In his substantial comment on my last blog post concerning intelligence, Michael Zimmerman reminds us that, “Beginning in the late 17th century, as explained by Michael Adas in Machines as the Measure of Man, Europeans began to conclude—based on their success in colonizing countries around the world—that their techno-scientific superiority was indicative of cultural (perhaps even racial) superiority.” Adas’ research dovetails into that of a more recent book, James Poskett’s Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science. Eric Davis Gurevitch, in his review of Poskett’s book and another, remarks that

The story of the scientific revolution, in particular, became common sense among a new technocratic Cold War elite, who organized the world along a developmental scale of progress. …part of a broader intellectual movement that portrayed regions outside the West as languishing in the waiting room of history. It was the task of the United States…to lead the recently decolonized nations through the stages of industrial and intellectual development necessary to secure prosperity.

Gurevitch’s summary illuminates a topic of central focus here at the Skunkworks. It is telling that the notion of “a developmental scale of progress” that “portrayed regions outside the West as languishing in the waiting room of history” should be articulated during the Cold War, precisely the horizon within which Flying Saucers first appeared. We have been at pains to desediment and unmask such a conception of “technological progress”, of there being societies more or less “advanced,” such that one imagines, as Maitreya Raël does, civilizations 25,000 years in advance of our own.

The differences between that Seventeenth Century notion of superiority and that Cold War one of progress are themselves interesting. The former is merely comparative (our culture is superior to theirs) while the latter posits a linear trajectory for development. This linearity is more premodern than modern (however much the idea of Progress is a legacy of the Enlightenment…). To posit this developmental scale is to posit at the same time a teleology that is, in the first instance, defined by the level of sophistication attributed to one’s own society. (That such a move is glaringly self-serving should be obvious…). Fundamentally, this view is not only teleological but theological (at least in a Thomistic sense). In the neo-Aristotleanism of Thomas Aquinas, Creation is teleological, with all created beings aspiring by their nature to union with the Summum Bonum, God, their origin and “end” (telos). Readers of Dante’s Commedia will be well acquainted with this vision of the cosmos. However, “God”, in this Cold War conception of technological teleology, is not so much a Summum Bonum but absolute knowledge and power, an ideal end or goal of the will-to-power. Thus, all thinking about “advanced” alien societies, whether the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis for the origin of UFOs/UAP, that of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in its hunt for technosignatures, the Kardashev Scale, or the ranking of civilizations in the Star Trek franchise, are arguably all a kind of idolatry, if not regressively theological.

The truth of that “developmental scale,” thus, is not so much a factual one as ideological. Like the notion of superiority earlier articulated by European colonists, it serves, in fact, as a legitimation for imperialism and colonialism. One irony of this developmental scale is the paranoia it cultures that breeds arms races. When it passes into ideology proper (i.e., its social function as a legitimating fiction passes into truth), it roots the anxieties recently expressed by Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, “the scientist and military intelligence officer leading the Pentagon’s task force for unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) [sic] [who] says being caught off guard by ‘intelligent or extraterrestrial technical surprise’ remains a top concern” for the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (ARRO). Kirkpatrick’s fears are part and parcel of those long-standing (and no less problematic) comparisons of First Contact to that encounter between Europeans and the peoples of the “New World.”

A more fundamental irony is in the offing. Given the increasing gravity of the environmental crisis and global warming, those “advanced” societies that take themselves as the present apex of human cultural development and project their character into an infinite future of ever greater progress may find that their very “advanced” character leads to their collapse as their technology consumes to exhaustion those living systems upon which all societies depend. Then, which societies will appear as the more advanced? Those essentially self-destructive or those they demeaned, colonized, and sought to destroy, namely those whose know-how was attuned to living in more-or-less sustainable harmony with the living world? Any anthropologist will observe that the longest-lived continuous culture on earth is that of the Australian Aborigine…

This reflection underlines the truth of an observation made by poet Jerome Rothenberg in the Pre-face to the first edition of his monumental assemblage Technicians of the Sacred. “Measure everything by the Titan rocket & the transistor radio, & the world is full of primitive peoples. But once change the unit of value to the poem or the dance-event or the dream (all clearly artifactual situations) & it becomes apparent what all these people have been doing all those years with all that time of their hands.”