by Sepka » Tue Feb 28, 2006 6:17 am
<!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>ProfessorPan said</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->:<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>it's difficult to examine stories with ancient times with any kind of objectivity<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>First-person ancient reports, as well as those attributed to a personage known to the author, should IMHO be treated exactly as modern reports. Many modern reports after all give us no access to the reporter, nor chance to question him. They're functionally no different than reports from people dead thousands of years.<br><br>There's a sort of built-in prejudice to treat modern reports as more reliable than those of ancient times, since they're couched in terms that reflect our own preconceptions. We trust more in spacemen than in angels; in robots than in golems. Yet when we get right down to it, an ancient saying "I saw an angel" is like a modern saying "I saw a spaceman", in that both are reporting their perceptions, conditioned by culture. We can read the statements more clearly as "I saw what fit my preconceptions of an angel / a spaceman". The possibility remains (and is likely, IMHO) that people a thousand years hence will perceive the phenomenon as neither angels nor spacemen, but as something else entirely that we can't imagine yet.<br><br>There's an irrational tendency among modern readers to assume that any part of an ancient account that doesn't fit their preconceptions must be counterfactual. In most cases, I think we can take for granted that when a forgotten monk says "I saw X" he really did see what he honestly believed to be X. That's not to say that he had enough background information to interpret what he saw correctly, which itself is not an assertion that were we there, we ourselves would have the necessary background to understand what we were seeing. He might say 'demon' where we might say 'grey', and the entity itself would laugh at us both for our ignorance.<br><br>Where the ancients do fail terribly is in passing along reports from distant lands. IMHO a careful reading supports the idea that most of the accounts, although dutifully passed along, are disbelieved by their authors. You'll note how many are prefaced "I have heard..." or "The Libyans believe...". What I think this really reflects (again, IMHO) is that the system of citation had not yet been invented. We know, for instance, that some traveller told Herodotus that the Libyans believed in the Dog-Headed Men, although we have no idea who, nor how reliable he was. In the absence of cites, we have no real way to determine where he got this knowledge, and consequently how much (or little) weight to assign it. One has to treat "traveller's tale" reports with a great deal of skepticism, as (IMHO) the chroniclers who set them down meant them to be treated. However, in the case of a first-person account, or the account of an acquaintance, this problem vanishes.<br><br><br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>StarRoute said</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->:<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>I think that what happened c. 1947 was a result of the special conditions of the immediate postwar years -- actual advanced tech, rumors of super-tech, plus lots of people hoping for aliens to show up and pull us out of the self-destructive loops we'd gotten ourselves tangled in.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>As you and ProfessorPan both noted, such contacts have gone on throughout history. That's entirely true, and I didn't mean to imply that they'd ever halted altogether. I think the record supports the idea that suddenly, come the summer of 1947, the number of reports went right off the chart. The hope of alien assistance does well to explain the saucer cults of the '50s, and may account for the intense public interest in the subject during the late '40s as well, but I don't think it can account for the original burst of sightings.<br><br><br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>StarRoute said</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->:<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>In "objective" eras, when people believe they are answerable to an outside reality, they tend to keep both their politics and their general belief systems as simple and daylit as possible. In "subjective" times, people are more willing both to believe in weird happenings and also to to create their own forms of weirdness. <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>That's a remarkable observation. It's going to take some time to think that one over. At any rate, thanks for the thoughtful criticism. <br><br>-Sepka the Space weasel <p></p><i></i>
