One Side of the Equation

Professor Simon Blackburn reviews a book on conspiracy theories. He thinks the believers of these crazy ideas sad-sacks, who litter the place with their epistemological ineptitudes. Stupid people.1 I wonder. How many has he met? On meeting some I am surprised how easily they wrong-foot me; how quick to make a rational, compulsive case.2 Vertigo of the intellect, as my received ideas fall to the floor. A thought: what if conspiracy theorists are the clever ones, and it’s cleverness that is the problem? Oh dear! Do I hear high table overturned, the cutlery and crystal crash to the floor....

Think like a grandmaster. Helps, does it, to navigate the world outside the chessboard... how to castle, to place a rook on the king’s square, this your guide when, the bladder bellowing for that overdue mate, you stumble from the tables and head for the toilets? As if cleverly following the rules of a game is the same as the improvisations of daily living, where the rules are few or faint. Indeed, cleverness, which needs the rule, the order, the pattern, and creates them when absent, can cause difficulties when faced with the new, the odd, the unexpected; slowing us down, confusing us, as it builds room-blocks to our destination. You head for the entrance hall, where reason says salvation must be located. But what if Mr Architect wasn’t so smart? In a crowded room, where the signs are obscured, we need different qualities, those intimate with instinct and the senses, to get us quickly to the men’s urinal. Now finding yourself outside the Ladies, the Gents on the other side of the building, you curse those who by a sixth sense seem to know where to go.

...we find that the more a cultivated reason purposely occupies itself with the enjoyment of life and with happiness, so much the further does one get away from true satisfaction; and from this there arises in many, and indeed in those who have experimented most with this use of reason, if only they are candid enough to admit it, a certain degree of misology, that is, hatred of reason; for, after calculating all the advantages they draw...they find that they have in fact only brought more trouble upon themselves instead of gaining happiness; and because of this they finally envy rather than despise the more common run of people, who are closer to the guidance of mere natural instinct and do not allow their reason much influence on their behaviour.3

A curious consequence of education is that by raising the rationality quotient in society we increase Kant’s misology; as the instincts react against and resent the restrictions reason puts in our way. It gets worse. How much greater the frustration when the rationality of the Kantian mind is translated into vast bureaucracies which organise large tracts of our lives. Oh to get rid of them all!

The first fact about conspiracy theories: their chief concern is freedom not knowledge. This camouflaged by both the conspiracists and their critics, who both conflate the agora with the classroom. Different spaces different operating practices. When knowledge enters public affairs do not expect the careful collation of evidence, the fine-tuning of an argument or the free play of mind, in lab, study or artist’s studio. Quite the opposite! Too often it is but instrument and weapon, advert or election manifesto. Always to ask for our location, the name of the thug with Descartes in her briefcase.

Who is using knowledge? 

What is knowledge being used for? 

It is to consider our peculiar times. Success, so dependent on qualifications, that require a huge investment in education, now an exercise in academic drudgery rather than a display of brilliance and wit, will create its own strange resentments and resistances.4 Imagine a clever cove beaten to Cambridge by a mere clerk.... Excluded from corporate glamour but knowing yourself smart you’re going to react in all sorts of odd ways to cope with this failure.5 Told we live in a knowledge economy, one monopolised by those dullards in Whitehall and Westminster, you’ll look for a different kind of knowledge - become a different kind of expert - to prove those ‘idiots’ are idiots. ‘Muscle me out of my place amongst the stars? Pshaw!’ In a culture that prizes education, and puts a premium on intelligence, the content of knowledge and the nature of that intelligence will be moulded to fit the image of not just those high up in the skyscrapers, but those low down on the street.

‘...I wasn’t thinking of things like that, but of how ignorant we are of the things of the world. Take Miss Williams, she knows so much more than her school work. She knows about literature, and what is going on today in other countries, and she still wants to learn more and more.’

‘Don’t forget she was brought up in London, and that’s an education in itself.’

‘Yes, it’s one kind of education. We’ve lived in the country, and that ought to be an education too. We should know about birds and flowers and trees and rural history and such things, or at least we should ask about them. But our education has not taught us to enquire about things.’

‘No,’ said Dora, ‘just to read a book in college, and to close it when we left.’6

How many graduates are this self-reflective? Not many, I think I can say with assurance, having spent a long day with a few, who prided themselves on their intellectual abilities, as proved by the fact of the degree and their aptitude for Tipping Point. Forced to reflect, Ann and Dora conclude that the only reason they went to college was to get a job and earn good money. Education rather than opening the mind closes it down. Too true for too many, I’m afraid. These friends, however, overlook a crucial factor: class. Miss Williams, belonging to the upper bourgeoisie, has been enculturated into an elite where public affairs and the arts, in forming the elite’s mentalité, so integral to its authority, are taken very seriously indeed. Literature and learning not separate from Miss Williams’s life but a part of it.

Not so for the rest of us, who despite the propaganda are not supposed to take ideas that seriously.7 Education creating the illusion of knowledge; an illusion encouraged by a media industry that in confusing information with insight, substitutes commentators for scholars, and the quiz show for a library, so disguising our ignorance, making it a virtue. It is a world where the factoid is believed an argument, a popular historian an Edward Gibbon. You want to be informed, see all those books on a professor’s walls, but are busy; watching TV, talking to friends, booking holidays: so much to do! ‘I haven't the time to read a shelf....’ What’s to be done? Ask a mate, a colleague, a complete stranger, for that one book to explain - well, take your pick: Brexit, Gaza, Ukraine, the English Civil War. Easy, innit. But you’re talking to the Schloss; he doesn't recommend a work, but instead gives one of his sermons. ‘Surely an easier, quicker way to learn a subject; after all, I don’t see many books in those television studios.’ It doesn’t take long to find that easy way: you meet a charismatic, find an compelling website, jump on a bandwagon, or follow some guru, who tells you in short and easy sentences exactly what to think. No work at all! as you scroll down the daily digest on Minotaur Central.

There is something else about Schloss: when he finishes the sermon you know less about the subject than when he began. ‘I asked him why Israel is bombing Gaza. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Droned on and on about...I mean what has Vienna got to do with bombs on babies? I just want a simple answer man!’ Know less. An awful lot of people believe that there is one, simple, easy answer to a political or historical event. Ukraine: Putin. Trump: Putin. Brexit: Putin. Gaza: Putin (no, it’s not quite that bad). Complicate the picture, lengthen out the exposition, and these characters’s comprehension of the subject dims. ‘God man, you’re doin’ my head in.’ For that one big idea - Putin! - shatters under the pressure of an extended exegesis.

A core problem for an educated polity: how get the balance right between simplicity and complexity? This question especially acute in a culture that confuses information with knowledge, and wants the latter to govern our lives.8 Too complex and no comprehension at all. Too simple...‘that Schrödinger chap, something about a cat, isn’t it?’...and you are left in a dark room you believe brightly illuminated. A real issue, for most people want facts not arguments; the one idea not an historical account. Don’t capture a topic in this simple way - stick with a pin and label it - you produce uncertainty and skepticism. Good! says your friendly educator. Bad, says the Schloss. For it creates the wrong kind of skeptic; for such minds are not comfortable with uncertainty and will seek elsewhere for the simple solution that rests those troublesome thoughts on solid ground. There are right kinds of the skeptical and there are wrong’uns.

How tell them apart?

An informed skepticism, comfortable in suspending judgement, grows out a specific intellectual training, where we discover the odd nature of knowledge, its growth and redundancy; with those hard-earned certainties, their unstable base. This training requires repeated doses of trust; for our own insights taking a long time, the authorities must first be accepted on faith.9 A truly paradoxical enterprise. Years spent hammering down our absolutes; yet knowing that one day some young turk will lever them up. True learning and culture a complex dance between the certain and the uncertain; one moderated by an informed and sophisticated sensibility. What strikes when I talk to the undereducated is their belief that knowledge should be absolute and fixed. The expert no more than a memory bank or filing cabinet.10 One reason why conspiracy theories have so much traction: there’s little grasp that much knowledge is scholarly interpretation; less about facts and arguments than a state of mind, formed by a tradition, shaped by the zeitgeist, decided from Professor Highpoint’s own elevated perspective.11 All that background we must acquire before jumping into the scholarly ring.... Not for tyro! He thinks to get straight in and knock the old duffer out. Defining genius Schopenhauer describes the Humanities:

It is much easier to point out the faults and errors in the work of a great mind than to give a clear and complete expression of its value. For the faults are something particular and finite, which can therefore be taken in fully at a glance. On the other hand, the very stamp that genius impresses on its works is that their excellency is unfathomable and inexhaustible....12

Schopenhauer is writing about professors, intellectuals and writers. Conspiracy Land is populated by the educational hoi polloi; who exhibit to an infinitely greater the extent the faults expounded here; faults disguised by our schools and universities that add a veneer of learning to what remain largely unformed minds. At best we hope for an Ann and Dora who have learned enough to trust authority and to close the book on curiosity. Alas, always there are the curious and disparaging types; who, taught to paddle, think to swim in the epistemological depths rather than wade in the journalistic shallows. Get the lifeguard out! Opinions mistaken for learning, prejudices believed proofs; a catalogue of facts confused with philosophical reflection; it is why hot air is often thought truth. She huffs and she puffs and she blows the Centre for Historical Research down!.... The purpose of reading a shelf - to expand opinions into insight, temper my beliefs with the wisdom of other minds - is beyond these characters’s ken; they read to confirm belief, not modify it; such beliefs closer to the feelings, than any dogma or doctrine, and these of an especially nasty sort. Then consider the impatience and laziness of the domestic self. Everything to be taken in ‘at a glance’. Seeing that a tree has been cut down, they miss that the forest remains standing. The background - and most scholarship is background - vanishes. Ordinary people, who told to think of themselves as extraordinary, have but the ordinary person’s narrow conception about the new, the strange, the difficult: these are mysteries, either to be worshipped or dismissed. Fine if the public realm is at a distance. A problem if you join the game. Not crushed in the pestle and mortar of a scholar’s training and a scholar’s self- creation, natural abilities are confused with the rarefied sensibility of a craft; so that the simple reflexes of daily living are mistaken for the rigorous artifice of scholarly endeavour. A characteristic I can’t help notice...the clever conspiracist is a great talker, relying on imagination and rhetoric; the power of personality, its magnetism of passion, that magic of ridicule, to attract attention and confirm belief.13 Social media a godsend for these characters, for although largely a written medium, it abolishes the distinction between writing and speaking.

To understand a conspiracist we have grasp their character and situation in society and their relationship to the new technologies; this a somewhat harder task than Professor Blackburn imagines.

Misology. Writing about happiness, Kant could be elucidating the role of the idea in modern life. Exercising too much reason in domestic or public duties is like carrying a large box down the high street: our progress clumsy and cumbersome. Reason, for all its fine qualities when applied to intellectual or practical problems, is clunky when introduced to the flow of living, where reflex is more agile than thought. Reason works best with rules and signs; keen on the explicit, it likes (it loves) certainty, clarity, and what’s quick to suss. Reason gets the tremors when, explanations not forthcoming, it has to feel its way through the unknown. The clever mind wants reasons for all things, even when no reason to be had; this can lead to an endless loop-the-loop of cogitation, generating convoluted theories and confusion not the desired simplicity. An Anti-vaxxer loses his missus. The explanation is simple: he’s overbearing and boring, and appears insane. Too simple! And anyway, lacking self-awareness and sympathy, that clever mind eclipsing the feelings, it is not an explanation a conspiracist could ever accept.14 No. They talk about a lack of affect, manufactured by the medico-industrial complex.

Blackburn writes about the pre-modern mind and how it wants a reason for all things. But isn’t that precisely the promise of modern education: that we learn how to understand... well everything! You Tube awash with professors telling us their latest tales (with their happy endings).15 Blackburn refers to Hume and his empiricism, but Hume is an exceptional thinker, a rare bird comfortable with chance, contingency and the unknown. Kant is more typical; for though he recognises the limits to reason, he nevertheless wants to construct a wholly rational moral universe. But Mannie is saved by his genius. Many profs not so lucky. It’s why they get a hammering from Hobbes.

There is yet another fault in the Discourses of some men; which may also be numbered amongst the sorts of Madnesse; namely, that abuse of words, whereof I have spoken before...by the Name of Absurdity. And that is, when men speak such words, as put together, have in them no signification at all; but are fallen upon by some, through misunderstanding of the words they have received, and repeat by rote; by others, from intention to deceive by obscurity. And this is incident to none but those, that converse in questions of matters incomprehensible, as the Schoole-man; or in questions of abstruse Philosophy. The common sort of men seldome speak Insignificantly, and are therefore, by those other Egregious persons counted idiots.16

With the expansion of university education, all are encouraged to learn about ‘matters incomprehensible’ and know something of ‘abstruse Philosophy’; though few are given the necessary training to acquire a true grasp of these subjects. For Hobbes the ‘Schoole- man’ was dealing in fake knowledge, which mistakes words for real insight, which he associates with Science. The inevitable consequence for a culture revering the Word; given divine status by Christianity. In our times, though moving away from the magic of words to the mysticism of numbers, Hobbes’s observation holds true, with this significant amendment: the ‘common sort of men’, educated out of their good sense, have also been taught to believe in meaningless phrases. Now, not just profs but Kanye and Chelsea talk about - well not ‘the Trinity’ and ‘Transubstantiation’- but Narcissism and Trauma, the Demos and Liberty. Words haven't just changed. To reflect the populist times they’ve been cut down into labels and pasted onto slogans.

Ideas: vacuum-packed vegetables. It is the consumer model of education.

To truly understand a concept I have to study a lot of philosophy. To grasp Hobbes, it helps to read Quentin Skinner. How many do this.... Most have neither the time, the interest, nor the gift to do such things; yet the culture tells them they are smart and enlightened, then bombards them with information they cannot absorb.

What if you ain’t smart? 

What if overwhelmed? 

What do you do? 

As a good citizen you find characters who reduce this vast complexity to a few simplicities, which are captured in a phrase, confused with a concept. The natural bent of modern education encourages such short-cuts and side-steps, and the illusions that go with them. That’s right! We are taught just enough to read signs and believe in fairy tales. Our schools turning out excellent material for conspiracy theorists; who, fortunately, will only be Hobbes’s ‘some men’ and women; the majority retaining but a cursorily interest in public affairs. Only for the latter is education doing its job: to help us passively accept the simple messages of newscaster and journalist; who confirm our place in this world.

The news. It entertains more than informs. An entertainment strange and horrible.17 To attract an audience, editors and producers must keep the emotions high; it is why fraud, corruption, hypocrisy, death, sexual assault, war, are staples of our media environment. Add the adverts, the crime series, the reality programmes, it is no wonder David Hume writes:

...by the prevalence of fanaticism, a gloomy and sullen disposition established itself among the people; a spirit, obstinate and dangerous; independent and disorderly; animated equally with contempt of authority, and a hatred to every other mode of religion, particularly to the catholic.18

In addition to these injections of passion the media industry pushes its own evangelical religion: the hyper-liberalism of globalisation, from which many suffer the material, cultural and intellectual consequences. Rather than bolstering authority such an elite is likely to bring it crashing down; as the ordinary punter sees images of migrant invasions and listens to super-privileged liberals saying the nation-state is junk, its natives primitives. Lucky for the elite most of us are passive, though many will have their own wild ideas which they repeat in the privacy of pub or barber shop. Let us not forget Hume. The Puritans of the Stuart period lived with either the memory or the legend of the dark days of Elizabeth I’s rule, when English Protestantism faced Spanish conquest and Spanish extinction. No wonder edgy when Archbishop Laud added what appeared Catholic elements to the Anglian rituals and liturgy. Now imagine a 1620s and 1630s when the Counter- Reformation was beamed into the home every evening...‘some men’ to go crazy. Add Surveillance Capitalism - our occult forces -; factor in the massive shift of resources from the ‘middling sort’ to the astronomical rich, making the secure insecure for the first time in centuries, and it’s a surprise that citizens are not more suspicious of authority, and take actions to floor it.

A positive word for conspiracy theories: anything that overturns the rotten system is better than...well, you choose: Blair, Johnson, Truss. You laugh, and I laugh with you. Then I quote Louis MacNeice.

I am a lonely Troll after my gala night;

I have knocked down houses and stamped my feet on the people’s

   heart.

I have trundled round the sky with the executioner’s cart

And dropped my bait for corpses, watched them bite,

But I am a lonely Troll—nothing in the end comes right.

In a smoking and tinkling dawn with fires and broken glass

I am a lonely Troll; my tributes are in vain

To Her to whom if I had even a human brain

I might have reached but, as it is, the epochs pass

And leave me unfulfilled, no further than I was.

Because I cannot accurately conceive

Any ideal, even ideal Death,

My curses and my boasts are merely a waste of breath,

My lusts and loneliness grunt and heave

And blunder round among the ruins that I leave.19

A conspiracist’s motivation is not to understand but destroy ‘the System’, replacing it with some ideal they ‘cannot accurately conceive’. What is this ideal? It takes many forms, from a mythological future paradise, to the resurrection of an air-brushed childhood, but all rests on a hopelessly simplistic and overly rational idea of politics; which is seen as a machine with evil engineers in charge. Get us, the good, the reasonable people, behind the wheel! Yet politics is more atmosphere than problem-solving, wishful thinking than analysis; while the accumulated muck of history always clogs up the quick, clean fix. You chuckle.... Yet such beliefs are not confined to the intellectual lumpen proletariat. Political leaders sell themselves as visionaries, and promise new cleaning vans to wash out the Augean Stables. Philosophers are not immune. Kant believed we should strive to live the wholly rational life, a moral utopia.

Reason must regard itself as the author of its principles independently of alien influences; consequently, as practical reason or as the will of rational being it must be regarded of itself as free, that is, the will of such a being cannot be a will of his own except under the idea of freedom, and such a will must in a practical respect thus be attributed to every rational being.20

Imagine a clever conspiracist glossing that passage. Here she goes....

Reason must determine how I think about the current crisis; and by thinking with my reason I will be free. Wowie zowie! Free to reason what I will. Ah, but...it also means those damn rulers are free when using their reason. And...you know...they’ll goin’ to create a world where they enjoy their reason to the max, creating their own lovely place, thinking what they want, doing what they will.... And they do! They’ve learned their Kant, who tells them that the moral world - aka our scrumptious social strawberry - is a wholly human place. We create it ourselves! Ripe for their dirty minds and ugly hands. But we know a thing or five. Since Kant we know from Marx that societies are dominated by class, serving minority interests. Ha! Then lovely Mr Freud comes along and tells us ideas are due to twisted motives, thrown out of shape by the dark unconscious. Kanty-boy thought we were bad men trying to be good. Freudy-girl tells us we are neurotics who create rational fantasies to disguise our insane perversions.... Obvious, ain’t it: the evil ones in charge are bending us around their lunacies. All this contingent stuff that Hume and Schloss and Blackburn go on about is just nonsense. Haven’t read their Freud, their Marx? Or Nietzsche, who brought in his will-loads of power. Useful idiots Yes! Yes! Lenin knew the scaredy score. Reason creates its own mad logic, to mirror the madness underneath; those adverts, the news, the docu-dramas, they must have the craziest of crazy plans behind them; conning us, deluding us, removing our liberty, our sanity...so these crazy lunatics can run the asylum. Ha! There’s Schloss trying to argue that Kant was a genius. He forgets Kanty-boy was in the pay of Prussian autocrats. He couldn’t tell the real truth about reason. Said we were all evil. He meant that the Kaiser and his crew were. Then that stuff about the ‘invisible church’. The Kaiser wasn’t so smart; must have been some clever lot behind that....

Shift Kant’s arguments only a little, changing his Kingdom of Ends to a Republic of Means; and instead of the moral realm being in God’s gift, it is the Devil who hands out his rewards. And indeed, isn’t that what many right-thinking people believe today?

Everywhere these days more and more people knock their heads together against the fact that the future of our planet and what it will offer or deny to its inhabitants, is being decided by boards who control more money than all the governments in the world, who never stand for election, and whose sole criteria for every decision they take is whether or not it increases or is prone to increase Profit.21

Simple for Blackburn to point out Penelope’s mistake: Kant is writing about metaphysics not actual historical events; while the terms and arguments have their own meaning within Kant’s metaphysical system and can only be understood within its terms (for example, that a moral community is different from a political community, the one requiring free thought the other physical coercion). It is my turn to chuckle. Unpack this in a ten minute interview on You Tube? Blackburn tries, but Penelope is sharp; she quotes Quassim Cassam’s ‘self- sealing’. Now he has to explain synthetic a priori statements.... ‘That’s a bit esoteric, isn’t it Professor Blackburn?’ as she smiles to Zoom, and terminates the conversation. ‘That’s it folks. Next week we have Lucy Trudenk, who’s going to tell us about Leibniz’s Great Clockmaker and the founding of the Illuminati.’

A better way to understand such characters and their impact is to read William Burroughs, that master of the paranoid riff.22 I suspect this intellectual underworld is unknown to Blackburn, the reason he can think conspiracists stupid. Many are not; and play strange games with these theories, half-believing, half-playing with them as intellectual games and for various kinds of frisson. The master here Philip K. Dick, for whom conspiracy embodies an artistic truth about modern society, its wholesale manipulations and corporate fantasies; the alienated personality drift in a disintegrating world.23 It’s a fine line for such performers. Too many drugs, mental collapse or catastrophe, and the play-acting turns into real belief.

The not so clever take their gurus at their word. A consequence of mass education which produces not only the good citizen but the clever charlatan and educated fool.24 It takes a lot of strenuous work to understand Kant, while much of that understanding requires that we both grasp and accept the intellectual tradition to which he belongs. Whew! It requires a degree at Cambridge, post-grad study at Durham, and a few more years of intense work at.... Not so, we are told by our democratic culture. This egghead can be squeezed into a semester; or we’ll roll him onto Eric Flight’s TV special, a quick five minutes between water bingo and the Injured Violin. All things to be open and transparent; new names for the thin and vacuous. Simon Rattle makes this acute point when asked about widening access to classical music: ‘not too fast’.25 But educators, Art Council funders and curators want the opposite: as many punters through the door as quickly as possible. This a society where numbers replace not just quality but comprehension. It is a world where an indifferent spectator elbows out the learned connoisseur. Professor Immanuel Kant stands up for his rights: ‘I vont to write long, incomprehensible sentences!’ The vice-chancellor, worrying about student numbers, boots him out of the department. It is a sad spectacle. Some young admin officer trolleying Mannie up the supermarket aisle he is to share with Jennifer Jackanapes and Kevin Clutterhead.

And yet Kant is criticisable. We can reject his moral metaphysics, think it unwise, unsound, not wholly coherent; believe it a rearguard action to protect the Christian religion, where faith in mysteries is replaced by a faith in reason. Cleverer than most Kant knew that at bottom all faiths, even rational ones, rely on the inexplicable. We, long buried under an archaeology of atheism, are not so wise; finding it impossible to accept a metaphysics that, although grounded on human rationality, requires as its foundation some unknowable principle.26 Always to run after some mad idea, collect those silly facts. This not all. We live in educated times. Is it really possible to rely on the inexplicable when told everything is explainable? It takes a lot of learning to realise that we don’t know very much, or nothing at all. Part of true learning is un-learning, a kind of de-education. Hearing this, teachers pick up their placards and go on strike. Schloss The Stupid. Schloss The Insane. Job Stealer.

Always to reach for the quick answer....

Consider Kant’s characterisation of the human animal: evil. An individual’s task to liberate the self a little from its own nature by the free use of reason. Kant recognises the necessity of a congenial society, one that shares our moral maxims, and seeks to act them out; yet his morality is essentially individual and internal: it is for each person to overcome and fulfil themselves. Times have changed. Kant’s metaphysics, his transformation of Christ’s Gospels into textbook philosophy, has been incorporated into a Liberal Humanism sacralising society; creating many a philosophical and psychological conundrum, as the empirical mixes up with the metaphysical, and State, Nation, Demos, and the People become variations on the same holy theme.27 With Christianity it was easy; Heaven a distinctly different place from Hell, Christ obviously the Devil’s foe. Not so in modern times, when states murder millions, and the Demos metamorphoses into a mob. How can society be sacred if do such bad things? A poet muses on the complexities.

I seem to stand in the midst

Of an incomprehensible 

Tragedy as though a world

Doubled against this were tearing

Through the thin shell of night;

As though something earth bound with its

Own glamorous violence

Struggled beside me in the dark.28

Not so easy if the intellectual equipment isn’t top-notch, or if bested by a corporate heavy or council official. The feeling of failure is a hard, penetrating truth; one not easy to endure without a belief in salvation and divine retribution. In kicking God out of the heavenly clinic we are left to ourselves, with only society to blame, and drugs and therapists to save us. Oh dear! By shifting sin away from the Christian soul and laying it onto the social field, all our fears, resentments and mad chiliastic dreams - that ‘glamorous violence’ - are projected onto a screen whose film goes on without us. It is to feel a cosmic indifference.29 Yet the authorities condescend to us, encouraging all to participate in the polis. We do, but find our influence nil, our commonplace beliefs, inculcated through school and TV, little more than sound-bites. It’s why those on the political fringes, experiencing their exclusion most keenly, often feel themselves the least free (also why the most knowing, cynical, angry). The committed and the clever, who do understand how ‘the System’ works, know they’re in for the long haul. Lenin created a party and kept it going for the desired crisis in some distant future, when the society dissolves.30 The amateurs, the losers, the deluded and the dilettantes, believe in the quick solution: chop off the heads of the evil doers. They think in terms of people rather than institutions, beautiful palaces not the ruins of bombed out cities. Just get rid of the bad leaders and the good people will be in charge. Simple souls! It is to utterly misconstrue the modern world, where an artificial realm - Hobbes’s Leviathan - is far more powerful than the individuals inside it. Only when a regime collapses - Paris 1789, Russia 1917, China in the 1940s, Cambodia in the 1970s - can festivities reign; and then only for a few crazy days. Afterwards the population to suffer the agonies of freedom; when its new leaders, free of all previous restraints, take charge of the institutions and remake the society in their own sociopathic image.31 As I said, simple souls, who, thinking to play politics, are in fact foot soldiers in a holy war. Conspiracy Theories are intimate with modernity, when the social becomes sacred, and the Church morphs into State and Corporation.32

...men are not the same in action as in contemplation.33

I’ve been knocking Kant. It’s time to give him his due: action not knowledge is wisdom.34 By doing things we actually learn the things we do. Yet the modern citizen lives in a spectator society, where politics is just another form of entertainment, cynically used by the media to touch our emotions. This culture, though a highly rational invention - television schedules are precision instruments - is designed to create irrationalist effects. Feeling before reason, image as argument, the adverts to replace pamphlet and learned tome. We inhabit a highly emotive culture; yet are told we’re the most rational and intelligent there’s ever been. ‘Some men’ to believe the hype, but puzzle over the contradiction. Then one day they read Philip K. Dick, and see a company man shifting the scenery...there is another reality behind the public façade. The curious, the clever, those desperate for answers, now to ask the obvious question: who are the hidden persuaders?35 Any discussion of conspiracy theories must ponder this dialectic with the modern media; who with its professional gloss but amateur content grossly distort and heavily manipulate the public sphere.36 Long since have the political class and the administrative state been immune. Today they join in!37 selling us their shoddy wares.

A mass culture depends upon a mass education, the best way of misleading the people.

An umbilical cord connects conspiracy theories to a modern education geared towards skills and social conditioning rather than knowledge. Talking to young adults it is amazing just how little they know; and then when one does start to explain, the eyes glaze, and out pops the stock response: so complex; that’s in the past.... Without some history it is nigh impossible to understand a political event; the history providing the appropriate context and suggesting the most likely consequences. Yet the population is conditioned to believe they can grasp events with the minimum of background, itself compressed into an image or phrase. This at a time when the media has expanded the individual’s world, which appears unstable and chaotic; our living rooms flooded, war-torn, raped, mangled, murdered. Open the fridge and we find a politician having kinky sex; walk into the bathroom and there’s a bishop stealing our make-up; while a thousand crying children occupy the garden. Crime, war, ill-health, bureaucratic inefficiency, political corruption, environmental degradation...it is a terrible world out there, as we eat microwave dinners and text Deliveroo for a beer. And we are told all things have a cause. ‘Eh, Dave, what did he say?’ ‘The chump said everything has a reason.’ But what reasons! as some crisis, given the minimum of context, embodied in a few personalities, which erupts from nowhere and is quickly forgotten, once the dead are buried, drifts across our media screens.38 History-lite, with little analysis but much ‘human interest’, and framed in the wooliest of concepts, no more than stickers, the viewer hardly registers what’s going on. I talk to someone about Gaza; believing themselves well-informed they confidently tell me religion is key. All those TV hours, and the morning paper, produces this result: not an ounce of knowledge; no inkling that this story is rooted in the land.

A few weeks ago the Schloss met some chap in a secondhand bookshop; who, puzzled by the coverage, with its competing claims, was looking for one book to explain the conflict. Schloss suggested Benny Morris’s Righteous Victims as possibly the most even-handed account. ‘Oh you know something about it!’ Then fires out his questions, which tend toward the abstract and essentialist; for with no grasp of the politics or the history he has framed it within a cartoonish religious context; as if Israel/Palestine a replay of Jewish life as imagined in medieval Europe. The Schloss gave a fifteen minute sermon which, to remove the stereotypes implicit in those questions, mostly covered modern European Jewry. He was interrupted by Mrs Schloss, who wanted to see the lamps in John Lewis.

Abstract and essentialist. Signs of a natural intelligence, which tends to think in cosmic terms when pondering public events and intellectual subjects.39 It requires much training and long years of craft to think about the abstract in the particular and the unique.40 But the TV channels have no interest in doing this training or fostering that craft; instead, they litter our living rooms with random details and big but largely vacuous ideas. As if amateurs can become professionals by pressing the remote.

Easy meat for a talented conspiracy theorist.

Acquire just a tad of background and the news appears thin and misleading. What’s the response? Someone informed and intelligent, with a seasoned judgement, knows the media offers poor fare; the perspective skewed, not just by power but by its own structural ignorance, arising from the endless media churn, with that rapid response, demanding a maximum clarity and the minimum of analytical complexity.41 Add repetition, a hammer blow to the sensibility, and there won’t be much for the serious and sophisticated.42 News is shorthand, a way of keeping in touch with some facts about the world. It is why read just one scholarly book about a subject and you’ll be skeptical about the coverage; which prefers caricatures to portraits. It knows its audience. Few are going to read academic monographs. History must be in digestible form. Journalism not scholarship. But always those clever and curious types.... One day our chap talks not to Schloss but to a smart cove, who demolishes the TV version; and offers a more informed, rational, coherent and compelling explanation for what’s happening in Gaza; an explanation that easy to understand, incorporates the usual human evils of greed, self-interest, lying and secrecy. Wouldn’t you be intrigued? And Connie Coveman has this advantage over Schloss: he gives you something to believe in; while the theory is pre-packaged - delivered straight from Amazon! - so you don’t have to spend months working it out for yourself. Fast food theories for a generation that no longer cooks up its own.

Educated without an historical memory we are given to believe that we can comprehend a myriad of events by turning on the telly; or that by receiving BBC news alerts we’re in touch with Reality.43 The illusion of being well-informed. What strikes, when speaking to its recipients, is how little the viewers and alertees know. Not much more than headlines, with a general sense of human chaos, the world an incomprehensible place.... Facts. Facts. Facts. With nothing to join them together. Yet on their own facts are meaningless. It’s why educated to have faith in the empirical we end up believing the silliest things. Our intellectual framework weak or nonexistent. It’s the difference between an archaeologist and some fella with his metal detector. No mass audience to stay the course of even a two hour lecture; instead they eat their chicken nuggets: Gaza, Ukraine; China, Big Tech. We must blame the television companies and governments that have created this media environment, where comprehension loses out to ratings. We should also blame our schools and universities for churning out such poor audiences. Although, as in all things, culture plays a major role; for, sad to say, we are victims of democracy; the belief that all should know what’s going on forcing executives and educators to turn the hard work of understanding into infotainment. Knowledge, alas, is only for the few who have the time, the energy, the gift, plus patience, plus seriousness, to waste their energy on heavy tomes.

In the Demos culture turns pop, which produces an underground, its dark mirror image. Who descends into this underworld to depend on character and circumstance.

If young and alienated, a middle-aged sourpuss, or some clapped-out wunderkind, you’ll have an odd relationship to this culture. Depending on it for information, you absorb the structure it gives to the understanding; while at the same time resenting those beautiful people who tell you what to think. ‘I don’t want to listen to this, man!’ ‘Smug bastards.’ ‘Robbed me of my fame!’ We hear the litany in pub and on park bench.... The resentment especially acute with those brought up to believe the world belongs to them. Then, by chance or design - one is intellectually active - you accumulate enough facts to see that the news coverage is thin and twisted. It hits like a revelation: ‘they’re telling me porky pies!’ The culture having trained them to think quickly and in cartoon concepts, already Wunderkind, Drop Chops and Smart Aleck are on the wrong road, as they personify events and look for the one satanic answer to a shocking affront to their dignity: ‘They’ve fooled me!’ Now on a crusade. It is to seek revenge.... Never underestimate the naivety of these characters, their skepticism the reverse coin of that innocence; the reason values switch so quickly between extremes. Also why they hate the newscaster and politician, are keen to reduce them to ‘idiots’. Almost...as if members of the family.

To understand the public realm we must grasp its abstract nature; individuals as likely to act in line with an institutional culture as with their instincts.44 Without this insight Alienated and Drop Chops will look for brutally simple human motivations to what is a political and cultural ecosphere: lies! Not quite (although individuals do lie, look after their own interests, and generally act in nefarious ways; this mostly within elite circles; the public a background audience for such establishment games). What goes on in a TV studio is part of a culture, a way of looking at the world, and is more than individual selfishness, especially for an elite, whose education interweaves an idea of the public into the private self. It is this culture that should be the focus of our ‘researches’ (who reads nowadays?). Drop Chops hardly notices. Imagine I talk to my immediate family always through the medium of class...you look at me oddly, as if a freak; and I am, because mixing up two different kinds of experiences. But in a world where the public and private are squeezed ever closer together, it is often difficult to tell them part, at least on the intellectual level; thus the more likely to get the perspective, the angle of vision, wrong. Poor Wunderkind! Lacking a scholar’s craft, its long years of training, that mental obstacle course, where, clambering over and through a tradition, we push, punch and kick our predecessors out of the way, he has no sense of the difficulty in mastering a subject. An ‘expert’ overnight, he copies and pastes his favourite guru, turning the mainstream upside down by accumulating a universe of counter-facts, strung together with a few weak concepts which are repeated ad infinitum across the conspiracy thread; which in proving his cleverness, ratchets up the self-righteousness. Another striking fact: the self-importance. Stars on their TV show. Such characters couldn’t exist without the pop culture they parody, and from which they feel excluded. All given an extra bite because believed victims of a targeted aggression: ‘they’ll doing this stuff to me man!’ Media junkies on a bad trip.

...as Leibniz pointed out, the soul would have to exert some sort of physical force in order to move the pineal gland so as to change the direction of motion of particles in the brain - and how an immaterial soul could influence matter was precisely what needed explaining in the first place.45

Give the conspiracist this credit: unlike academics, who float along on their conceptual clouds, Smart Aleck and Drop Chops know that concepts don’t just descend on our heads like rain; individuals do man the precipitation pumps. Ideas are embodied in the actions of people, whether alone, in groups or institutions. What Smart Aleck overlooks is that those who run the place - an elite, the establishment, a ruling class - stand under the same rain as everybody else.

The poor quality of the thinking is what we must criticise. Should it be discussed in the same breath as serious scholarship? That each concept has a history...this requires too much work and sophisticated interpretation for characters who need ideas prepackaged. A common defence of conspiracy theory is to say evolution is only a theory (alternatively, Darwin is denied because just a theory). In both cases we are puzzled by a strange quality of mind, which conceives of an idea as little more than a word or phrase; one effortlessly transferred from screen to Parliament Square.... I pick up a jug brimful with water from a book on my desk in the study at the top of the house; I step slowly down the paper-strewn stairs, and walk across the hall, the cat snaking around my ankles; opening the door; I crunch crunch crunch over the gravel, avoiding a vine, when...the rhododendron bush bashes my face; ah!...a brief stop, a quick recovery, and a slow pirouette around the gate; when bump bump into a policeman strolling on the street; ‘sorry sir!’ as I hurry down the neighbour’s path, a dog jumping at my thighs; another gate, rusty and stiff - open at last! -; and now to negotiate the uneven concrete slabs, before crossing the long grass, where bending down...‘boo!’ shouts a child popping out of a hedge...I water - no drop lost! - my neighbour’s roses. Most don’t get that far. The words ‘jug’ and ‘water’ never to leave the page. The few who try drenching the cat. This confusion of action with idea with words, believed efficacious through utterance, is a natural instinct of the mind - Hobbes’s attacks it at length in Leviathan - and shown woefully inadequate not just by modern science but the carnage of our revolutionary centuries. The root cause of conspiracy theory: its adherents have not been trained out of their natural human instincts and ways of thinking.

They remain ordinary people not scholars, who yet want to enter the scholarly arena - little Charlie Clerk thinks to wrestle with gladiators. I have no doubt that this very ordinariness, felt in the bones, fuels the rage. A tad unkind. I should note the similarity between the old scholastics and the new conspiracists; though aware too of the too easy comparison. Scholasticism in sharing the anthropomorphic mentality common to all humans, raised it to impossible levels of intellectual sophistication; while their primary interest was in the metaphysical, not the misdeeds of ‘some men’.46 Clever play.47 Conspiracy theorists are mundane. There is little feel for ideas, which are treated less as organisms with their own life, evolving with time, but as objects, thought fixed, static, simple. Each idea has its own boundary, policed by high walls and watchtowers, and not be transgressed on punishment of abuse or ridicule. (Analytical philosophy, standing in the corner, eavesdropping, has the jitters.) Little sense that ideas change with the times. That wise distinction of philosophers between the empiric and the analytic, to which different conceptual rules apply, a foreign language to the conspiracist, who wantonly merges ideas with events and actions with concepts. Intimate with this lack of feel for ideas, public affairs and people, is poor judgement; it is why Darwinian evolution occupies the same epistemological space as a conspiracy theory about Diana. All ideas, theories and thoughts occupy the same plane; not unlike a television schedule, where fiction mingles indiscriminately with non-fiction, the serious followed immediately by the absurd.

Sir Oswald then started droning on about the catastrophic state of the current British economy. There had been many recent strikes and he spoke of them with gloating pleasure. He obviously loved to sit in the comfort of his beautiful house in France reading about the economic difficulties that were plaguing the country of his birth. Every piece of bad news, Sir Oswald read as good news, for he saw it as proof that he had been right all along. There should have been appeasement of Hitler and all would have been well for Great Britain.

He believed that his countrymen were now paying dearly for having rejected him as their leader. But despite his ill-health he still seemed to have a certain confidence and optimism. He implied that all was not lost for the British. Eventually they would come to their senses and he would be recalled from his exile and elected with honour and glory.

Sir Oswald was a man of immense vanity but listening to him droning on I felt he was carrying his conceit to the point of lunacy. In the odious event that the British were to elect a Fascist government surely they would choose a younger and fresher leader. Why would they feel the need to recall the services of this self-indulgent, old, reptilian aristocrat? Sir Oswald lived in a bubble. Yet he clearly was loved by his wife and they seemed to be happily married: they had survived imprisonment and exile, and united by their ugly political dream, they were enjoying an old age that seemed more contented than of most people. The soufflé they served was light as air. It was frivolous like their fascism.

‘The trouble with England now...’ Sir Oswald said to me. All his statements were delivered with such self-importance they sounded like pronunciamentos. ‘The trouble with England now...’ he repeated. He never stopped trying to be hypnotic. I braced myself waiting for some abrasive opinion. But the trouble with England now was that it no longer had any hostesses. ‘Where are the great hostesses?’ Sir Oswald asked with a rhetorical melancholy. ‘Tell me, where are the great hostesses of the ilk of Sibyl Colefax and Emerald Cunard? There are all these lovely, intelligent, young English women but none of them have a salon. And the salon has always played such a vital role in the true life of any country. It really is a tragedy...’48

All the qualities of a conspiracist - vanity, self-importance, that foolish naivety; the serious indistinguishable from the trivial - are captured here, except Sir Oswald isn’t a conspiracy theorist. Caroline Blackwood perceptively picks out the luxury, the self-satisfaction and self-belief; that need to prove himself right, which the newspapers easily facilitate. Stuck in the deep freeze of his youth, his ideas show the wrinkles and senility of age. Losers can never be wrong. Their truth is all they’ve got; take it away and there’s nothing to hide the failure and absurdity. Sir Oswald, of course, had his whiff of power, his scent of fame. The belief of a return although foolish it is based on this fact: he was a player in the political game.49 What makes Daisy Key, that no-hoper in a bedsit, believe she is playing in the same league? Not ideas, but Daisy’s relationship to what Will Self calls bi-directional digital media. Convinced she’s part of the conversation, it fuels the self-belief in her own opinions which seek out theories, facts and friends to confirm them. These opinions, arising from feelings whose source is mostly boredom and listlessness - that ‘luxury’ -, given an edge when she discovers media-land isn’t listening. ‘But I’m a nobody!’ Conspiracy theory an epiphenomenon of a culture that creates the intoxicating belief that all are important, everybody ‘to make a difference’. On discovering the sober truth you look for other, darker, more potent fantasies to maintain an illusion instilled into the psyche by long immersion in the culture. Time for Daisy to create her own channel where she hosts her own chat show.

Why do the more intelligent of these characters take such an intellectual farce seriously? Here we have to look both at the personality and life history of the committed conspiracist; those who need a stronger, more coherent meaning than those who usually watch Heartbeat and Shetland. For them conspiracy theory is a necessary revelation.

In religious experience understanding merges with identity to embody the self in an idea.50 No longer a subject of study the idea is a life to be lived; the more outlandish, outré, the better; for it forces a leap of faith into the unknown, into a new persona, a radically new mode of being, where social intercourse electrifies the mind.51 The body subjugated to the idea, one becomes extremely fragile, as we try to live the counterfactual life, proving it true. A fizzing wire. To find one’s self at the centre of a labyrinth is to have amazing insights into forbidden things; it is to feel a magus. Believing in heretical ideas we have divine insight - ‘I’m a magic man!’ -, while to devil-turn sacred words and evangelise taboo ideas generates enormous psychic energy. Perfect for jaded palates. When some scholar or official, even Janice at work, ridicules these ideas, this only fuels the passion, increasing the egoism, proving you are right: the feelings tell you so. A sad, pathetic circus. The same simplicities that we find on the TV are replicated in the conspiracists, though twisted into bizarre and ugly shapes and saturated with wild emotion. A once reasonable, even a clever, person becomes a crank.

These strange fictions play off the belief they are true, but a truth very different from what we find in the Aristotelian Society. These characters feel they are watched, preyed on, persecuted, that their liberty is being taken away...and indeed it is; for in addition to the usual surveillance capitalism they create the conditions which causes a disturbance and puts them on display. This precisely what they want! A star in the local high street. The vast accumulation of facts (many accurate) in substantiating the theory confirm the feeling and thus gives substance to the role, that albeit rather mad is real and authentic. It is the truth of artist and actress. But we are not in the National watching King Lear, or at home reading Evelyn Waugh. This is TikTok. I repeat, a sad pathetic circus. They seem to enjoy it. Supernaturally alive. Clerks turned kings overnight. And how worthy they think themselves! Extremism a virtue, evidence of their secret knowledge and a moral purity not sullied by compromise; it is when ideas, separated from action, are uncontaminated by the empiricism of this world.52 Such superior souls! though the rest of us think them dimwits and dumb-balls. To whom are they comparing themselves? Newscaster and junior minister reading their lines from a tele-prompter, or Doris at Aldi, who likes to listen to the news before she comes to work - ‘it makes you think, don’t it just.’ When confronted with cooler, wiser, actually informed, individuals, and forced to engage across the neutral space of email or letter, it is remarkable how quickly the conspiracist splutters into incoherence, then falls into silence; for these characters belong not in the seminar room, but to street and marketplace, where one can dominate though speech and presence; hot tempers allowing no time for the reflective pause.53 Social media facilitating such performances as it turns the public realm in a simulacrum of living-room and shopping-centre.54 Writing gives way to talk.55

The Schloss is in the gents, washing his hands. Flash Rantrack, the company’s Conspiracy Theorist, steps out of a cubicle. Thinking he spies a fellow traveller, he repeats the usual litany of falsehoods and errors beamed daily into our living rooms. ‘A death-ray, man. Mental radiation.’ Schloss looks bemused. ‘Are you listening to me man, a Chernobyl of the mind; it’s melting us down.’ The crazier the language the more electrifying that gaze. His body...a thousand frogs jumping around the central nervous system. Heating himself up on the tropical paradise of his conceit, Rantrack is sweating out his contempt and mad ideas. He calls the experts ‘The Certified’ and says he’s proved them fruitcakes. ‘Mash potato minds.’ Laughing hysterically he gives our hero his hypnotic look. ‘A goon show, man! but they won’t inject me with their goonery.’ Rantrack asks Schloss a question. The reply: ‘I couldn’t possibly comment, as I know nothing about the science of vaccines’. The frogs all die. A body slumps to the floor.

Another trait of the culture: every question has an answer, every problem a solution. Yet most political situations can only be managed until resolving themselves in some, hopefully humane, way.56 An event; its causes myriad; the technological and ideological trends, that cultural space, a time’s moment, an atmosphere; plus leaders, plus rebels and the headless crowd; then add the imponderables...it is why historians write big books about the tiniest happenings. The scholarly enterprise built on the assumption of no simple, single, absolute answer. History a lifelong journey into new territory. Scholars, committed to exactitude, yet knowing their views will be rejected by future generations digging up new facts or discovering different perspectives on the same material. Hegel famously wrote of the Owl of Minerva looking back to make sense of the past. Alas, we cannot rely on scholars to find the once-in-a-lifetime-solution to an historical question. Even with her spectacles the owl doesn’t see all what’s going on.

And yet....

Much knowledge is stable and secure; in disciplines like engineering or physics the subject is constant change through expansion not revision or rejection of past models (Newton, having built the foundations, is safely left in the library). Within the Humanities, knowledge, relying heavily on interpretation, and umbilically tied to institutional cultures far from stable, tends towards the provisional.57 This exaggerated by an academia geared towards its own profession, where promotion and esteem prefers the fashionable (and milquetoast notorious) to the established (and old hat).58 The idea of flux is built into a professional culture that needs the idea of change to justify itself and create the means of academic mass-production. Indeed, the chief failing of today’s Humanities is its blindness to something unique in organic life; the human ability to create (semi)-permanent entities. You gasp! I drone on: the Catholic Church, the State, and, ironies of ironies, our ancient universities; or think of steel, plastic, uranium waste.... Not convinced? Take Plato’s Republic from the shelf. Two thousand years is nothing for a concept, each co-eternal with the human race. By empathising flux and flow - the animal in us - we actually to miss what is distinct (and weird) about human beings.59 We outlive death. We create the divine.60 

       Potter nor iron-founder

Nor caster of bronze will he cherish,

       But the monumental mason;

       As if his higher stake

Than the impregnable spiders

      Of self-defended music

      Procured him mandibles

To chisel honey from the saxifrage,

      And a mouth to graze on feldspar.61

I’m gone off piste. You wonder where I’m heading.... Conspiracy theory is a parody of a parody: of those professors and their cronies - Rod ‘Radical’ and Ruth ‘the Revolution’ - who churn out their rebarbative tracts in which ideological pap and career advertisement is disguised with Byzantine prose. But academics are different, Blackburn argues; even the worst having some respect for evidence. I’m not so sure. I agree that events are more messy than clear; that instincts and habits play a far greater role than Machiavellian reason; however, this is to go against the trend of an academia that tries to prove that indeed there are simple, all-encompassing explanations for events; that there are villains with their masterplan; though these not living persons but abstract nouns: Imperialism; Capitalism, Race; Class. Ah says Blackburn, a different kind of conspiracy...philosophers always to wriggle out of a difficult example.

Nor forget the corruption of campus, where in order to pay for an inflated university system, grades, courses, even knowledge itself, is twisted around the profit motive. Lies, fraud, bad faith; these, alas, disfigure our once noble halls of learning. We must be skeptical of the academic industry, question its credentials, its self-justifying methodological poses. The boundary between campus and common life porous, it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate not only graduate from school leaver, but professor from charlatan.62 The distinction and refinement intimate with a craft is being lost. All jumbled up! If a lay person, how tell the difference between Frances Yates on the Rosicrucian Enlightenment and Penelope spinning a line from The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail?

It’s not so easy, my friend.

Philosophy does not think all things are contingent. In fact it goes to the other extreme, abstracting even political concepts from their context.63 One consequence is that complex entities like states and political movements are treated as single entities - the concept of the State, the concept of liberty, the concept of conspiracy theory... - which are then defined and evaluated. Yet, as Raymond Geuss wisely notes, most things that happen cannot be given such a single, unitary evaluation.64 The pupil of a wonderful teacher ends up a dictator; their murderous enterprise due in large part to that wonderful teaching...what single value do we put on Miss Jones? Well, we shouldn’t go there; but we can’t help ourselves!

The lay shares the philosopher’s belief in the self-contained quality of ideas.65 What separates the hoi polloi from the philosopher, is what she does with the idea; taking it apart and putting it together in new forms. Not us. You and I visit the marmoreal concept in a museum, and leave it behind to enter the gift shop. This popular view of ideas is carried over to knowledge as a whole; most assuming it as permanent as a Greek statue.

Pop culture believes knowledge is certitude; the expert losing her credentials if proven wrong even on a single point (though the standard of ‘proof’ often hilariously low).66 Aside from the natural instinct to think ideas fixed, we must add the complications of a modern world where human creations are changing all the time. Man has been shown to be the Great Inventor of his own environment, where once he thought himself its mere servant. Once it was natural and comfortable to believe in fixed ideas; a way of dealing with our inability to control nature and ourselves.67 Security sought in some perennial and thus omnipotent idea.68 Not so easy today, when all beliefs appear dissolvable. Permanent change!.... Already you see the problem; one especially difficult for Western philosophy, whose great insight has been the strange nature of the concept, its ability to withstand the ravages of time.

A tension has arisen in our psyche, leading to odd consequences; as this new idea of change wears the garb of that old fixity: not just the idea that everything is changing all the time, but the qualities associated with permanency are attributed what is mutable; thus the popular belief that a professor should never be wrong or change her views; as if the work of a mature mind only confirms that of its youth. In addition, professors are expected to respond to events, predict their outcomes, and suggest how to sort them out. The metaphor of the Ivory Tower long since out-of-date in our plate-glass disciplines, as the walls between campus and town demolished. ‘Get it right, prof! It’s what we pay you for.’ The model for such simplistic belief is technology, where there are indeed solutions to every problem, and ideas are indubitable: no one argues with a vacuum cleaner. Transfer the mentality of Google or Bosch to political or historical analysis it is almost inevitable we’ll end up with the belief that the world is ruled by a cabal creating false façades (how else square the surface chaos with the rational substructure?).69 Different intellectual skills are needed for different intellectual problems; but this idea, I’m afraid to say, appears to be dropping off the curriculum, as the Humanities mimics the social sciences, itself a poor version of physics and chemistry.

Knowledge is firewater. Our culture encourages everybody to drink.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fired at sight with what the Muse imparts,

In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,

While from the bounded level of our mind,

Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind….70

You’re a loser? What better way to deal with your condition that drink yourself into oblivion. And who’s to say this isn’t an idea’s greatest value, it’s original evolutionary function: to blind us to the reality of our pain and suffering.71 Ideas: a natural drug, human nature’s high. But there are consequences to ideational excess in a bureaucratic society. The boss wants sober people at her desk; while colleagues have no interest in prophets, are uncomfortable with the insane. ‘Can’t you stop Rantrack messing with my ear?’ Conspiracy theory, although a miraculous way out of loserdom, is apt to accentuate its effects, as we lose, family, friends and job to its mad demands. Inevitably we take higher doses of the hit.

Blackburn has to face this terrible paradox: a conspiracy theorist really is controlled by an omniscient, invisible force: the conspiracy concept itself. An odd kind of truth, which says little about the external world but everything about Daisy Key’s own mind, enthral to an idea she can’t escape. But here’s the crux...in a global marketplace where Daisy feels little more than corporate product - aka disposal junk - she has created a safe space, a magic land, where if not exactly secure she can at least rule as her own queen. Hume would have been amused by the lengths to which the imagination goes to bolster our vanity.72 Nevertheless, he’d note this truth: for Daisy it may be better to believe in the conspiracist dream than be taught the facts of the case by the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy. In our domestic lives truths of feeling often do and should trump truths of fact and logic.

...the memory, or the dream, has the texture and colour of actuality; it is the blasted present that is fragmentary, impossible, and therefore illusory. The realization of the fragility of things - ‘tables and chairs’ - made the whole city’s fabric seem to Elizabeth like the gauzes of a stage-set....73

We live in democratic times, with its egalitarian faith. Yet as with violinists and gymnasts, only a few have the gift of scholarship and philosophical analysis. So what happens when, increasing the numbers beyond their natural limit, scholarship is made to fit the populist taste; the French Revolution or Western metaphysics plastic-wrapped and discounted at the student superstore? We already see the consequences. A subject is reduced to a few ideas - class, race, the post-colonial - that are further debased to label and slogan when hitting street and screen.74 Encouraging everyone to be wise, we make the culture stupid. It is here the conspiracy theorist flourishes, as they ‘uncover’ the mainstream ‘narrative’, showing its facts selective, the view distorted, the ideas obviously thin and self-justifying. The conspiracist’s mistake: to think themselves immune from the populist disease; that infectious belief that intricate situations can be compressed into simple ideas, treated as givens. In pop culture an idea is thought not as a complex event, evolving over time, moulding itself to zeitgeist and raumgeist, but a definition in the dictionary, that word-object on a page. This exacerbates the literalism of the unwise. An educational system that privileges the practical and vocational, while polluting the humanities with ideology, itself used to ‘change’ the mass, believed stupid and prejudiced, is likely to encourage such thinking. Let’s go on a visit....

The Schloss is in a museum with some friends looking at a Degas dancer. A woman pops up, and introducing herself as a volunteer guide, says she is an artist. It is to load her gun before firing her bullets.… Assuming Schloss & co innocents, she tells them that Degas is an Impressionist, and that Impressionism is all about im-press-ions (slow and in capital letters). Here is an expert who knows things. Also an opening gambit to soften and disarm the unsophisticated visitor. Believed suitably softened, she lets the bullets fly: the sculpture is poorly done, badly proportioned, the head all wrong. (Now we get that intro: impressions not skill; the movement an ideological cover for ineptitude).75 Poor girl! She topples over dead. Time for the guide to reload the pistol - she stops to pluck insults from her iPad - and shoot the old master down: he hates women. Schloss waits for charges of anti-Semitism and reactionary politics; but no, she has run out of ammo; the education camp short on materials this week. Irritated and amused the Schloss holds the guide with his gaze. Then gives his definition of Impressionism: to capture movement, especially of light and colour. He smiles into her eyes, and says think of Degas’s interest in dancers, of where he paints…she looks puzzled. Turning to the dancer, he says, ‘In theatre or dancing school; places where movements are swift, the light artificial; and where the view is distorted, at times severely so. Do you see, he’s interested in perspectives twisted out of shape.’ The guide looks horrified, and walks away. Nodding to the dancer Schloss shrugs his shoulders and pats her on the head; ‘there there, don’t worry about these fools, they need you for their hate, their ignorance and their self-righteousness.’

A top museum employs a guide to diss their collection of old masters. Visitors expected to be art ignorants - simple punters - who are to be demystified about European artists of the past; because, I assume, these talented chaps are believed to belong to an elite culture.76 In truth it is the resentment of the petite bourgeoisie and philistine; odd coves for today’s universities to enlist in their services. Once upon a time curators and directors knew there are far more sophisticated ways of talking about art and literature:

I am well aware that it is essentially poetic not to allow the reason to intervene too quickly and that often rectifying one’s judgement amounts to falsifying one’s sensation; but art would consist in maintaining the sensation in all its freshness and yet not allowing it to prevent any other function. Odd lay-out of that mind!77

Before the populist expansion of universities Gide had already predicted their blighting of the arts. In a knowledge industry reason replaces sensation and analysis kicks out taste; while clear judgements, with their false promise of ‘objectivity’, vaporise the vague, tentative, mysterious.78 The sensuous qualities of the mind lost to the hard mechanics of a rational faculty that easily finds fault with what doesn’t touch the feelings. Academics almost obliged to fire their heavy artillery at the old masters. Add a fatal lack of freshness. Specialisation has faded the colours, added its own extra layers of dust...any enchantment left if an entire professional career spent on just a few artists?79 Bound to be bored. Think of a long marriage, where love is replaced by irritation. What do the Grumps do? They moan, find fault, and lack generosity with each other’s failings, while chafing at their mutual dependence. On campus The Moan is more sophisticated. Rolling out the analytic faculty you create a conspiracy of context to cut the old josser down to size. An original! Dr Knifeknot laughs in my face, as she identifies the traits he shares with other men. I burble on about beauty, a work’s divine grace. She giggles, and gives me a list of the chap’s prejudices and beastly behaviours. But art is its own world! I cry. Dr Knifeknot scorns me with her radical politics: he was a bagman for the capitalist class. Who needs the death of the author, when you can call him a misogynist or imperialist? The worst effect of mass education hasn’t been on the students, but the professors themselves.

In general academics are no longer thought to be special people. The title ‘professor’ does not carry the cachet that it did in Wundt’s day: there are simply too many of us about for that. Nor are our working environments particularly special. We have managers, who use the same management jargon as the managers of non-academic corporations. In requiring us to increase our productive outputs, our managers do not handle us as if we were special beings, engaged in an almost sacral mission to discover truths and to uphold ancient values of scholarship. The days for such claims are long past. Even as we work, we resemble non- academics: our habits of academic reading resemble the way that non-academics - including ourselves when we are not working - consume the products of mass culture.

[A comparison of the contemporary academic with the media consumer, leads to this observation....]

There may be a greater volume and variety of academic work being published today than ever before, but this does not mean that we have a new generation of enlightened academics, who have broader knowledge than their forerunners. The reverse is the case. We have to ignore all but the publications relevant to our own specialist island. We have little time to wander at will around the library, browsing haphazardly. Search engines direct our attention to ‘relevant’ articles, which we can then download. We do not have to subscribe to whole journals, whose contents we might browse as we physically hold a complete issue in our hands.80

In lockstep with the growth of academic mass production has been the march of ideology, as scholarly writing turns pulp. A terrible coarsening of intellectual activity; as the arts of the connoisseur are replaced by those of the professional employee, whose one interest is their career, for which overproduction and servility to current conventions are essential. Art and literature now less freestanding entities, to which one has some positive emotional response, they have been turned into evidence - a fact-mine - to prove the ‘truths’ of the latest cultish fad.81 Odd to reflect that as campus loses its aura - no longer a sacred place - and becomes a business, the employees have this desperate need to signal their virtue and self-indulgently flash their spiritual (radical) credentials.82 A bad conscience drifts across our cathedral cities.

The real thing is replaced by an act.

The worst consequences are suffered by the public sphere. A vast, complicated organism is subjected to a catalogue of cheap ideas and comic-strip theory: Marxist, Freudian, Foucauldian.... Ideology, it is the idea’s conveyer-belt, as if purposely designed for our knowledge factories, with their Fordist production schedules.83 The older humanities tuned up the sensibility, educating the taste, encouraging the students to love literature; that training into the subtle sensibilities of an elite culture.84 The effect of such an education, especially in the best universities, was to make the beneficiary sensitive to the implicit and the invisible, those currents of mood and atmosphere so important to politics and aesthetics, that rely so much on fine distinctions and clever interpretations.85 It was to create a civilised ruling class.86 Today’s profs turn out cartoon radicals, fully armed with their hermeneutic suspicions; which places the old masters at the centre of some ideological conspiracy. A terrible corruption with baleful effects on our elite. It is not simply that academics, and thus our politicos and corporate heads, are philistines.

You must have courage to go to sea in a sieve, or indeed to sail away for a year and a day, but such courage will be rewarded. Narrowness of outlook - whether imposed by false conventions, by the distortions of a dogmatic rather than a loving Christianity, or by the pursuit of other people’s spiritual and physical perfection - robs man of his humanity, with all its oddities and faults. But you can leave such narrowness behind, for the faint-hearted will not follow here.87

The university has changed the nature of the subject; literature, ceasing to be understood on its own terms, is seen only through the lens of an academic discipline, splattered with politics.88 It is to destroy a culture that offers both an escape from a suffocating society, with its clergy and its commissars, demanding a dull conformity, and a different way of experiencing life: pick up Edward Lear and we do sail with the Jumblies in a sieve. Art is nonsense...

And all night long they sailed away;

    And when the sun went down,

They whistled and warbled a moony song

To the echoing sound of a coppery gong,

    In the shade of the mountains brown.

‘O Timballo! How happy we are,

When we live in a sieve and a crockery-jar,

And all night long in the moonlight pale,

We sail away with a pea-green sail,

    In the shade of the mountains brown!’

        Far and few, far and few,

            Are the lands where the Jumblies live,

        Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

            And they went to sea in a Sieve.89

...and nonsense is a zone of freedom, where we live our own mad existence with its own crazy truths.90 ‘No no no’, says our kindly academic, ‘this to accept the values of an elite’. She waves in the bulldozers: her political truths to smash down those beautiful palaces; leaving the reader amongst ruins, as the apparatchiks build their Committee of Culture, that concrete monstrosity. It is to create a terrible ‘narrowness of outlook’. Almost inevitable in a university system that turns poetry into knowledge.91 Too many academics have no feel for the arts at all.92 A disaster! Talent invisible to the untalented, who believe that fame must be due to nepotism, fraud, bias or cabalism. For Prof the Populist, conspiracy is the easy way to account for success and esteem. Many with no gift for the arts, after injected with a dose of academic philistinism, are ready to run the art bureaucracies or become - we shudder to think of it - ‘artists’ themselves.93 No only does this thin out the culture but also corrupts it, as ideology replaces talent as the measure of inclusion and success. It adds another layer of the false and the fake to a public realm already saturated with half- truths and lies.

No wonder there are characters who want to know what’s going on. But understanding structural-functionalism, that complex interplay between ideas, economics, politics, culture and human nature, is not an easy task; especially for those without the gift of abstraction and analysis.94 Easier to explain it in human terms: these academics are cheats and frauds. Nevertheless, the conspiracist is on to a truth: there is something seriously wrong with our institutions; the universities not quite what they profess to be. So much is fake; a mere façade.

Once academics aped the aristocracy, today they act the petit-bourgeois that many have become;95 with all the narrowness, resentment, stupidity and prejudice this implies.96 Exaggeration, yes, but too close to a truth to be comfortable. It produces odd effects. The kind of the mind that reduces history to class or sex war - the conspiracy of the idea - isn’t that far from the conspiracy theorist. Often it is only the professional culture - its focus concepts not living people - that separates them.97

What is wrong with your whole position, I still believe, stems from the self-blinding theory that a critic is never allowed to gauge the author’s Intention. I must not make extravagant claims for a process which all persons not insane are using in all their social experience; I have only to say that the effects of renouncing it (in the unique case of the most delicate and intimate formulations of intention) produces dirty nonsense all the time, with a sort of tireless unconscious inventiveness for new kinds of nonsense.

Above all, it means that you can never get out of the circle of rival colleagues and consider the matter freshly, as it would have appeared to the author (authors of earlier times being necessarily free from our technical jargon). What you are offering is a recipe, for the unfortunate man who has fallen into the trade but knows has no judgment, so that he can back the safest horse...98

What unites conspiracy theorists and conceptual conspiracists is not just an hermeneutics of suspicion, with its resentments and self-righteousness, but a lack of judgement. Both seek safety in the idea; that simple, clear, unequivocal sign for those unable to judge for themselves. To grasp a novel or a political event we must have a feel for it, with all the ambiguity and uncertainty that comes with the feelings, and which requires the kind of intelligent, fine-grained interpretation done by William Empson. It is the Achilles Heel of the ideologue and conspiracy theorist; lacking this quality, they cannot judge people, events, intellectual history with the requisite depth or wisdom. All is reduced to the stupidity of the concept.

Let’s go further...a conspiracy theorist is likely to be closer to the truth than a conceptual conspiracist when diagnosing society’s ills. Coercion isn’t due to the Immaculate Concept. Ideas depend upon people, groups and institutions for their transmission. By ignoring the mechanics of how ideas are used in a society - the men and women who rule our lives - the academics lose their grip on political and economic action. They must rely on conceptual miracles to explain events.99 It is what saves them from ridicule. Closer in spirit to how societies are actually run, the faults of conspiracy theorists are nevertheless multitudinous: no grasp of political and institutional cultures; oblivious to human sentiment and human failings, which produces poor caricatures of history and tradition; then that total ignorance of scholarly culture and knowledge production: ‘It’s just facts and ideas, innit?’ Kant described these characters well:

...the natural need of all human beings to demand for even the highest concepts and grounds of reason something that the senses can hold onto, some confirmation from experience and the like....100

There is an odd corollary to Kant’s view: the wider university expansion, the more students are taught to think in concepts, the more likely they are to embody them in palpable things; so distorting even denying their true nature.101 Universities, in a paradox Mannie would have liked, the great breeding ground of error not wisdom.102 Yes, that’s right folks! professors the fons et origo of our conspiratorial universe. Something odd happens to ideas both in the university, when it expands beyond its natural limits, and when it leaves campus and enters the marketplace. In these contexts, not the content of ideas but how they are used becomes their most important element. To teach large numbers of students, and supporting the less gifted to pass exams, requires massive simplification and distortion to get the job done; it also helps to work on the student’s emotions, encouraging their counter-cultural prejudices (extra points on the impact assessment). On campus an idea is essentially a pedagogical tool.103 In public life the purpose of ideas is not to be understood but to convince one’s self and others of their social value. This twists a concept completely out of shape; such conceptual gymnastics most philosophers seem to miss; as if ‘democracy’ in the seminar room is identical to ‘democracy’ on the election stump.104 The usage so different, almost different notions.

It’s still possible to agree with Professor Blackburn, and say we are discussing questions of degree and it is these degrees that are crucial; and despite similarities of mentality, the conspiracy theorists are far less intelligent than English profs and political scientists. There is truth here. However, having known a number or conspiracists, I don’t think he is correct. What the clever ones lack isn’t intelligence but a feel for other people; this human disconnect reproduced across the public realm and intellectual history, where the invisible connections and forces that shape a society and its history - atmosphere, that galvanising phrase, a tarot-like idea, the alchemical magic of an incident; long-term trends, a culture’s growth and decay... - are not felt, so not seen, so misunderstood.105 Everything has to be made explicit. All to have a reason, and those reasons to be be embodied in actual people, pictured as alien and an enemy. Kant, who saved himself from Blackburn’s strictures, because he believed in ideas not real people, elucidates the mindset.

It is a peculiarity of Christian morality to represent the moral good as differing from the moral evil, not as heaven from earth, but as heaven from hell. This is indeed a figurative representation and, as such, a stirring one, yet not any the less philosophically correct in meaning. -For it serves to prevent us from thinking of good and evil, the realm of light and realm of darkness, as bordering on each other and losing themselves into one another by gradual steps (of greater and lesser brightness); but rather to represent them as separated by an immeasurable gap. The total dissimilarity of the basic principles by which one can be subject to either one or the other of these two realms, and also the danger associated with the illusion of a close relationship between the characteristics that qualify somebody for one or the other, justify this form of representation which, though containing an element of horror, is nonetheless sublime.106

Hume was smarter and more adept at moral reasoning; which he saw, correctly, as a thousand shades of mental feeling. In sensibility there is little difference between your clever conspiracist and Kant, but being a genius the Königsberg King saw deeper and is more profound: theoretical concepts occupy a different mental space to thinking on empirical events and domestic affairs. This division into different cognitive attributes is incomprehensible to the conspiracy theorist, who needs ideas and emotions to merge into a single view of things.107 Idea and action, self and the public realm, itself a projection of their thoughts and feelings, are embodied in a personality that cannot be separated out into public persona and private person. Think of an artist, whose sensibility is expressed in an image or character; and indeed, many of the conspiracists I’ve met are artists and musicians, who carry over their aesthetic sensibilities (the ‘horror’ and the ‘sublime’) into their daily lives.108 This inability to distinguish between different cognitive realms is the catastrophic error, that can transform super-smart people into nitwits. Conspiracy theories don’t attract the stupid, they make you stupid.109

Nevertheless, I must be fair to these characters: just like a work of art conspiracy theories tell a truth about society; it’s just that they mistake a fiction for real things, confuse metaphors and symbols with facts and incidents.

Blackburn is running down the corridor towards me...’what about that rubbish they spout against the experts. No truth there.’ I disagree. There are real experts - professors, lab technicians, engineers, nurses - and there are the pseudo-experts, who overpopulate the public sphere: consultants, trainers, therapists, and much of the petit-professional class who administer and manage the Welfare State. Often it’s only the pseudo-experts that most of us meet - housing officer, social worker, benefits clerk.... Come into contact with these and one’s confidence in expertise quickly disappears. Blackburn walks to the rest room, and slumps in a chair. I offer him a coffee, pat him on the shoulder, and ask him if he’s ever been inside a local authority.

It is the mismatch between the cleverness of the rational mind and the stupidity of the emotional intelligence that produces the strange ideas and elaborate theories to explain what is often simple behaviour: laziness, greed, instinct, panic, fashion, self interest, habit.110 Top heavy with reason, not in touch with others or themselves, the conspiracist misses the obvious, and falls into Hume’s trap: unable to understand the inexplicable - political and social action is often inexplicable to them - they create an excess of reasons to explain what they cannot feel.111 Too much reason. Too many ideas, which float free of the human reality. Alright in the old days, when God and Satan fought it out in the heavens. Not so nice when metaphysics is brought down to Earth.112

Latest news: Apollo’s become the god of journalists, press men, And his blue-eyed boy he who reports all the facts.113

In theology and political science we expect an excess of reason. We also know that this has little to do with religious feeling and actual politics.114 Philosophy suffers the same weakness: a subject that depends on insight has been transformed into pure rationality, as epiphanies are turned into logical arguments. The scaffolding mistaken for the building behind it.115 Here, perhaps, where Blackburn is at odds with his hero Hume, who was happy to live with the inexplicable. And of course Hume himself has suffered an odd history; his great Treatise, in Newtonian fashion, written both to explain the mind and to show the limits to its understanding, came to be seen as a theory of that mind and identity. Yet after nearly seven hundred pages the reader is left - in classic Socratic style - with a mystery about these core human matters.116 Alas, the subtleties of his silences are overlooked for those enchanted by his brilliant, clear and distinct ideas; these believed to define mind and the self. Science Hume’s model, his goal to reduce explanations to their minimum; his Treatise a kind of Occam’s Razor to the professorial propensity to accumulate reasons, which hide the mysteries of life not reveal them.117 Nevertheless, mysteries remain. Then contrast his treatment of causes in the Treatise with his history of Stuart Britain: here reasons are legion. For Hume there were different intellectual solutions to different intellectual problems. Social affairs best understood through the kind of detailed empirical work of historians and novelists. It’s why Bernard Williams wanted to set limits to philosophy.118 There are subjects that are just too complex, too empirical, too contingent, for philosophers (qua philosophers) to have much of interest to say.119

Philosophers, ideologues and conspiracists stand at the gates of Hell. The philosopher saved because he believes in a wholly metaphysical world.

The ideologue is closest to the conspiracy theorist: all facts and thoughts to be squeezed into the claustrophobic space of a concept. Ideologists retain respectability because, ultimately, the thinking is mostly metaphysics, though of a coarser kind than philosophers; a gap left between idea and actuality, allowing the empirical and the conceptual to go their separate ways.120 This gap a godsend to the academic Marxist, who can spend her professional career playing with the ideas, never worrying about their failure in current affairs. Another saving grace: though rigid and dogmatic, ideologies do allow for the free play of the mind. Not so lucky the sad sods who join a Communist sect and believe in Das Kapital as their forefathers believed in the Bible; here ideas are facts, theories actual descriptions of this world; and salvation is assured.121 When the capitalist reality diverged from Marxist theory, two divergent trends arose; in academia the theories became more elaborate and metaphysical; while for the sad suck activist they remained literal, and thus evermore extreme.122 What saves prof is that her thinking is theoretical; also the sophistication of the intellectual play and its accompanying erudition. In contrast, the conspiracist needs the theory to be grounded in actual people. The theory less important than the proof that it is true; why most of the time is spent hunter-gathering facts to prove the Evil Ones's maleficence. Because the theory too simple and rigid, it is quickly wrong- footed by events with the inevitable reaction of a mad counterfactual faith: the theory no longer explains but protects their belief, now shown absurd.123 All the great religions - Christianity, Marxism, Freudianism - begin as clever but one-sided descriptions of reality that require their adherents to believe its favourite concept - Love, Class, Sex - is both the crucial fact about society and will save us if actualised in behaviours. It is the transforming power of the concept - less the explanatory theory - that produces the faith, generating a tremendous energy, its chief attraction.124 The different weight given to ideas and salvation is what differentiates the intellectual from the activist. This balance shifts when the religion expands and popularises; becoming more metaphysical for the intellectuals, over-simple and literal for the rest.125 Nevertheless, it’s not that easy to distinguish a dull Marxist academic from a clever conspiracy theorist.

What Hobbes overlooked and failed to put into his model was the centripetal force of a cohesive bourgeois class within the society.126

This good professor thinks there is a bourgeois conspiracy across history. Nonetheless, it is not quite the same as believing in the Illuminati; for, ultimately, the theory rests on an idea; the idea more important than individual members of the bourgeoisie.127 Nor are we likely to see Professor Macpherson outside Kilburn tube station selling the Morning Star. Yet once upon a time that is exactly what Marxists did.128 Beyond the pale. It changes when their ideas seep into the culture, which in absorbing some of the key concepts makes the movement and their founder respectable. Marx a part of our intellectual tradition when he discards the prophetic cape for the scholarly robe. Conspiracists are our pop prophets. It is the quackery of fairground and music-hall beamed live on the Internet.

Simple salvation. Take a pill - pop your concept! - and all to be well. It’s why conspiracies attract so many (they are also fun, and annoy the sobersides running the show).129 For government their popularity is the problem. A threat to authority because in mixing the outlandish with the true they create a volatile mix that invites activism and opposition. The real issue of conspiracy theories not the fanciful beliefs but the truths they clothe in their outrageous theoretical garb. To believe that the media lies, corporations manipulate, and we are tracked...these should be commonplaces in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism.130 Indeed, in a recent PREVENT training course, supposed to be about terrorism, much time was spent on conspiracy theories; not, as far as I could see, because they posed a terrorist threat, but because they threaten the legitimacy of our parliamentary system, which rests on democratic myths crumbling under hyper-capitalism and the establishment response to Brexit. The error of conspiracists is in wanting a total explanation, which encompasses all phenomena and is wholly one-sided - the media only lies, corporations only manipulate, the Matrix only surveils etc. Also their mad belief that a tiny group of Evil Ones personally target them. It is this paranoid, totalitarian framework - not necessary the individual details - which falsifies the theory. Then add the crazy belief that only they see the truth and will be saved. This self-importance both barmy and impressive.

Such faiths have conquered societies. Every successful religion invents the world they want to save. We both the victims and the beneficiaries of a long history of cultic conquests with their crazy but necessary fictions.131 Kant sets out a new rational religion, which he hopes will transform humanity and lead to world peace.132 We living with the oddball results; where flesh and blood individuals are turned into abstract carriers of ‘human rights’; which are used to justify ‘humanitarian’ interventions where actual humans are slaughtered in their thousands. It is a caricature of the original theory, which places a strong emphasis on duty, the only way to overcome our essentially ‘evil’ (non-rational) nature. Such debasements the inevitable consequence of a Messiah’s words; whose more extravagant claims eclipse his realism and wisdom.133

Respectability is a crucial factor in deciding a theory’s worth. Nowadays Marxism is no bar to the elite, while a popular novelist like Sally Rooney can earn millions peddling what have become platitudes. Even conspiracy theories are treated seriously if play to powerful prejudices: the EU, Putin, China have all been called in to explain establishment failures.134 Conspiracy theorists are by nature oppositionists: they wish ‘the System’ down. This automatically puts them outside polite society which, happy to condemn the current set up, benefits too much to want it destroyed. Conspiracists are not so restrained. They are the uncouth outsider, a threat one’s comfort and sanity; thus the abuse. Yet close enough to respectable radicals to cause an itch; one reason they attract so much attention. Most folk are wiser: thinking the conspiracist daft we ignore him.

Why are some louts - journalists - accepted, while others (the conspiracists) are ridiculed? It’s not just that the theories are intellectually vacuous; most journalism is thin fare, yet we consume it every day.135 No. Some theories tell a truth about the culture that the elite who shape the culture wants to hear; the bizarre or distressing elements conveniently filtered out. When Christianity conquered Imperial Rome it incorporated much of pagan mores and beliefs, allowing the powerful and wealthy to turn Christian without financial or physical cost.136 What remained of the miraculous or scarcely believable either siphoned off to the fringes - the desert monks - or transformed into the acceptable forms of metaphor and metaphysics; the truths of faith (and body) metamorphosing into those of concept (and mind).137 A new syncretism the consequence; though with a heavy cost to the old society; ‘drained’ of its previous intellectual and philosophical achievements.138

Conspiracy theories are religions at their most extreme and weird; usually when cults, which in attracting the outré and the outcast requires the believing of absurdities and radical leaps of faith.

...a human being should become not merely legally good, but morally good (pleasing to God) .... so long as the foundation of the maxims of the human being remains impure, [they] cannot be effected through gradual reform but rather must be effected through a revolution in the disposition of the human being (a transition to the maxim of holiness of disposition). And so a “new man” can come about only through a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation... and a change of heart.”139

Kant is writing about the individual and their conscience. Emphasising the importance of a community, its role in shaping and supporting that conscience, so it can act rationally in the world, he nevertheless makes a distinction between political and ethical communities; between coercive states and voluntary churches. The ethical and religious must remain outside the state apparatus. Life has changed since Kant’s time. With the help of Hegel and Marx his religion of the rational has come into being; although in usual style that religion bears little resemblance to his original thesis. Indeed, the history of this theory has its own ironies; Kant believed that a religion of reason follows the ecclesiastical one (reason replaces dogmas, idols, rituals and bureaucracy); yet the history of his own theodicy reverses the process, ending with the Communist nomenklatura and a landscape littered with Lenins. Brezhnev & Co only one line of the Kantian influence, which has transformed everyday secularism into Secularism, a new religion of Humanity, where the political and the ethical is fused into a single polity.140 He foresaw the results:

But woe to the legislator who would want to bring about through coercion a polity directed to ethical ends! For he would thereby not only achieve the very opposite of ethical ends, but also undermine his political ends and render them insecure....141

Modern parliamentary democracies are not just machines of political activity, distributing resources; they also want to make good people; which means interfering with our consciences. The mind, a zone of freedom which Kant cherished above all else, is put under pressure and penetrated by our institutions which not only limit our acts but shape and constrain our beliefs. These attempts massively increased since the cult of Neo- liberalism captured the West, seeking to turn citizens into consumers, by removing the separation between government, markets, civil institutions, and the culture.142 No wonder a backlash! Conspiracy theories are, ultimately, an expression of what Kant calls the ethical, that instinct for freedom, the mind’s liberty. Yet as Society expands its influence - a telly in every room - the zone of freedom narrows down; while the institutions, each day evermore like churches, are shown inefficient, out-of-touch, error-prone, corrupt.143 Behind the billboards advertising the Good, we find incompetents, hypocrites, and some rather nasty characters.144 Given such an assault on the mind, it’s almost a sin not to rebel, not to believe in any old counter-cultural nonsense.

‘Messing with our minds, man.’ Something else to be said for the conspiracist in an age where all things are manipulated, transformed, turned into plastic.

Whatever he showed of something in the rough,

  Sluggish in flow and unadaptable,

I liked him for, affecting to be gruff,

  An awkward customer - so much was due,

He seemed to think, to what a man was, once:

  Something to build with, take a chisel to.145

Obduracy. We arrive at the heart of the conspiracy theorist. Ideas express a mood, usually of resentment, failure, resistance. Through an idea the scattered fragments of a life are brought together; as the lost, the broken, the defeated and clueless, use this idea to glue themselves together around a pervasive feeling of exclusion and rage. The conspiracist creates an identity which in acting it out gives a sense of wholeness and worth. At last a very important personality! The great study is Maximiliano in Fortunata and Jacinta; whose mad ideas stem from real betrayal, and genuine suspicion.146 Contrast Maxi with his brother, Juan Pablo, whose radical ideas also reflect a mood and his outsiderdom, but are tempered by sophistication, self-interest and a proximity to power. Maxi succumbs to pure fantasy, which has elements of the true; Juan says much truth, though riddled with errors, illusions, and wishful thinking. It is the difference between genre fiction and literature.

How tell them apart?

Conspiracy theories often attract adolescents, who, overly rational and emotional, lack the experience to read others and society.147 Reason is not separated from the feelings, while the rational is not tempered by the customary and the habitual, those most efficacious of social forces. A combustible mix that longs for the slogan and the bulldozer to flatten all complexities. Schools and universities exacerbate these tendencies rather than subduing them; as they conflate society with the ego, and treat ideas as remedies for ills rather than subjects for investigation. Grown-up kids are not the only type. One solution to a mental breakdown is conspiracy theory: it both structures your thoughts and gives an explanation for your collapse. Religious types and artists also risk infection. Then the deracinated of all ages; Dostoevsky our master pathologist here. These characters are saturated with the clichés of the press and TV, which taken literally are turned on their head, the quickest and easiest way of creating a radical persona. It never dawns on them that Westminster and the media is a game played by insiders where one is expected to know the rules; set by an institutional culture, corporate interests, and reasons of state. One day that revelation: ‘they’re telling me lies!’148 there is another world behind the screen and newspaper. Alas, conditioned by the pop culture to think in facile ways, they seek equally reductionist explanations to create a cartoon version of the real thing.149 So different from Marxists?

I began to read Marx, Engels and Lenin in earnest. By the time I had finished with Feuerbach and State and Revolution, something had clicked in my brain which shook me like a mental explosion. To say that one had ‘seen the light’ is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows...the new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull: the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jig-saw puzzle assembled by magic in one stroke. There is now an answer to every question: doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past.150

What makes conspiracy theory absurd is its lack of sophistication; its material gathered not from philosophical and historical tomes, but from newspapers and Internet magazines. The Internet: the poor man’s further education college. The quality of the material the conspiracist works on is data rich but intellectually poor - a freight train of opinions, speculations and rank nonsense -; one suited to a consumer of knowledge, and of a special kind: those who dine on burgers and chips. Mental obesity. It’s what happens when learning goes pop! The very nature of the medium encourages this mentality, which is validated by politicians and professors who Facebook and tweet.151 Those without the academic training, who’ve not done the hard graft of actually creating knowledge, think to grasp a complex topic at a glance, so miss all the nuances, difficulties and blindspots. Who can blame them? The BBC and Google do this all the time.

Nuance divides the smart from the stupid.

I give the wrong impression: that conspiracists are poor saps from the council estates; penniless dunderheads, who left the comprehensive with no qualifications and a rucksack of resentment. This is not my experience. It is striking that those I know come from minor public schools. The false promise of elite success turns to rancour and envy when excluded from stage and screen. These relative failures contrast their life-histories with the stars and miss the obvious: that accidents, kinks in the personality, the right class but the wrong friends, and luck, have caused them to miss the media heights. ‘But I’ve more clever, talented, charming than that Perry Blandrum, so how come he’s on Master Chef?’ Precisely because a mediocrity is the easy answer - TV prefers the smooth operator to the cragged original. An answer too easy for the public school intellect. And in a culture where all are encouraged to ask why? why? why? the answers are ready to hand: relatives, friends in high places, sexual favours, blackmail, the Deep State....

I have sympathy with Blackburn’s solution: work on the emotions by giving real life examples of the consequences of their belief. Alas, he doesn't fully comprehend the egoism and selfishness, which is extreme.152 Such characters have no sympathy with those who don’t share their ideas. Moreover, a conspiracy theory is taken up to increase this egoism and selfishness; which feeds off the passions. The conspiracist enjoys their rage, wallows in self-righteousness and self-importance, as they scorn the unenlightened of respectable society. They want, need to be, outré, to feel the frisson of heresy. Anti a way of life. Deeply disturbed themselves they want others to feel that disturbance; the neighbourhood’s windows to become mirrors in which they follow their Dostoevskian image. To show films or provide counter-evidence will only increase the aggression; and will be easily (and rightly) dismissed as propaganda. ‘You’re trying to control me man.’ Like a broken love affair, or an acrimonious divorce, proximity to the old love provokes anger and abuse not reconciliation. You can’t be reasonable with these characters, for we are not talking about problems of knowledge and policy, but identity, and of a very special kind: many are broken in some way; the conspiracy theory holding them together; and deep down the clever ones know this; thus the closer to the truth the greater the passion to avoid it. Brittle people do not respond well to solid arguments.

Nobody speaks the truth when there’s something they must have.153

Blackburn’s other solution - Hume’s arguments against miracles - will have no success at all. Hume is writing for people like himself, or for those whose faith has cooled. The hot gospellers of conspiracy theory are not going to put themselves into the refrigerator of reason. And here of course, Hume knew exactly what he was writing about: reason really is the slave of passion, but a passion of Wagnerian proportions. To give reasons why the theory is wrong is to put kindling onto a raging fire. The clever conspiracist believes they hold the truth and knows their views are absurd; it’s why they let loose a barrage of mad abuse when faced with intelligent criticism. The cooler and the smarter the critique the greater the tension between these two positions, producing not a magnanimous surrender but an insane disdain. Hume gave a wonderful description of such characters, who mix belief with charlatanism.

’Tis however probable, if not certain, that they were, generally speaking, the dupes of their own zeal. Hypocrisy, quite pure and free from fanaticism, is perhaps as rare, as fanaticism, entirely purged from all mixture of hypocrisy. So congenial to the human mind are religious sentiments, that, where the temper is not guarded by a philosophical scepticism, the most cool and determined, it is impossible to counterfeit long those holy fervors, without feeling some share of the assumed warmth: And on the other hand, so precarious and temporary is the operation of these supernatural views, that the religious extasies, if constantly employed, must often be counterfeit, and must ever be warped by those more familiar motives of interest and ambition, which insensibly gain upon the mind.154

At least Hume’s fanatics could enjoy success. How much worse if powerless, treated as a fool and used to sell newspapers - columns on conspiracy theories attract readers. A loser whose loserdom is being exploited...bound to jet-propel the rage, as they become actors in their own exploitation.

Blackburn ends with this wry reflection: it is reasonable to skeptical about our institutions, but the same skepticism should be applied to your friendly conspiracist on Facebook. Is this really going to happen? What our professor overlooks is the distance that separates the elite from those with whom the conspiracist shares their virtual or physical space. We know our friends, experience their kindness, loyalty, truthfulness and intelligence, and trust them; unlike those strangers (shady characters in more ways than one) who rule our lives.155 It is something that Blackburn misses: conspiracy theories have traction because of a quite specific taut-wire-tension between quotidian experience and metaphysical worldview; the theory an extension of a life; the theory’s content, the people it attacks, mere abstractions, invented by Drop Chops to fuel his rage.156 It is that odd combination of closeness and distance that produces the conspiracist mind; close enough to create a human relationship, with its ‘public’ emotions; the distance abstracting out those instinctive feelings of sympathy and understanding, with their judgement and common sense, which comes from knowing someone day-on-day.157 Emotion without closeness is apt to produce a mad rationality, a mind out of control. This mixing of the domestic and the public, feelings and information, the esoteric and the everyday, resentment and belief, nonsense and knowledge, is what makes the conspiracist cocktail. A heady brew. A nice night out.... Of course you’re going to be less skeptical of friend Jack than a drug company that sells worthless remedies, an MP who fiddles his expenses or a journalist peddling propaganda.

You can’t reason with such characters. I see it as a storm hitting the coast. We must take cover, letting the storm blow itself out.158 For many, when the emotions calm, the wound heals, and other interests emerge, new ideas will crowd into that crowded mind, crowding out the conspiracy ideas: the theory no longer the organising principle of their lives; just an idea to frame some news story. And when the news is over, it is tea, cakes and Vera. The minority who need to organise a life around an idea will never be convinced of error. We can only hope the society remains stable and power remains out of their reach.


____________

Notes

1 Although there is a slight ambiguity of phrasing: did he change his mind after reading the book? A Society review of Quassim Cassam’s Conspiracy Theories.

2 Susan George had a similar experience when arguing with believers in Intelligent Design: Hijacking America: How the Religious and Secular Right Changed what Americans think.

3 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Reason, edited by Mary Gregory, Introduction by Christine M. Korsgaard, p.9.

4 The thrust of Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite.

5 There is complex issue of precocity, which I discuss in Bolshy. 6 Kate Roberts, One Bright Morning, pp.16-17.

7 Visit the history section of a medium-sized Waterstones: how many titles will you find published by Oxford or Cambridge University Press?

8 Powerful analysis in Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance.

9 Andrew Robinson, Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs.

10 A related feature: for a conspiracist a quote doesn’t decorate an argument, but proves it. Not the quality of thought, the rigour of argumentation, the dazzling insight, but the authority of fact, of phrase, of countercultural personality.

11 A wonderful example: Blair Worden: Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity.

12 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, translated by E.F.J. Payne, p.415.

13 Brilliantly portrayed in The Master. See my Cult Crazy.

14 An extraordinary portrait of such a character: Caroline Blackwood’s book on Maître Blum: The Last of the Duchess. Maître Blum isn’t a conspiracy theorist, but she was a defence lawyer; the similarities so similar that not surprising these types share the same kind of persona.

15 Think of the current fashion for book subtitles: this book solves the problems of Britain, America, the world.... Examples bedizen these footnotes.

16 Thomas Hobbes, edited by C.B. Macpherson, Leviathan, p.146.

17 For how much of media is simply fiction: Nick Davies, Flat Earth News.

18 The History of Great Britain: The Reigns of James I and Charles I, edited by Duncan Forbes, p.146.

19  From Troll’s courtship, in Collected Poems.

20  Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Reason, p.54.

21  John Berger, Photocopies, pp.178-179.

22  Will Self, Why Read? Selected Essays 2001-2021.

23  A high art version: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49.

24 For the contrast between an older educational system, one centred around a scholarly elite, and the new, thinner American version: Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran.

25 In conversation with Sir Simon Rattle.

26 God. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, Edited by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni; Introduction by Robert Merrihew Adams.

27 It begins with Hobbes and reaches it epitome in Kant. There is a discussion across the footnotes of my Interstitial Lives.

28 From Yugao in The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth.

29 Evocatively described in Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.

30 A good biography of this personality is Robert Service, Lenin.

31 A Flaubertian account of living under such a regime: V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River. The surrealist version, seen from the emperor’s palace: Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief.

32 The great modern thinker who explores this theme: Durkheim.

33 Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity, p.59.

34 I believe somewhere in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Reason. Alas, having looked for it, I can’t find the quote. Is the Schloss making it up? Wouldn’t put it past him.

35 You know the reference. Shoshana Zuboff has updated the theme for our new times: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of Power.

36 It is telling that when serious thinkers - Noam Chomsky - detail the lies and misinformation they are called conspiracy theorists. Such responses, I would argue, are the result of an elite education that seeks to take out personal responsibility from the exercising power. Everyone, including leaders, are passive before the forces of history.

37 Peter Oborne, The Rise of Political Lying.

38 To consider just how bad is our media consider the strictures of R.G. Collingwood in his Autobiography. What we see and hear today he would have found incomprehensible. 39 This is nicely brought out in William Buckley Jr’s interview with Noam Chomsky.

40 Nicely captured in an interview with Julia Blackburn: note how concrete and specific are her replies. An artist!

41 An insider’s account: Flat Earth News.

42 Revealing comment on this particular problem: Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities. The second part of the book is a demonstration of the media debasement.

43 For the history of history-teaching in Britain: David Cannadine, Jenny Keating, Nicola Sheldon: The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in Twentieth-Century England. 

44 Leviathan.

45 G. MacDonald Ross, Leibniz, p.38.

46 When they did consider the deeds of ordinary men, they could have some bizarre ideas. In their treatment of distant peoples, they concentred on the fantastic and the weird: Margaret T Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, pp.28-34. This is her conclusion:

Having lost touch with the classics, medieval scholarship purveyed a preposterous and fabulous sediment of what had once been a comparatively realistic antique ethnography. (p.34)

47 Will you excuse me the caricature? A good history: Edward Grant, God & Reason in the Middle Ages. The chief weakness of scholasticism was its natural philosophy, whose empirical content was subordinated to its deductive theories.

48 The Last of the Duchess, pp.67-68.

49 Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley.

50 My Interstitial Lives. Many of the ideas here are developed at greater length in that piece.

51 The best account is Oliver Stone’s JFK. We are inside the mind of a Conspiracy Theorist, and feel its compulsive force.

52 Kant has a great insight into this - the idea is morally pure - but he conflates this insight with a Christian God with its own peculiar morality, to which we should give absolute abeyance. Idea as a mode of coercion. Alas, both the French Revolution, which he misreads, and its influence throughout the following centuries, shows what happens when we give absolute authority to a concept. The King of Königsberg has no inkling of what it means when such big ideas are let loose across a society. For acute criticism of Kant’s moral metaphysics: Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics, p.83.

53 A remarkable book on the type: Diana Athill, make believe: A True Story. For a brilliant fictional retelling of the same events: V.S. Naipaul, Guerillas.

54 The confusion of private and public is discussed in my Temperate Zone.

55 Or to put in more academic terms: logic loses out to rhetoric. Back to the Renaissance, Rome and Ancient Greece! but with this difference: the agora is now filled not by aristocrats or citizens but the hoi polloi and the slaves. What is remarkable about Philip Pettit's discussion of republics is that the effects of such different constituencies is not discussed, or perhaps even noticed (interview with Johnny Lyons).

56 For what happens when politicians forget this truth: John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars. 

57 Marvellously documented in Roundhead Reputations.

58 Ernest Gellner diagnoses an early example of ‘revolutionary’ inflation in The crisis of the humanities and the mainstream in philosophy, in The Devil in Modern Philosophy.

59 This concern with the transient is linked to our contemporary populism. It is seen in a work like Donald Sassoon’s Culture of the Europeans: From 1800 to the Present, where the longevity of high culture is attributed (and thus subtly mocked) to the interests (snobbishness?) of the elite.

60 Is Christianity both a corruption and the apotheosis of this idea? whose origin is Greek. 

61 The ‘Sculpture’ of Rhyme, by Donald Davie in Collected Poems.

62 A modern trend in publishing is to centre a non-fiction book around a single concept. It is why many become almost unreadable after the Introduction; for once grasp the big idea, which often means just reading the title, we must turn over page after page of repetitive, mind-numbing detail, to prove this one insight. Stumbling over these cobblestones of fact we are bored and bruised.

It is a style that replicates the current academic culture, where scholars are trained to skim books - intro, chapter ends, conclusion - rather than read them. This no doubt accounts for the large bibliographies that adorn modern scholarship. Less impressive when we know that few have been swam into the depths; only skinny-dipped. A curious feature of this bibliographic obesity is that the evidence - the bulk of the book - must be taken on trust. And as for the idea that life can be explained by that one idea...aren’t we back to religious and medicinal quackery? Scholars and corporations combine to create a charlatan culture.

In the great books, which sprawl across the intellectual landscape, it is often the incidental ideas that are the most interesting, keeping the whole work fresh for future readers.

Having delivered my obiter dictum, I must retract a little: most of these books are found in the erroneously named Smart Thinking section of bookshops. ‘Popular’ history books written by scholars - think of the current Penguin list - tend to be far more wide-ranging, and of a higher quality.

63 There are many examples in Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behaviour: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. For a different way of looking at the same political and moral problems see the same author’s discussion of maxims in Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions. These maxims often capture the messy and paradoxical nature of human behaviour better than the abstract models of political scientists, who are apt to fetishise both rationality and the distinction between the rational and the irrational.

64 Outside Ethics, p.96.

65 In Morality, Culture, and History: Essays on German Philosophy and Outside Ethics, Geuss subjects this ‘classical’ philosophical approach to devastating criticism.

66 For a related mentality, see Stefan Collini’s review of Christopher Hitchens, ‘No Bullshit’ Bullshit, LRB. Hitchens is a type of intellectual who always has to be ‘right’. The best way of doing so to hold extreme ideas, which, never marred by any practical application, are used to criticise a society’s inevitable failings. It is the charm of radicalism. Adamantine in one’s righteousness. We can just about get away with this in our youth; but as this brilliant piece shows - subtler, clever, better written than anything by Hitchens himself - this hardens into an attitude with age. Well before the end The Hitch had become an old colonel with a sclerotic prose style.

67 A peculiar moment of synchronicity, which creates the usual ambiguous response. Weeks after first writing these words I read near identical remarks in Geuss’s marvellous On the Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions, in Outside Ethics. Geuss, with greater penetration and clarity, deals with many of the issues I raise here.

68 The great religions were Man’s greatest invention until the New Science of the 17th-century turned our view of the concept upside down: no longer our master, just a simple employee. Starting with Descartes, the great drama of modern thought has been the attempt to restore the idea to divine status; our tragic hero the intellectual who, even when he succeeds - the French Revolution -, fails, as the ideas are transformed into corpses.

69 The great novel about this kind of political situation, that of Mobutu’s Zaire, is V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. This masterpiece, prophetic of our ‘postmodern’ times; when political leaders create a fantasy world of ideas to hide their powerlessness and incompetence.

70 From Alexander Pope, An Essay in Criticism, in Selected Poetry, edited by Pat Rogers.

71 I should be careful with that ‘function’. For wise words on both evolution and its confusions over function: Noam Chomsky, Closer to Truth Chats (in four parts).

72 For Hume imagination was the strongest of our mental faculties. Treatise of Human Nature. 

73 Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen, pp.144-5.

74 An immense subject, which I cover at length in my (as yet unpublished) book Cartoons and Their Concepts.

75 Strange how the old bourgeois values come back in new guise. For gentle satire on the older bourgeois philistine: Mrs Nesbitt in E.H. Young’s William.

76 That most artists were poor.... An intelligent look at the artist and their complicated relationship with the wealthy: Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear. See especially pp.140-155.

77 André Gide, Journals 1889-1949, p.148.

78 Penetrating commentary in Poetry and Knowledge and Plato, Romanticism, and Thereafter in Outside Ethics.

79 In For Love and Money Jonathan Raban writes of an academic whose entire career subsisted on the last two Henry James novels.

80 Michael Billig, Learn How to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences, pp.28-29.

81 For the problems of teaching literature in universities: Gerard Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History. For just how hard literature is to teach as a subject; the eponymous hero in John Haffenden’s William Empson: Volume I: Among the Mandarins.

82 An early warning: John Gross: The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. For just how thin and careerist is contemporary academia: Learn How to Write Badly.

83 It is one of the ironies that these ‘Leftist’ ideologies are the product of Neo-liberalism reforms of the universities.

84 John Haffenden’s two volume biography of William Empson describes an exemplar of this kind of culture; with its mixture of aristocratic insouciance and donnish cleverness. It is surely why literature came to such prominence in the early 20th-century; as it served as a defence against changes that threatened to demolish this way of life, so bound up with the written word. Though this not without its own ironies: it was the parvenus who mounted the barricades.

A common theme in many of Alan Macfarlane’s interviews is the inspirational English teacher. Early to mid century the ‘golden age’ of literature-teaching in the universities; a time when they were shifting from finishing schools for an elite to our modern research institutions; this tension embodied in the kultur kritik of characters like Leavis, Knights, and Willey. However, as Gross notes in his great book, much of this teaching hollowed out actual literature. This is confirmed in Stefan Collini’s The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism. Here is one student:

‘...there did not seem to be much literature in Leavis’s proposed course, noting in slightly pained tones that Leavis’s discussion “seems to show more concern with history.”’. (p.65.)

Literature is both too rich and too thin to be taught as an academic subject. It is why other subject areas are brought in to discipline it. One way of thinking about the institutionalisation of literature in the last century is to see it as a series of conquests by other subjects: history; psychology; sociology; linguistics, philosophy.

85 A sensitive account of this class: Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen.

86 Richard Davenport-Hines offers a celebratory account of this elite in Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain. A more ambiguous picture to be found in Peter Hennessy, Whitehall.

87 Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear, p.185.

88 Nicely illustrated in the disagreements between William Empson and his academic critics over John Donne. John Haffenden, William Empson: Volume II: Against the Christians. Empson was an unstable mixture of academic, poet and bohemian. This is shown by his interpretation of Donne, whom be treats as a man not an abstract category - Poet. Thus feelings as well as thoughts are embodied in the poems, which exhibit a state of being not just an exhibition of virtuoso verbals. His interpretation given extra spice because he identifies with his hero, whom he believes shares his own struggle with a sexually repressive Christianity. His opponents treat the poems as text, a repository of styles and tropes.

Stefan Collini reminds us that underlying such strictly formal analysis there was a socio-historical background, often highly moralistic in nature (if not tone). The Nostalgic Imagination. Since the 1960s that moralism - the walls on which dons hang their modern pictures - has been plastered with a puritanical politics.

89 From The Jumblies in Edward Lear ‘Over the Land and Over the Sea’: Selected Nonsense and Travel Writings, edited with an introduction by Peter Swaab.

90 Another way of saying that art’s importance is in its uselessness, Outside Ethics, pp.167-8. 

91 Check out Outside Ethics for stupendous discussion.

92 In Professing Literature we see how the study of literature (qua literature) declines through the process of institutionalisation. The department takes over the subject.

93 An interminable exegesis: my Train Them Good.

94 Shorthand for historical analysis. Interstitial Lives has extensive comment on Ernest Gellner, a master of this anthropological approach.

95 For the ‘proletarianisation’ of the university: A.H. Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion: The British Academic Professions in the Twentieth Century.

96 For the contrast between an educated woman and her narrow, moralist and bigoted neighbours: One Bright Morning. She was once the ideal and the stereotype of a graduate. What is remarkable is how many of today’s academics are closer to the intolerant chapel-goers of Blaen Ddȏl than college graduates like Ann.

97 Consider Johnny Lyons's interview with John Gray. Gray points out that in the 1970s an overwhelmingly Left wing academia believed that Capitalism not Communism was going to fail. For a serious thinker who, at the time, realised something was going wrong with his worldview: John Dunn. The preface to the Canto edition of Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future is a classic:

‘This book was written, in 1977, to try to bring into focus - and, if possible, to calm - the nagging suspicion that I and my contemporaries did not really understand politics. For all the confidence and the ready self-righteousness of many of our judgments on the topic I found it increasingly difficult to believe that the great bulk of these judgements were grounded in anything at all dependable, or indeed that, taken together, they even made sense. When I came to publish the book in 1979, I was unpleasantly conscious of how far I had failed to lay that suspicion to rest.’

98 William Empson letter to Phillip Hobsbaum, in Against the Christians, p.479.

99 For devastating criticism of John Rawls, arguing along similar lines: Outside Ethics.

100  Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason & Other Writings, p.118.

101  Elman R. Service describes his teaching experience in The Hunters, p.vii.

102  This was, of course, Hobbes’s view: Leviathan.

103  ‘In the second half of the nineteenth century, attempts to legitimate the academic study of English literature had reflected some of these same ideals: the enterprise had to be historical, factual, ‘objective’, and hence - and this was the crucial requirement in the celebrated debate at Oxford over introducing English as a subject - examinable.’ The Nostalgic Imagination, p.7. My italics.

104 It is why the work of Quentin Skinner is crucial. We can only grasp a thinker’s ideas if we consider the intellectual and political context and how these ideas are used in the debates to which they themselves are a contribution. Visions of Politics: Volume 1: Regarding Method.

105 For a brilliant analysis of one such event: Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p.125. She shows how the reigning idea fits into a religio-political landscape.

106 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, p.79.

107 Leavis comfortably fits the stereotype: The Nostalgic Imagination. Collini, when discussing the influence on Richard Hoggart, writes that this kind of unitary, evaluate judgement is intrinsic to the Leavisite method. A sign, I think, of the still inchoate nature of the subject: increasingly academic, but still containing something of the artist’s sensibility, streaked with that old puritanism: the chapels closing the ministers now stayed on at Cambridge.

108 There is a corking description of such a character in Outside Ethics: pp.116-117. Geuss on Adorno. The similarities with the conspiracy theorist and the narcissist (Mosley) are strong, because all three share qualities that belong to the religious personality. Everything has meaning; and thus the trivial is mixed up with the profound, the personal conflated with the cosmic, and all given a unitary value, which structures thought and feeling. However, let's not be hasty....

These are also characteristics of the artist, in whom ideas have a complicated relationship to emotions, the source of insight and truth. Adorno was a failed artist who projected that failure onto both the arts and modern society. In conflating his aestheticism with his academicism, Adorno produced major insights into the creative process, and the artist's relationship to society; but also held a too reductive and one-sided view of modern life and art; the latter taken to court by the academic’s analytic faculty, and found guilty by a jury that was also the judge. The mistake was to believe an aesthetic feeling - his Weltschmerz - a philosophical category. With a conspiracy theorist, the error is to confuse feelings with a belief about empirical phenomena. A minor difference...hardly!

I describe the sterile artist in Get Out the Geiger! a piece on Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno. 

109 In all walks of life - even in universities - there are fools.

110 A fault to which clever characters are especially prone. There are extraordinary examples in Julia Blackburn’s amazing family memoir, The Three of Us. Two highly intelligent parents explain ordinary failings through elaborate Freudian or Jungian concepts, which mask the problems not remove them. The solutions to their ills are simple and banal: stop drinking; cut off the sex addiction, be nicer, kinder; care more. Tune down the ego! Act like responsible parents! But this is impossible for such obsessional people, whose character flaws are interwoven with their super- smart minds.

Academics are lucky; their obsessions, concentrated on page, are confined to the study. Artists are not. They have to act out their obsessions in the world; a place where the intellect is often a hindrance rather than a help.

111 David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature.

112 It starts with Hobbes, and his artificial person of the State (Leviathan). It reaches its apogee in Kant: who makes the moral sphere - society - holy (The Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals). 113 Descriptive Poetry in Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems & Fragments, translated by Michael Hamburger.

114 For subtle and acute discussion of the latter, which shows their limitations: Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions.

115 Bryan Magee is our lead here. Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy and The Philosophy of Schopenhauer.

116 Tellingly, it is the non-professional philosopher Chomsky who understands Hume the best: New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind.

117 See my Professional Amateurs for how modern commentators read back too much reason into Hume, so missing his essence.

118 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.

119 It is questionable whether philosophy should be a separate subject. Like novels and poetry it can be a highly useful supplement to history, politics and sociology. This was Descartes's view, when he advised Princess Elizabeth that philosophy should take up only a small amount of one's intellectual time. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume III: The Correspondence; translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, Anthony Kenny.

120 Adorno is a case where the tension between different parts of his mental apparatus is extreme; thus the mixture of the acute and the bland, the profound and silly, in his corpus. Outside Ethics.

121 Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest tetralogy is an exhaustive insight into these characters. 

122 J.G. Merquior, Western Marxism.

123 Initially many Covid conspiracists were optimists - lockdown proved that they were living in a totalitarian state. Things got darker and uglier - the shift to Anti-vaxx - when lockdown ended, and the State shown to be not quite so ‘fascist’ after all.

124 It is not absurd to think love will change a person’s outlook and personality, but it is unreal to think this the solution to an individual life or the whole of society. That said, to try to inject more Christian love into the polity is almost certainly a good thing; if that love is properly understood and sensitively administered.

125 The original christians believed in all sorts of unnatural ideas: Peter Brown: The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. The history of Christianity to turn these beliefs into more acceptable, naturalistic concepts, where ritual and allegory predominate. Kant believed this is the trajectory with all religions: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. He is wrong.

126 C.B. Macpherson introduction to Leviathan, pp.55-6.

127 This distinction is wonderfully illuminated by Frances A. Yates:

‘Our concern in this book is with the Rosicrucian Enlightenment as a whole and its manifold and multiform manifestations, and less with the canalisation of some aspects of it into secret societies. The pursuit of secret societies has tended to obscure the importance of theme. We can never know, for example, whether Francis Bacon was some kind of early Freemason. Nor is it necessary or indeed important, that we should know such a thing. Much more important it is to take the influence of the idea of Rosicrucianism, than invent the membership of secret societies.’ The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p.263.

128 Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time.

129 Blackburn is right: not all conspiracies are about politics.

130 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of Power.

131 The consequences are often paradoxical: David Hume, The History of Great Britain: The Reigns of James I and Charles I.

132 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.

133 This degradation of an idea is the theme of Cartoons and Their Concepts.

134 In Enemies Within Richard Davenport-Hines catalogues the media’s obsession with Communist conspiracies in the intelligence services; with its baleful consequences on our institutions, who’ve lost popular trust.

135 Flat Earth News.

136 At the same time it allowed the idealists, fanatics and sociopaths to use the faith to do extraordinary things to their own bodies and others. The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity.

137 Kant argues something similar in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason; but gives the process a wholly positive valuation. Again, I think he is wrong. Over the long run the rationalisation of a religion empties it of content. Kant has mistaken the spiritual energy of a new religion - Enlightenment Reason - with the entropy of Christianity, whose life-force is faith not rational argument.

138 The actual phrase is ‘drained of the secular’, which is more expansive: R.A Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, p.15.

139 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, pp.67-8.

140 For acute comment: John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. 

141 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, p.107.

142 For the political nature of Neo-liberalism: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. This takeover is vividly described by James Burnham in The Managerial Society; though he got the social actors wrong: not the engineers - that was the Soviet Union - but the accountants and finance officers have conquered the West.

143 Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, The Blunders of our Governments, for how badly we are run. As an exercise, compare the list of key faults of our political class with Blackburn’s summary of Conspiracy Theorists...aren't the similarities striking and disturbing?

144 Consider the Post Office scandal, and what has been revealed by the enquiry. 

145 From For an Age of Plastics, by Donald Davie, in Collected Poems.

146 Benito Pérez Galdós.

147 I found it telling that in a video interview with an amateur philosopher the latter was non-plussed when Blackburn mentioned literature. For geeks, nerds and technocrats philosophy is a game and literature mere fiction. I suspect many professional philosophers are of a similar mind.

148 The great study is James Vandeleur Latter in Joyce Cary’s Not Honour More; the weakest novel in the Chester Nimmo trilogy, which explores the political and religious personality.

149 A fantastic insight into such a mind is Joyce Cary’s Horse’s Mouth. Gulley Jimson, an artist of genius, sees the world in cartoon. Perfect for his art. Useless for understanding politics or adapting to the demands of ordinary life (he relies on a sequence of wiling women to look after him). For domesticity and politics we must to turn to Sara Monday and Tom Wilcher in the other two volumes of the trilogy (Herself Surprised and To Be A Pilgrim).

150 Arthur Koestler quoted in Noel Annan, Our Age: The Generation That Made Post-War Britain, p.243.

151 The Internet is dismantling a culture and the mind it has formed: Will Self, Why Read? 

152 For just how selfish and egotistical such characters are: The Three of Us.

153 Elizabeth Bowen quoted in Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen, p.95.

154 The History of Great Britain: The Reigns of James I and Charles I, p.503.

155 For how strangers generate superstition: Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage. Unlike traditional societies we lack the rituals to drain off this superstition; conspiracy theories one consequence. A wonderful film that deals with this problem of the stranger and the psychic imbalance they cause a community is Frieda. See my Civilised Bigotry.

156 I refer you again to Caroline Blackwood’s Maître Blum.

157 Hume makes a distinction between two types of emotions: the instinctive and the reflective, the latter generated by comparison with others. Treatise of Human Nature. What I here call ‘public’ is the latter sort.

158 An impressive example is Clifton Duncan. Caught up in the reaction to lockdown he first thinks in conspiratorial terms. However, he then thinks his way out of conspiracy theory and comes to a clear-eyed view of social action: we don't need a grand theory, it is about human motivation within specific cultures. The Glenn Show. The interview is very thought-provoking; and shows the other side of the conspiracy coin: how the mainstream uses it to silence critics by pushing all skeptics under the same ‘conspiratorial’ umbrella.

Duncan shows that it is not so unreasonable for conspiracy theory to be the first reaction to an event like the Covid lockdown. However, being super-smart, and in touch with his emotions, when he actually settles down to think about these matters, he ditches conspiracy theory for a rational although still highly controversial analysis of the issue.

We should also consider the cost he has paid for his stance: ostracism. I suggest the kind of social conformity that can freeze someone out of a profession is far more concerning, because more pernicious in its consequences, than the belief in conspiracy theories (though these, if acted out, can be extremely damaging). Such a reaction points to something that Blackburn misses in his review: charges of conspiracy theory are used by the mainstream media to silence outsiders through mockery and abuse. Conspiracy theory is not just a bunch of crazy ideas. It is used as a weapon, both by an alternative media denied access to the mainstream and a mainstream losing its long-held monopoly over the ‘national narrative’. Does Blackburn realise that Cassam and himself are actors in somebody’s else game.... I turn to Borges, a far better guide to these matters than analytical philosophy. Oh dear! what am I saying!?

A last word on this interview: it illustrates how the best sites on the Web easily outdo in seriousness and intelligence our main news channels.