Oct 20, 2020 10:20 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 20, 2020 10:45 PM by C C.)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-...g-saucers/
EXCERPT (Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft): . . . In his new book The Unidentified, Colin Dickey asks what happens when people go further than I did — when they see or hear something move in the water, perhaps take a blurry photograph, and enter the world of fringe thinking. The Unidentified is a thoughtful, searching book about people’s deep investment in unexplained phenomena, about how flying saucers, Sasquatches, and lake creatures are strung together on a thread of desire. As I read it, I traveled back to that moment at Loch Ness and asked myself why I, the son of a historian and an anthropologist, the product of a skeptical subculture, stared at the dark water and felt tempted to believe.
One of the epigraphs to The Unidentified comes from primatologist John Napier’s 1972 book Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality: “It is simple enough to apply reason to what is reasonable, but it is much more difficult to argue logically about the illogical.” For me, this quotation recalls a scene from the annals of Jewish studies. Gershom Scholem, the historian of Jewish mysticism, was about to give a talk on the Merkabah (Ezekiel’s chariot and its journey to the throne of God) at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. His introducer, Talmud scholar Saul Lieberman, a skeptic about the subject, ushered him onstage with these words: “Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is a very important science.” In other words, history (or anthropology or any other interpretive field) can make sense of human practices that seem, on their surface, nonsensical. This sense-making is a significant part of what interpretive social scientists do when they sit down to write.
Similarly, you could say that there are two types of work on unexplained phenomena: those chiefly concerned with whether or not Bigfoot is real, and those that ask why the first class of work exists in the first place. The Unidentified is the latter kind of work, a detective story whose quarry is not aliens or cryptids but a particular logic of belief. These beliefs are widely shared among Americans, incidentally. A 2018 Chapman University survey suggests that 41 percent of us believe that aliens have visited this planet, perhaps as described in Erich von Däniken’s well-known (and thoroughly debunked) 1968 book Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past. Some 57 percent said yes to Atlantis — that is, to the existence of ancient civilizations beyond our ken. And Bigfoot’s existence went from 13 percent in a prior survey to 21 percent in 2018. Fringe belief edges toward minority report.
You don’t have to be a big believer in the power of survey data to see that behind the monster stands meaning. Belief in the existence of monsters, Dickey explains, rarely starts with a chance observation in the woods. It requires psychological preparation...
[...] one answer to the question “Why look at flying saucers...” The physical world contains mysteries once again. According to one story commonly told about secularization, that process doesn’t involve the mere retreat of religious faith among the general public but rather the persistence of religious attitudes even in our beliefs about the physical world. You could argue that progress narratives about technology, including the fringe belief in an imminent technological “singularity,” are nothing but the old eschatology wearing new chrome. ... The trouble with reenchantment, though, is that it lives next door to darker kinds of fantasy. “Finding meaning” can easily slip into paranoia. Some believers go too far, committing acts of violence in response to the conspiracies they imagine behind every door... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT (Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft): . . . In his new book The Unidentified, Colin Dickey asks what happens when people go further than I did — when they see or hear something move in the water, perhaps take a blurry photograph, and enter the world of fringe thinking. The Unidentified is a thoughtful, searching book about people’s deep investment in unexplained phenomena, about how flying saucers, Sasquatches, and lake creatures are strung together on a thread of desire. As I read it, I traveled back to that moment at Loch Ness and asked myself why I, the son of a historian and an anthropologist, the product of a skeptical subculture, stared at the dark water and felt tempted to believe.
One of the epigraphs to The Unidentified comes from primatologist John Napier’s 1972 book Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality: “It is simple enough to apply reason to what is reasonable, but it is much more difficult to argue logically about the illogical.” For me, this quotation recalls a scene from the annals of Jewish studies. Gershom Scholem, the historian of Jewish mysticism, was about to give a talk on the Merkabah (Ezekiel’s chariot and its journey to the throne of God) at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. His introducer, Talmud scholar Saul Lieberman, a skeptic about the subject, ushered him onstage with these words: “Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is a very important science.” In other words, history (or anthropology or any other interpretive field) can make sense of human practices that seem, on their surface, nonsensical. This sense-making is a significant part of what interpretive social scientists do when they sit down to write.
Similarly, you could say that there are two types of work on unexplained phenomena: those chiefly concerned with whether or not Bigfoot is real, and those that ask why the first class of work exists in the first place. The Unidentified is the latter kind of work, a detective story whose quarry is not aliens or cryptids but a particular logic of belief. These beliefs are widely shared among Americans, incidentally. A 2018 Chapman University survey suggests that 41 percent of us believe that aliens have visited this planet, perhaps as described in Erich von Däniken’s well-known (and thoroughly debunked) 1968 book Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past. Some 57 percent said yes to Atlantis — that is, to the existence of ancient civilizations beyond our ken. And Bigfoot’s existence went from 13 percent in a prior survey to 21 percent in 2018. Fringe belief edges toward minority report.
You don’t have to be a big believer in the power of survey data to see that behind the monster stands meaning. Belief in the existence of monsters, Dickey explains, rarely starts with a chance observation in the woods. It requires psychological preparation...
[...] one answer to the question “Why look at flying saucers...” The physical world contains mysteries once again. According to one story commonly told about secularization, that process doesn’t involve the mere retreat of religious faith among the general public but rather the persistence of religious attitudes even in our beliefs about the physical world. You could argue that progress narratives about technology, including the fringe belief in an imminent technological “singularity,” are nothing but the old eschatology wearing new chrome. ... The trouble with reenchantment, though, is that it lives next door to darker kinds of fantasy. “Finding meaning” can easily slip into paranoia. Some believers go too far, committing acts of violence in response to the conspiracies they imagine behind every door... (MORE - details)
