A Culture of Conspiracy. Michael Barkun
rather than ancient gods or demigods.” These stories are almost always false, “but are always told as true.” As Patricia A. Turner points out, urban legends—those that deal with distinctively modern themes—are closely related to rumors. Both purport to be true, or at least to be believable, and both circulate rapidly, though legends are likely to be more long-lived and complex. Beliefs that originally circulate as rumors may subsequently appear as elements of legends.13
There is, however, one complication in dealing with conspiracy beliefs as urban legends: the modes of transmission. The bias of folklorists is toward oral transmission as the primary medium. Legend texts are often secured in tape-recorded examples with accompanying data about the teller and how he or she learned the story. Conspiracy ideas clearly circulate widely in oral form, as evidenced by Turner’s important study of conspiracy legends in the African-American community; but the media-rich, technologically sophisticated society that exists in both the United States and other developed countries opens up new avenues for transmission.14
Brunvand, writing in 1981, conceded that “today’s legends are also disseminated by the mass media.” During the succeeding two decades, the Internet emerged as a major new medium. Wojcik notes: “Folklore is not only transmitted through printed sources and electronic media but now through the Internet and e-mail, as members of global subcultures who never interact face-to-face exchange and create folklore in cyberspace. Despite predictions to the contrary, technology and industrialization have not necessarily destroyed traditions but have altered the ways that traditions are expressed and communicated, and have helped to generate and perpetuate new types of folklore.” Such technological innovations are particularly important for the subcultures in which conspiracy theories have taken root.15
Conspiracy ideas are particularly prevalent in what I call the realm of stigmatized knowledge—knowledge claims that have not been validated by mainstream institutions. Subcultures dominated by belief in some form of stigmatized knowledge—such as those defined by commitments to political radicalism, occult and esoteric teaching, or UFOs and alien beings—are therefore most likely to nurture conspiracy ideas. These are also precisely the kinds of subcultures most attracted to the Internet.
The Internet is attractive because of its large potential audience, the low investment required for its use, and—most important—the absence of gatekeepers who might censor the content of messages. To some extent, of course, the subcultures referred to above have access to conventional mass media. They publish books and periodicals, though these are often restricted to distribution by mail or only the largest book stores, which may also screen out overtly anti-Semitic or racist material. Access to radio and television appears limited to shortwave stations and community-access cable channels. There have been, to be sure, exceptions, such as the newspaper The Spotlight, once the right-wing publication with the largest circulation in the United States, and which ceased publication in 2001; and the Australian New Age–conspiracy magazine Nexus. For the most part, however, stigmatized knowledge subcultures are at a distinct disadvantage as far as mass media are concerned, for the latter are precisely the mainstream institutions best positioned to confer stigma on certain knowledge claims, including those that are overtly conspiracist. This contempt is reciprocated by conspiracists themselves. Not only do conspiracists distrust the mass media as distorters and concealers of the truth; they also regard them as part of the conspiracy, a tool controlled by the plotters in order to mislead the public.
Consequently, those whose worldview is built around conspiracy ideas find in the Internet virtual communities of the like-minded. Copyright and other issues of intellectual property appear to count for little among many who engage in Internet posting. Multiple versions of the same document are likely to appear in various places, some identical, some slightly different, some with annotations by the poster. The result is not unlike the variant accounts of urban legends that circulate by word of mouth. Unlike oral versions, however, all of the variants may in principle be simultaneously accessible to the Web surfer, who may then be tempted to judge the credibility of a story by the number of times it is told. Here repetition substitutes for direct evidence as a way of determining veracity. The dynamics of rumor provides a helpful analogy, for it is in the nature of rumors to appear precisely in those situations in which normal means of determining reliability are not available, so the potential consumer of rumors may end up determining truth on the basis of how widely a particular one circulates. This gives to rumors—and, by extension, to Internet conspiracy accounts—a self-validating quality. The more a story is told, and the more often people hear it, the more likely they are to believe it.
In a somewhat different way, search engines’ placement of a page in a list of responses can reflect searchers’ preferences. Google, for example, ranks pages produced in response to a search on the basis of both the page’s content and the frequency with which it is linked to other pages. The more frequently other pages include it as a link, and the more prominent the pages that include the link, the higher the placement.
This communications milieu, in which self-validating rumors and urban legends can spread with unrivaled rapidity, has had particularly important implications for the spread of millenarian and apocalyptic beliefs. The result has been millennialism that is not only pervasive but increasingly varied in form. While many of the older religious and ideological forms remain—as, for example, among fundamentalist Protestants—these have been joined by many other varieties that resist easy classification. These are the examples I call improvisational millennialism, and it is to improvisational millennialism that conspiracists have most often been drawn.
2
Millennialism, Conspiracy, and Stigmatized Knowledge
It has become a commonplace that America is in the throes of an unrivaled period of millenarian activity. In 1978, William McLoughlin spoke of a religious resurgence that constituted a new “great awakening.” He expected it to end by about 1990. Instead, it intensified, driven in part by the proximity of the year 2000. Even the heyday of the Millerites, Shakers, Mormons, and Oneida Perfectionists in the 1830s and 1840s cannot compare to it, and there is no sign that millenarian anticipation will diminish anytime soon. The uneventful passage from 1999 to 2000 has had little effect on many millenarians, who merely set the date of the apocalypse ever further in the future.1
What makes the present period an era of particular interest to observers of millennialism, however, is less the sheer volume of activity than its bewildering diversity. Attempts to map contemporary millennial ferment have become increasingly difficult and frustrating. The reason, I suggest, is not simply that there is so much “out there,” but that old categories no longer fit well. Much of the proliferating millennialism is neither of the old religious variety, whose roots lie in the theological controversies of earlier centuries, nor a product of secular ideological battles that dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While neither of the latter strains of millennialism has vanished, they share the stage with a rapidly growing third variety, which is the subject of this chapter.
RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR MILLENNIALISM
The Christian idea of the millennium is rooted conceptually and etymologically in the New Testament passage that prophesies that at the end of time, the saved will “reign with Christ a thousand years” until the Last Judgment (Rev. 20:4). By extension, millennialism—belief in this end-time—came to mean any religious vision that saw history reaching its climax in a collective, this-worldly redemption. In this redeemed state, those who had once suffered would receive justice, and the poor and powerless would gain what had formerly been withheld from them. Although religious institutions often had a decidedly ambivalent attitude about this implied rejection of the status quo, the origin of millennialism in a canonical text insured its survival, and resilient strains of millenarian popular religion continue in Christianity into the present. They can be seen especially in the many contemporary religious fundamentalisms, most of which contain millenarian elements.
By the late eighteenth century, however, a second form of millennialism was developing, unconnected to religious concepts. This consisted of secular visions of a perfect future—ideas propelled by faith in transcendent but not conventionally religious forces. These forces were