Conspiracy Theory in Latin Literature

Foreword

Mark fenster On occasion, a harried reporter contacts me to ask what I think about some present conspiracy theory infecting the republic. Explain this craziness to us, Professor. Is the United States a nation of nutcases, or what? Dinner party conversation often transpires similarly when a new acquaintance learns that I’ve written a book about conspiracy theory. How interesting, the companion states, before he or she declares with confidence that those crazy believers (who, not coincidentally, believe something opposite to the speaker) are unique to our time, our culture, our nation. This lay impulse neatly tracks a more ambitious intellectual and academic perspective that understands what it sees as conspiracy theorists’ paranoia as a functional but irrational response to stimuli extant in the political air— stimuli from which elites are curiously immune, despite their own willingness to view theorists’ political organization itself as something of a conspiracy. Some of the academic work on conspiracy theory thus frames the object of its research as merely the product of particular conditions unique to the time period and culture under consideration, one that can simply be diagnosed as a dysfunction and pathology produced by and contingent on present events. The error in these assumptions is obvious to historians and comparativists —or, really, to anyone with a memory or who has traveled. It ignores that previous periods and other popular and political cultures harbor groups and individuals who view the world around them as orchestrated by powerful characters who operate off stage. Viewing the current political leadership as criminally illegitimate; the moneyed elite as holding excessive and unchecked control; a foreign power as holding too much influence over domestic events, or a racial, ethnic, or religious Other as an existential threat to the nation— none of these is a new phenomenon. Indeed, such beliefs seem quite common if not endemic to modern democracies. (Allow me to defer for the moment the question of whether such views may on occasion be accurate.) Conspiracy foreword ConspiraCy Theory in LaTin LiTeraTure x theory serves as a rhetorical tool commonly used to persuade, build political organizations, and mobilize populations. To dismiss the fear of conspiracy as a unique expression of a presumptively irrational time and place is to miss the continuity of such fears across time and culture. An opposite, equally ahistorical error in studies of conspiracy theory assumes that the fear of conspiracy is an inevitable element and failing of human thought. Some schools of social science and those who would dress their prejudices in a universalist cloak dismiss conspiracy theory as the paranoid ravings of lunatics or as a necessary and singular product of a particular type of political order, whether democracy or authoritarianism or primitive societies. Conspiracism, in this view, is the inexorable crutch on which the poor, benighted people lean when they find themselves frustrated or confused . But to dismiss the fear of conspiracy as an essential cognitive and social phenomenon is to miss the specific ways in which such fears manifest themselves in popular and political cultures. These, then, constitute the dangers that any effort to describe and analyze conspiracy theories, whether as a general phenomenon or in a particular manifestation, must avoid: one should neither essentialize conspiracy theory, because doing so fails to view the important context from which it emerges and the role it plays in solidifying or disrupting the political order, nor view conspiracy theory as an idiosyncratic expression of a particular subculture or isolated individual, because doing so fails to view the broader cultural and social forms and patterns that such theories tend to share across time. Neither of these warnings seems unduly complicated, particularly for those working within humanistic, interpretive traditions wary of essentialism and vigilant about history and context. And yet, there’s something about conspiracy theory, whether found in the past or present, that seems to cause commentators to lose their bearings. It leads writers to project a simplified narrative— conspiracy theorists are pathological!—upon precisely those they accuse of building their theories on simplistic misunderstandings of the present and past. It leads analysts also to overlook or deny inequities in the distribution of power, willful political machinations, and, occasionally, actual conspiracies (albeit in narrower forms). Ironically, conspiracy theory spawns two intellectual communities: the conspiracy theorists who engage in their hermetic practice of (over-) interpretation to find conspiracies that threaten the republic by causing everything of consequence; and those who seek to condemn conspiracy theory in the broadest possible manner, who engage in an accusatory...