Samuel Johnson and Dwight Macdonald on why people believe conspiracy theories

Because they can make them make sense

“The premier English literary figure of the mid and late 18th century,” according to the Poetry Foundation, Samuel Johnson “was a writer of exceptional range: a poet, a lexicographer, a translator, a journalist and essayist, a travel writer, a biographer, an editor, and a critic.” Dwight Macdonald was a leading American political writer in the mid-twentieth century. His words, taken from James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and MacDonald’s description of the conspiracists of his own day appeared as an appendix to his essay “A Critique of the Warren Report,” published in Discriminations: Essays and Afterthoughts, 1938-1974.

I.

At dinner with his biographer Boswell in 1763 at an inn called the Mitre, Johnson argued that one could easily be wrongly skeptical with apparent good reason. (I follow Macdonald in putting in italics what seem to be Johnson’s stating of the objections.)

“It is always easy to be on the negative side. If a man were now to deny that there is salt upon the table, you could not reduce him to absurdity.

Come, let us try this a little further. I deny that Canada is taken and I can support my argument by pretty good arguments. The French are a much more numerous people than we, and it is not likely that they would allow us to take it.”

“But the Ministry have assured us, in all the formality of The Gazette that it is taken.”

“Very true. But the ministry have put us to an enormous expense by the war in America and it is to their interest to persuade us that we have got something for our money.”

“But the fact is confirmed by thousands of men who were at the taking of it.”

“Aye, but these men still have some interest in deceiving us. They don’t want you to think the French have beat them.

“Now suppose you should go over and find that Canada is really taken. That would satisfy only yourself, for when you come home, we will not believe you. We will say you have been bribed. Yet, sir, notwithstanding all these plausible objections, we have no doubt that Canada is really ours.”

And according to the history books, Wolfe had beaten Montcalm long before that dinner at the Mitre, and Canada had, in fact, been “taken” by the British despite all historical probabilities.

II.

The greatest believers in a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy were “the young and/or alienated,” Macdonald noted. They believed people like Mark Lane, a popular speaker who saw a conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy. They

have developed an instinctive mistrust — almost a reflex below the conscious level — of the American Establishment that seizes on every contradiction, obscurity, and mistake in a most complex, murky, and bungled affair as a feedback justifying their initial prejudice. . . .

To their suspicions of the Ruling Class was added a habituation to Marxist historical determinism that made it impossible for them to take seriously the hypothesis that an isolated oddball had killed the President of the United States for his own personal, cranky, and utterly ahistorical reasons.

Macdonald explains in a footnote:

That few of them had probably read much, if any, of Marx is irrelevant. As Joyce and Eliot shaped our literary tastes by diffusion in the postwar cultural atmosphere, so to speak, whether we read them or not, so with Marx and the liberals in the same period: they breathed in his system through their pores.

It was in the 1930–1960 air: History is an understandable working out of the conflict, dialectically progressive, between large, dignified, and abstract forces, and is definitely not a chancy game in which small, trivial individuals can absurdly and accidentally affect the outcome.

So “of course” there “must have been” something, or somebody, serious behind Oswald. Else History makes no sense (which, by the way, it doesn’t). So the Mark Lanes were listened to respectfully as shamans whose magic assimilated smoothly into the Marxist tribal beliefs a discordant, threatening event.

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