At 9:40 on the morning of November 1, 1755, Portugal was rocked by the most deadly earthquake in the recorded history of Europe. In Lisbon alone, more than thirty thousand people perished. Many victims were entombed in their churches, which collapsed around them as they celebrated All Saints.
The scene that emerged when the earth stopped shaking was one of Last Days. A tsunami swallowed the city’s harbor, killing many of the survivors who’d assembled on the shore. A fire at the Royal Hospital roasted hundreds of patients alive. Gallows sprouted up on the city’s hilltops, from which were hanged the desperate looters trying to survive amidst the ruins.
In purely quantitative terms, death on this scale was not uncommon in eighteenth-century Europe, which often was ravaged by wars and plagues. But the sudden, spectacular nature of the Great Lisbon Earthquake filled Europeans with a special kind of terror. Indeed, the impact of this horrific event on European thought and culture has sometimes been compared to that of the Holocaust. Most significant, perhaps, was the space that opened up for radical challenges to the authority of the Church, as Enlightenment philosophers asked how the benevolent God of the Christian Bible could permit such a catastrophe.
One of those men was François-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name, Voltaire. In his 1756 “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster,” he pronounced his despair—“Oh unhappy mortals! Oh wretched earth! Oh dreadful gathering of so many dead!”—but also his anger, aimed at contemporaries who depicted the event as just another mysterious subplot in God’s master plan:
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts —
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The Iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
Three years later, in Candide, Voltaire satirized this superstitious attitude through the character of Pangloss, a philosopher who greets every unspeakable tragedy—including the Great Lisbon Earthquake itself—with fatuous syllogisms aimed at proving ours to be “the best of all possible worlds.” Throughout their shared adventures, Candide holds Pangloss in awe. Only in the book’s final pages, as the two men find themselves tending a subsistence farm in an obscure corner of the Ottoman Empire, does a skeptical Candide glimpse the truth that life can be cruel and random, and that the best course is simply to muddle through, using our wits as well as practically possible.
Or as Candide put it in the book’s last line, in response to one of Pangloss’ particularly ambitious flourishes: “Excellently observed. But let us cultivate our garden.”
In the two and a half centuries since Voltaire helped usher in the Enlightenment, Western societies gradually, fitfully have come to embrace rationalism and skepticism. We have separated church and state, enshrined science, questioned God, elevated materialism over piety, swept aside the divine right of kings, and otherwise followed the skeptics’ claim that our world is shaped by human agency, in all its cruel imperfection, not some grand blueprint imposed from on high. America itself, founded by rational deists, has long been considered the crown jewel of the Enlightenment.
Yet there are risks inherent in the rationalist project, as the philosophers themselves sometimes acknowledged. A little learning is a dangerous thing, wrote Alexander Pope—a reminder to those who embraced the ideal of universal enlightenment that human reason remains an imperfect tool and that skepticism can be a two-edged sword. Even now, the intellectual edifice we’ve built on these foundations occasionally teeters, shaken by the tectonic social forces set in motion by depression, war, and terrorism. “Let us cultivate our garden” may be persuasive advice in normal times. But when skyscrapers crumble, when great powers are laid low, we demand a grander narrative than mere chaos, and grander villains than mere criminals and lunatics. In France after the French Revolution, on America’s Great Plains following the depressions of the late nineteenth century, in Germany after World War I, and across the Western world in the shadow of Cold War hysteria, JFK’s death, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the rise of the 1960s counterculture—these have been the moments when shrieking prophets and conspiracy theorists found their followers. Americans now are living through another such moment, one that began with the collapse of the Twin Towers, and has continued through the aftershocks emanating from Afghanistan, Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, and the crippling recession that followed it.
On the op-ed pages of the New York Times and on the airwaves of NPR, America’s respectable intellectuals reassure one another that we are merely passing through a transient phase—a rekindling of populist agitation that comes and goes with the political tides. It’s just a matter of waiting it out. But the evidence suggests that America’s state of intellectual agitation in the aftermath of 9/11 isn’t a temporary phenomenon. Like the Lisbon Earthquake, it has had far-reaching social, political, and psychological consequences that have yet to be fully absorbed or understood.
The reason for this goes in part to the nature of terrorism itself, which—after eliciting a brief spasm of patriotism and national solidarity—inevitably shrinks a society’s common political center. Since 9/11, America has been implicitly divided between those who believe the country had provoked its enemies, and those who don’t; between those who believe America needs to retreat from the world stage, and those who want to project freedom and democracy more aggressively than ever; and, in the purely domestic arena, between those who embrace the romantic project of returning America to its original “pure” libertarian social contract, and those who see its future in the image of the modern, multilaterally encumbered European welfare state. Like an earthquake, 9/11 produced a great fissure through the heart of America’s political center—with two increasingly polarized ideological camps sniping at one another on radio, cable TV, and blogs from either side of the divide.
It is not just politics that separate these two camps, but the very manner by which they answer fundamental questions about the world. Is the earth getting hotter, or is global warming a hoax engineered to bring America into a UN-controlled One World Government? Is America led by a brilliant visionary—or a fifth columnist intent on bringing America down in the name of some sinister Afrocentric, Islamist, or communist agenda? Is socialized medicine necessary to make America a humane society, or is it a Malthusian plot to put Granny before a death panel? Which is to say: The basic building blocks of our political reality.
Many books have been written about the geopolitical fallout from 9/11. This book is about its seismic effects on the country’s collective intellect—9/11’s cognitive consequences.
In the past, such rifts have been healed by America’s intellectual and political establishment, which has thrown bridges across the political spectrum at several critical historical junctures. A century ago, the extremes of populism gave way to progressivism, and then the New Deal. The Depression ended in FDR’s war economy, and then the prosperous, relatively apolitical Pleasantvilles of the 1950s and 1960s. Even as late as the 1990s, American scholar Francis Fukuyama was predicting that ideological conflict itself was becoming a thing of the past, thanks to the universal embrace of core Western values. Ten years after 9/11, not even America (much less the world) seems anywhere near Fukuyama’s “end of history,” in large part because the institutions that we once counted on to discourage radicalism and guide our society toward common ground—organized religion, a vibrant academy, an influential mainstream media, and a respected central government—no longer command the public trust.
Voltaire is venerated for rebelling against the suffocating religiosity of Pangloss, which required a total, fatalistic submission to the whims of God. But the Christian intellectual monopoly that the Enlightenment overturned at least provided society with a shared frame of reference. Moreover, it also provided a cosmic explanation for evil—the main preoccupation of the secular conspiracy theorists who have proliferated in our own age. Voltaire himself understood all this, which is why he detested atheism even as he challenged the power of the Church. “The man who believes in God will recover from his excitement,” Voltaire wrote. “He can be violent but for a moment, while the atheist is a monster all his life.”
In the postmodern marketplace of ideas, there is little check on popular “excitement.” Gaian environmentalism, healing crystals, and dilettante variations of Asian spirituality are claimed to be coequal in status to established Western faiths; and a wave of aggressive atheists—from Christopher Hitchens to Richard Dawkins—treat religion as a species of mental illness. Certainly, America remains home to legions of deeply observant Christians. But increasingly, they regard themselves as besieged combatants in an endless culture war against everyone else, with no shared moral language with which to negotiate an armistice. As for the dwindling tribe of equally embattled rationalists who take comfort in atheist tracts, it must be pointed out that attacks upon religion are not the same as the enlightened defense of reason originally offered by such figures as Bacon and Descartes.
Far from healing this growing cognitive rift, the secular academy has fetishized it: Many of the most revered liberal arts scholars of the postwar era have cast doubt on the very idea that language can act as a bridge between people holding different viewpoints. Thanks to the rise of identity politics, it is imagined that words—and even facts—have no meaning independent of the emotional effect they produce on their audience: Everyone feels entitled to their own private reality. And so the idea of rationally negotiating a consensus truth about the way our world works came to be seen as not only impossible, but undesirable—a trap created by society’s privileged caste to justify their position. “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: Almost every student entering his university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative,” wrote Allan Bloom in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. “The study of history and culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather, it is not to think you are right at all.”
Yet even Bloom would have been astonished by the intellectual balkanization created by the World Wide Web. For the first time in history, ordinary people now can spread their opinions, no matter how hateful or eccentric, without them first gaining the approval of editors, publishers, broadcasters, or paying consumers. At the Web’s birth in the mid-1990s, it was imagined that these new information technologies would usher in an Enlightenment dreamworld of mutual understanding and rationalism. Instead, the opposite has happened: Rather than bring different groups into common discussion, they instead propelled radicals into their own paranoid echo chambers. They have also provided a stage for the most megalomaniacal of these radicals to act out their conspiratorial scripts—such as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose publication of hundreds of thousands of classified documents apparently was motivated by his desire to undermine Washington’s ongoing “authoritarian conspiracy” against “a more just society.”
Perhaps most worrying of all is the general disrepute into which authority figures of all stripes have fallen—especially our government and elected officials. The proportion of Americans who say that they “basically trust their government” has dropped from a high of 73 percent in 1958, when pollsters first asked the question, to just 22 percent in 2010. And there is a direct line from this statistic to the men and women profiled in this book. “I am old enough to remember having to sign up for selective service during the Vietnam War and also vividly remember the denied ‘conspiracy theory’ that Johnson and the military staged/lied about Tonkin Gulf,” a Boston, Massachusetts–based conspiracy theorist named Mark McKertich told me. “Forty years later, we now know it was a theory based in fact. A lot of us have no patience to wait forty years for the truth about 9/11 to be revealed.”
Indeed, a series of blows to official credibility, including the unsatisfying Warren Commission Report on the JFK assassination, the secret bombing of Cambodia and the military cover-up of My Lai, a program of foreign coups and assassinations by the CIA, and other questionable activities officially denied and only brought to light after the fact have all but destroyed Americans’ faith in the pronouncements of their government.
The media fares no better: Many Americans now regard journalists with the same jaded skepticism that they apply to pop-up Internet ads and infomercials. In part, this is because the major news organizations—formerly represented by the reassuring face of Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America—are now dominated by Ivy League elitists and California Google jockeys. In part, it is because cost pressures have dumbed down broadcast media to a format so compressed that the crawl text on some headline news services doesn’t even allow space for verbs. And in part it is because Americans now are simply more sophisticated consumers of news, for the obvious reason that they have more sources than ever to compare.
But the larger problem for the media is that, since the 1960s, they have been undermined by a dual critique that comes (ironically) from both the left and right. Conservatives increasingly see the media as a liberal-elitist establishment that is complicit in a whole range of partisan sins—including the uncritically reverential treatment accorded Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. (As Bernard Goldberg put it in his 2009 book, A Slobbering Love Affair: “I could not remember a time when so many supposedly objective reporters had acted so blatantly as full-fledged activists for one side—and without even a hint of embarrassment.”) Many liberals, meanwhile, see the media through the lens of a left-wing critique whose central text is Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, a staple of liberal-arts reading lists that presents corporate-owned news media as lackeys to society’s wealthy stakeholders. Even if the two angry poles of the political spectrum agree on nothing else, their attitude toward the media has fused together in a common posture of aggressive skepticism. Moreover, the media’s failure to take this two-pronged assault seriously enough to respond to its major assertions—and more important, perhaps, its refusal to acknowledge the grain of truth in these critiques—has further compromised its authority as an arbiter of what is “true” or “real” in American life.
In sum, the media have ceased to be the source of an accepted common vision of events and have come to be seen instead as interested partisans manipulating public perceptions for hidden commercial or ideological ends. Even if a majority of Americans do not actually share these suspicions, the generalized mistrust of the “official version” of events has made many of them less critical of formerly outlandish explanations, which are now entertained as equally plausible “alternative narratives.”
The result of all this is nothing less than a countercultural rift in the fabric of consensual American reality, a gaping cognitive hole into which has leaped a wide range of political paranoiacs previously consigned to the lunatic fringe—Larouchites, UFO nuts, libertarian survivalists, Holocaust deniers, and a thousand other groups besides. Even conspiracy theories that were discredited generations ago suddenly have sprung back to life, as if animated by electroshock. Explaining his decision to run a 1999 cover story questioning “who in fact was the bard, the usual suspect from Stratford, or Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford?” Harper’s then-editor Lewis H. Lapham—the very caricature of a coastal, salon-dwelling sophisticate, which is to say, someone who should know better—recalled that his interest in the controversy was first piqued in 1972, “not a year conducive to belief in the masterpieces of the official doctrine.” Such talk is eerily reminiscent of Orwell’s reflections on the nature of totalitarian propaganda.
Conspiracy theories, the subject of this book, are both a leading cause and a symptom of this intellectual and civic crisis. When a critical mass of educated people in a society lose their grip on the real world—when they claim that George W. Bush is a follower of Nazi ideology, that Barack Obama is a Muslim secretly plotting to impose Sharia law on America, that the United States government is controlled by Israel, or that FEMA is preparing to imprison political dissidents in preparation for a totalitarian New World Order—it is a signal that the ordinary rules of rational intellectual inquiry are now treated as optional. It is not unusual for intellectuals and politicians to reject their opponents’ arguments. But it is the mark of an intellectually pathologized society that intellectuals and politicians will reject their opponents’ realities.
As I argue in Chapter 5—my field guide to the different breeds of conspiracy theorist—people come to their paranoias for all sorts of complicated reasons. Some of the figures profiled within this book are Marxists. Others are anti-Semites, or radical libertarians, or religious fantasists. Some defy ideological categorization. But they are all bound together by one increasingly common trait: They have spun out of rationality’s ever-weakening gravitational pull, and into mutually impenetrable Manichean fantasy universes of their own construction. Much of this book is devoted to the task of exploring those fantasy universes and delving into the minds of those who create them—an inquiry that is a critical first step in defending the rationalist tradition.
It is important to concede that some conspiracies are very real. Watergate was no myth. Neither was Iran-Contra, or the Teapot Dome scandal. There is always a tiny grain of truth at the core of popular conspiracy theories, even in the case of concocted ones. Or at least some vexing question. How did Adolf Hitler exterminate European Jewry without the Allies finding out about it earlier? How was Lee Harvey Oswald able to shoot JFK twice within such a short period of time? Why does the U.S. flag appear to flutter in the moon-landing footage? In most cases, experts can provide persuasive answers. But sometimes, the truth is that we simply don’t know. The world is a complicated place, and some aspects of even the most heavily scrutinized historical events always will remain fissures in society’s intellectual foundations. In normal times, those fissures remain small and inconsequential—fodder for campus crackpots and late night AM call-in shows, perhaps, but nothing more. But in a society whose public intellectual foundations have been compromised over decades, those cracks will spread until the entire edifice is threatened.
That is what has happened to the United States, a place where millions of American “Birthers” accuse their president of being a foreign-born illegal alien. Other right-wing conspiracists, including no less a political celebrity than the Republicans’ 2008 vice-presidential candidate, accused Barack Obama of creating “death panels” that would send the old and crippled to early graves. In bookstores and movie theaters, Dan Brown became a cultural force of nature by peddling discredited fantasies about Christian conspiracies, freemasonry, and secret societies.
Most infamously, there is the 9/11 “Truth movement,” whose members have concluded that the September 11 attacks were actually part of an “inside job” hatched by ultra-hawkish elements within the U.S. government in order to secure a pretext for war abroad and draconian repression at home. In the Truther vision of America, our elected government is nothing but a smokescreen for Deep State actors—arms dealers, oil companies, neoconservative ideologues, Strangelovian Pentagon warmongers—who pull our elected politicians’ puppet strings, and control our society at all levels through bribery, murder, and extortion.
Despite this otherworldly premise, the 9/11 Truth movement has become a mass phenomenon in the last ten years, spawning best-selling books, conferences, a pseudo-academic journal, and dozens of heavily surfed websites. A 2006 Scripps Howard poll of over one thousand U.S. citizens found that 36 percent of Americans believe it was either “somewhat likely” or “very likely” that “federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or took no action to stop them.” About one-sixth of the respondents also agreed it was at least “somewhat likely” that “the collapse of the twin towers in New York was aided by explosives secretly planted in the two buildings.”
For some Truthers, including many of those I’ve interviewed for this book, the idea that elements within the Bush administration used self-inflicted mass murder as a launching pad for geopolitical adventurism has become a full-time, all-consuming obsession. They include white-collar professionals like Richard Gage, a mild-mannered California architect who spent twenty years designing office buildings and strip malls before giving up everything—his wife, his home, his job—so he could travel the world preaching the gospel that the Twin Towers were felled by controlled demolition; and Steven Jones, a famous Brigham Young University physicist renowned for his work with cold fusion back in the 1980s, who then went on to lead a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice. Actor Daniel Sunjata is a Truther (and even was permitted to deliver an in-character Truther monologue during a 2009 episode of the FX Network television drama Rescue Me). So is former pro wrestler and Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, who went on to host a TV series dedicated to conspiracy theories; Charlie Sheen, who in September 2009 published a lengthy Truther-themed pseudo-interview with Barack Obama; Van Jones, the presidential advisor who was forced to quit his post after it was disclosed that he’d signed a petition seeking a new investigation into 9/11; Jared Loughner, the gunman who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords; as well as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. In November 2010, as I was preparing final edits for this book, FOX News Channel analyst (and former New Jersey Superior Court judge) Andrew Napolitano told his audience: “Twenty years from now, people will look at 9-11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today. It couldn’t possibly have been done the way the government told us.”
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a Truther, too, naturally. In September 2010, he told the United Nations General Assembly that the 9/11 attacks were staged by elements within the U.S. government in order “to reverse the declining American economy and . . . save the Zionist regime.” Just a few days later, he visited Yale University, where he lectured a graduate seminar on “U.S.-Iranian Diplomacy.” Hillary Mann Leverett, the senior research fellow who organized the event, claimed Ahmadinejad’s smooth performance at Yale demonstrated that he is “not a crazy, irrational leader.” On the modern American campus, accepting the truth of 9/11 (not to mention the Holocaust—which Ahmadinejad also doubts) apparently is no longer a prerequisite for “rational” thinkers.
Despite all this, the 9/11 Truth movement mostly has been ignored by the mainstream media. In some scattered instances, Truthers have appeared on television (usually, on community access), and a few popular left-wing columnists (such as Robert Fisk of Britain’s Independent) have expressed skepticism of the conventionally accepted account of the 9/11 attacks. But in general, mainstream authors and publishing houses have shunned Truthers. To provide them with any sort of media platform, the theory goes, is to “dignify” their position as respectable—the “other side” in a debate we should not even be having.
But having spent the last three years interviewing Truthers, reading their literature, attending their events, and surfing their discussion forums, I’ve come to a different conclusion. The Truther phenomenon—like the broader intellectual trend it epitomizes—is simply too important to ignore. Truther theories may be nonsense, but the disturbing habits of mind underlying them—a nihilistic distrust in government, total alienation from conventional politics, a need to reduce the world’s complexity to good-versus-evil fables, the melding of secular politics with apocalyptic End-Is-Nigh religiosity, and a rejection of the basic tools of logic and rational discourse—have become threats all across our intellectual landscape. Moreover, journalists’ refusal to engage intellectually with conspiracy theorists only serves to justify their claim—made on both sides of the political spectrum—that the mainstream media is nothing more than a trade shop for establishment propagandists.
You can’t defeat the Enlightenment’s enemies unless you understand them. And that is the project I ask my readers to embark on as they read this book. Those of us who continue to adhere to the rationalist tradition must commit to its defense, as though the year were 1755 and not 2011. For if the Great Lisbon Earthquake can be said to have inaugurated the Age of Reason, 9/11 and its consequences may yet prove to mark its end.