exu156
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Political theorist Michael Barkun believes that the allure of conspiracy theory can be summed up in three main points:
"The appeal of conspiracism is threefold. First, conspiracy theories claim to explain what others can't. They appear to make sense out of a world that is otherwise confusing. Second, they do so in an appealingly simple way, by dividing the world sharply between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. They trace all evil back to a single source, the conspirators and their agents. Finally, conspiracy theories are often presented as special, secret knowledge unknown or unappreciated by others. For conspiracists, the masses are a brainwashed herd, while the conspiracists in the know can congratulate themselves on penetrating the plotters' deceptions." [Source: Interview with Michael Barkun http://www.publiceye.org/antisemitism/nw_barkun.html ]
What is common with all conspiracy theories is that they tend to strengthen among fundamentalists (regardless of creed). This well illustrates the point that conspiracy theorists operate very much like a cult. Alarmist cults generate and feed off moral panics which give 'credibility' to their theories. Conspiracy theory is a modern day moral panic the likes of which we have seen numerous times in history. There are many examples of such moral panics, here are examples from just the 20th century:
Communism
Stalin's purges
Jewish conspiracy
Jazz music
Waltz dance
Comic books
Rock and Roll
Satanic Ritual Abuse
Dungeons and Dragons
Backward Masking
Heavy Metal music
A moral panic may be defined as "a state of panic induced in a large group of people, who feel that a societal norm or an aspect governing the safety of people is being seriously threatened by a mysterious or hidden outside force."
Moral panics, when sufficiently large to be able to organize into groups, take on cult-like characteristics which are fairly easy to identify.
If the panic takes on a truly large form then a very great danger emerges. History provides us with many examples but perhaps the clearest was the witch hunts which plagued Europe during the Renaissance.
Imagine a society whose landscape is aflame with bonfires that consume screaming, writhing human beings. Imagine a quarter of a million people being drowned, hanged, or chained in dungeons, tortured, stabbed, dismembered – literally hacked to death – in short, subjected to indescribable horrors, for crimes they did not commit.
Imagine the populace of an entire continent seized by the terror of diabolical deeds that we, in our more enlightened times, know could not have happened, accusing friends, neighbors, fellow community residents, of unspeakable crimes, subjecting their hapless victims to hideous pain to extract bogus confessions, and executing them in the most agonizing fashion possible. That time and place was Renaissance Europe, and the name we give to this madness is the witch craze.
The Renaissance witch craze is the classic and most dramatic instance of a moral panic. In its most pestilent form, the craze stretched from the early decades of the fifteenth century until about 1650, an unusually long time for a moral panic. During this period, a novel crime came into being: conspiring with Satan in a fiendish plot against God to engage in evil, demonological deeds. In continental Europe during this period, hundreds of thousands of accused witches, roughly 85 percent of them women, were executed.
The European witch craze raises some intriguing sociological questions, three of which stand out most prominently. The first is timing: Why did the witch craze begin in the fifteenth century? Why did it become widespread and especially poisonous between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries? And why did it end in the seventeenth century? Second, we have the issue of content: Why the sudden, increased attention to sorcery, witchcraft, black magic – in fact, all manner of consorting with the devil? How to explain the emergence of a religious ideology that implicates witches in wicked acts and the promulgation of world-view antithetical to true Christianity? Why did this ideology give rise to the widespread and murderous persecution of witches? And third is the target of the witch-hunts: Why were women singled out as its main victims?
I think that the vested interests of the Church at the time and the collapse of the authoritative framework of religion and the feudal social and political order address the issue of timing. The dissolution of the medieval cognitive map of reality, which brought about utopian expectations, skepticism, and the rise of scientific rationality, experimentation, and exploration, address the content issue. Changes in the economy, demography,and the family, especially with respect to changes in the role of women, explain the nature of the target of the craze. The answer to the target question is given in the spatial distribution of the witch-hunt in continental Europe during this era.
Changes in social boundaries offer an answer to our riddles. Medieval society crumbled during the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and historically novel social, political, economic, scientific, and religious institutions came into being. New and innovative arrangements in the economy, family, science, polity, and religion emerged.
These changes transformed the social order; with the shattering of tradition, custom, and limitations, new patterns of behavior – for instance, in art and science – appeared. As a result of these changes, religious and political authorities mounted a ferocious backlash that attempted to redraw societal boundaries and restore the status quo.
To understand the cultural foundation of this backlash, it is worth mentioning that most Europeans strongly believed in the reality of witchcraft, Satan, and demonology. Some of the greatest minds of the seventeenth century – including Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes – firmly believed in the reality of witchcraft. As Jeffrey Burton Russell put it, "Tens of thousands of [witchcraft] trials continued throughout Europe, generation after generation, while Leonardo painted, Palestrina composed, and Shakespeare wrote."
Are things any different now? Your thoughts?
"The appeal of conspiracism is threefold. First, conspiracy theories claim to explain what others can't. They appear to make sense out of a world that is otherwise confusing. Second, they do so in an appealingly simple way, by dividing the world sharply between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. They trace all evil back to a single source, the conspirators and their agents. Finally, conspiracy theories are often presented as special, secret knowledge unknown or unappreciated by others. For conspiracists, the masses are a brainwashed herd, while the conspiracists in the know can congratulate themselves on penetrating the plotters' deceptions." [Source: Interview with Michael Barkun http://www.publiceye.org/antisemitism/nw_barkun.html ]
What is common with all conspiracy theories is that they tend to strengthen among fundamentalists (regardless of creed). This well illustrates the point that conspiracy theorists operate very much like a cult. Alarmist cults generate and feed off moral panics which give 'credibility' to their theories. Conspiracy theory is a modern day moral panic the likes of which we have seen numerous times in history. There are many examples of such moral panics, here are examples from just the 20th century:
Communism
Stalin's purges
Jewish conspiracy
Jazz music
Waltz dance
Comic books
Rock and Roll
Satanic Ritual Abuse
Dungeons and Dragons
Backward Masking
Heavy Metal music
A moral panic may be defined as "a state of panic induced in a large group of people, who feel that a societal norm or an aspect governing the safety of people is being seriously threatened by a mysterious or hidden outside force."
Moral panics, when sufficiently large to be able to organize into groups, take on cult-like characteristics which are fairly easy to identify.
If the panic takes on a truly large form then a very great danger emerges. History provides us with many examples but perhaps the clearest was the witch hunts which plagued Europe during the Renaissance.
Imagine a society whose landscape is aflame with bonfires that consume screaming, writhing human beings. Imagine a quarter of a million people being drowned, hanged, or chained in dungeons, tortured, stabbed, dismembered – literally hacked to death – in short, subjected to indescribable horrors, for crimes they did not commit.
Imagine the populace of an entire continent seized by the terror of diabolical deeds that we, in our more enlightened times, know could not have happened, accusing friends, neighbors, fellow community residents, of unspeakable crimes, subjecting their hapless victims to hideous pain to extract bogus confessions, and executing them in the most agonizing fashion possible. That time and place was Renaissance Europe, and the name we give to this madness is the witch craze.
The Renaissance witch craze is the classic and most dramatic instance of a moral panic. In its most pestilent form, the craze stretched from the early decades of the fifteenth century until about 1650, an unusually long time for a moral panic. During this period, a novel crime came into being: conspiring with Satan in a fiendish plot against God to engage in evil, demonological deeds. In continental Europe during this period, hundreds of thousands of accused witches, roughly 85 percent of them women, were executed.
The European witch craze raises some intriguing sociological questions, three of which stand out most prominently. The first is timing: Why did the witch craze begin in the fifteenth century? Why did it become widespread and especially poisonous between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries? And why did it end in the seventeenth century? Second, we have the issue of content: Why the sudden, increased attention to sorcery, witchcraft, black magic – in fact, all manner of consorting with the devil? How to explain the emergence of a religious ideology that implicates witches in wicked acts and the promulgation of world-view antithetical to true Christianity? Why did this ideology give rise to the widespread and murderous persecution of witches? And third is the target of the witch-hunts: Why were women singled out as its main victims?
I think that the vested interests of the Church at the time and the collapse of the authoritative framework of religion and the feudal social and political order address the issue of timing. The dissolution of the medieval cognitive map of reality, which brought about utopian expectations, skepticism, and the rise of scientific rationality, experimentation, and exploration, address the content issue. Changes in the economy, demography,and the family, especially with respect to changes in the role of women, explain the nature of the target of the craze. The answer to the target question is given in the spatial distribution of the witch-hunt in continental Europe during this era.
Changes in social boundaries offer an answer to our riddles. Medieval society crumbled during the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and historically novel social, political, economic, scientific, and religious institutions came into being. New and innovative arrangements in the economy, family, science, polity, and religion emerged.
These changes transformed the social order; with the shattering of tradition, custom, and limitations, new patterns of behavior – for instance, in art and science – appeared. As a result of these changes, religious and political authorities mounted a ferocious backlash that attempted to redraw societal boundaries and restore the status quo.
To understand the cultural foundation of this backlash, it is worth mentioning that most Europeans strongly believed in the reality of witchcraft, Satan, and demonology. Some of the greatest minds of the seventeenth century – including Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes – firmly believed in the reality of witchcraft. As Jeffrey Burton Russell put it, "Tens of thousands of [witchcraft] trials continued throughout Europe, generation after generation, while Leonardo painted, Palestrina composed, and Shakespeare wrote."
Are things any different now? Your thoughts?