The Age of
Coronavirus is also a Time of Conspiracy. Maybe the Chinese government made up
the deadly disease in a lab, and then covered up just how many people it
killed. Perhaps it’s those 5G mobile phone masts putting so many people in hospital, and killing so many others.
There’s plenty of
WhatsApp messages hammering those messages home if you want to read them (and
you can get hold of them). There are even celebrity videos backing these
apparently outlandish ideas if you want to watch them. Rather than tutting and
sighing, so often the reaction of the expert or the practitioner, it’s perhaps
best to ask: why is this happening?
First things
first: most people don’t believe the conspiracies. It’s a minority taste.
According to polling by Opinium, ‘only’ seven per cent of voters think that new
mobile phone technology caused the coronavirus outbreak. That’s fewer than
think Elvis lived on after his apparent death in 1977. Second and even more
important, that constrained conspiracism has policy implications. Most Britons
aren’t going around blaming China or 5G (above) – they’re following guidelines with
even more alacrity than the citizens of most other states, and for the most part
they trust their scientists and their government.
Even so, a
significant swathe of the population do believe lots of the stories they scroll
through on their screens. That seven per cent of adults adds up to maybe four
million people. Nearly a quarter of respondents have told YouGov that the novel
coronavirus either ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ came out of a lab. Some of them
have gone out and vandalised 5G technology. The Government obviously thinks it
can divert some of the blame onto China, or it wouldn’t brief newspapers that
China will face some sort of backlash when this is all over.
This is part of a pattern. The same short circuits are everywhere.
Trumpians and Eastern European authoritarians place the blame for the rule of
capital at the feet of one man: George Soros. Donald Trump’s closing political
broadcast during the 2016 campaign – his ‘Argument for America’ – blamed ‘the establishment’ and
‘global special interests’ for everything, a poisonous assertion played over footage of Soros and other public figures who happened, just happened, to be
Jewish.
Liberals blame Russia and Putin for Trump and Brexit. Agents of
the ‘Deep State’ draw the ire of the authoritarian Right and the populist Left.
Under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party protested again and again about BBC
‘bias’, a line they knew played well among their activists and distracted them
from Labour’s many sleights of hand over Brexit (they usually dropped those complaints once everything had gone quiet). Everything bad is laid at the door
of ‘them’: ‘the bankers’ and ‘the elites’, or perhaps ‘the immigrants’ or ‘the
foreigners’.
This is not, of course, an entirely new historical
conjuncture. Those radicals who opposed the British Empire’s South African War
at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often detected in its
prosecution the guiding hand of ‘the banks’, or diamond traders, or the
fantastical ‘Jewish interests’ they imagined stood behind both. Many literate
Edwardian citizens came to suspect the influence of the Kaiser and his spies behind
every shift in international politics.
Conspiracy theories have always interlaced themselves
around British politics and British public life. The ‘red scares’ of the
interwar years paralysed Labour and delegitimised socialist policies. Lots of
people always thought the moon landings were faked, and maybe between four and 16 per cent of British adults still do.
Still, this present outbreak of one-size-fits-all
thinking does still seem rather different. It reaches across the political
spectrum; disinformation from many bad faith actors and some states seem
prevalent; it binds together tribes beyond as well as across formal politics
(as anyone versed in the conspiracy theories of the anti-vaxxers will tell
you); it involves outbreaks of sheer rage that are as remarkable for their
intensity as they are notable for the relatively small numbers through which
the wildfires run.
There are, of course, off-the-peg answers to why this type
of thinking has become entrenched. Some writers look to social media, which does seem to focus the anger of deeply connected networks on specific targets. That’s a bit of a
reach. There’s quite a bit of evidence that social media actually makes you more likely to change your mind, not least in the UK’s 2017 General Election.
And who needs social media when you have Clunky Old Media, in the shape of TV presenter Eamon Holmes, to spread your conspiracy theories for you? You shouldn't just generalise about How Twitter Makes People Mad when The Washington Post and CNN put up stories about the Wuhan lab that some people think might just have caused all
this.
Other analysts begin their own journey down the rabbit
hole with the psychology of political rage itself (we've tried at our hands at this in the past), always easier to direct and channel
against a single hated antagonist. Pop psychologists and psephologists alike
have prodded and poked the supposedly very angry older white male until there isn’t much left to
dissect. Coffee shops in Iowa and pubs in Hull have never been so full of notetakers.
Yes, the psychology of older voters in ‘left behind’ places is interesting, and can be critical in electoral systems privileging their views: but this isn’t the full
story either.
Deeper trends can also be detected – and they certainly
have not been manipulated by any one actor. The Big McGuffin is, first and
foremost, a comforting heuristic in a world of noise. It springs out of the politics of confusion, sometimes deliberate confusion - not so much of rage as head-spinning dislocation. The postmodern
restlessness of the developed world in the twenty-first century can often be
experienced as sheer chaos: so many screens, so many streams, so many voices,
that Fake News is just one facet of the jittery, frameless, boundless
hyperreal.
That was a feature of the Edwardian world, too, when time
appeared to many observers to be ‘speeding up’ – now an exponential line that seems so steep that many citizens yearn to place their phones in a box and lock them away.
But if you’re not going to place your phone beyond reach, what better way to escape
the great gusher of events than pretending to yourself that it all has one
particular source?
Our late (or perhaps post-) capitalist societies of
course celebrate the individual. Thatcherite economics dictate that you
yourself must pull yourself up by your bootstraps alone, rather than living and
coping within groups that accept and validate their shared understandings. The
last forty years have seen an inconsistent but overall absolutely clear demerging of risk – in terms of the
benefits you’re entitled to, within the rules that govern your contracts of
work, encoded in the value of your shrinking pension (or lack of one). Why should that not be
paralleled by a kind of demerging of threat, that sees each citizen faced not
by structures and systems that are hard to grasp, but by the malevolence of a
personalised opponent?
There’s a genre effect in play here, too, which first
began as one example of that kaleidoscopic imaginary, and which is now probably
exerting its own feedback effects. The storytelling importance of the Big Bad
can now be observed in every onscreen drama’s serial or box set. The Doctor must come to understand the true (and self-referential) nature of the Bad Wolf. The Netflix Daredevil would be as nothing without the
mesmeric Wilson Fisk. Don’t you want to know who ‘H’ is in Line of Duty? It is
a cultural phenomenon designed to keep you watching, but which predisposes
people to look for the shadow behind the curtain.
The obverse of this insistence on the
personal-as-political is our search for leadership. You can see this in the
huge regard for President Obama in liberal circles, and the fierce adherence to
President Trump among much of his base: Trump still has an average approval rating of just over 44 per cent (a low-40s rating has been pretty constant
throughout this Presidency), even after his disastrous attempt to downplay the
coronavirus crisis.
If one thinks of voters faced with a sequence of chaotic
or cold contracts between themselves and the world, a politics of a thousand
cable channels and the call centre, this search for the warm, the personal, the charismatic, becomes more understandable.
This trend, too, gives itself over to a strange kind of
antonym. Just as the disintegration of old groups and the constant coalescing
of new ones can create a personal sense of threat to mirror our singular sense
of self, so our yearning for a leader casting heat and light has as its other
face our fear of anti-heroes acting as the agents of hidden forces. Hope and
fear interact. Some inside the European Left see the hand of Israel everywhere.
Some among the fiercest Trump activists believe that he pretended to be in
league with Russia to recruit Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller into an
anti-paedophile drive.
Political ideas are not just governed by formal ‘politics’
as we have come to understand them: the affairs of parliaments, politicians and
civil servants. They are shaped, also, in the way that we think about ourselves
– in our case, by the deluge of data, our individualistic self-image, new modes
of entertainment and our attendant craving for something or someone better.
The Big McGuffin isn’t really out there. China probably
didn’t mean to hurt you. 5G isn’t going to kill you. But the reasons why some
of us think like this are full of clues to who we have become.
