The study of institutions and social movements is certainly not advanced
by the Manichaean views of « light versus darkness ». Such
social theories (if, indeed, one can call them theories) serve to hide
more than they explain.
Several years ago, I was invited to the Collège de France, to
discuss « the American left » with Pierre Bourdieu, (whose
untimely death last January represents a major loss for the social sciences,
and specifically for our
research center in Grenoble). It was our colleague from Lyon, Keith
Dixon, who introduced me to Professor Bourdieu, as « an unusual product
of the United States, i.e. a left-wing teacher. » I remember being
a bit uncomfortable with this label, but I accepted it as a European approximation
for the American term, radical.
For me, the label "left-wing" implied ideology –which is always a "two-edged sword" : it can cut in the direction of opening up new vistas, by formulating original questions for research ; but it can also have the opposite effect, and simply serve to replace one orthodoxy with another, thus closing off avenues of research, so that one is left with the dismal choice of supporting « the lesser evil ». This is hardly a fruitful research strategy, and I was sure that Pierre Bourdieu understood that.
I saw myself as one among literally millions of « American radicals
» –not in the vulgar meaning of the word, as extremist, but in the
true etymological sense of the word, as root (in Greek). In my academic
pursuits, I had become interested in discovering root causes for phenomena.
This, to me, was the essence of radicalism –not ideology, but science;
not propaganda,
but theory with explanatory power.
Pierre Bourdieu represented the best in contempory social science. His
was a commitment to uncovering true relationships in society, describing
social patterns that no one else seemed to notice or deem important. He
was much more than a product of Cartesian logic; more like Isaac Newton,
he was out to make new discoveries and to explain what he had found, if
necessary, using new terminology.
In his discussion of Doxa, Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy (1977), Bourdieu observed
that the inculcation of « doxa » -- the sense that the limits
of one’s subjective desires are more or less isomorphic with the limits
of objective possibility-- offers us a study of the formation of
subjectivity itself, and not simply a particular form of subjectivity.
Working in tandem with Michel
Foucault, Bourdieu examined one side of institutions –how they inscribed
values (their « logic and script ») into the everyday lives
of people—while Foucault, on the other hand, studied institutions by uncovering
the operation
of power in institutional discourses and disciplinary practices. If
Foucault’s study of institutions focused on the origins of power, Bourdieu
tried to chart how the social division of labor is « naturalized
», by looking at the practice of how the social order seeps into
the heads, the bodies, the selves, how it is taken so utterly for granted
that "it goes without
saying because it comes without saying."
This is not ideology; it is science....
The Grenoble Research Center for the Study of American Institutions
and Social Movements recently solicited commentary on "conspiracy theories"
from our research associate, Michael Albert in Boston. The piece below
is an excerpt form his recent commentary on the production of social
science theories and methods, which we believe will serve to altert young
researchers to the pitfalls of hasty theory building and of selective methods
of accumulating evidence. The 17th Century English philosopher, Francis
Bacon warned of conceptual distortions due to self-deceptions and environmental
influences in his magnum opus, Novum Organum (1620). Our two colleagues
below certainly do not endorse Bacon’s extreme form of empiricism –gathering
facts without the aid of any theory, but as we shall see, they hold that
the theoretical scafolding which facilitates the construction of understanding
based on facts determines the whole structure and the fuction of our understanding.
Students and scholars are invited to respond to this introduction to usefulness
of theory in scientific research.
____________________
Conspiracies or Institutions
by Stephen R. Shalom and Michael Albert
(1) What Is a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory? The most common definition
of a conspiracy is two or more people
secretly planning a criminal act. Examples of related conspiracy
theories include belief that JFK was assassinated by rogue CIA elements
attempting to ward off unwanted liberalism; that negotiations between the
United States government and Iran to release American hostages in Carter's
last year failed because Reagan aides secretly struck a deal with Iran
to hold the hostages until after the election; or, more recently, that
9/11 was a plot by a rogue CIA/Mossad team cunningly engineering rightward
alignments in the United States or Israel. A broader definition of conspiracy
includes legal acts that are, however, sufficiently misleading. For example,
even if the U.S. president and his top aides could legally perpetrate the
secret 9-11
attacks, doing so would still be a conspiracy. Legal assassination
disguised as an accident or secretly pinned on someone else might also
fit the second, broader definition because it's not just secret, but actively
deceptive. But no definition of conspiracy, however broad, includes everything
secret. People often secretly get together and use their power to achieve
some
result. But if this is always a conspiracy, then virtually everything
that happens is a conspiracy. When General Motors executives get together
and decide what kind of Chevy to produce next year, it would be a conspiracy.
Every business decision, every editorial decision, even a university academic
department getting together in a closed session to make a personnel decision,
would be a conspiracy. Conspiracy would be ubiquitous and therefore vacuous.
Even in the broadest definition, there must be some significant deviation
from normal operations.Thus, no one would call all the secret acts of national
security agencies conspiracies. Spying is sufficiently normal and expected
that no one calls it a conspiracy. Most business decisions and government
policy decisions are made in secret but are only deemed a conspiracy when
they transcend "normal" behavior, either by working against the norms of
surrounding institutions, in the narrow definition, or by manipulating
and actively imposing wrong perceptions, in the broader definition. No
matter what definition we use, we don't talk of a conspiracy to win an
election when the suspect activity includes only candidates and their handlers
working privately to develop effective
strategy. Seeking to win an election, even secretly, is operating "normally"
within the bounds of surrounding institutions. We do talk about a conspiracy,
however, if the electoral behavior includes stealing the other party's
plans, spiking their Whiskey Sours with LSD, having a campaign worker falsely
claim he or she was beaten up by the opposing camp, or other exceptional
activity transcending electoral institutions or actively misleading and
manipulating events.
(2) What characterizes conspiracy theorizing? Any particular conspiracy
theory may or may not be true. Auto, oil, and tire companies did conspire
to undermine the trolley system in California in the 1930s. Israeli agents
did secretly attack Western
targets in Egypt in 1954 in an attempt to prevent a British withdrawal.
The CIA did fake a shipload of North Vietnamese arms to justify U.S. aggression.
Conspiracies do happen. But a conspiracy theorist is not someone who simply
accepts the truth of
some specific conspiracies. Rather, a conspiracy theorist is someone
with a certain general methodological approach and set of priorities. Conspiracy
theorists begin their quest for understanding events by looking for groups
acting secretly, either outside usual institutional norms in a rogue fashion,
or, at the very least to manipulate public impressions, to cast guilt on
other parties, and so on. Conspiracy theorists focus on conspirators' methods,
motives, and effects. Personalities, personal timetables, secret meetings,
and conspirators' joint actions claim priority attention. Institutional
relations largely drop from view.Thus, conspiracy theorists ask "Did Clinton
launch missiles at Sudan in 1998 in order to divert attention from his
Monica troubles?" rather than
seeking a basic understanding of U.S. foreign policy. They ask "Did
a group within the CIA kill Kennedy to prevent his ithdrawing from Vietnam?"
rather than examining the shared Vietnam assumptions and policies of Kennedy
and Lyndon Johnson, as an examination of institutions would prioritize.
Because personalities matter so much in conspiracy theories, attention
focuses largely on what one individual said to another, whether a phone
conversation implicates so and so, the credibility of this or that witness,
and who knew what when. Suspicion abounds. For conspiracy theorists, no
sooner does something happen, then a conspiracy is suspected. Is there
a new disease called AIDS? A biological warfare lab must have created it.
Did Clinton aide Vincent Foster appear to commit suicide? Someone must
have killed him. Did flights TWA 800 and Airbus 587 crash? There must have
been a missile involved.
(3) What characterizes institutional theorizing? An institutional theory
emphasizes roles, incentives, and other institutional dynamics that promote
or compel important events and, most important, have similar effects over
and over. Institutional heorists of course notice individual actions, but
don't elevate them to prime causes. The point of an institutional explanation
is to move beyond proximate personal factors to more basic institutional
factors. The aim is to learn something about society or history, as compared
to learning about particular culpable actors. If the particular people
hadn't been there to do the events, most likely someone else would have.To
the institutional theorist, the behavior of rogue elements is far less
important than the ways in which defining political, social, and economic
forms lead to particular behaviors. An institutional theory of the U.S.
missile attacks on Sudan or the Iran Contra affair focuses on how and why
these activities arose due to the basic institutions of U.S.
society, not on the personal quirks of a womanizing Clinton or a loose
cannon Ollie North.
(4) Can thinking about conspiracies ever be institutional? Can thinking about institutions ever highlight conspiracies?There are, of course, complicating borderline cases. A person investigating personal proximate causes of some occurrence in what appears to be a conspiracy-minded way could do so to make a larger institutional case. Thus, a person trying to discover a CIA role in 9/11 could be trying to verify a larger (incorrect) institutional theory--that the U.S. government is run by the CIA. Or, more subtly, a person might be trying to demonstrate that some set of U.S. institutions propels actors toward conspiring. Someone studying Enron, for example, may be doing so not as a conspiracy theorist concerned with condemning the proximate activities of the board of Enron, but rather to make a case (correctly) that U.S. market relations instill motivations and provide contexts that make conspiracies against the public by major corporate decision makers highly probable. The difference is on the one hand, trying to understand some broad claim about society by understanding its institutional dynamics, and, on the other hand, trying to understand some singular event by understanding the activities of the direct actors in it.
(5) What are the relative features and attributes of conspiracy theorizing
and institutional theorizing? For social activists, it makes sense to develop
institutional theories because they uncover lasting features with ubiquitous
recurring implications. On the other hand, if an event arises from a unique
conjuncture of particular people who seize extra-systemic opportunities,
then even though institutions undoubtedly play some role, that role may
not be generalizable and an institutional theory may be mpossible to construct.
For a district attorney, it is sufficient to identify individual wrong
doers, but for those seeking social change it is important to go beyond
particular participants. Unique events, of course, could be hugely consequential--as
in the attempt to assassinate Hitler--but exploring the details of such
events rarely if ever facilitates understanding society or history.
Institutional theories claim that the normal operations of some institutions
generate behaviors and motivations leading to the vents in question. For
example, an institutional theorist is much more likely to explain U.S.
foreign policy in terms of corporate and geopolitical interests, than in
terms of the operations of shadowy characters, and when they look at corporate
interests they are much more likely to focus on corporate interests generally
rather than the interests of one rogue corporation that tries to hijack
U.S. foreign policy to its narrow interests at the expense of the corporate
system more broadly. When institutional theories address personalities,
personal interests, personal timetables, and meetings, it will be to enumerate
facts that need explanation, not because these are seen as explanations
themselves. With institutional theories, organizational, motivational,
and behavioral implications of institutions are the heart of the matter.
Particular people, while not becoming mere ciphers, are not regarded as
primary causal agents. With conspiracy theories, regardless of the type
of conspiracy identified, the balance of attention is inverted. The specific
deceptive actions of rogue or at least greatly duplicitous and deceptive
actors are highlighted.
Consider the media. A person seeking conspiracies will listen to evidence
of media subservience to power and see a cabal of ad guys, perhaps corporate,
perhaps religious, perhaps federal, censoring the media from doing its
proper job. The conspiracy theorist will want to know about that cabal
and how people succumb to its will, when they meet, etc. Discussion will
highlight he actions of some coterie of editors, writers, newscasters,
particular owners, or even a lobby of actors. In contrast, an nstitutional
theorist will highlight the media's internal bureaucracy, socialization
processes, profit seeking motivations in a market system, and funding mechanisms
(selling audience to advertisers), as well as the interests of media owners
directly and more broadly due to their class position. The institutional
theorist will want to learn more about the media's structural features
and how they work, and about the guiding interests and what they imply.
The conspiracy approach will tend to lead people to believe that ither
they should educate the media malefactors to change their motives, or they
should get rid of the media malefactors and endorse new editors, writers,
newscasters, or owners who will behave differently. The institutional approach
will note the possible gains from changes in media personnel, but will
explain how limited these changes will be. It will incline people toward
a campaign of constant pressure to offset the constant intrinsic institutional
pressures for obfuscation, or toward the creation of new media free from
the institutional pressures of the mainstream.
(6) Why and how does much (but not all) conspiracy theorizing create
a tendency for people to depart from rational analysis?
In a famous study back in the 1950s, researcher Leon Festinger wanted
to find out how a religious sect would react when its rophecy that the
Earth was going to come to an end failed to come true on the predicted
date. When the fateful date arrived and nothing happened, did the believers
cease to be believers? No. Instead they revised their beliefs to explain
away the failed prediction by asserting that God had given humankind one
more chance, and they maintained the rest of their belief system intact.
One is entitled, of course, to hold whatever beliefs one wants, but beliefs
like those of the religious sect are not rational r
scientific, for it is a basic requirement of scientific beliefs that
they be in principle falsifiable, that there be the possibility of disconfirming
evidence. If a scientific hypothesis predicts X, and instead not-X occurs
(and recurs repeatedly with no ff-setting
explanations for the discrepancy), then the hypothesis ought to be
doubted. If the hypothesis flouts prior knowledge as well as urrent evidence,
and is accepted nonetheless, then the behavior is often no longer scientific,
nor even rational.
Conspiracy theorists tend to develop a similar attitude to Festinger's
religious zealots toward counter-evidence. Where God's ysterious ways salvage
the religious believers' failed predictions, added layers of conspiracy
salvage disconfirmed conspiracy theories. To the conspiratorial mind, if
evidence emerges contradicting a claimed conspiracy, it was planted. If
further evidence shows that the first evidence was authentic, then that
further evidence too was planted. One website, for example, claims that
the Palestinian suicide bombers are actually hoaxes by Israeli intelligence
organizations wherein bombs are set off by Israeli agents and a Palestinian
body is later added to the debris. But what about the family members of
the suicide bomber who speak to the media? This seems like pretty strong
counter-evidence for the conspiracy claim. But actually it poses no problem
or the conspiracy theorist. He or she promptly claims that the family member
interviews are all also staged by the Israelis. (See
http://www.publicaction.com/911/toothfairies.html ) But don't
we all ignore evidence that goes counter to long held beliefs?
And aren't we often right to do so? When magician David Copperfield
apparently saws a woman in half, most of us don't uddenly give up our belief
in physics and biology. We instead stand by past evidence and suspect a
hoax and even if we can't figure out how Copperfield did it, we're not
likely to walk into a chain saw anytime soon. We sensibly maintain our
beliefs because we have an immense body of prior evidence supporting the
prevailing view, and only the one televised magical counter example.Conspiracy
theorists rarely have a vast amount of evidence confirming the conspiracy
and only a little detail or two that doesn't quite fit and can reasonably
be set aside. Quite the contrary, conspiracy theories are often strung
together from the thinnest reeds of evidence and the counter-evidence is
often an irrefutable negation of the very piece of evidence that the conspiracy
theorist previously claimed was decisive. Obviously the World Trade Center
attack was a U.S. government hoax,
declared the conspiracy fans within days of 9/11, because most of the
hijackers have turned up to be still alive. This claim took advantage of
early confusions, but became completely discredited a short time later.
The conspiracy theorists didn't miss a beat. The loss of their crucial
evidence weakened their belief in a conspiracy not one iota. Likewise,
why is the government not letting people listen to the voice recorders
for Flight 93, the plane that went down in Pennsylvania, they intoned.
To conspiracy heorists, this hid the fact that the official story of the
hijacking was bogus. But when the government belatedly allowed the
families of the victims to hear the tapes, few if any conspiracy theorists
retracted their claims.
(7) Is a conspiracy theory regarding 9-11 credible?There is no single
conspiracy theory regarding 9/11, there are dozens of
them, often mutually contradictory. Thus, it's not just institutional
theorists who reject most conspiracy theories, but most conspiracy theorists
reject most of them as well, except, of course, the one they happen to
champion.
Here are some of the leading 9/11 conspiracy theories:
a. The World Trade Center was destroyed not by planes
but by explosives.
b. The planes were not hijacked at all, but commandeered
by remote control by Norad.
c. The planes were hijacked, but the hijackers were
double crossed and the planes were taken over by remote control by Norad.
d. The hijackers were actually working for the U.S.
government.
e. U.S. intelligence knew about the plot, but intentionally
did nothing so as to cause massive deaths that would mobilize public support
for a war on terrorism that would benefit the government.
f. The plot was actually organized by the Mossad.
g. The Mossad knew about the plot, but did nothing,
hoping that the massive deaths would mobilize public support for Israel's
war on the Palestinians.
h. Tower 2 of the World Trade Center was hit by
a missile.
i. A joint plot by rogue elements in the CIA, the
Mossad, other U.S. government agencies, Mobil (being investigated in a
criminal case, all of the evidence against whom was in FBI offices in the
World Trade Center), and Russian organized crime (which profited especially
from Afghan heroin with which the Taliban was interfering). We should be
forthright here. None of the above strike us as remotely interesting much
less plausible. Neither of us would ordinarily have ever spent even five
minutes exploring the above claims, because they all fly in the face of
our broad understanding of how the world works. But, because such theories
seem to have some popularity among progressives, we are taking the time
in this essay to briefly address them. However, before considering some
of these specific theories, we need to be clear what isn't a conspiracy.And
here are the rest of the questions in the essay, detailed answers being
available online...
(8) Doesn't the existence of lies and cover up point to a conspiracy? And aren't lies and cover ups profoundly politically mportant? ...
(9) Do all the ignored warnings about 9/11 prove conspiracy or just incompetence? ...
(10) Why are conspiracy theories regarding 9/11 not credible? ...
(11) What about bin Laden's former ties to the U.S.? Don't they reveal the secret roots of conspiracy? ...
(12) What about looking at who benefits to see who must be responsible - doesn't that imply conspiracy?
(13) But surely the U.S. government is capable of committing atrocities, isn't it? Doesn't that make plausible a conspiracy? ...
(14) Why is conspiracy theorizing popular among critics of injustice?
(15) How do conspiracy theories lead to harmful political inclinations
and allegiances? ...
*********
For more discussion on Conspiracy Theory and Scientific Methods
of research, readers are invited to visit <http://www.zmag.org>.
___________
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