topic by
John Calvin
6/27/2002 (20:10) |
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'Conpiracy beliefs are a source of cold comfort. At the end of the century that gave us the Theory of Relativity, the Uncertainty Principle, and the Incompleteness Theorem, conspiracy theory returns us to a comforting clockwork universe, before the materialist bedrock of our worldview turned to quicksand. Conpiracy theory is a magic spell against the Information Age, an incantation that wards off information madness by organizing every scrap of the free-floating data assaulting us into an impossibly ordered scheme. Unified field theories for a hopelessly complex, chaotic world, conspiracy beliefs are curiously reassuring in their 'proof' that someone, somewhere is in charge.
Conpiracy theory is the theology of the paranoid, what Marx might have called the opiate of the fringes if he'd lived to read 'The New World Order' by Pat Robertson. It 'replaces religion as a means of mapping the world without disenchanting it, robbing it of its mystert', writes the literary critic John A McClure. It 'e4xplains the world, as religion does, without elucidating it, by positing the existence of hidden forces which permeate and transcend the reralm of ordinary life.
Like fundamentalist christianity, conspiuracy theory accepts on faith that social issues can be reduced to a Manichean struggle between good and evil. Like the New Age, it embraces a faith in the interconnectedness of all things, a cosmic holism not unrelated to the 'holographic universes', 'morphogenetic fields' and 'nonlocal connectedness' of quantum mysticism....conpiracy theory has become the horoscope of the late nineties, a kitschy charm against chaos, a novelty song to whistle in the gathering millenial gloom. It's a manifestation of the postmodern zeitgeist, whose knowing sensibility is neatly summed up in the computer hackers expression 'ha-ha-only-serious'
from 'The pyrotechnic insanitarium; american culture on the brink' by Mark Dery.
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