Cass Sunstein is a member of Obama’s Harvard klatsch, a Harvard professor who has gone on leave to serve as a czar, heading this regulatory office. Well, two years back Sunstein wrote a paper called "Conspiracy Theories," online here (co-authored by another Harvard prof), that is mostly about the bad beliefs that circulate in Muslim societies about American foreign policy. The paper argued that Muslims are specially prone to conspiracy theorizing and blamed this chiefly on the lack of free flow of information in their societies. And while it said that many westerners are also prone to conspiracy thinking, the paper actually entertained the idea that febrile thinking comes from Muslims’ upbringing, a subject I’m sure that Sunstein has studied closely (that was ironic). Excerpts:
Conspiracy theories flourish in many Middle Eastern and predominantly Muslim societies, so much so that there is a small literature seeking to explain why Muslims are so prone to conspiracy theorizing (One paper by Freudian psychologists even ascribes this “fact” to Muslim childrearing practices; we are skeptical)… it is unsurprising that such theorizing is even more widespread in the Muslim world than the United States. Overall conspiracy theorizing is undoubtedly virulent in the Muslim world, has a sharp anti-American inflection… It is highly likely that the virulence of conspiracy theorizing in Muslim societies has a great deal to do with… weak civil liberties and the lack of a robust market of ideas in many of these nations… The marketplace of ideas, in many Muslim countries, is institutionally fragile, or dominated by powerful governments.
I learned about Sunstein’s paper from Glenn Greenwald, who didn’t go after the Muslim angle but saw the work as "truly pernicious" in its call for active intervention by the U.S. gov’t on the internet to try and counter conspiracy theorizing. And David Bromwich had this wise response to the paper, as an attack on critical thought:
The part I liked best was the definition of a conspiracy theory as a theory that
teaches us to suspect that politicians may act from unavowed motives or attempt to conceal the extent of their machinations. This sweeps away, at a stroke, the entire canon of modern political theory. They were all conspiracy
theorists–Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke–and in the twentieth
century Hannah Arendt on the disguises of the total state and Leo Strauss on
esoteric vs. exoteric meaning. Let alone the American radicals and those who
most influenced them: Trenchard and Gordon, Jonathan Mayhew, Paine, Jefferson, Madison. All the latter group supposed that "a long train of abuses" had been deliberately planned and its motives deliberately concealed.Richard Clarke in his Congressional testimony and then in Against All Enemies may have been the first to say that the neoconservatives close to Cheney and Bush had evidently concerted the strategy of using the September 11 attack to draw the U.S. into war against Iraq, rather than use it to construct a better defense against terrorism (the danger of which they depreciated). On the new prohibitive definition, this, too, is a conspiracy theory. Yet it is recounted as an obvious truth today by people as mainstream as Chris Matthews.
I would add that the paper, while explicitly targeting the Truthers of 9/11, seems to have the hidden agenda (yes I know, I’m smelling conspiracy) of responding to anti-Semitic theories of Jewish influence in the Muslim world. The paper has that aura anyway, with its great apprehension about Muslim-borne theories re the U.S. and Israel. Here I would point out that while the paper approvingly quotes Philip Zelikow, the former head of the 911 Commission, as saying that conspiracy theories are "deeply corrosive to public understanding," it was none other than Zelikow who said that the "real threat" that led to the Iraq war is one that dare not speak its name–– and this was to protect Israel’s security.
"Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 – it’s the threat against Israel," Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002… "And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell."
I.e., government officials lie about things, because they’re corrupted, or they know that what they’re doing goes against the public interest, or they have a sectarian religious agenda, in sum, they are not prepared to tell the public everything that’s going on…
More from Greenwald on the paper’s "spine-chilling" proposals that "the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-‘independent’ advocates to ‘cognitively infiltrate’ online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems ‘false conspiracy theories’ about the Government":
This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists… This program would target those advocating false ‘conspiracy theories,’ which they define to mean: ‘an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role’…Covert government propaganda is exactly what Sunstein craves. His mentality is indistinguishable from the Bush mindset that led to these abuses, and he hardly tries to claim otherwise. Indeed, hefavorably cites both the covert Lincoln Park program as well as Paul Bremer’s closing of Iraqi newspapers which published stories the U.S. Government disliked, and justifies them as arguably necessary to combat ‘false conspiracy theories’ in Iraq — the same goal Sunstein has for the U.S.
