← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Six
Thread ID: 17129 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2005-03-05
2005-03-05 23:40 | User Profile
Aliens: why they are here Bryan Appleyard Scribner, 340pp, ã15.99 ISBN 0743256859
[COLOR=SlateGray]Reviewed by John Gray[/COLOR]
The Martians are always coming, according to Philip K Dick. The prolific and hugely talented science-fiction author was in a disturbed state of mind much of the time towards the end of his life, and by the time he died in 1982 - three months before the release of Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner, which was based on one of his stories - he was undoubtedly crazy. He believed that he was in touch with an extraterrestrial entity he called the Vast Active Living Intelligence System (or Valis), which was communicating with him via an earth-orbiting satellite. In a million-word journal, he recorded his belief that the world was still ruled by the Roman empire and detailed his experience of being under surveillance by the FBI and the KGB.
This is the stuff of paranoid delusion, yet Dick understood better than almost anyone the condition which led him and millions of others to believe that they had been in contact with alien intelligences. Such experiences, he believed, confirm the truth of "the Gnostic Gnosis: you are here in this world in a thrown condition, but you are not of this world".
Ever since the end of the Second World War, there have been sightings of objects flying across the sky in a way no human craft has been known to do, and in recent decades such experiences of extraterrestrial visitation have swelled into reports of alien abduction. Large numbers of seemingly unremarkable and well-balanced people claim to have been removed from the earth by aliens. It would seem that such a perplexing and large-scale phenomenon requires an explanation.
In Aliens: why they are here, Bryan Appleyard outlines three main ways of understanding these reports. The first, which he calls the "nuts and bolts" view, interprets them as accounts of events that actually happened; the spacecraft and their inhabitants are as real as the Tube we take to work, but have somehow escaped scientific observation. The psychosocial view, set out by Carl Jung among others, is that UFOs and their inhabitants are projections of our own minds. The last approach postulates a third realm distinct from our minds and the physical world, which is seen as the point of origin of the aliens who are reported to be visiting us.
Whether they are no-nonsense debun-kers, conspiracy theorists or believers in an occult third realm, those who seek to explain aliens try to reduce them to the terms of ordinary experience. For Appleyard, this gets things the wrong way round: what such phenomena reveal is the mysteriousness of human consciousness. Rather than trying to explain them away, he starts from the undoubted reality of aliens - as he puts it, they "may or may not exist, but they are all around us and they are trying to tell us something". In taking this line, he exposes himself to attack from scientific reductionists, who want an explanation that fits with what they think we understand already. Yet it seems to me that Appleyard's suspension of disbelief is the path of true inquiry. By leaving these anomalous experiences unexplained, he enables us to look at ordinary consciousness in a new light.
Aliens is an invigoratingly sceptical history of one of the most intriguing and important phenomena in postwar culture. It is endlessly fascinating, ranging from academic controversies - such as that surrounding the work of the late John Mack, the Harvard professor of psychiatry who lost favour with the university when he came to think that some reports of alien visitation might have some truth in them - to the prophets of artificial intelligence who predict the emergence of self-conscious mental life in machines. However, Appleyard does much more than offer a fresh take on late 20th-century cultural history. He interprets the postwar experience of alien visitation and abduction as a symptom of an ambivalence in human consciousness: a sense of being at once in and out of the world that seems to have existed as far back as we can go.
In the mid-18th century, the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg described travelling to other planets and meeting Martians, and there is a clear line of descent from the angels and demons encountered in medieval times to the close encounters of recent decades. Alien presences are recognised in virtually all cultures. It is only in the past hundred years or so that they have been ostracised as falling outside the dominant world-view.
Reports of aliens are disturbing because they remind us that our ordinary experience is in many ways highly anomalous. We tend to separate everyday perception from the altered states experienced in dreams, and maintain that the latter are human projections while the former represents the way things really are. The message of cognitive science is rather different. The world we perceive every day is also a human construct, far removed from "things in themselves". We live permanently in a virtual environment, and the question of what actually exists cannot be settled as easily as reductive materialists would have us believe.
Aliens are with us and they are not going away. There can be no adequate explanation of our encounters that does not recognise them as ultimately religious. The need for a connection with non-human things does not disappear when a secular world-view takes over. The sense of not belonging in the world persists in two seemingly contradictory ideas - in the humanist insistence that we are somehow special and unique, and in the belief that we are surrounded by alien intelligences. The question of whether aliens exist is a question about what human beings really are, and lies behind all contemporary debates in which hoary issues of science and religion are being forever rehashed. In Aliens, Appleyard confronts this question directly. The result is a profound meditation on what it means to be human.
John Gray is the author of Heresies: against progress and other illusions (Granta Books, ã8.99)
[url]http://www.newstatesman.com/Bookshop/300000094930[/url]
2005-03-06 01:44 | User Profile
I know 3 guys who say that they believe in extra-terrestrial presence here on earth. All 3 of them are ex-military. I don't believe personally, because extraordinary statements require extraordinary evidence.
2005-03-06 04:32 | User Profile
Many in the UFO-research community are also open-minded to less conventional--and even forbidden--politics as well.
Jeff Rense, for example. He once stuck to "greys" and "chupacabras" but now regularly posts Revisionist and anti-Zionist articles on his heavily visited site... :D
2005-03-06 11:31 | User Profile
[QUOTE]This is the stuff of paranoid delusion, yet Dick understood better than almost anyone the condition which led him and millions of others to believe that they had been in contact with alien intelligences. Such experiences, he believed, confirm the truth of "the Gnostic Gnosis: you are here in this world in a thrown condition, but you are not of this world".[/QUOTE]
No, Dick understood [I]less [/I] than almost anyone about this. I love the guy and find his early stuff brilliant, but he was writing [U]a story a week[/U] during his tyro period in the 50s in large part due to his amphetamine habit, which he didn't give up for decades. You eat speed for 25 years (and add in a few acid trips along the way) and your mental and physical health will atrophy accordingly. All of that UBIK/VALIS stuff he wrote towards the end is just the sad ramblings of a near-total burnout. Obviously, Dick was well-acquainted with the mechanics of paranoia - it permeates all his work - but, like most drug addicts, he couldn't grasp that the drugs were exacerbating the part of him that was already most damaged.
[QUOTE]Ever since the end of the Second World War, there have been sightings of objects flying across the sky in a way no human craft has been known to do, and in recent decades such experiences of extraterrestrial visitation have swelled into reports of alien abduction. Large numbers of seemingly unremarkable and well-balanced people claim to have been removed from the earth by aliens. It would seem that such a perplexing and large-scale phenomenon requires an explanation.[/QUOTE]
But this has been explained, in [B]Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds[/B] by Charles MacKay back in 1841. That people began seeing flying saucers only after the reality of airplanes had given way to the jet...that the all-time high in sightings was the 50s and 60s, amid the dread and uncertainty of both the Cold War and the rapidly-encroaching Space Age ....that there are no sightings of such flying crafts in the 1700s when, incidentally, there was a helluva lot more visibility in the night sky....that the first reports of butt-probing aliens coincidentally began arising after the Kinsey findings were being reported on and causing commotion.....I mean, come [I]on[/I].
I think the flying-saucer craze was a wacky, fun highlight on the roadtrip through the American 20th century, but if it indicates anything, it's that the average American, who had been through war and boom and bust and Depression and war again and then, suddenly, left at the doorstep of mutually assured destruction before he could draw a long breath and come to grips with it, [B]feared [/B] - feared in the pit of his being - this Brave New World that the great powers claimed to be building for his comfort and security. Suddenly, the big wide, multifaceted world had, in a mere decade, shrunk uncomfortably, as military powers had conquered the skies, eradicated barriers of great distance, unleashed the atom - and was now in the process of subdividing the earth between them.
I think that nothing in their own lives, or their own history, adequately prepared people for that Brave New World that was purportedly being built by Science, let alone a Science being given orders by money-hungry Industry and the barking dogs of the Pentagon and State Dept. It wasn't just the world being remodelled, but the way we think about the world that changed. For instance, the actual possibility of it being destroyed by the hand of Man....which up until then had been a fantasy too ridiculous to entertain for the past five millenia. I guess you could say funny things happen to people who "win the war" only to have the things you fought to try to preserve and protect snatched away forever as only the first spoil of "victory". I'm not so sure I wouldn't have looked up at the stars hoping to see alien spaceships [I]myself[/I].
2005-03-06 16:48 | User Profile
Anyone who thinks this sorry little planet is the only place to have life in the vast space of the universe, must have an ego the size of the moon. There are others around, I've seen them and so have a lot of other people I know.
2005-03-06 17:08 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Howard Campbell, Jr.]Many in the UFO-research community are also open-minded to less conventional--and even forbidden--politics as well.
Jeff Rense, for example. He once stuck to "greys" and "chupacabras" but now regularly posts Revisionist and anti-Zionist articles on his heavily visited site... :D[/QUOTE] I had Jeff Rense in the back of my mind when I posted this article. I'm not an alien believer myself, but if the alien phenomenon causes some people to start questioning genuine taboos -- I suppose it's worth something.