In the time of the breaking of nations...

A few months ago, I suggested that there would be at least one serious attempt on Mr.Bush's life. I can see that I have been slow, but now I realize the point of his choice of running mate. It is to protect his life. If anyone kills him, they will be saddled with Cheney as President.

A historical-psychological note: how conspiracy theories arise

A couple of days ago, I reported on the worrying trends among the orthodox rebels in the American Catholic Church. One thing I mentioned was the unlovely sympathy of at least one or two writers in the Roman Catholic Faithful newsletter for Lefebvrite schismatics and their paranoid view of the world (e.g. Popes John XXIII and Paul VI were Communist sympathizers). Thinking about it, I think this has a bearing on the issue of how conspiracy theories come to be.

Roman Catholic Faithful arose, as a group, in areas where the intellectual and ritual malfeasance of the "liberal" infiltrators in the Catholic Church had reached epidemic proportion. The experience of genuine Catholics in those dioceses was of trying to push against a rubber wall, that always snapped back the harder you fought against it. It can, without fear of exaggeration, be described as an experience of persecution and conspiracy: those in power - parish priests, diocesan bureaucrats, vicars, bishops - coming together to deny the man-in-the-pew what was due to them as Catholics; and nowhere for genuine Catholics to turn, for the authorities just reinforced each other and excluded any opportunity of reform or even of orthodox practice (orthodox priests from before the era of current management were got rid of one way or another, and notoriously orthodox congregations left without a priest or even closed with the excuse of a "vocations crisis" which the establishment itself had engineered). No doubt the generation in power did not regard this sort of thing as a conspiracy, just as vigorous executive action to enforce a progressive attitude. But try telling that to the person who cannot even get a hearing!

So the founders of Roman Catholic Faithful experience something which is, from their point of view, pretty indistinguishable from a conspiracy. They feel smothered by a group of men in power who work hand in glove with each other to force on them things they do not want and deny them even the shadow of justice. Then it develops. These rebellious faithful go to Rome; and for some reason or another they are disappointed. And they come to believe what their own enemies have told them (I quote)): "Rome will let ten thousand priests be shot rather than hurt one bishop." It is nonsense, of course. But they have had such an experience of constant rejection and ignoring that they take it seriously.

What happens to the mind of these people? That they project backwards, into an imagined past, the conspiracy which they feel to exist (and which, in some manner, does exist - at least as a convergence of interests and beliefs that leaves no space for opposition) in the present. They feel that if a conspiracy exists, then it was born as a conspiracy. They do not realize that it is often objective conditions that lead to such convergences of interests and beliefs. And they do not believe that, in so far conspiracies may have existed, they may have been penny-ante items taking place locally, not vast things that involve the world. This is part of a patter of historical ignorance. To them, the Church at present is what they experience, there and then, in Springfield or Rochester or Albany; but the Church in the past is the Church of the Popes, one single entity existing in Rome. Thus they assume that the current state of their diocese has a chain of origins that begins in Rome. They ignore purely local factors: they know nothing of how their church was fifty or a hundred years ago, or how certain local events in places such as New York or Philadelphia may have affected them.

But the basic element is the retrojection of present experience into the past. This is how conspiracy theories are born. It is an aspect of a greater feature of human thought, that events always create their own prehistory in people's minds. Like those interpretations of Russian or German history where everything concurs to the ultimate result of Communism or Nazism. It is a state of mind that I find inimical to good history, but there are a lot of historians who consciously or unconsciously cultivate it.

I think I've got Tony Blair figured out.

It has taken ten years for me to understand the so-and-so; and (as was to be expected) it was religion that gave me the clue. Tony Blair has just promoted one Ruth Kelly, a universally respected junior minister, who just happens, however, to be a devout Catholic, a member of Opus Dei, and to have managed her last few years' work at the Treasury (which is reputed to be brilliant) during a nearly continuous pregnancy - she had four children in six years. Clearly not a person who regards contraception or abortion highly.

This drew my attention to Blair's religious attitude. Blair's wife and children are Catholic and reputedly devout. He goes to church with them and has actually been present at a private ceremony with the Pope (although I cannot believe the rumour that the Pope let him take Communion as well - that would be in violation of umpteen-squinchy Church laws about schism). At the same time, he is a strong supporter of abortion and half-a-dozen other causes that do not resonate well with Catholic doctrine or spirituality. Yet he goes on the same way. For seven years or more he has done this constant double act, appearing in Catholic churches every sunday, the picture of devotion, fuelling rumours that he is about to convert, but sticking to a policy that pleases neither the moralist conservative wing of the Church (who notice with distaste his continued support for abortion and such things) nor the socially-minded "liberal" area, which regards his privatizing and big-business-friendly policies with disgust. (Some of us orthodox, such as yours truly, are not too enamoured with them either.)

Shall I tell you what Tony Blair is? He is a flirt. He is the male version of what the English call a prickteaser. The difference between a flirt and a tart is that the flirt has no intention of actually doing anything. He or she is always dropping hints, always leading people on, because leading people on is what s/he does. If you want an example of a flirt at work, just follow the agonizing saga of the succession continuously promised and continuously denied to Gordon Brown (no wonder the Chancellor of the Exchequer is supposed to be brooding and jealous; that is exactly the attitude of the victim of a flirt). His flirting is not, in the main, sexual (although his popularity among women has always baffled me), but it certainly is in every other way the exact picture of the worst, most agonizing, most heartless leader-on of lovers.