Conspiracy Theory, Anyone?

The movie Anonymous is due out soon. I have already started seeing trailers on TV. That's good, because I haven't had a bizarre conspiracy theory to think about for quite some time. I've worked my way through the Dan Brown Catholic Church conspiracies pretty well by now. I've quit seeing Opus Dei each time I go to the grocery store to buy grape juice. And the birthers have pretty much given up for a while, although with the Republican primaries starting up soon, I expect to hear at least one  candidate call Obama's citizenship into question.  I can hear it now - "No, 9 - 9 - 9 is not bad for the middle class and besides, how would Obama know - he's a Muslim."  I'm pretty sure we did go to the Moon in 1969 and not just to a NASA soundstage in New Mexico. And contrary to what Tommy Lee Jones tells me, I don't think Dennis Rodman is from another galaxy.   

Steven Marche, a former college English professor, writes an interesting article in the NY Times about the movie Anonymous and about conspiracy theories in general. He explains that he wasn't sure if the movie was any good. He spent most of the movie being upset by the absurdities given to justify the original premise: Shakespeare did not write his own plays. He describes a good final exam for a graduate class in Shakespeare would be to have the student find 10 ridiculous things that are stated as facts in the movie. The Oxfordian hypothesis, he writes, is a dead issue. But after this movie comes out, the loonies will come out and play. Despite having no background in English literature or English history, some people will take this seriously.    

I think that is the part that is so frustrating to me. Texas governor Rick Perry, in a recent debate, was talking about how climate change is a fraud perpetrated by scientists to get more funding, then goes on to compare his skepticism to that of Galileo. Come on, Mr. Perry. Really? It is frustrating to me that a denial of science comes so easily to those with no science background whatsoever. They can't explain what Galileo or Newton or Hawking did, but they are sure that their position on climate change and evolution and quantum physics is scientifically valid. And they take the fact that there are constant arguments about each of those to mean that they don't exist. The scientific community has a lot of arguments about how climate change will manifest itself, about the speed of the change, basically all about how it will unfold. But there is almost no argument in the scientific community that climate change is real and needs to be addressed soon.    

Marche sums it up very nicely:   

The Shakespeare controversy, which emerged in the 19th century, was one of the origins of the willful ignorance and insidious false balance that is now rotting away our capacity to have meaningful discussions. The wider public, which has no reason to be familiar with questions of either Renaissance chronology or climate science, assumes that if there are arguments, there must be reasons for those arguments. Along with a right-wing anti-elitism, an unthinking left-wing open-mindedness has also given lunatic ideas soil to grow in. Our politeness has actually led us to believe that everybody deserves a say.

The problem is that not everybody does deserve a say. Just because an opinion exists does not mean that the opinion is worthy of respect. Some opinions deserve to be marginalized and excluded. There are many questions in this world over which rational people can have sensible confrontations: whether lower taxes stimulate or stagnate growth; whether abortion is immoral; whether the ’60s were an achievement or a disaster; whether the universe is motivated by a force for benevolence; whether the Fonz jumping on water skis over a shark was cool or lame. Whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is not one of these questions.     

And neither is climate change or evolution.  I'm just really happy that my brother Alan is retired from teaching Shakespeare courses at SOU; I feel sorry for the instructors next fall who will have a student say, "Well, everybody knows that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays. I mean, that's why they did the movie, right?"