"Camp - Little Green Men From Afar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Camp L. Sprague de)

This is especially true now, when the world is high on an equality kick. It is fashionable in some circles to believe that all men are created literally equal. If they are not, it is unfair and undemocratic, and we should pretend that they are. To think otherwise is called elitism, and you know what a wicked thing that is said to be.
So the enlighteners from afar, whether green or some other color, will be with us for some time to come. No explanation of how the little brown men of the Nile Valley actually built the pyramids will banish these exotic pedagogues, because belief in them panders to human vanity. Most people want reassurance, consolation, and flattery more than they want scientific facts.

The story of pseudoscientific cultism, of which the enlighteners in UFOs form but one small part, is depressing to believers in human rationality. Some cultist ideas, such as Cyrus Teed's notion of the 1890s that the earth is a hollow sphere with us inside, or the more recent one that fluoridation of drinking water is a Communist conspiracy by those notorious red-plotters Dwight Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and Ear] Warren, are so absurd that they beguile few followers. and soon fade away. Others attract huge followings and persist for generations.
During the past century, hundreds of thousands of such credophiles (as I like to call them) have believed, despite clear evidence to the contrary-
that Plato's Atlantis not only existed but also gave rise to all other civilizations;
that the descendants of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel are the British, the Irish, the Japanese, the American Indians, or some other modern folk;
that the Great Pyramid of King Khufu at Giza embodies in its measurements a revelation of the wisdom of the ages and a prophecy of the future of man;
that in early historic times, a comet hit the earth, reversing its rotation and changing the length of its day;
that creatures from some other planet are keeping us under surveillance from spacecraft;
that visitors from another fictitious continent-Lemuria, in the Pacific-still dwell on Mount Shasta, in California, where they perform mystic rites with magical fireworks;
that William Shakespeare's' plays were written by Sir
Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford, or some other Elizabethan worthy;
that the ancient Babylonian superstition of astrology is an effective means of analyzing a personality and predicting the vicissitudes of the one possessing it;
and that in various parts of the world lurk large, picturesque animals left over from some prehistoric era, such as dinosaurs, ape-men, or the plesiosaur of Loch Ness.
As all good monster-fanciers know, the story of Nessie started with a tale of Saint Columba, a sixth-century Irish priest who went to Scotland and converted some of the Picts to Christianity. According to his biographer, another Irish cleric named Adomnan, about the year A.D. 565:

. . . when the blessed man was for a number of days in the province of the Picts, he had to cross the river Nea. When he reached its bank, he saw a poor fellow being buried by other inhabitants; and the buriers said that, while swimming not long before, he had been seized and moat savagely bitten by a water beast. Sodie men, going to his rescue in a wooden boat, though. too late, had put out hooks and caught hold of his wretched corpse. When the blessed man heard this, he ordered notwithstanding that one of his companions should swim out and bring back to him, by sailing, a boat that stood on the opposite bank. Hearing this order of the holy and memorable man, Lugne mocu-Min obeyed without delay, and putting off his clothes, excepting his tunic, plunged into the water. But the monster, whose appetite had earlier been not so much sated as whetted for prey, lurked in the depth of the river. Feeling the water above disturbed by Lugne's swimming, it suddenly swam up to the surface, and with gaping mouth and with great roaring rushed towards the man swimming in the middle of the stream. While all that were there, barbarians and even the brothers, were struck down with extreme terror, the blessed man, who was watching, raised his holy hand and drew the saving sign of the cross in the empty air; and then, invoking the name of God, he commanded the savage beast, and said: "You will go no further. Do not touch the man; turn backward speedily." Then, hearing this command of the saint, the beast, as if pulled back with ropes, fled terrified in swift retreat; although it had before approached so close to Lugne as he swam that there was no more than the length of one short pole between man and beast.
Then, seeing that the beast had withdrawn and that their fellow soldier Lugne had returned to them unharmed and safe, in the boat, the brothers with great amazement glorified God in the blessed man. And also the pagan barbarians who were there at the time, impelled by the magnitude of this miracle that they themselves had seen, magnified the God of the Christians.

According to Adomnan, Columba also, with God's help, saw events taking place far away or in the future, cast out demons, healed the sick, raised the dead, controlled the winds, calmed storms at sea, summoned water from a rock,," turned water into wine, and destroyed evil-doers by his' curses. If you believe these marvels, there is no reason why, you should not believe in Nessie, too.
It is true that new species of animals are discovered from: time to time. Only last year, a supposedly extinct species of peccary turned up alive in the Gran Chaco of Paraguay. It: seems increasingly unlikely, however, that any more large: air-breathers remain to be found. So to discover new species, the most promising fields are either the deep-sea or very small organisms. The likeliest of all is the largest single order, in number of species, of all animals: the Cleoptera,:; or beetles. Of the million-odd known species of animals,: about one fifth are beetles. So, if you itch to discover a new species, a new kind of beetle is your best bet.

Nowadays, however, instead of hunting for new species, it is more to the point to try to keep the species we already know from being exterminated, as many are in danger of being.

Why do such cults and their dogmas survive endless exposures, discreditings, and confutations? What gives them; the regenerative powers of the Lernaean Hydra, which grew two new heads for every one that Herakles knocked off?
Well, men have always had a voracious appetite for tall: tales of colorful, exciting wonders. They accept them and pass them along, often with embellishments, because it is-: fun. Nearly all histories, before modern times, were full of marvels. Thus the skeptical Roman historian Titus Livius collected hundreds of stories of portents. During Hannibal's invasion of Italy, he wrote:

. . . many portents occurred in Rome or in the neighborhood, or at all -_ events, many were reported and easily gained credence, for when men's minds have been excited by superstitious fears they easily ; believe these things. A six-month-old child, of freeborn parents, is said to have shouted "lo Triumphe" in the vegetable market, whilst in the Forum Boarum, an ox is reported to have climbed up of its own accord to the third story of a house, and then, frightened by the noisy crowd which gathered, it threw itself down. A phantom navy was seen shining in the sky; the temple of Hope in the vegetable =
market was struck by lightning; at Lanuvium Juno's spear moved of itself, and a crow had flown down to the temple and settled on her couch; in the territory of Amiternum beings in human shape and clothed in white were seen at a distance. ['the Annals of the Roman People XXI xlii, 1]

Some of these events may have been natural, if unusual. But to show how these things grow, Livy gave a later list, in which the child spoke in its mother's womb, the ox talked in a human voice, and the beings in white stood around an altar in the sky.
For a later example, the thirteenth-century Icelandic Njal's Saga tells how, before the battle of Clontarf in 1014, which enabled the Irish to throw the Vikings out of Ireland, on three successive nights, one of the Norse contingents suffered first a rain of blood from the sky, then the men's own weapons leaped into the air and attacked them, and finally they were assailed by flocks of fierce ravens. One could go on like this all day.

Another factor in the ebullient recent growth of pseudoscience is the weakening of traditional religions as sources of facts about man and the universe. As science advances, it finds the true explanations for many questions that have long puzzled men. These explanations often contradict those given in the sacred books.
Thus the authors of the Bible obviously believed the world to be flat, but it's round. We are not descended from Adam and Eve but from a hairy ground-ape living in Africa twenty million years ago. Plagues are not sent by God to punish disobedient peoples but are caused by bacterial infections. Hence the traditional religions are less and less relied upon for material facts. Increasingly, they have been relegated to being teachers of morals and social-service organizations.
This decline has left a blank in the human psyche. Efforts to substitute some secular philosophy, such as Stoicism, Confucianism, or Marxism, for religion, as a guide and comforter to sinful man, have not been spectacularly successful. Science does not offer a very comforting substitute. It is the best way of finding out what is what, but it makes men neither better nor worse; and the impersonal universe it reveals is bleakly indifferent to human hopes and desires.
Further, by its very nature, science becomes more complex, specialized, and difficult as time goes on. It thus

becomes progressively harder for an ordinary mind to keep abreast of scientific discovery. Pseudoscientific cults, on the other hand, give the believer the feeling of being in the "modern" scientific swim, or of knowing things hidden from the unenlightened mass, without compelling him to master anything really hard.
Furthermore, the ease of transportation and communication has fostered the multiplication of cults. When people were more closely tied to their birthplaces, their kin, and the social milieux into which they were born, they were compelled to associate with a variety of people, many of them uncongenial, with whom they were connected by accidents of birth or geography. But at least they had to face other viewpoints, and obvious foolishness was hooted down.
Of course, new ideas that turned out to be right were also hooted down. With the dizzy speed of change in the present day world, however, many people have developed minds that are not merely open but gaping. They swallow any new idea, no matter how fantastic, if it is forcefully presented by a charismatic leader.
Also, more and more find it possible, by easy travel and communication, to confine their social lives to those who share their own outlooks and prejudices. Wherever they go, they seek out others of their own peculiar views, since most folk prefer having their existing beliefs confirmed to having them refuted. In such a limited milieu, the most bizarre ideas can be solemnly embraced, because the cultists, seeing only one another outside of working hours, are never forced to consider other points of view. Hence a leader, if he can isolate his followers long enough, can convince them that the moon is made of green cheese. Since they never hear him contradicted, they believe it indefinitely.
Thus contemporary society tends to become more and more subdivided into small, exclusive, mentally self-isolated groups. Each has its own version of the True Faith and never listens to any other.

What can be done about this? Something, but not a great deal. If one is in academe, one can drill one's students in the 1 criteria for judging a statement, as Instructor Broman did at
the University of Denver. He seems to have made it work; at least, his students were not fooled by Newton's tale. One can warn one's students against the stigmata of the charlatan:
arrogance, garrulity, appeals to emotion, authoritarianism, incomprehensible language, conviction of his own grandeur and persecution, and certainty that those who reject his ideas are scoundrels or madmen.
Few, however, seem able to examine new ideas with the calm, evenhanded intelligence, and the unemotional balance of receptivity and skepticism, needed correctly to evaluate such ideas every time. Pseudoscientific cultism, therefore, seems destined for a long and prosperous career.