But still...
In one of those weird and brilliant essays in which De Quincey makes the performative case for opium addiction (if it makes you as great a writer as De Quincey, why not?), “Secret Societies,” De Quincey claimed that at the age of seven (an important age for de Quincey – the age when his father died, and the age when he started dreaming vividly), he was introduced to the literature on secret societies – specifically, the dreaded Illuminati – by a thirty four year old woman. This woman keeps popping up – she pops up in the Confessions too. Her name was Lady Carberry, she was a friend of his mothers, and she floats above De Quincey’s career as a sort of guardian angel – or, devil. She loaned him Abbe Barruel’s Memoires pour servir a l’histoire du Jacobinisme. Barruel’s book, according to Patrick Bridgewater (De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade) had an effect on Shelley too. Shelley, the atheist, took heart in the idea of a vast fellowship working to overthrow the tyranny of organized religion. For De Quncey, it was another matter. Barruel’s story had a certain, well, addictive air – it seemed at once something to believe in that would render one both a knower and a marginal - and something that shocked logic.
“But, however much or often I might vault over the limits of propriety, or might seem to challenge both her and the Abbé—all this was but anxiety to reconcile my own secret belief in the Abbé, with the arguments for not believing; it was but the form assumed by my earnest desire to see how the learned gentlemen could be right, whom my intense faith certified beyond all doubt to be so, and whom, equally, my perverse logical recusancy whispered to be continually in the wrong.”
De Quincey was an exemplary early consumer addict: not only for opium, but for books, which he spent inordinate amounts on, pauperizing himself as a result. And the Abbé was impersonated, or personated, in the four of a four volume series — which made him all the more credible.
De Quincey was particularly and morbidly fascinated by Barruel’s use of a disease metaphor that has perennially clung to the conspiracy discourse: that secret societies were a cancer.
“I had already Latin enough to know that cancer meant a crab; and that the disease so appalling to a child’s imagination, which in English we call a cancer, as soon as it has passed beyond the state of an indolent scirrhous tumour, drew its name from the horrid claws, or spurs, or roots, by which it connected itself with distant points running underground, as it were, baffling detection, and defying radical extirpation.”
The mutation of a secret society into this image, and image credentialled by philology – and who am I to blame this kind of reasoning? – enhanced the satanic prestige of the secret society, the Illuminati, that was working towards the overthrow of the good.
But there is a problem. De Quincey, at seven, asks the right questions: ‘Then, also, when wickedness was so easy, why did people take all this trouble to be wicked? The how and the why were alike incomprehensible to me.” The very “success” of the Illuminati in overthrowing Christianity puts in doubt its method – for it seems a very costly way to achieve a wicked end when we are all so wicked that this is just what we want.
De Quincey, in the age of Q, the Twitter extreme right, the emergence of ridiculous German “nobles” seeking to seize the government, etc. – is a very timely writer. I’ve always found the idea that there is something discrediting in “conspiracy theory” ridiculous: of course people can work in secret to an illegal end. This has been recognized in law and fact. “Conspiracy theory” as a phrase of derogation is used by establishment figures who have blandly accepted and acted on conspiracy theories – such as that of the “worldwide communist conspiracy” (or the Islamicist conspiracy, etc.) – without question. You can’t understand the Cold War or the Post Cold War without tackling the issue of conspiracy, and trying to sort through what conspiracies are correct (for instance, the conspiracy put into practice by the CIA to overthrow governments from Guatemala to Iran) and those that are bogus (an exercise I leave to the reader).
This reading, though, fatally ignores the libidinous pleasure of both conspiring and discovering conspiracy. No history of human doings can afford to ignore human desires, the taxonomy of which lags far behind the practices they promote. And so it is with De Quincey’s gothic conservatism.
“The mysteriousness to me of men becoming partners (and by no means sleeping partners) in a society of which they had never heard, - or, again, of one fellow standing at the beginning of a century, and stretching out his hand as an accomplice towards another fellow standing at the end of it, without either having known of the other’s existence, -- all that did but sharpen the interest of wonder that gathered about the general economy of Secret Societies. Tertullian’s profession of believing things, not in spite of being impossible, but simply because they were impossible, is not the extravagance that most people suppose it. There is a deep truth in it. Many are the things which, in proportion as they attract the highest modes of belief, discover a tendency to repel belief on that part of the scale which is governed by the lower understanding. And here, as so often elsewhere, the axiom with respect to extremes meeting manifests its subtle presence. The highest form of the incredible is sometimes the initial form of the credible.”
A liberalism that believes it is shed of conspiracy theory is a liberalism of gulls. De Quincey’s essay is an oddly pertinent – perhaps semipiternally pertinent – text.
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