V. Ethos

There is a surface resemblance between rumor and legend, a resemblance that folklorists have recognized, although they have had trouble with the distinctions between the two as analytic categories. This is due to the interdisciplinary nature of Folklore Studies. The disciplinary boundaries of fields such as social psychology tend to be closed, while folklore tends to maintain more permeable boundaries. For example, Patrick Mullen and Patricia Turner have each cited Allport's and Postman's definition in their work. Neither is able to let the definition go unchallenged. Postman and Allport are able to construct a denotative definition that conforms to the standards of social psychology. Mullen and Turner recognize the disciplinary constraints that limit the definition from a folkloristic perspective.

In I Heard it Through the Grapevine (1993) Patricia Turner remarks on "the subtle nuances that distinguish" rumor from legend, while at the same time, noting how both forms transmit the specific body of African-American folk belief she examines. An account of the origins of AIDS in the Black community can be conveyed in a "brief, oral, nonnarrative statement based on hearsay", or in "a narrative account set in the recent past and containing traditional motifs" told as true (4). This is especially vexing for some folklorists since the basis of the distinction between myths, legends and folktales has been whether or not they are believed to be true. Myths and legends are meant to be believed. Folktales are known to be fiction. Legends, as folklorists define them, are narratives set in the recent past, told as true. The Norwegian folklorist Reidar Christiansen equates legend with history, since they are intended to be factual and are set in the recent past.

Rumor, on the other hand, is commonly regarded as unreliable and subject to distortion. Rumor is, therefore unofficial discourse, nontraditional, without institutional sanction. The audience for folktales and legends are aware that one form is fiction and the other is factual. Rumors are erroneous; its tellers and audiences believe what is obviously false to be true.

However, contemporary, or urban, legends are regarded in the same way as rumors. When initially formed, they contain nontraditional elements; they can be short; they are told as true; they are set in the recent past. And once the audience becomes familiar with them, they can even be recounted briefly: "Did you hear about the Kentucky Fried Rat?" "The mouse in the Coke Bottle?" "The Vanishing Hitchhiker?" Initially, they are believed since they are transmitted face to face through the personal social network of family, friends and acquaintances. As they become more widely circulated and better known, they are received more doubtfully.

Mullen points out that contemporary legends are composed of verbal expressions that form a basic core of the narrative. These expressions are identified as beliefs, statements, legend motifs and memorates, and can apply to rumor as well. The focus on the structural features that distinguish rumor from legend is a distraction, since they share overlapping characteristics, but may vary in context, function, style as well as structure (96). Although rumors and legend are distinct phenomena, they are, at times, dependent forms. Perhaps it is best to see the relationship between rumor and legend as an aggregate process. Rumor does not have to cluster around a legend in order for one to originate; legend is not necessary for the formation of rumor. However, it can occur. A rumor can form the basis of a legend and a legend can arise out of folk belief.

The best demonstration of this point can be found in traditional folklore genres. Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature indexes the smallest elements in a tale that persist in tradition. The numbering system from Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads are used to identify folksongs. Thompson lists Motif V361 as "Christian child killed to furnish blood for Jewish rite." Child Number155 is the ballad "Hugh of Lincoln." It is probably best known among high school graduates in the English speaking world as Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Prioress's Tale", but it is also found in Christopher Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta." All are based on the legend of Hugh of Lincoln (c.1246-1255), an English child supposedly tortured and murdered by Jews in Lincoln. Miraculous accounts clustered around this figure, such as his identification of his murderers from beyond the grave.

This Christian narrative is clearly linked to the folk belief known as the blood libel, which portrays Jews as child killers. This idea served to establish Jews as distinct from Christian. It presents them as Other, and in doing so it makes Judaism a depraved, corrupt, alternate practice rather than the antecedent from which Christianity developed. It also served to justify the oppression and murder of Jews. After all, if Jews will kill children, they will do anything.

The blood libel has been a component of many rumors, legends and folk belief, but these components do not function as a whole. It is possible to have read Chaucer and not recognize the influence the blood libel had in the construction of the tale. It as an aggregate of separate components (rumor, legend, belief), as are certain conspiracy theories.

The blood libel continues to have motive power. In May, 1969 a rumor swept the city of Orleans in France that women's clothing shops and boutiques were engaging in white-slave trafficking. French women were being drugged in the fitting rooms, then held prisoner, transported underground to the Loire river, where they were taken by submarine to be carried overseas to serve in brothels. By May twentienth, it was rumored that twenty-eight young women had disappeared from Orleans. There were several constituent elements that went into the formation of this rumor. The anti-Semitic notion that Jews engaged in ritual murder was one of the most prominent features (Watzlawick 1979: 77-79).

The Orleans rumor was a contemporary manifestation of the anti-Semiticism undoubtedly influenced by the folk belief of the blood libel. It is another reason why conspiracy theories are generally regarded with revulsion. Many of them express repugnant beliefs such as anti-Semitism. Consequently, conspiracy theories are seen as dangerous because of this underlying ideology. The charges made by militia movements that the United States is under the control of a Zionist Occupation Government and the idea found among extreme fundamentalist Christians that there is a plot by the New World Order to overthrow the United States government and, by extension, Christendom comes out of this idea. Similarly, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purportedly an outline of the strategy for world domination by international Jewry, still has currency among anti-Semitic groups today, although it has been revealed to be a fraud as early as 1921 (79). Yet the book continues to be sold and purchased at conventions held by the militia movements and others.

As Watzlawick states in his discussion of Orleans, it is the existence of such ideas that matters, not the truth of them. And, as Turner has demonstrated, ideas can be conveyed by a variety of forms. In this case, rumor, legend, and folk beliefs served as form of ritual condensation. Certain ideas are projected onto the external world, used to explain why things are and then used to justify actions taken in defense. In the case of the Orleans rumor, the presence of anti-Semiticism drew attention to the story, which helped to disprove it. Similar cases have resulted in pogroms.

However, as has been said before, conspiracy theories exist at all levels of society. They are a traditional response. As Hofstadter wrote:

In the history of the United States, one finds it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen for abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders' conspiracy, in many writers alarmed by Mormonism, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers' conspiracy of the First World War, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right-wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens Councils and Black Muslims (9)

Illuminati panics occurred throughout Europe during this period. The Scottish scientist John Robison wrote a fairly self-explanatory tract Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies in 1797. In it he alleges that social upheavals of the time (such as the French Revolution) could be traced to secret societies, particularly the Order of the Illuminati. Founded by a Bavarian university professor, Adam Weishaupt, the Illuminati were a branch of the Freemasons, comprised of like minded select members of the Masonic leadership. Weishaupt was an intellectual who held both progressive and mystical ideas, which called for replacing monarchies and authoritarian states with democracies. Weishaupt did not manage to institute a revolution, although he did succeed in taking over the leadership ranks of the Masonic lodges in Europe.

The Illuminati provided a site for the free exchange of radical ideas, which led the Bavarian government to close it down once those ideas became known. According to Robinson, the Illuminati went underground to pursue its anti-Christian, anti-property, licentious schemes.

In the pre-Revolutionary War United States, the idea of conspiracy was a consistent theme. Robinson's book created a hysteria in the post-Revolutionary War period among the clergy and Federalists, who were concerned about the spread of democracy. The secrecy of Masonic practices led many to believe that they were actively plotting to overthrow the government consistently cropped up in anti-Masonic political activities. The Masons were seen as the source of all evil and misfortune. The belief in an inhuman, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent clandestine organization society, determined to overthrow a peaceful, God fearing society is at the root of ZOG and New World Order conspiracies.

Reidar Christiansen equated legend with history, noting that the "implicit belief in the constant interference in everyday life by non-human powers has ceased to play a decisive part" in contemporary worldview (1964:xx). This observation connects legend to history, a well as to rumor, belief and worldview. Worldview, is the patterned cognitive sets by "which people perceive, consciously or unconsciously, relationships between self, others, cosmos, and the day-to-day living of life" (Dundes 1980:69). The genres we have mentioned are reflective of unconscious, unstated values. Which leads us to ask, what values are conspiracy theories reflecting?

Belief studies in folklore usually center around a Western sacred/secular division. However, belief is a characteristic of subjects other than religion: history, morality, politics, ethics, law, medicine, social as well as religious belief can be likened to ideology: This term is regarded as a pejorative (as is conspiracy), however this is an intentional, political distortion of the word's original meaning. Ideology, as originally coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, meant the study of ideas. This study brought Destutt to a shocking conclusion: ideas based on experience were valid. Those based on convention, such as religion or state authority, were not. Among those who were disturbed by the democratic implications of Destutt's theories were the church and Napoleon Bonaparte, who denounced ideology as false or dogmatic beliefs. "When the word ideology is used by conservatives or reactionaries, it implies, ...that people who express opposition to established authority are ideologues--troublemakers and revolutionaries who hold dangerous and false ideas. Their ideas are then put down as false and mere expression of group self-interest." (Kohl 1992:166)

For Karl Marx and Friederich Engels ideology was the expression of the ideas of the dominant class in a society. As such, ideology was representative of the values of those who control society, a.k.a. the elite, the insiders, they, them. Seen this way, ideology is the result of an historical process arising out of specific economic relationships and political structures, not universal truths.

This redefinition of ideology is limited in the same way that Napoleon's was limited. Both regard ideology as the province of those they oppose. And Marx' and Engles's redefinition has an additional flaw. It analyzes what Parkin called the dominant meaning system. Parkin says that there are three meaning systems in western industrial societies: dominant, subordinate or radical. Dominant meaning systems support the social structure; subordinate meaning systems accept the dominant structure, but demand a place within it for specific groups; the social structure is rejected by radical meaning systems, which propose an alternative and oppositional system to replace it.

With the advent of mass media, ideas could be circulated in new and different ways, which meant that new and different readings could be given to them. Texts can be open, (have multiple readings available) or closed (have one preferred reading). According to scholars such as Eco, Parkin, Hall and Morley, mass media "texts"are closed and so can be responded to or "read" in three ways. Hall and Morley, following Parkin's theory, say that alternate readings arise according to the social positions or cultural experiences of the audience, which given the diversity of mass media audiences, differs from that of the author. These readings can be dominant hegemonic, negotiated or oppositional. (O'Sullivan, et al. 1-2; 174-175; 238-240: 1994).

Without belaboring the point, ideas other than those sanctioned by a society's elite existed. Elites could determine what ideas would and would not be officially accepted and uttered, but they could not eliminate other ideas. Folk groups no doubt held ideas that adhered to the dominant meaning system, but they also held subordinate and radical ones, too. Power is one example; conspiracy seems to be another.

I have tried to establish that, rather than being anomalous delusions of paranoid individuals, conspiracy theories are in fact, a widespread, traditional response to historical, social and political occurrences. As such, they give us insight into folk conceptions of power. They are manifestations of political philosophies, and should not be dismissed.

As conceptions of power, the fact that conspiratorial behavior is a feature of politics is essential to keep in mind, since conspiracies do in fact happen. To disregard them automatically serves only to mask an essential and regular feature of the nation state, whether they be repressive or open. When one considers the vast networks that form once conspiracy theories are believed, the need for more in-depth knowledge of the phenomenon is obvious. The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, or the Aum Shinri Kyo gas attack in Tokyo are examples of how a small effect can lead to a dramatic event.

Despite the general contempt with which conspiratorial thinking is met, conspiracy theories are a frequent, widespread, and traditional phenomena which, given the prevalent impact of electronic media, seem more pervasive than ever. They form the basis of television shows and movies, they are the subject of serious discussion on the worldwide web. Conventions are held on everything from UFOs to the true identity of Jack the Ripper, from the assassination of John Kennedy to the proof of the existences of shadow governments headed by the Elders of Zion, the Freemasons, the Illuminati or the Trilateral Commission.

The problem is that what seems to be nonsense to one is perfectly logical to another. And as we have seen in Folklore Studies issues of belief have nothing to do with the presumed sophistication of believers. Dismissing conspiracy theories out of hand ignores the wide range of responses that accompany conspiratorial thinking, and it conceals a central flaw as well. Conspiracies happen. Conspiracy is a criminal act which carries criminal penalties in many societies. If the idea of conspiracy is silly, why criminalize it? Failed conspiracies have often been documented historically. If failed conspiracies have occurred, why is it unthinkable to believe that successful ones have occurred ?

Part of the answer lies in Christiansen's observation about the addition of skepticism to contemporary worldview, which raises the subject of ethos, or source credibility. In rhetoric, ethos was a means of persuasion. For Aristotle, ethos was based on the character of the speaker. An ethical speaker had certain traits that made him a reliable source. An ethical source was a man of good character, possessed of wisdom and goodwill. Over time, the concept shifted from the character of the source to the perception of the receiver. An ethical source is now dependent on how an audience receives the argument. This the ethos of a persuasive argument polysemic; it is capable of having multiple meanings and, therefore, having variable effects on audiences.

This shift has been observed in folklore, especially in genres such as legend, now differentiated as contemporary legend, and also in folk belief, which has not been explicitly distinguished as a modern form. The point is that the credibility of these forms, and of rumor and conspiracy theories, does not have to be judged according to their source, but by their varied reception.

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