I've worked my way through this thread with interest over the last few days.
As a teenager in the 1970s, I read several of the "ancient astronaut" type books with a sort of suspended disbelief. They were presented as factual and I sort of half believed them because I was so naive that I did not think someone would deliberately present fiction as fact.
I'm now going to go on a bit of a diversion and then come back to the ancient aliens:
Racism: I think it is inappropriate to apply modern ideas of racism to something that was a product of an earlier era.
Even today, we use "racism" to include everything on a spectrum from outdated jokes based on racial stereotypes, through to violent attacks on people from other races. We also wrongly assume that we know exactly what we mean by "race". Finally, many people tacitly assume that only white people can be racist.
The truth is far more complex.
When critiquing books written decades ago, it is perhaps fairer to use a more neutral term than "racism" and consider
how the writer was influenced by contemporary preconceptions based on race.
The first big mistake. White Europeans and north Americans have historically considered themselves to be sophisticated, successful, advanced, and, in general, superior to other races.
They reached this conclusion by measuring their own status and achievements against things that are important to white European and north American society: things like democracy, Christianity, architecture, literature, classical music, style of clothing.
In short, "Anyone who has the things we value most is best, and we have the things we value most, so we're the best." A sort of circular reasoning.
If you base your assessment on these factors, then the tribal society with an unelected chieftain, which follows an animistic religion, lives in mud huts, has no system of writing, chants songs accompanied only by a drum, and wears penis gourds, is likely to be adjudged "primitive".
This could be turned around and caricatured by looking at the bad things that our society has produced and saying, "Look at how savage the natives are: they haven't even developed gunpowder, bombs, or an international slave trade."
The second big mistake that we in the white west have often made is to lose our sense of proportion and historical context. We have only had the things we value most for a short time.
A mere 1,000 years ago, Saxon Britain was primitive by modern standards.
2,000 years ago, the Romans produced architecture and plumbing which was then more or less forgotten and became "impossible" in most parts of the former empire for centuries.
Before that, the Greeks invented sophisticated philosophy and mathematics which were largely forgotten from the time of the fall of Rome through to the renaissance.
If 'we" have had these dark periods of primitive savagery following periods of sophistication and enlightenment, why should we assume that the people we now consider to be "primitive" were not once (in our terms) sophisticated and enlightened?
That is only tangentially about "race". I say that because it is not
necessarily to do with colour or ethnicity, but more to do with geography: the people who occupy a given place now have lived in mud huts for centuries; how could their ancestors possibly have built elaborate finely engineered structures? Ergo, as it can't have been them, it it certainly wasn't us, it must have been, er... aliens.
The third big mistake is to apply modern attitudes to ancient peoples.
An Englishman putting up a long fence in his garden may choose to hire a mini digger, a skip, and a petrol powered Earth auger. He will work long hours to earn the money to hire these labour saving devices and never see the irony.
A builder repointing a chimney stack will use a powered cement mixer, and probably work from a scaffold tower. The joiner working elsewhere on site will use a £200 electric screwdriver because it is quicker than a £5 manual screwdriver. The site foreman will do a written health and safety assessment. Everything is geared towards a small number of people using sophisticated equipment to do a job quickly and safely.
This is a comparatively recent development. Only just over 100 years ago, we sent young men of working age walking across muddy fields into machine gun fire. Determination and weight of numbers were sufficient to achieve an objective, and life was cheap — at least for the leaders.
Now look back to when the pyramids were built, or Stonehenge, or any other putative "product of ancient aliens". It was probably a time when determination and weight of numbers were sufficient to achieve an objective and life was cheap — at least for the leaders.
So the proponents of the ancient astronaut hypothesis are making three mistakes:
- They are generally judging others according to their own preconceptions about what is "advanced" or "primitive".
- They are ignoring the fact that our own history has had enormous ups and downs in terms of technology and culture, and that other peoples' histories may well have done the same.
- They are in effect saying, "You'd need the biggest modern cranes to build that," forgetting that machinery and technology are only one approach to fulfilling major projects.
His work had a LOT of stupidity in it!
