only still exist but be much nearer Caveat and the warring cousins than Scott would like. And on top of the visions and body-jumping and Old Hollywood gossip and Lovecraftian threat of world-ending madness there are overtones of Poe’s House of Usher, ancient myth, and more. Medusa’s Web has a lot going on and it’s hard to explain without giving too much away, but I greatly enjoyed it and read the entire book in just a few days. Worth checking out if you’re looking for something completely different.

The Mysteries, by Bill Watterson, illustrated by John Kascht—A simple but haunting “fable for grownups” from the creator of “Calvin & Hobbes.” A story of the disenchantment of the world, human hubris, and the inevitable consequences of both. One of my favorite books this spring. Full review here.

Favorite non-fiction

Great Uncle Harry, by Michael Palin—A biography of Palin’s great uncle, a man who was killed in action at the Somme and whom Palin never knew, this is a remarkable piece of detective work, archival research, and familial pietas that also commemorates a lost world and a generation destroyed. A continuously engaging and moving book. Full review here.

Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, by DJ Taylor—An excellent short introduction to Orwell’s life and work, ranging from his childhood to his death and posthumous reputation—indeed, the book begins with the birth of his legend almost the moment he died—and covering everything from his personal character, novels, journalism, and his evolving political ideas to his attempts at farming, his friendships with other writers, his love of England, and his hatred of pigs. I strongly recommend this book to any and everyone. Taylor is also the author of two (two!) full-length biographies of Orwell. I have his Orwell: The New Life on standby for future reading. I blogged about Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four twice based on observations made in Taylor’s book. You can read those posts here and here.

Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, by Mark Brotherton—A solid examination of the psychology of conspiracy theories and conspiracist thinking. Brotherton does not make a case that conspiracy nuts are, well, nuts, but rather that they let run unchecked natural and useful thought processes that simply need discipline. Some of this will be old hat to anyone who has studied conspiracy theories seriously, but this may be the best and fairest one-volume assemblage of this material that I’ve come across. Full review here.

Campaldino 1289: The Battle that Made Dante, by Kelly DeVries and Niccolò Capponi—A thorough and thoroughly-illustrated guide to the bloody battle between Guelf Florence and her allies and Ghibelline Arezzo and her allies, in which a young Dante Alighieri participated. I wrote a paper about Campaldino in a graduate seminar on medieval and renaissance Florence at Clemson and the available material was thin back then. This book would have been a godsend. Worth looking at for anyone interested in Dante, medieval Italy, or military history.

A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Mark Dawidziak—This briskly written book tells two stories in alternating chapters. The first is an overview of Poe’s life, with all of its hardships and all-too-brief victories, up to 1849. The second is the story of Poe’s final months, in which he both behaved erratically (telling friends in Philadelphia that pursuers were trying to kill him and had, in fact, murdered and dismembered his beloved mother-in-law, who was alive and well in New York at the time) and also seemed to be on the cusp of overdue success (having reached an understanding with a childhood sweetheart, now a wealthy widow, and working on soliciting support for his long-dreamed-of literary journal) before dying under unexplained circumstances in Baltimore. Dawidziak offers a good capsule life story of Poe in the one half and a thorough examination of Poe in the weeks before his death in the other, and follows these up with a good explanation of the evidence and competing theories about what exactly happened to Poe on that final trip. Had Poe had an alcoholic relapse? Was he the victim of cooping? Some kind of brain swelling? Cholera? Syphilis? Rabies? The theory Dawidziak offers is one of the more convincing that I’ve come across, and he makes a good case for it. I would have liked a slightly more scholarly and well-sourced treatment of this subject but this is a good book and a worthwhile read for any fan of Poe. I wrote a short post about one offhand comment by an interviewee in this book. You can read that here.

Rereads

As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Inferno and Purgatorio, by Dante, trans. Stanley Lombardo

• No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy*

• Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, by Roger Scruton*

• Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor

A strong set of books to revisit, especially Wise Blood, which I last read in college and hardly remembered. I’m enjoying but not loving Lombardo’s translation of the Comedy. I hope to read his Paradiso this summer.

Kids’ books

The Mysterious Goblet, by Sophie de Mullenheim, trans. Janet Chevrier—The third in a series set in the Rome of Diocletian and the Great Persecution, in which the emperor is all-powerful and Christians are despised and suppressed as threats to order. This wasn’t my favorite of the series so far but it has an engaging, multi-thread plot and was enjoyable both to read aloud and, for my kids, to listen to.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl—Somehow I’ve made it to the age of 39 having never read anything by Roald Dahl. I read this on my daughter’s recommendation and loved it. (And what a joy to take a book recommendation from one of your children!) Clever, briskly paced, darkly and wryly funny, and most of all really fun to read. Looking forward to James and the Giant Peach soon.

Flight for Freedom: The Wetzel Family’s Daring Escape from East Germany, by Kristen Fulton, illustrated by Torben Kuhlmann—A short, simple, but nicely illustrated retelling of the story of two East German families who flew over the wall to West Germany and freedom in a homemade hot air balloon. A fascinating story that my kids really enjoyed, and a good opportunity to talk about why Germany was divided and what Communism is (as opposed to what some people would like it to be). This also prompted us to check out the 1982 film Night Crossing, which we enjoyed.

Saint Patrick the Forgiver, by Ned Bustard—A delightful picture book with a rhyming story and beautiful woodcut illustrations by the author. Bustard also has books on St Valentine and St Nicholas of Myra—the real Santa Claus—but this Patrick book is far and away his best of the three. Going to add this to my list of recommended St Patrick’s Day reads soon.

Looking ahead

That’s it! I’m already reading some good stuff—a Viking adventure by the author of King Solomon’s Mines, a study of Dante by Charles Williams, a short book on Old Testament wisdom literature by a favorite philosopher, and my first novel for this year’s John Buchan June—and I’m looking forward to more in the relatively more relaxed days of summer. I hope y’all found a book or two above that sound enticing and that you’ll check them out. Thanks as always for reading!

An effect of sense

When I reviewed Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories earlier this week I mentioned the pattern-finding processes built into our minds, the necessary, natural, and helpful instincts that can also lead us into error unless we carefully discipline our thinking. As it happens, I’ve run across two good examples of this kind of aberrant pattern-finding in the last few days (Coincidence??? Yes!), which I’ve decided to supplement with one more that I’ve personally encountered several times.

An ambiguous provocation

One of the pitfalls of writing fiction is the possibility of mistakes creeping in during revision, the stage when you’re supposed to be fixing mistakes. (I generate more typos in my own work during revision than at any other point of the process.)

This week I finally started reading The Name of the Rose, the great historical novel by Umberto Eco in which William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar, investigates a series of murders in an Italian monastery. Assisting him is Adso of Melk, a young German Benedictine, and opposing him is Bernard Gui, a real-life Dominican inquisitor. In his lengthy postscript to the novel, Eco relates the following anecdote:

As I read the reviews of the novel, I felt a thrill of satisfaction when I found a critic . . . who quoted a remark of William's made at the end of the trial . . . “What terrifies you most in purity?” Adso asks. And William answers: “Haste.” I loved, and still love, these two lines very much. But then a reader pointed out to me that on the following page, Bernard Gui, threatening the cellarer with torture, says: “Justice is not inspired by haste, as the Pseudo Apostles believe, and the justice of God has centuries at its disposal.” And the reader rightly asked me what connection I had meant to establish between the haste feared by William and the absence of haste extolled by Bernard. At that point I realized that a disturbing thing had happened. The exchange between Adso and William does not exist in the manuscript. I added this brief dialogue in the galleys, for reasons of concinnity: I needed to insert another scansion before giving Bernard the floor again. And naturally, as I was making William loathe haste . . . I completely forgot that, a little later, Bernard speaks of haste. If you reread Bernard’s speech without William’s, it becomes simply a stereotyped expression, the sort of thing we would expect from a judge, a commonplace on the order of “All are equal before the law.” Alas, when juxtaposed with the haste mentioned by William, the haste mentioned by Bernard literally creates an effect of sense; and the reader is justified in wondering if the two men are saying the same thing, or if the loathing of haste expressed by William is not imperceptibly different from the loathing of haste expressed by Bernard. The text is there, and produces its own effects. Whether I wanted it this way or not, we are now faced with a question, an ambiguous provocation; and I myself feel embarrassment in interpreting this conflict, though I realize a meaning lurks there (perhaps many meanings do).

Here, the accidental repetition of a distinctive word creates “an effect of sense” in the reader, the feeling that there is some significant linkage between the two characters. And because its meaning is not immediately clear, it provokes the reader, who feels intuitively that there is something here that must be investigated and uncovered. Its very ambiguity suggests significance, so much so that a reader went to the trouble of asking Eco for an explanation.

It turns out there is no such linkage at all, but the feeling remains. Not a bad parallel to the kind of suspicions, arising seemingly out of nowhere, that commonly lead to conspiracy theories.

Cui bono?

I decided to follow up Suspicious Minds by reading the new revised edition of Conspiracy Theories: A Primer, by Joseph Uscinski and Adam Enders, a short academic study of conspiracy theories and other “anomalous beliefs.” In its chapter on the psychology and sociology of conspiracism, the authors introduce intentionality bias, which Brotherton covers well in Suspicious Minds, as well as a concept the authors call cheater detectors: “the willingness to suspect others of cheating,” especially when those others are perceived to benefit from an event. This can lead to “a tendency . . . to make an inferential leap from incentive to conspiracy.”

They continue:

For a real-world example, we could look to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Scalia's passing gave then-president Barack Obama the opportunity to shift the balance of the Court in his favor. Since he and his party had something to gain, some (including former president Trump) jumped to the conclusion that Obama had Scalia murdered. A more sober interpretation might be that an overweight, seventy-nine-year-old smoker with diabetes and heart problems isn’t exactly unlikely to die from natural (i.e., non-homicidal) causes. If we assumed that every time a grandmother passed away the grandchildren expecting to receive an inheritance murdered her, then every grandchild who inherits money must be a murderer! Such a view is obviously untenable.

That last example is a good takedown of one of the most annoying hermeneutical principles in modern popular discourse: the cui bono? (Who benefits?) principle. The question of cui bono? is staple of conspiracist thinking, which is a problem because of its simplifying, reductivist effect. Just because someone benefits in some relative way from an event does not mean that they intended or even wanted it to happen.

Kingfish

I’ve taught both halves of US History for eleven years now, and still use, with occasional updates and modifications, the PowerPoint slideshows I designed for my lectures during my first year. When I teach the Great Depression and introduce left-wing critics of the New Deal, one of the major figures I describe is Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana and eventually one of its two US senators. Long, a populist autocrat and vocal proponent of public spending and wealth redistribution, viewed FDR and the New Deal as insufficiently left-wing and vocally criticized both the policy program and the president himself.

I include some photos and usually take a detour to YouTube to show clips of Long giving speeches, but here are the points on my one slide about Long in a subsection I call “New Deal Backlash”:

• Huey Long of Louisiana

• Radical democratic populist

• “Share the Wealth” plan to make “every man a king”

• Popularity a challenge to FDR

• Possibility of presidential campaign, but assassinated

I’ve been meaning to modify these last two points for years, because do you know what a consistent minority of students immediately suspect when this information is presented in this way? Again—the effect is instantaneous. Such patterns seem to suggest themselves.

As it happens, Long’s assassination also offers a good example for how to discipline this kind of thinking: by simply delving into the details. In the last few years I’ve shown my classes an “Unsolved Mysteries” segment on the Long assassination from 1992. It’s as fun and sensationalistic as you’d expect (I vividly remember watching Long’s bodyguards blow the assassin away as an eight-year old), but it does a good enough job of conveying the complexity in the lives of Long and his aggrieved assassin, Dr Carl Weiss, to put a hypothetical FDR hitman firmly out of mind.

To me, one of the most fascinating aspects of two fruitful fields for conspiracy theories—the JFK assassination and Hitler’s suicide—is the way the very possibility of conspiracy dissolves the more specifically you look at the details. Each event involved not only the major names but hundreds of other people, all of whom can be studied and charted individually and all of whose stories interact with each other’s and hundreds more. And there are tons of documentation. It’s often possible to know, minute by minute, who is in which room of the Führerbunker at any given time in the days surrounding Hitler’s death, and the same is true of the people inside the Texas Schoolbook Depository on the day Oswald shot Kennedy. (Here’s an excellent recent video on precisely this topic.)

All of which shows that conspiracy theories are easier to formulate and to believe—these dots are easier to connect—when you forget that the figures involved in them are people with lives and attachments living in complex communities, not game pieces.

Conclusion

In all three of these cases you have patterns naturally detected and suggested by the mind. Merely noticing them is not enough. A pattern is not evidence of the truth of any conclusions you may draw from them—the pattern may not even exist. Our thinking has to be subject to standards of truth outside its own natural processes.

More if you’re interested

Definitely check out that Lemmino documentary on the people inside and near by the Texas Schoolbook Depository on November 22, 1963. It’s excellently done, and if it weren’t so long I would certainly show it to my students. Here’s one I always show them, about one of the individuals whose behavior on that day never could have been predicted. I especially like the interviewee’s macro vs micro view of history. For what really happened in Hitler’s busy, crowded bunker in April and May of 1945, I always recommend the sixth edition of The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the more up-to-date Hitler’s Death, by Luke Daly-Groves, which I reviewed here long ago. If you’d like to hear from one of the many people present, Heinz Linge’s memoir is a worthwhile read. And Umberto Eco was no stranger to conspiracy theories. His satirical novel Foucault’s Pendulum concerns academics who invent a wild conspiracy theory for fun, only to have the theory start coming true.

Finally, I can’t pass over the actor playing Huey Long in the “Unsolved Mysteries” reenactment. This is Coen brothers veteran John McConnell (“And stay out of the Woolsworth!”), who also originated the role of Ignatius J Reilly in a stage version of A Confederacy of Dunces.

Suspicious Minds

Rob Brotherton’s book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories had been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read, for just over four years when I ran across an Instagram reel in which a smirking mom wrote about how proud she was of her homeschooled child questioning the reality of the moon landing “and other dubious historical events.” When people in the comments asked, as I had wondered the moment I saw this video, whether this was really the kind of result homeschoolers would want to advertise, she and a posse of supporters aggressively doubled down, lobbing buzzwords like grenades. I think the very first reply included the loathsome term “critical thinking.”

Silly, but unsurprising for the internet—especially the world of women mugging silently into phone cameras while text appears onscreen—right? But I had not seen this video at random. Several trusted friends, people whose intellects and character I respect, had shared it on multiple social media platforms. I started reading Suspicious Minds that afternoon.

Brotherton is a psychologist, and in Suspicious Minds he sets out not to debunk or disprove any particular conspiracy theory—though he uses many as examples—but to explain how and why people come to believe and even take pride in believing such theories in the first place. He undertakes this with an explicit desire not to stigmatize or demean conspiracy theorists and criticizes authors whose books on conspiracism have used titles like Voodoo Histories and How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. He also, crucially, dispels many common assumptions surrounding conspiracist thinking.

First among the misconceptions is the idea that conspiracy theories are a symptom of “paranoid” thinking. The term paranoid, which became strongly associated with conspiracism thanks to Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” is inappropriate as a descriptor because of its hint of mental imbalance and indiscriminate fear. Most conspiracy theorists, Brotherton points out, believe in one or a small number of mundane theories that are untrue but not especially consequential, much less worthy of anxiety. A second, related misconception—and by far the more important one—is that conspiracy theories are a phenomenon of the “fringe” of society: of basement dwellers, militia types, and street preachers in sandwich signs. In a word, obsessives. As Eric Ambler puts it in A Coffin for Dimitrios, “‘Obsession’ was an ugly word. It conjured up visions of bright stupid eyes and proofs that the world was flat.”

The idea of conspiracy theories as fringe is not only false, Brotherton argues, it is the exact opposite of the truth. In terms of pure numbers, repeated polls have found that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe in at least one major conspiracy theory—the most common by far being the belief that JFK was killed by someone other than or in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald—and often more than one. Conspiracist thinking is mainstream. It is the norm. This cannot be emphasized enough.

But why is this? Is it, as I must confess I used to think, that those numbers just provide evidence for how stupid the majority of people are? Brotherton argues that this conclusion is incorrect, too. There is no meaningful difference in how often or how much educated and uneducated people (which is not the same thing as smart and dumb people) adhere to conspiracy theories. Conspiracism is rooted deeper, not in a kernel of paranoia and fear but in the natural and normal way we see and think about the world.

Conspiracy theories, Brotherton argues, originate in the human mind’s own truth-detecting processes. They are a feature, not a bug. The bulk of Suspicious Minds book examines, in detail, how both the conscious and unconscious workings of the mind not only make conspiracist beliefs possible, but strengthen them. In addition to obvious problems like confirmation bias, which distorts thinking by overemphasizing information we already believe and agree with, and the Dunning–Kruger Effect, which causes us to overestimate our expertise and understanding of how things work, there are subtler ways our own thinking trips us up.

Proportionality bias, for example, causes disbelief that something significant could happen for insignificant reasons. As an example, Brotherton describes the freakish luck of Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian assassin who thought he had missed his target, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, until the Archduke’s car pulled up a few feet in front of him and stalled out as the driver changed gears. This farcical murder of an unpopular royal by an inept assassin caused a war that killed over twenty million people. That people after the war—on both the winning and losing sides—sought an explanation more commensurate with the effect of the war is only natural. And the classic example is JFK himself, as many of the conspiracy theories surrounding him inevitably circle back to disbelief that a loser like Oswald could have killed the leader of the free world.

Similarly, intentionality bias suggests to us that everything that happens was intended by someone—they did it on purpose— especially bad things, so that famines, epidemics, stock market crashes, and wars become not tragedies native to our fallen condition but the fruit of sinister plots. Further, our many pattern-finding and simplifying instincts, heuristics that help us quickly grasp complex information, will also incline us to find cause and effect relationships in random events. We’re wired to disbelieve in accident or happenstance, so much so that we stubbornly connect dots when there is no design to be revealed.

That’s because we’re storytelling creatures. In perhaps the most important and crucial chapter in the book, “(Official) Stories,” Brotherton examines the way our built-in need for narrative affects our perceptions and understanding. Coincidence, accident, and simply not knowing are narratively unsatisfying, as any internet neckbeard complaining about “plot holes” will make sure you understand. So when outrageous Fortune, with her slings and arrows, throws catastrophe at us, it is natural to seek an explanation that makes sense of the story—an explanation with clear cause and effect, an identifiable antagonist, and understandable, often personal, motives.

Why does any of this matter? As I heard it put once, in an excellent video essay about the technical reasons the moon landing couldn’t have been faked, what is at stake is “the ultimate fate of knowing.” The same mental tools that help us understand and make quick decisions in a chaotic world can just as easily mislead and prejudice us.

This is why Brotherton’s insistence that conspiracy theories are, strictly speaking, rational is so important. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve quoted many times, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Merely thinking is not enough to lead us to the truth. Brotherton’s book is a much-needed reminder that finding the truth requires discipline, hard work, and no small measure of humility.

On lunatics and cranks

Last week a friend shared a screenshot of an interesting theory propounded, as all world-changing theories are, in someone’s Instagram comments. You know the Vikings? The old Norse raiders who terrorized all of Europe from the Baltic and the North Sea to the Mediterranean, laid the foundations of Russia, served generations of Byzantine emperors, and traded as far away as Baghdad and the Caspian Sea? Made up. Totally made up. A fictional scapegoat for the crimes of Christians. The Vikings were invented, you see, to cover up for the Knights Templar everywhere the Templars went a-pillaging.

It shouldn’t be hard to see problems with an idea like this—which shouldn’t even really be dignified with the name “theory.” In addition to all the basic factual stuff like when these groups lived and were active and where they lived and were active, it neglects the veritable Himalayas of evidence supporting the existence of the Vikings: letters, chronicles, charters, linguistic evidence, archaeological evidence on three continents… Name a field of historical investigation and there is a branch dedicated to the Viking Age. Just to deal with texts alone, Michael Livingston’s recent study of one battle between the Anglo-Saxons and a Viking coalition, Brunanburh, used sources in Old English, Latin, Irish, Old Norse, and Welsh to reconstruct what we can know about it. Was all of this manufactured and planted later?

Whatever. Anyone proposing an idea like this doesn’t know how we know what happened in the past; they don’t know how history works. Perhaps they should get into filmmaking.

But the hypothetical culprit behind Viking violence in this particular theory reminded me of a favorite line from Umberto Eco that I once shared here many years ago. This passage comes from Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum:

“A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”

— Umberto Eco

“[E]verything proves everything else” should be a recognizable pattern nowadays. A theory like the one above is lunacy.

Revisiting Eco’s diagnostic passage also brings to mind one in which Joseph Bottum defines the crank, a type similar to but with important differences from the lunatic. Here’s Bottum with his useful working definition that manages to nail three common crank fixations, all of which have gotten plenty of play recently:

“There are three infallible signs of the crank—that oddball, goofball sort of person who mutters, as he walks along, about how he’s grasped the key to everything. The first is that he has a theory about the Jews. The second is that he has a theory about money. And the third is that he has a theory about Shakespeare.”

— Joseph Bottum

To put the distinction another way, there’s no arguing with a lunatic, but a crank will argue you under the table. Not that a crank is any nearer the truth than the lunatic, but whatever fixation a crank has will lend itself to tabulation, nitpicking, and a kind of big-data hairsplitting that feels like thought in a way the world-bestriding historical revisions of the lunatic do not. That guy you know who thinks the CIA shot down Flight 370 in order to cover up the fake moon landing on behalf of Satan-worshiping lizard people is a lunatic. That guy you know who posts three times a day about crypto—or the Fed, or the Mossad, or “the Zionists,” or, yes, Shakespeare—is a crank. And there’s a reason you avoid engaging.

For a case study in anti-Shakespeare crankery, see Jonathan Kay at the National Post here. (And I would recommend Kay’s book Among the Truthers for a broad and insightful study of lunatics, cranks, and other similar species.) And here’s a short reflection from Sonny Bunch, inspired by Bottum’s line about cranks and overlapping somewhat with Chesterton’s observations, about how conspiracy theories can reveal a lot—just not about the subject of the theory.

I posted that Eco quotation in the early days of this blog as an addendum to a long passage from Chesterton about the biased of motivated thinking of cranks. You can read that here. For crank-on-crank combat, see the world-class observer of the scene, Charles Portis, in Gringos, here.