Alien Abduction
Alien abductions, visitations, ancient aliens … people really love to believe that we’re not alone. People do still believe in this kind of thing, but it feels like the heyday was back in the 60s and 70s. Maybe I’m just not tapped into the credulous community, though. Looking on reddit, r/abductions has about the same number of subscribers as r/antivax. There are alien abduction pages/groups on facebook with thousands or tens of thousands of fans, but antivax pages on facebook tend to have hundreds of thousands of followers. Antivax is much more popular on facebook.What I’m saying is, it feels like the alien wannabes are more in the past.
Of course, a year ago I would’ve said the same thing about flat earth nonsense, and look where we are now. Anyway.
Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, spent a lot of time dealing with alien abductions. It deals with other stuff, too, but he wrote it in response to the pseudoscience and myths that he encountered as a science educator in the 70s and 80s (Demon-Haunted World was published in 95, a year before Sagan’s death). Really, the book’s purpose is to discuss scientific methods and how they can be used to suss out junk science and pseudoscience in real life. He just used things like alien abductions and alien visitations as examples for how to apply tools in his baloney-detection kit.
Man, he was neat.
Anyway, alien abductions/visitations. We’ll save ancient aliens/astronauts for later. Ever since we started sending stuff into outer space, people have been talking about getting harassed by aliens. Oddly, no one talked about getting visited by aliens before that. However, they did talk about getting harassed by angels, demons, ghosts, saints, elves… In other words, people have always been talking about visitations.
Alien abduction/visitation believers say that pre-20th century folk who talked about angels and the like were talking about aliens, they just didn’t know about outer space and were putting it in terms of stuff they understood. Meanwhile, a lot of religious folk say that alien abduction folks are getting fooled by demons. Either way, we’re probably talking about the same phenomenon; is it sci-fi or fantasy? Well, it’s fiction regardless.
You might be surprised to learn that we have documentation of angel/demon visitations going back centuries. Demon-Haunted World is a good resource for this; Sagan talks about it a bit. And they really do sound like the alien abduction/visitation stories we get today. The visitors all look more or less human, just with dream-like distortions. They might be weirdly tall and thin, they might be short with huge eyes. Only rarely are they truly weird.
Another common feature of these visitations is that the visitors bring messages. For a while there, aliens were warning people to avoid war. Then they were warning people to avoid nuclear war. Then they started warning people about global warming. Ancient angels (or demons, or the Virgin Mary…) had warnings for people, too.
Oddly, the warnings these visitors delivered are always incredibly parochial. They never warn people about things before we’ve already discovered them. People weren’t getting warnings about nuclear weapons in the 20s. We didn’t start getting warnings about global warming until after it became a hot topic in the press. The little girl who got a visitation from the Virgin Mary in the 1400s got a warning about going to church and making sure to tithe. No warnings about the coming plague, no hints about how to build a good sanitation system, or city walls that can withstand cannon-fire…
That is to say, despite being representatives of a hyper-advanced technical civilization or magical beings from another plane of existence, these visitors never give any information people don’t already have. They never give warnings about problems people haven’t already discovered for themselves.
In short, these beings seem very, very limited.
And that’s a big part of why it’s not reasonable to believe that any sort of visitation/abduction is happening. The other part is that these events always occur when a person is asleep. That is, they’ll insist they weren’t asleep, but they were always alone, or in an isolated location, and no one is ever in a position to corroborate. Or anyone who could have corroborated has nothing to say, because they were definitely asleep. It’s also common for drugs or alcohol to be involved.
So the fact that these things always have a lot of dream-like elements isn’t at all surprising. The weird sensations people report, the oddly distorted aliens/angels (who are almost always humanoid), the vague, broken quality to their memories… everything points to people being asleep and/or in an altered state due to intoxicants.
Nevertheless, people will insist that they have evidence. Then they’ll point to things like the DoD videos that supposedly show an encounter between a Navy pilot and a UFO. It’s a weird video! You can’t explain that! It’s official! It’s ALIENS!
Now, wired did a great analysis of those particular videos and their origins (link in the thingy), and it looks like we don’t really know where the videos came from. One of the earliest appearances was actually from a video production company. Frauds like this are incredibly common; people are always willing to make money off of believers of every stripe.
However, even granting those videos are real, they still don’t help. This is what’s known as anomaly hunting, when a believer goes looking for weird things, then insisting that they count as evidence of their beliefs. That is, they find poor quality evidence or something that doesn’t match their expectations, then declare that their weird theory is true because “science can’t explain that!”
For example, ghost hunters go to old houses with cameras and temperature probes and EM detectors, and wait for… something. Wait long enough, you’re going to get a something. Drafts cause cold spots; you’re carting around a lot of equipment in houses with old wiring and you’re going to get some weird electric or magnetic fields. They also love things like “rods” and “orbs”, these inexplicable weird things showing up on cameras. And they’re right, you can’t ex… it’s dust. Dust caught in the flash of a camera that shows up as a big, bright dot, or a smeared “rod”.
Or look at conspiracy theorists. They really love anomalies. Weird bits of “the official story” that doesn’t match or that they think doesn’t make sense. “Look at the film! His head moves backward! You can’t explain that!” (We can, actually, a high-powered rifle round creates an entry wound and an exit wound; JFK’s head jerks forward when the bullet hits from the rear, then backward when the bullet exits).
Moon landing nutjobs are also pretty bad about this. They look at photos and videos that were taken on the moon and point out all the weird things that they think proves the moon-landings were faked. These are all pretty face-palmingly awful because the things they point to are all anomalous if the photos and videos were taken on Earth. They look incredibly strange because they were taken on the Moon, with different gravity and no atmosphere.
As for UFO-hunters, if you collect enough photos and videos of the sky and in the sky, you’ll eventually find weird phenomena. Things that don’t quite make sense at first glance, things that might genuinely be inexplicable, if only because there’s only one photo or the video ends. In other words, these edge cases, even if they aren’t faked, rely on us not having evidence. You gather enough evidence, you’ll find anomalies. You’ll get blips and scratches and fuzz. Equipment malfunctions and dings and so on.
A lot of “abductees” also point to weird stuff going on with their skin. Bruises! Can’t explain those! Odd scratches! Can’t explain those! This weird pattern of bumps! Can’t explain that! Yes we can, actually, on all three. Moving in your sleep, allergic reactions, your cat… Just because you don’t have a mundane explanation, or don’t want a mundane explanation, doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
No, alien abduction believers don’t have evidence. They have things they can’t explain, and then claim that the lack of explanation is the explanation. Just like religion, really.
At this point, alien abductions seem like a low-hanging fruit. But, an even lower hanging fruit would be the flat earth, and that shit’s making a come-back…
It seems to me that some false beliefs are based on a desire to explain things and/or a desire to be special. People want everything to fit within a narrative on the one hand, and they really want to be the center of that narrative on the other. The search for meaning isn’t limited to small-minded fascists like Jordan Peterson and his lobster-boys; we all want meaning, to some degree.
Another problem is that we’re not naturally very good scientists. To do good science, you have to try and prove your hypothesis is false. You have to try really, really hard to find evidence against it. But that requires discipline and training, because even considering that you might be wrong engenders cognitive dissonance. The natural tendency is to try and prove your hypothesis correct, to seek out confirming evidence, to ignore evidence you don’t like, to find communities that support you.
And, of course, some people are jackasses.
Links
- Skeptic Dictionary on alien abductions
- Wired magazine's article on those DoD videos
- What is anomaly hunting?
- Carl Sagan's book on amazon
Musical Interlude
Monty Python's - Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
White Guilt
“For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and, satisfied, drove on into the night.”
Man, conservatives love white guilt. Well, they hate it. They love to hate it.
Okay, what is white guilt? Well, it’s a little bit of individual and collective shame felt by white people over current and historical racism in the US. Oh, here’s a great bit, wikipedia follows that up with, “and to a lesser extent in Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom”. Like, what, South Africans don’t see the need to feel guilty about anything they’ve done? The UK doesn’t look as bad as South Africa from the outside, but they’re racist as fuck. I mean, I get it for Canada, they still live with the lie that they’ve never done anything racist, they don’t realize how awful they are to brown people up there. They’ll get theirs, is what I’m saying.
Anyway, white guilt is kind of a middle class phenomenon. White people in the suburbs with no real connection to brown people feel mildly bad about things that have happened to brown people. This lets them get away with not doing anything about what’s happening right now. Well, it can let them get away with that.
White guilt is kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can be real guilt, sorrow, anger over how people of color have been treated and are being treated. Pervasive negative emotions really can have an ongoing, serious impact, like depression and anxiety. On the other hand, not only does it sidetrack white people into seeking absolution instead of solutions, not only does it let white people feel that they’ve done enough just by feeling bad, but racists (aka Republicans) get to use it to fight against anti-racist programs.
Judith Katz, an educator and strategist, has dealt with white guilt in her efforts at anti-racism training. Specifically, she was moved to segregate her groups and remove black educators because white people in anti-racism training kept looking for acceptance and forgiveness rather than learning. The purpose of the education was to recognize and correct problematic attitudes and behaviors, and the white participants kept getting sidetracked.
So, yeah, white guilt can be a problem when it turns attention away from the people still being harmed by racism and toward self-congratulation or flagellation on the part of white people. And it can be a real pain in the ass. People of color are already spending a lot of time and energy trying to overcome racism and the fact that they have to convince white people that racism is still a problem is a huge barrier. That they then have to waste time getting white people to shut up and stop feeling bad and start working on solutions is a big burden. People of color are already fighting for their lives; they shouldn’t have to also take on the burden of helping you get over your feelings about the fact that they’re fighting for their lives.
Another problem is that a lot of white people acknowledge white guilt and leave it at that. It’s like they took a look at Avenue Q and “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” and said, “Yeah. Yeah. I’m a good person.”
The quote I read at the beginning in a British voice came from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which a truck-driver splashed water all over a soaking-wet hitchhiker in the rain. He felt good about it in a small-hearted bully kind of way. But then he felt bad about it. And then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it. And that last bit was him deciding that he was absolved of his sins by the act of feeling bad.
Yeah, it’s easy to put this in Christian terms, and this bullshit method of absolution is baked into Christianity. I remember a youth pastor telling a story about a time in college when he insulted a heavy-set girl who was buying one of his albums (he played guitar). He later found out she had dropped out of school and he felt so bad about it. But he apologized to God, and that made it okay. That’s so Christian. Apologizing to an imaginary friend you didn’t harm over harm (you may or may not have actually done) to a real person you never bother to make amends to.
I don’t want to claim this is unique to Christianity; religion generally doesn’t seem to ever actually invent anything new, and Christianity in particular is a hodgepodge of ideas stolen from other religions. I think it’s a problem of civilization, of living in large populations, of societal structures that encourage or require suffering in large numbers of people. We are empathic, caring beings (by and large), and we don’t like seeing suffering, and actually solving these problems is almost entirely beyond the capacity of any one person.
White guilt can be used as a sort of symbolic expiation. By recognizing that bad things are happening, you absolve yourself of the sin and can get on with your day without having to feel bad. In a way, this is necessary; you can’t really function if you allow yourself to feel the burden of these negative emotions, this guilt, all the time. On the other, you actually have to do something about it. Just recognizing the problem isn’t enough; inaction allows the problem to persist and makes you part of the problem. Ironically, white guilt as expiation is worse than simple ignorance, because it makes you feel like the problem has already been solved merely by having been seen.
But worse even than that is white guilt wielded as a weapon by the right. They love to use it to rile up white people. “I never did anything wrong! Why should I feel bad!? Why should I be punished?!” The Social Justice wiki specifically links white guilt to “not all x”, a silencing tactic used to derail discussions of social justice. It can be similar to how people leap to attack vegetarians even when the vegetarian hasn’t said anything, because the person feels implicitly attacked by the moral judgment buried in the vegetarian/vegan commitment.
But that’s just the sort of “not all white people!” response you’ll get from the man on the street. The right as a movement actively weaponizes white guilt. They take that simple, instinctive response, and dial it up to eleven. Talk show and radio hosts make incredibly emotional appeals all the time, and their rage against this assumption of guilt is top among them. It really boils down to “I’m a good person, you’re implying I’m a bad person, fuck you. Fuck you so much.” It leads to the rage so often evinced against Black Lives Matter, and the fact that right-wingers refuse to actually say “black lives matter” (all lives matter).
The response by the right is vicious and self-righteous. The Republican party deliberately allied itself with the KKK 50 years ago, and immediately switched to dog-whistle politics in order to not alienate all the other white people who were, let’s be absolutely clear about this, incredibly racist, but not as benightedly viciously gleefully racist as the southern monsters the Republicans were courting. The result is that the Republican party is the home of people who either embrace racism (as “race realism”) or merely are incredibly racist but refuse to recognize that fact and resent it whenever it’s brought up.
People on the right largely recognize that racism is a bad thing (except, once again, those who embrace “race realism”), and hate the criticism represented by people of color. The ongoing discrimination against and suffering of non-white peoples is a strong moral condemnation against white people. That’s why so many seek absolution rather than solutions, and it’s why the right rejects the premise.
When you actually embrace empathy and compassion, then the world becomes a rather hellish place. Billions of people live in suffering or even despair, and much of that is straightforwardly the result of the wealthiest and most powerful nations. We in the US bear huge moral responsibility for the deaths and torments of billions of people for the last century, and of millions of people in the century and a half prior to that.
But there’s an important word to get out of that last sentence. “Responsibility”.
Something that anti-racism activists have been focusing on for a very long time is responsibility, rather than collective guilt. Guilt is inward-focused, it’s narcissistic, it ignores the suffering of others. Compassion and empathy, in the face of such large problems, such widespread suffering, require us to eschew guilt in favor of responsibility.
No, I didn’t cause these problems, I’m not guilty for the ongoing suffering of people around the globe. It’s not something I did. But I have some measure of wealth and power as a white person and citizen of the United States. If I choose to do nothing, then I will be guilty of allowing that suffering to continue. I have a responsibility to use my position to do the right thing. I cannot simply pass by on the other side. In the end, what matters most is cleaning up the mess, not assigning guilt.
That doesn’t eliminate the problem represented by right wing douche-canoes, but it does offer a path forward.
Links
- The wikipedia entry on white guilt
- Judith Katz's page at the Centre for Global Inclusion
- The social justice wiki's page on "not all x"
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