All conspiracy theories are alike

Here's Robert Fisk in Saturday's Independent: "I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11." You know what's coming, right down to the defensive protest "I am not a conspiracy theorist".

Fisk is indeed a conspiracy theorist. He outed himself 18 months ago in a speech in Australia. It is moderately scandalous that in the meantime he has made no attempt to answer his own ill-informed questions by directing them to competent researchers in engineering and aviation. Even so absurd and discredited a figure as Michael Meacher denies that his speculations about 9/11 make him a conspiracy theorist and claims "I'm only raising questions". Yet Fisk and Meacher "raise questions" to which definitive and comprehensive answers are wholly accessible and in the public domain. The alternative explanation is that these answers themselves are part of an attempt to deceive the public and divert attention from the real culprits. That type of explanation about agency has a common and useful name. It is "conspiracy theory".

There are two conspiracy theories, and two only, where I make a serious attempt to follow the outlandish claims made on their behalf, and on which I have a fairly extensive library of the crank literature. (I leave aside here Noam Chomsky, whom I read and who I maintain is a conspiracy theorist and a crank, but who is a slightly exceptional case nonetheless.) One is Holocaust denial, and the other is the speculation that the works of Shakespeare were written by someone other than the actor from Stratford. Ostensibly these theories have nothing in common bar the fact of being wrong. The first is a form of racism and is advanced by fraud. The second is an eccentric Edwardian parlour game for the literary dilettante, some of whose proponents have achieved fame in fields other than Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. (Sigmund Freud was a convinced believer that the true author of Shakespeare was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. More recent advocates of the same view were Enoch Powell and Paul Nitze. It isn't relevant to the truth or otherwise of their claims, but I'm encouraged that so absurd a notion was put forward by men whose legitimate claim on our respect is so limited in the fields for which they were publicly known, never mind any other.)

Yet there are essential common characteristics. All conspiracy theories are alike in positing redundant explanations where straightforward ones will do, and in maintaining that known historical sources must be lies. (This point is well made in a fine book about the supposed authorship controversy called The Case for Shakespeare, by Scott McCrea, 2005. I have taken the title of this post from McCrea's final chapter, pp. 215-23.) The late Samuel Schoenbaum wrote a great historical study of the changing shape of Shakespearean biography, Shakespeare's Lives (2nd edition, 1991), in which he devoted a blackly comic section to the theorists of alternative authorship (the principal names that have been put forward are Francis Bacon, the 17th Earl of Oxford, the 6th Earl of Derby and the playwright Christopher Marlowe). He concluded (pp. 450-1):

Away from the academy, whether in the lounge bar of a cruise ship or in the shadow of the Moorish wall in Gibraltar or on the Intourist bus on the road to Sevastapol, the professor of English (once his identity has been guessed by fellow-holidaymakers) will be asked, as certainly as day follows night, 'Did Shakespeare really write those plays?' He will do well to nod assent and avoid explanation, for nothing he says will erase suspicions fostered for over a century by amateurs who have yielded to the dark power of the anti-Stratfordian obsession. One thought perhaps offers a crumb of redeeming comfort: the energy absorbed by the mania might otherwise have gone into politics.

Professor Schoenbaum was perhaps more right even than he realised. Once you dispense with the normal canons of evidence - not authority, but evidence - then you are prey to the irrational. Applied to politics, irrationalism and obscurantism have caused and still threaten horrors. Yes, conspiracies do happen in politics, and governments in the UK, US and Israel have perpetrated them. But - to take the obvious examples - the Suez invasion, the Watergate cover-up, the Iran-Contra scandal and the Lavon affair were ludicrous schemes that quickly unravelled and inflicted immense damage on the governments responsible. Democratic governments do not have the powers of persusasion, let alone omniscience and cunning, imagined by theorists of overarching conspiracy.

Commentators on public affairs who mistake personal incredulity for a decisive challenge to science or history or literary scholarship commit a recognisable offence against the pursuit of truth. George Monbiot argued a few months ago that the 9/11 conspiracy cult had turned some opponents of the Bush administration into gibbering idiots. He is not refuted by the case of Robert Fisk.