Centrism and the Epithet "Conspiracy Theorist"

The term "conspiracy" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "[a] combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose; an agreement between two or more persons to do something criminal, illegal, or reprehensible."

That being the case it would seem obviously indisputable that conspiracies happen all the time, especially in political life--while it would seem that a hypothesis that some event or other was the result of a conspiracy would not be intrinsically illegitimate, but rather a thing to be judged on its own merits, or lack thereof.

Yet the term "conspiracy theorist" has become an epithet. Of course, those who defend the term's use as such try to stress that a "conspiracy theorist" is somehow not someone who merely hypothesizes that there has been a conspiracy in some particular situation, more or less plausibly, but rather displays some deep, irrational tendency to imagine conspiracy where none exists. The attempt to draw a general-purpose distinction betrays a real strain, the more obvious in as the term is so readily deployed in contemporary political discourse.

Simply put, alleging conspiracy in political life is treated as automatically suspect as illegitimate--and considering the assumptions of the political centrism that defines mainstream discourse in the U.S. it is easy to see why. After all, a "conspiracy theory" is identified as such only because the alleged "combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose" does not have the recognition of the "consensus" (otherwise it would be called something else), with said non-recognition a big problem given the centrist's high regard for "consensus" (not really much more than what Authority tells you things are like)."

Moreover, the allegation itself flouts centrist premises in a deeper manner. After all, the charge of conspiracy implicitly entails a suspicion of elites, and alertness to differences in power--while the centrist typically demands deference to elites, and treats differences of power as effectively nonexistent.

Simply put, the centrist holds that, certainly in a complex modern society, especially of the liberal democratic type, power is so diffused--not least among voters and consumers--that in the end everyone has it, and therefore no one has it--which pretty much rules out meaningful conspiracy as a possibility. Indeed, merely to broach the idea of people having power--to say that society is arranged in a certain way--implicitly a way in which it ought not to be arranged--is to depart the "civil," "pragmatic" politics which take the status quo as a given for an "ethical" and "ideological" politics where people talk about what should be, or might be, that is necessarily outside the bounds of legitimate discourse so far as the centrist is concerned--while given the centrist's inclination to psychologism, and in particular their view of anyone not unquestioningly accepting the status quo as mentally ill, those who suspect elites for whom the centrist demands respects can only be "paranoid."

Thus is it that anyone who points out what everyone knows--that, irregardless of centrist ideology, there are differences in power in society, and those who have power use it for their ends in ways that are neither benign nor open--sneeringly identified with tinfoil hat wearers. In the process the term, like so much else in the vocabulary of the contemporary political mainstream, obscures rather than explains reality. But it does undeniably speak volumes about the centrists who so delight in tossing the term "conspiracy theory" about, while crowning all of this with the irony that, just as centrists accuse others of being ideologues while being indisputable, highly vehement, ideologues themselves, even as they fling the epithet "conspiracy theorist" at others they give themselves a free pass with their own conspiracy theories, examples of which are by no means few.

Giving Everyone a College Degree?

In one of his later novels, Friday, Robert Heinlein tells us that, after the recognition that people with bachelor's degree made on average 30 percent more than non-degree holders a referendum in California granted all of the state's high school graduates a bachelor's degree in the name of eliminating "undemocratic advantage."

The protagonist and narrator of that novel tells us she "can't see anything wrong with it," but, while Heinlein's politics changed through the course of his life, and were at times idiosyncratic or even ambiguous (in part because he was not above backing away from an opinion he gave in the face of backlash), given the period of Heinlein's life in which he published the book, and what he had to say about American education elsewhere, this bit seemed to me obviously satirical--an elitist right-winger's sneer at the ruin of education by a bunch of hare-brained "liberals" with egalitarian notions.

Still, there seems to me a basis for criticizing the proposal from other standpoints--the more obvious for something vaguely reminiscent of that having happened not just in California but the whole country in recent decades. After all, consider what the ultimate object of the California legislation was in Heinlein's story--helping those who are socioeconomically less well-off. As American history itself shows there are many ways to do that--for example, with laws regarding wages and benefits, broadening the room for maneuver enjoyed by organized labor, the improvement of public services, transfer payments, etc., all of which those broadly identifying as liberals once championed. However, instead those who passed for "liberals" in America (reflecting their meritocracy-mindedness, and their accommodation of themselves to a neoliberal outlook in which the other measures were less acceptable than before) increasingly fixated on "sending everyone to college" what they presented as a vision of uplift of the underprivileged.

Not everyone went, of course. But the percentage of people with degrees expanded enormously--nearly four in ten American adults now having a B.A.. By contrast incomes did not expand in the same manner. This was, of course, partly a matter of the consistently lousy growth record of this period--but even relative to growth workers' incomes simply did not move up, with, in spite of the notion that a degree is a magical amulet protecting the bearer against a global economy that is dark and full of terrors, the majority of B.A.-holding college graduates suffering from the same trend as everyone else. Of course, some of this was a matter of students getting degrees unlikely to be remunerative (thus the horror story of Columbia University film school graduates with which the Wall Street Journal regaled the country not so long ago), but even that can seem a matter of the fetish of which some have made college--and the broader reality of a credentialing crisis in which degrees are requiring larger investments and delivering diminishing returns as a growing number of B.A.-holders competed for a much less rapidly growing number of jobs actually requiring B.A.s; in which "sending everyone to college," far from helping resolve the Social Question, worsened it with a credentialing crisis and the burdening of graduates with trillions of dollars worth of student debt, such that the supposed uplift, as might be expected given its unbelievably half-baked nature, has in itself become a source of crisis for all involved.

The Post-Work Society, and the Possibility of "Enough": Are Human Wants Insatiable?

In considering the prospect of a post-work society one important question is "Given rising productivity can we imagine a world in which a critical mass of human beings feel they have enough things, sufficiently so that striving after the gain of more things will cease to be central to their lives?"

The standard reply of those who determine the orthodoxy in the field of economics--those who teach in the colleges (especially the colleges where those who get tenured professorships are likely to themselves be trained), those who edit the field's journals and publish in them, those who get prizes like the Nobel--and those who get hired as consultants or appointed to high public office--is "No. Never. Don't even think about it." Indeed, they go to great lengths in arguing why we should not even think about it, dismissing essential physical needs and material realities in favor of a relativistic subjectivism they are prepared to push to preposterous extremes. Thus will they tell us that a billionaire's desire for "one more ivory backscratcher" is no less a "need" than the need of someone literally starving to death for food, and its lack no less painful; and make much of how, for example, we might be able to give everyone a house, but there will only be so many lots around Lake Como, and that this will mean scarcity oppressing us as much as before we gave everyone a house; etc., etc., etc..

In considering such absurdities it seems relevant here that the economists in question espouse a dark, misanthropic view of human nature, and with it a pessimism about the prospects for a free, comfortable, happy life for very many of those on the planet--a view which is not without significant political implications. After all, if human wants are as infinite and insatiable--and relative--as they say then there is no getting off the treadmill of getting and spending, no end to the Rat Race and its ugliness, and no point to any reforms, whose benefits would only be lost on the grubby little can't-ever-satisfy-them bastards they see the general public as being.

Still, if the insatiability of human wants is an article of faith for economists (whose teaching is, of course, seen by many as a faith masquerading as science), it does seem fair to say that others have made a case that the matter is exactly the opposite of the way that such economists tell us it is, the "law of diminishing marginal returns" (ironically, another concept from economics, and indeed its mainstream) operative here. The implication of this argument is that for people who are really poor more money and more consumption (money for food, money for shelter, money to relieve pressing physical wants) really do make for more satisfaction and contentment and "happiness"--while in line with the aforementioned "law" the further away one is from being so poor the less does added money and consumption improve their sense of well-being.

In short, no matter how much orthodox economists sneer, it would seem plausible that that extra ivory back-scratcher really does mean less than that food for the starving person, the house for someone who is homeless mean less than the view of Lake Como for the already well-housed.

Indeed, one study of note suggested that we might hit a point at which simply having more money contributes little to one's sense of subjective well-being, concluding that after a country's per capita National Income hit $13,000 in the terms of a generation ago (or, after adjustment for inflation, $25,000 or so in today's terms) more growth does not in itself produce a sense of greater well-being. Going by World Bank figures at present over thirty countries are above that mark in nominal terms (pretty much all the North American, West European, East Asian and Australasian nations we call "advanced industrial" or "developed"). Dozens more do so when we go by Purchasing Power Parity (with states like Russia or Chile making the cut). Additionally those countries that do not make the cut are often not very far short of it (with the world average closing on $19,000 by the latter measure last year).

Does this mean that anyone whose country has $25,000 a year per capita can sit back content in the knowledge that life is as good as it gets? Of course not, innumerable other factors complicating the issue. People may well be personally poor in a society that is rich--and still left with unmet material needs of such a kind that a bit of money would mean a real improvement in their sense of well-being. A lot depends on how wealth is distributed, and perhaps even more fundamentally on how the provision of essentials is organized. (After all, we know from experience that even in a relatively affluent society--such as the U.S., with a per capita income nearly three times what the study identified as the requirement--a significant fraction of the population may suffer hunger, homelessness and other fundamental material lacks, with all their associated misery.) Still, the existence of scientific evidence that human needs may start being sated at a level well below what millions have, and minute next to what a handful have, is a powerful rejoinder to the preachers of want and misery as humanity's eternal lot.

Can Political Centrism Survive the Digital Age?

Previously discussing centrism I have stressed how much it has been a creation of the mid-century period, and especially of Cold War anti_Communism, such that it seems to me more useful to think of centrism as a species of conservatism (specifically, the more flexible, adaptable, bend-rather-than-break, pick-its-battles side of the conservative tradition, rather than the heels-digging variety associated with the hard right) rather than mere middle-of-the-roadness, or "practical" non-philosophy.

However, it also seems to me that centrism was a product of the mid-century media universe as well, with this evident in its attitude toward public discourse—centrism's sense of what are s legitimate boundaries, with certain viewpoints, certain modes of argument, acceptably "pragmatic," "pluralist" and "civil," and others not, and in line with the sense that the dialogue had to be carefully managed, carefully gatekept, against the latter. Those espousing this view seem to think it a great thing that the sources of information, the forums in which that information and the views based on it could be discussed, were few in number, making them more easily manageable, and the public dialogue along with them. Others took a more critical view of the matter, but it does seem worth noting that those unsatisfied with the center had few alternatives, enabling the center "to hold."

By contrast, with broadcasting given way to the Internet and its opportunities for innumerably more "channels" of communication, those dissatisfied with the center find it easier to present and to access such alternatives today--and are perhaps given more reason to do so with the center, in spite of being defined by its facilitation of compromise, actually less given to compromise of any kind. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that with the mainstream so often seeming to speak in a single voice on many issues, and offer a lame "both sidesism" when it does not, those looking for any other view at all find themselves going elsewhere--and perhaps very easily pulled toward views far more extreme than they might otherwise have interested themselves in simply because the range of what centrism deemed allowable was so limited and so unsatisfactory.

In such a situation centrism would seem to be backfiring--and quite frankly the way centrists pine nostalgically for that earlier age in which everybody watched three channels that offered pretty much the same thing seems to bespeak their lack of ideas about how to cope with the present situation, which may be a feature, not a bug. After all, one way of coping with the situation would be to reconsider how the boundaries of the legitimate have been drawn, engaging with rather than simply shutting out anything that does not fit within the very tight confines of today's centrist-gatekept discourse. But in that event centrism would become something other than it has been--ceasing to be centrism.