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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 4, 2011
The paranoid style
Once upon a time, when I had my own magazine (The Idler) and could commission people to write, instead of having to do it myself, I commissioned an essay on "The Uses and Abuses of Paranoia." The title was suggested by Eric McLuhan, so I thought he should have to do it. Soon it struck me that a whole series could be commissioned on common foibles, and I generated an abecedary of things that can also be used or abused: from Anachronism, Buffoonery and Captiousness through to Xenophobia, Yobbishness and Zealotry, with stuff like Masochism, Narcissism and Opisthotonosity in the middle.But nothing ever came of it. As a public issue, paranoia "begins" (really, nothing ever begins) with Richard Hofstadter's "classic" 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. This revisited defunct conspiracy theories, and listed the private inner fears that - according to an old liberal like Hofstadter - had unduly influenced U.S. politics over the decades. His ulterior motive veritably screamed at the alert reader. His immediate purpose was to trash Barry Goldwater, then running for president, but beyond this the whole tribe of right-wing Cold Warriors, Biblical Christians, Middle Americans and ultimately, anyone lacking the elevated and enlightened rational serenity that he and his own Ivy League tribe so perfectly embodied. The term "McCarthyism," to be used as a broad brush to tar one's conservative opponents, was popularized, I think, with that essay. Joe McCarthy was raised in memory from what he had been in life - a somewhat demented backwoods senator from Wisconsin, who died probably of drink at a fairly early age - into the founder of a political creed and a straw man of gigantic proportions. Now, one thing the student of un-American activities in the early 1950s will know is that some of the people McCarthy recklessly fingered during his brief heyday were, in fact, Communists. They were extremely lucky to be fingered by Mc-Carthy, for now they could wear the badge of victimhood. By the later 1960s, if you called even Angela Davis a Communist - and she twice ran for vice-president on the ticket of the Communist Party USA - you would be accused of "paranoia." There were many flaws in Hofstadter's thesis, which applied categories from psychology and social science to politics, quite illegitimately, for the purpose of confusing the sane with the insane. Moreover, he was wilfully contributing to the long and nasty modern tradition of "psychologizing" in debate, wherein you ignore an opponent's arguments and go straight for his jugular with ad hominem attacks, but with that superior, elevated, smug look that comes from Ivy League training. Compare, if you will, McCarthy and Hofstadter. The former laid often egregious charges against his political opponents and others he merely disliked. But the charges were factual, and therefore disprovable, and his enemies usually benefited from his attacks. Hofstadter, by contrast, dealt in smears so vague, oleaginous, and grimy that they could never be washed out. He was clever, though, and could be subtle sometimes. Whereas, his descendants just hurl rocks like troglodytes: "Misogynist! Racist! Homophobe!" and the like. However, the deeper criticism, which we would have undertaken in the Idler against Hofstadter and all his kind (had we not ourselves been waylaid), goes to the heart of "paranoia" itself. Hofstadter's recondite, elaborate and extensive thesis started going wrong, about the first sentence, from its unreflective assumption that paranoia is always and entirely a bad thing. On the contrary, there is such a thing as "healthy paranoia," and we lose sight of it from the moment we agree to use the word only as a pejorative. Sane people can be paranoid, too, and, after all, "Even paranoid people have real enemies." The trick is to keep your paranoia on the leash of reason, for when the reverse happens, the dog is walking the man. But to dispense entirely with the means of detecting ill will and conspiracy in the forces arrayed against us is to become a babe in the woods. Worse, without an imaginative appreciation for the social dimension of paranoia - the way in which it can be communicated from one human vessel to another, until it overflows all round - we are without the means of comprehending the behaviour of mobs, or personal defences against joining in. The opposite of paranoia - naiveté - is not good, either. Or rather, it, too, has its uses and abuses. Somewhere between is Aristotelian good sense. But I doubt the living balancing act is possible without some dark sense of humour, that sees the funny side in terrible things and feels comfortable with self-deprecation. Short of good humour, sanctity might work. Hofstadter, on whom I have been picking a little gratuitously, after all this time, was typical of our modern liberal intelligentsia in having wit, but no humour. The ability to grasp paradox, to see the worst in the best and the best in the worst, was denied to him, probably by his education. That is how, by discerning paranoia in the opposite political camp, he became blind to his own efforts to advance the very same thing in his own. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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