[RRE]The Return of Antimasonism in American Political Life

--- begin forwarded text Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 17:59:29 -0800 (PST) From: Phil Agre <pagre@alpha.oac.ucla.edu> To: "Red Rock Eater News Service" <rre@lists.gseis.ucla.edu> Subject: [RRE]The Return of Antimasonism in American Political Life Sender: <rre@lists.gseis.ucla.edu> Precedence: Bulk List-Subscribe: <mailto:rre-on@lists.gseis.ucla.edu> Conspiracy and Reason: The Return of Antimasonism in American Political Life Phil Agre http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/ (I wrote this back in the spring, but it seems even more relevant now.) When going to the movies, my favorite part is afterward, walking back out into the world, seeing everything through the prism of the movie. After seeing Terry Gilliam's bizarre "12 Monkeys", for example, I drove across San Diego in the grip of a delusion that I was Bruce Willis, warning Cassandra-like about a catastophe that nobody wanted to hear about. Of course it didn't make sense. Am I really warning anyone about a catastrophe? Is nobody really listening? But that's how it felt for a good couple of hours. I got that feeling again this afternoon. For the last few months, in amongst my official duties, I have been reading the literature on apocalytic social movements. I was originally inspired in this by David Noble's book "The Religion of Technology". Noble observes, for example, that many of the important early engineers, particularly in the United States, were Masons, and he describes the development of a particular kind of millennialism -- or at least a secularized form of religious utopianism -- among engineers that became secularized and formed the outlines of technical movements such as artificial intelligence and -- he might as well have added -- cyberspace. As part of this reading campaign, earlier this week I read large parts of Robert Fuller's "Naming the Antichrist", which is a history of social movements in the United States that, from earliest colonial times to the present, have claimed to identify the Antichrist that is mentioned briefly in the visionary books of the Bible. In reading Fuller's book, all at once it occurred to me that the ongoing tidal wave of accusations and innuendoes against Bill Clinton and his entire generation resemble nothing so much as Antimasonism. The similarities are most striking: both involve attempts to foment hatred by ordinary people against their slightly better-off and more cosmopolitan fellow citizens by implicating them in an enormous Conspiracy. Even the fine details of the accusations are similar: in each case, for example, the conspirators are said to undermine religion and promote decadence through the public schools. This analogy impressed me for a while, but then I cooled down. Even when an analogy is instructive, one should determine its limits. After all, nobody is claiming that Bill Clinton is mounting his vast campaign of murder, drug dealing, treason, and bank fraud on behalf of the Illuminati, right? And with that thought I filed the whole thing in my notebook. That was Tuesday. This afternoon, Friday, I happened to pass through a Barnes and Noble in Costa Mesa, California. I was there because the bookstore has a public restroom and is on the way to the most excellent El Toro Bravo taco stand, which does not. Briefly inspecting the "New Non-Fiction Books" shelves as is my custom, I noticed a new book by Tony Brown. Its title, "Empower the People", was not so promising, given that I've already read quite a few books by conservative authors about how the free market empowers people to make choices etc etc etc. Yet something poked at me to look closer, and I saw the subtitle: "A 7-Step Plan to Overthrow the Conspiracy That Is Stealing Your Money and Freedom". I opened the book and found to my utter slack-jawed amazement that it described none other than the great Conspiracy by the Illuminati, led by Bill Clinton. I am not making this up. Now, if the author of this book were a fringe crazy then it would only be mildly odd to find the book in Barnes and Noble. Just the other day I sat on the floor in the Barnes and Noble at Pico and Westwood in Los Angeles and read large parts of a well-produced volume entitled "A Woman Rides the Beast" by Dave Hunt, which argues that the woman seen riding on the back of the Beast in the Book of Revelation is none other than the Virgin Mary as she is worshipped in the Catholic Church. (This is part of a resurgence of anti-Catholicism among some American evangelical Protestants that deserves much more attention than it has gotten -- see, for example, Michael W. Smith singing on a recent record, amidst a lamentation of various sins, of people who are "jaded by hypocrisies behind cathedral walls"). This is the sort of fringe weirdness that is easy to write off. But the author of "Empower the People", Tony Brown, is not a marginal crazy. I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the United States is now a country in which a man who believes that the President is an agent of the Illuminati has a regular program on public television. What are we to make of this? Several things. First, in the astonishing climate of political warfare now under way in the United States, when the speaker of the House insinuates in a speech at Stanford University that the President is systematically killing his enemies (NY Times 5/3/98) and nobody finds this even slightly odd, we have to confront the fact that in the late 18th century, during the formative decades of the political culture of the United States, this country was positively addled by conspiracy theories. These theories were not prominent in the writings of the educated secular elites who officially founded the country. But the rank and file of the Revolution were animated in large part (though not, of course, solely) by elaborate claims to have located the Antichrist in the crown and church of England, and in their adherents in America. Nor the American cultural inclination to conspiracy theories end with the Constitution. As the new country fought its first round of political conflicts, the theories suddenly shifted their attention -- to the Masons. This happened precisely 200 years ago, in fact, in 1798, when the first tracts appeared describing the great Conspiracy of the Illuminati, a subgroup of the Masons from Bavaria. After smouldering for several years, opposition to this Conspiracy became a substantial social movement beginning around 1830 in the "burned-over district" of upstate New York, so-called because of the waves of evangelical religious enthusiasm that had swept over the area. (Madison probably had an earlier wave of revivals, the First Great Awakening, in mind when he expressed relief in the famous tenth Federalist Paper that social movements that rise up in one part of the country, particularly religious movements that devolve into political ones, cannot easily spread to other areas.) The Antimasonic movement became a political party which contested several elections before collapsing a decade later. You will recall that many early American engineers were Masons, as were many of the Founding Fathers. But who exactly were the Masons? The Masons originated as a medieval guild, but during the period in question they were a semi-secret society of white men who constituted themselves on classical Greek and Roman models as the intellectual elites of their respective countries. In this sense, Antimasonism was very much a revolt against educated people. That it was also a revolt against the same people who founded the country was, so far as I can determine, little-noted at the time. It is often observed that cultural patterns are able to go underground for decades or centuries, only to spring fully-formed to the surface once again, as if they were brand new, when the time is right. And that, I would suggest, is what's happening now. If this were the late 18th century, white men who rose through education from relatively poor backgrounds -- men such as Bill Clinton -- would be spinning classical political philosophies and writing the Constitution, and conservative evangelical ministers would be spinning conspiracy theories and opposing the Constitution on the grounds that (quite the opposite of what many such ministers say today) it does not create a Christian nation. The vigorous but ideologically vague patriotism of the contemporary anti- government movement likewise corresponds to the equally vague ideas of the 18th century conspiracy theorists. In drawing out these parallels, I am particularly struck by the place of technology in American political culture. The early engineers -- the men who founded the country's original technological institutions -- were largely Masons, and popular reactionary movements in the United States have increasingly incorporated technological themes into their theories. Computers, for example, play an important role in conspiracy theories based on the Book of Revelation. Viewed superficially, these theories sometimes seem to resemble the much more serious ideas of privacy and civil liberties advocates. My experience, however, is that the people who spin such theories are indifferent to accurate information about the nature and use of computers, no matter how unsettling; their concern with the technology is much more symbolic. In my view, a critical turning point in American cultural constructions of information technology occurred in the 1970's, in the wake of the Vietnam war. This cultural shift has been brilliantly documented by James W. Gibson's "Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America" (1994). The Vietnam war, Gibson observes, was organized largely by men from elite institutions who believed in formal rationality and made heavy use of mathematical decision-making models. They lost, and there arose in the aftermath of that loss an important cultural narrative that was best captured by Sylvester Stallone's "Rambo". Rambo is a lone individual who keeps fighting despite having been betrayed by decadent institutions. Cold War heroes, by contrast, may have been ambivalent about their institutions, but they were insiders -- they were part of the institution. Rambo is an outsider. He has two enemies, the "official" enemy and the institution itself. This figure of the betrayed and wounded hero fighting two enemies has become deeply engraved in American culture. Constrast, for example, the original Cold War era (1966-1969) "Mission: Impossible" television series and the 1996 movie version starring Tom Cruise. In the television version, the government is completely unquestioned, but for Tom Cruise, the CIA is the enemy as well. Rambo epitomized a new cultural construction of masculinity, set against institutions rather than identifying with them. And technology was identified with the institutions. This helps to explain why Hollywood has apparently decided that computers and rationality are feminine domains. (Think, for example, of "The X-Files".) Cultures often define men as "outside" of something and women as "inside"; what varies is the something. In this case, the something is the institutional world, technology and all. The Rambo phenomenon also helps to explain the otherwise mysterious shift that took place during the 1980's in prevailing cultural constructions of computer hackers: the original hackers were comfortably identified with military-sponsored research institutions, but then the word "hacker" suddenly shifted around to refer to men, whether bad criminals or virtuous rebels, who were outside of and opposed to institutions. This, in turn, helps explain the peculiar divide on the political right between those cultural conservatives -- the inheritors of the Antimasonites -- who persist in identifying technology with oppressive institutions and a demographically narrow but highly educated group of libertarians who have redefined technology as an instrument for the destruction of institutions. The point here is not that Rambo appeared from nowhere. Quite the contrary, "Rambo"'s construction of the Vietnam war drew upon and revalued elements of American historical memory that have been handed down, for the most part unconsciously, by all sorts of mechanisms throughout the country's history. And once it did, neoconservative intellectuals such as Irving Kristol set about reinterpreting those cultural forms in terms of their "New Class" political strategy. That phrase, "New Class", was originally applied by Milovan Djilas in his analysis of the bureaucrats who consolidated their power in the Soviet Union. True to the ideologies of Lenin and Stalin, these people were drawn primarily from the lower strata of Russian society, semi-educated and selected through the Soviet examination system (itself originally derived, via European variants, from the classical Chinese system), and installed in positions of power that they proceeded to consolidate over several decades. The neoconservatives' strategy is to portray American liberals as an analogue of the Soviet New Class and to use the money of the rich to mobilize working people against professionals and the poor. This helps to explain why conservative rhetoric virtually never discloses the existence of working-class liberals, and why the party that enjoys the overwhelming support of wealthy Americans persists in appropriating generations of left-wing rhetoric to portray liberals as a wealthy "elite". (It's bad to foment envy against the rich, apparently, but not against college professors.) This whole strategy succeeds in large part because of the whole historical inheritance of Antimasonism and its successive generations of descendents. The liberals, in short, are the new Masons. In his history of German intellectual life in the era that led up to the Nazis, Georg Lukacs spoke of a "destruction of reason" -- a step- by-step demolition of rational thought that became possible as Germans found themselves willing to project more and more and more of their own negative impulses into a vast enemy. Tony Brown's "Empower the People", it seems to me, is one very clear step in a destruction of reason that is currently far along in the United States. Antimasonism is the American equivalent of fascism, and Antimasonism is coming back. Will the relatively rational antiliberalism of neoconservative intellectuals be drowned by the unfortunate tradition of conspiratoralism upon which it draws its emotional force? That, it seems to me, is an urgent question for our country right now. end --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'