Tethered Swimming

Jack Kennedy was assassinated in on 22 November, 1963.  The crime was solved shortly thereafter when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested.  Despite that, intelligent and serious people have, at various times, tried to pin his crime on everyone from the Russians to the mob to Lyndon Johnson and the Loch Ness Monster.  Theories like those bring a sense of dramatic proportion to something as gargantuan as the assassination of the world’s most powerful man.  The reality, that it was perpetrated by a man no one had ever heard of and about whom almost no one cared, is far too mundane to be satisfying.  A big event like that demands a big explanation, and some people are inherently suspect of the small one, however much the facts indicate that it is correct.

The happenstance of history is one of the underlying themes of David Aaronovitch’s marvelous new book about conspiracy theories, “Voodoo Histories”.  Shot through with dry British humor, “Voodoo Histories” trades in the kind of cool, witty derision that is the surest way to hold up lunatic ideas for the ridicule they so richly deserve.  In discussing the Kennedy Assassination, Aaronovitch not only smacks aside theories of varying craziness and easily falsifies many of the “facts” upon which they rest, he also brings a measure of understanding (if not compassion) as to why otherwise reasonable people succumb to them.

Aaronovitch points out that while it’s true that America has a long tradition of assassinating Presidents (four out of forty-four have died from gunfire, a 9% fatality rate not counting natural causes), America also has a long tradition of failing to assassinate Presidents that gets considerably less attention.  Gerald Ford and both Roosevelts were shot at.  Andrew Jackson survived office only because two pistols misfired.  Ronald Reagan came within an inch of being killed just two months into his first term.

But Reagan survived, and his near assassination is little more than a Jeopardy question.  There are no books ridiculing the idea that some lone nut could bring down a president because he thought Jodie Foster would be smitten.  There are no biographies of John Hinckley positing that he was a Soviet agent or some kind of brainwashed stooge, not because such books would be impossible to construct, but because there is no demand for them.  The reason that demand doesn’t exist is one of pure chance, the bullet that struck Reagan narrowly missed his heart.  A centimeter or two this way or that, and we’d have a second conspiracy on our hands.  Instead, the Wikipedia page for John Hinckley is just 2,430 words, Lee Harvey Oswald rates 12,499.

“Voodoo Histories” revels in those kind of simple counter arguments.  If Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe were murdered, the conspiracies behind them must have had very peculiar methods in mind.  What sense does it make for an enormous international conspiracy, paying off dozens if not hundreds of people, to rely on its victim neglecting to put on her seatbelt?   What’s more likely, that shadowy forces would conspire to murder one of the most famous women in the world, or that an actress with a known drug problem overdosed?

Not that Aaronovitch limits himself to celebrity deaths.  Indeed, the goofy theories that grew up around Jack, Marilyn, and Diana are all dealt with in a single chapter.  He ranges over things as disparate as the ham handedly forged “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, the still extant idea that Franklin Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor in advance, and the entertainingly batty notions that form the background to “The Da Vinci Code”.  The chapter about Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel, titled “Hold Blood, Holy Grail, Holy Shit” is considerably more amusing than either the novel or the dreary movie they made out of it.

The book does have two small, and slightly related, problems.  At the end of the introduction, Aaronovitch writes:

Part of my motivation for writing this book was the lighthearted aim of providing a useful resource to the millions of men and women who have found themselves on the wrong side of a bar or dinner-party conversation that beings, “I’ll tell you the real reason . . .” and have sat there, knowing it was all likely to be nonsense but rarely having the necessary arguments to hand.

[…]

I also wanted to understand just why it was that the counterintuitive, the unlikely, and the implausible would so often have a better purchase on our imagination and beliefs than the real.  In other words, I wanted to understand the psychology of the conspiracy theory.

Aaronovitch succeeds wildly at the first part.  I’ve never paid much attention to the 9/11 Truthers, but should I ever get into a conversation with one of them, “Voodoo Histories” has armed me to the teeth with funny and effective counterarguments.  But on the second part, on “the psychology of the conspiracy theory”, he falls a bit short.

He frequently points out how conspiracy theories tend to be reflections of the fashionable hysterias of the time.  But what he can’t quite distinguish is the knife edge difference between believing that British scientist David Kelly was murdered (not true), and the fact that, thanks to things like the Downing Street Memo, we now know that the American and British governments really did go to war under false pretenses.  The question of distinguishing the psychology of healthy skepticism from the psychology of batshit crazy is hardly raised.  Aaronovitch takes some stabs at differentiating between the two in his conclusion, but it’s pretty weak sauce.

The second, related problem is that while Aaronovitch is aware of the fashionable nature of conspiracy theories, he brushes over it when trying to make conspiracy theories seem more harmful or profound than they really are.  In discussing the serious nature of the 9/11 Truthers, Aaronovitch cites polls from 2003-2006 about heavy percentages of Germans, New Yorkers, and all Americans who believed that there had been some kind of cover-up relating to the terrorist attacks.  That’s all well and good, but those polls were taken during the height of anti-Iraq War sentiment and/or the false belief that Bush had stolen then 2004 election.  Susceptibility to those beliefs doubtlessly took big hits after the 2006 and 2008 elections went against the villains of those conspiracy theories.  Citing polls about the widespread nature of 9/11 Truther arguments from before those elections is a little misleading.

Those two flaws are the result of Aaronovitch not fully exploring what is, perhaps, the best explanation for his question about the psychology of conspiracies.  His concluding chapter is a rundown of all the reasons conspiracy theories flourish, and amidst talk of satisfying narratives and fashionable fears, he points out that conspiracy can often be read as “history for losers”.  When your side has been beaten, it’s easier to believe you were the victim of an unjust plot rather than the vagaries of chance or simple inadequacy.

But he calls that explanation inadequate, and ends the book by speculating that conspiracy theories allow people to feel important.  After all, if you believe that you’re in on a big secret that’s being kept from everyone, you’ve made yourself a member of a kind of elite.  But there is more than enough room for both explanations under the heading “history for losers”.  Whether you’re upset at what politicians you voted against are doing, or whether you’re unhappy about some tragedy, you’ve lost.  Conspiracy theories allow people to make sense of an often unhappy world without acknowledging their own powerlessness or insignificance.

Those are small complaints, and they don’t affect the main fun of the book, which is demolishing nutty theories with verve and panache.  “Voodoo Histories” is thoroughly researched, well written, and very funny.  Whether or not it will dissuade anyone from buying into the next round of paranoid conspiracy theories is anyone’s guess, but it’s a hell of a good read.