Last week’s post, with its uncompromising portrayal of what
descent into a dark age looks like, fielded the usual quota of voices insisting
that it’s different this time. It’s a familiar chorus, and I confess to a
certain wry amusement in watching so many changes get rung on what, after all,
is ultimately a non sequitur. Grant that it’s different this time: so? It’s different every time, and it always has
been, yet those differences have never stopped history’s remarkably diverse
stable of civilizations from plodding down the self-same track toward their
common destiny.
It may also have occurred to my readers, and it has
certainly occurred to me, that the legions of bloggers and pundits who base
their reasonings on the claim that history has nothing to teach us don’t have
to face a constant barrage of comments insisting that it’s the same this time.
“It’s different this time” isn’t simply one opinion among others, after all;
it’s one of the basic articles of faith of the contemporary industrial world,
and questioning it reliably elicits screams of outrage even from those who like
to tell themselves that they’ve rejected the conventional wisdom of the present
day.
Yet that raises another question, one that’s going to bear
down with increasing force in the years ahead of us: just how will people cope
when some of their most cherished beliefs have to face a cage match with
reality, and come out second best?
Such issues are rather on my mind just at the moment.
Regular readers may recall that a while back I published a book, The
UFO Phenomenon, which managed the not inconsiderable feat of
offending both sides of the UFO controversy. It did so by the simple expedient
of setting aside the folk mythology that’s been heaped up with equal enthusiasm
by true believers in extraterrestrial visitation and true believers in today’s
fashionable pseudoskeptical debunkery. After getting past that and a few other
sources of confusion, I concluded that the most likely explanation for the
phenomenon was that US military and intelligence agencies invented it out of
whole cloth after the Second World War, as protective camouflage for an
assortment of then-secret aerospace technologies.
That wasn’t the conclusion I expected to reach when I began
work on the project; I had several other hypotheses in mind, all of which had
to be considerably modified as the research proceeded. It was just too hard not
to notice the way that the typical UFO sightings reported in any given decade
so closely mimicked whatever the US was testing in secret at any given
time—silvery dots or spheres in the late 1940s, when high-altitude balloons
were the latest thing in aerial reconnaissance; points or tiny blobs of light
high in the air in the 1950s, when the U-2 was still top secret; a
phantasmagoria of flying lights and things dropping from the sky in the 1960s,
when the SR-71 and the first spy satellites entered service; black triangles in
the 1980s, when the first stealth aircraft were being tested, and so on. An
assortment of further evidence pointing the same way, not to mention the
significant parallels between the UFO phenomenon and those inflatable tanks and
nonexistent battalions that tricked the Germans into missing the real
preparations for D-Day, were further icing on a saucer-shaped cake.
To call that an unpopular suggestion is to understate the
case considerably, though I’m pleased to say it didn’t greatly hurt sales of
the book. In the years since The
UFO Phenomenon saw print, though, there’s been a steady stream of
declassified documents from US intelligence agencies admitting that, yes, a lot
of so-called UFOs were perfectly identifiable if you happened to know what
classified projects the US government had in the air just then. It turns out,
for example, that roughly half the UFO sightings reported to the Air Force’s
Project Blue Book between 1952 and 1969 were CIA spyplanes; the officers in
charge of Blue Book used to call the CIA when sightings came in, and issue
bogus “explanations” to provide cover for what was, at the time, a top secret
intelligence project. I have no reason to think that the publication of
The UFO Phenomenon had anything to do with the release of all
this data, but it was certainly a welcome confirmation of my analysis.
The most recent bit of confirmation hit the media a few
weeks back. Connoisseurs of UFO history know that the Scandinavian countries
went through a series of major “flaps”—periods in which many UFO sightings
occured in a short time—in the 1950s and 1960s. The latest round of
declassified data confirmed that these
were sightings of US spyplanes snooping on the Soviet Union. The
disclosures didn’t happen to mention whether CIA assets also spread lurid
accounts of flying saucer sightings and alien visitations to help muddy the
waters. My hypothesis is that that’s what was going on all the way through the
history of the UFO phenomenon: fake stories and, where necessary, faked
sightings kept public attention fixated on a manufactured mythology of flying
saucers from outer space, so that the signal of what was actually happening
never made it through the noise.
Many of my readers will already have guessed how the two
sides of the UFO controversy responded to the disclosures just mentioned: by and large, they haven’t responded to them
at all. Believers in the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs are still insisting at
the top of their lungs that some day very soon, the US government will be
forced to ‘fess up to the reality of alien visitation—yes, I field emails from
such people regularly. Believers in the null hypothesis, the claim that all UFO
sightings result from hoaxes, illusions, or misidentification of ordinary
phenomena, are still rehashing the same old arguments when they haven’t gone
off to play at being skeptical about something else. That’s understandable, as
both sides have ended up with substantial amounts of egg on their face.
Mind you, the believers in the extraterrestrial hypothesis
were right about a great many more things than their rivals, and they deserve
credit for that. They were right, for example, that people really were seeing
unusual things in the skies; they were right that there was a coverup
orchestrated by the US government, and that the Air Force was handing out
explanations that it knew to be fake; they were even right in guessing that the
Groom Lake airfield in Nevada, the legendary “Area 51,” was somehow central to
the mystery—that was the main US spyplane testing and training base straight
through the decades when the UFO mystery was at its peak. The one thing they
got wrong was the real origin of the UFO phenomenon, but for them,
unfortunately, that was the one thing that mattered.
The believers in the null hypothesis don’t have much reason
to cheer, even though they turned out to be right about that one point. The
disclosures have shown with uncomfortable clarity that a good many of the
explanations offered by UFO skeptics were actually nonsense, just as their
opponents had been pointing out all along. In 1981, for example, Philip Klass,
James Oberg, and Robert Sheaffer claimed that they’d identified all the
cases that Project Blue Book labeled as
“unknown.” As it happens, they did nothing of the kind; what they actually did
was offer untested ad hoc hypotheses to explain away the unknowns, which is not
exactly the same thing. It hardly needs to be said that CIA spyplanes played no
part in those explanations, and if the “unknown” cases contained the same
proportion of spyplanes as the whole collection, as seems likely, roughly half
their explanations are wrong—a point that doesn’t exactly do much to inspire
confidence in other claims made on behalf of the debunking crusade.
So it’s not surprising that neither side in the controversy
has had the least interest in letting all this new data get in the way of
keeping up the old argument. The usual human reaction to cognitive dissonance
is to exclude the information that’s causing the dissonance, and that’s
precisely what both sides, by and large, have done. As the dissonance builds,
to be sure, people on the fringes of both scenes will quiely take their leave,
new recruits will become few and far between, and eventually surviving
communities of believers and debunkers alike will settle into a common pattern
familiar to any of my readers familiar with Spiritualist churches, Marxist
parties, or the flotsam left behind by the receding tide of other once-influential
movements in American society: little circles of true believers fixated on the
disputes of an earlier day, hermetically sealed against the disdain and
disinterest of the wider society.
They have the freedom to do that, because the presence or
absence of alien saucers in Earth’s skies simply doesn’t have that much of an
impact on everyday life. Like Spiritualists or Marxists, believers in alien
contact and their debunking foes by and large can avoid paying more than the
most cursory attention to the failure of their respective crusades. The
believers can take comfort in the fact that even in the presence of
overwhelming evidence, it’s notoriously hard to prove a negative; the debunkers
can take comfort in the fact that, however embarrassing their logical lapses
and rhetorical excesses, at least they were right about the origins of the
phenomenon.
That freedom isn’t always available to those on the losing
side of history. It’s not that hard to keep the faith if you aren’t having your
nose rubbed in the reality of your defeat on a daily basis, but it’s quite
another matter to cope with the ongoing, overwhelming disconfirmation of
beliefs on which you’ve staked your pride, your values, and your sense of
meaning and purpose in life. What would life be like these days for the vocal
UFO debunkers of recent decades, say, if the flying saucers had turned out to
be alien spacecraft after all, the mass saucer landing on the White House lawn
so often and so vainly predicted had finally gotten around to happening, and
Philip Klass and his fellow believers in the null hypothesis had to field
polite requests on a daily basis to have their four-dimensional holopictures
taken by giggling, gray-skinned tourists from Zeta Reticuli?
For a living example of the same process at work, consider
the implosion of the New Age scene that’s well under way just now. In the years before the 2008 crash, as my
readers will doubtless remember, tens of thousands of people plunged into real
estate speculation with copies of Rhonda Byrne’s meretricious The Secret
or similar works of New Age pseudophilosophy clutched in their sweaty hands,
convinced that they knew how to make the universe make them rich. I knew a fair
number of them—Ashland, Oregon, where I lived at the time, had a large and
lucrative New Age scene—and so I had a ringside seat as their pride went before
the real estate market’s fall. That was a huge blow to the New Age movement,
and it was followed in short order by the self-inflicted humiliation of the
grand nonevent of December 21, 2012.
Those of my readers who don’t happen to follow trends in the
publishing industry may be interested to know that sales of New Age books
peaked in 2007 and have been plunging since then; so has the take from New Age
seminars, conferences, and a galaxy of other products hawked under the same
label. There hadn’t been any shortage of disconfirmations in the previous
history of the New Age scene, to be sure, but these two seem to have been just
that little bit more than most of the movement’s adherents can gloss over. No
doubt the New Age movement will spawn its share of little circles of true
believers—the New Thought movement, which was basically the New Age’s previous
incarnation, did exactly that when it imploded at the end of the 1920s, and many
of those little circles ended up contributing to the rise of the New Age
decades later—but as a major cultural phenomenon, it’s circling the drain.
One of the central themes of this blog, in turn, is that an
embarrassment on much this same scale waits for all those who’ve staked their
pride, their values, and their sense of meaning and purpose in life on the
belief that it’s different this time, that our society somehow got an exemption
from the common fate of civilizations. If industrial society ends up following
the familiar arc of decline and fall into yet another dark age, if all the
proud talk about man’s glorious destiny among the stars turns out to be empty
wind, if we don’t even get the consolation prize of a downfall cataclysmic
enough to drag the rest of the planet down with us—what then?
I’ve come to think that’s what lies behind the steady
drumbeat of emails and comments I field week after week insisting that it’s
different this time, that it has to be different this time, and clutching at
the most remarkable assortment of straws in an attempt to get me to agree with
them that it’s different this time. That increasingly frantic chorus has many
sources, but much of it is, I believe, a response to a simple fact: most of the promises made by authoritative
voices in contemporary industrial society about the future we’re supposed to
get have turned out to be dead wrong.
Given the number of people who like to insist that every
technological wet dream will eventually be fulfilled, it’s worth taking the
time to notice just how poorly earlier rounds of promises have measured up to
the inflexible yardstick of reality. Of
all the gaudy and glittering technological breakthroughs that have been
promised with so much confidence over the last half dozen decades or so, from
cities on the Moon and nuclear power too cheap to meter straight through
to120-year lifespans and cures for cancer and the common cold, how many have
actually panned out? Precious few. Meanwhile most measures of American public
health are slipping further into Third World territory with every year that
passes, our national infrastructure is sinking into a morass of malign neglect,
and the rising curve of prosperity that was supposed to give every American
acces to middle class amenities has vanished in a haze of financial fraud,
economic sclerosis, and official statistics so blatantly faked that only the
media pretends to believe them any more.
For many Americans these days, furthermore, those broken
promises have precise personal equivalents. A great many of the people who were
told by New Age authors that they could get rich easily and painlessly by
visualizing abundance while investing in dubious real estate ventures found out
the hard way that believing those promises amounted to being handed a one-way
nonstop ticket to poverty. A great many of the people who were told by equally
respected voices that they would attain financial security by mortgaging their
futures for the benefit of a rapacious and corrupt academic industry and its
allies in the banking sphere are finding out the same thing about the
reassuring and seemingly authoritative claims that they took at face
value. For that matter, I wonder how
many American voters feel they benefited noticeably from the hope and change
that they were promised by the sock puppet they helped put into the White House
in 2008 and 2012.
The promises that framed the housing bubble, the student
loan bubble, and the breathtaking cynicism of Obama’s campaign, after all, drew
on the same logic and the same assumptions that guided all that grand and
vaporous talk about the inevitability of cities on the Moon and commuting by
jetpack. They all assumed that history is a one-way street that leads from
worse to better, to more, bigger, louder, gaudier, and insisted that of course
things would turn out that way. Things haven’t turned out that way, they aren’t
turning out that way, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that things aren’t
going to turn out that way any time this side of the twelfth of Never. I’ve
noted here several times now that if you want to predict the future, paying
attention to the reality of ongoing decline pretty reliably gives you
better results than trusting that the decline won’t continue in its current
course.
The difficulty with
that realization, of course, is precisely that so many people have staked their
pride, their values, and their sense of meaning and purpose in life on one or
another version of the logic I’ve just sketched out. Admitting that the world
is under no compulsion to change in the direction they think it’s supposed to
change, that it’s currently changing in a direction that most people find
acutely unwelcome, and that there are good reasons to think the much-ballyhooed
gains of the recent past were the temporary products of the reckless overuse of
irreplaceable energy resources, requires the surrender of a deeply and
passionately held vision of time and human possibility. Worse, it lands those
who do so in a situation uncomfortably close to the crestfallen former UFO
debunkers I joked about earlier in this post, having to cope on an everyday
basis with a world full of flying saucers and tourists from the stars.
Beneath the farcical dimensions of that image lies a
sobering reality. Human beings can’t live for long without some source of
values and some sense of meaning in their lives. That’s why people respond to cognitive
dissonance affecting their most cherished values by shoving away the unwelcome
data so forcefully, even in the teeth of the evidence. Resistance to cognitive
dissonance has its limits, though, and when people have their existing sources
of meaning and value swept away by a sufficiently powerful flood of
contradictions, they will seek new sources of meaning and value wherever they
can find them—no matter how absurd, dysfunctional, or demonic those new
meanings and values might look to an unsympathetic observer. The mass suicide of the members of the Heaven’s
Gate UFO cult in 1997 offers one measure of just how far astray those quests
for new sources of meaning can go; so, on a much larger scale, does the
metastatic nightmare of Nazi Germany.
I wrote in an
earlier post this month about the implosion of the sense of political
legitimacy that’s quietly sawing the props out from underneath the US federal
government, and convincing more and more Americans that the people who claim to
represent and govern them are a pack of liars and thieves. So broad and deep a loss of legitimacy is
political dynamite, and normally results within no very long a time frame in
the collapse of the government in question. There are no guarantees, though,
that whatever system replaces a delegitimzed government will be any better.
