Tag: technoscience

On technological “development”: a brief reflection

Featured ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 1 Comment

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.”

“…news affirming the existence of the Ufos is welcome…”

~ Bryan Sentes ~ 8 Comments

Of recent developments in the ufological sphere, two stand out to me: the release of a huge cache of CIA documents on UFOs and the prepublication promotion of astronomer Avi Loeb’s new book on Oumuamua and related matters. I was moved to address Loeb’s recent claims (you can hear him interviewed by Ryan Sprague here and hear him speak on the topic last spring here), but, since I have addressed the essential drift of Loeb’s speculations, however curtly, and I’m loathe to tax the patience of my readers or my own intellectual energies rehearsing the driving thesis here at Skunkworks yet again, I want to probe a not unrelated matter, an ingredient of the ufological mix since the earliest days of the modern era.

This post’s title is taken from a longer passage from Carl Jung’s ufological classic Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. In the preface, Jung observes:

In 1954, I wrote an article in the Swiss weekly, Die Weltwoche, in which I expressed myself in a sceptical way, though I spoke with due respect of the serious opinion of a relatively large number of air specialists who believe in the reality of Ufos…. In 1958 this interview was suddenly discovered by the world press and the ‘news’ spread like wildfire from the far West round the Earth to the far East, but—alas—in distorted form. I was quoted as a saucer-believer. I issued a statement to the United Press and gave a true version of my opinion, but this time the wire went dead:  nobody, so far as I know, took any notice of it, except one German newspaper.

The moral of this story is rather interesting. As the behaviour of the press is sort of a Gallup test with reference to world opinion, one must draw the conclusion that news affirming the existence of the Ufos is welcome, but that scepticism seems to be undesirable. To believe that Ufos are real suits the general opinion, whereas disbelief is to be discouraged.

Loeb’s recent experience harmonizes with Jung’s. Loeb recounts around the 22:00′ mark in his interview with Sprague that when he and his collaborator published their paper arguing for the possible artificial origins of Oumuamua, they experienced a “most surprising thing”, that, despite not having arranged for any publicity for their paper, it provoked “a huge, viral response from the media…”

There are, of course, myriad reasons for the media phenomenon experienced by both Jung and Loeb. An important aspect of their shared historical horizon, however, suggests the ready, public fascination for the idea of extraterrestrial, technologically-advanced civilizations springs from an urgent source. Jung, famously, however correctly, argued that flying saucers’ appearing in the skies just at the moment the Iron Curtain came down had to do precisely with the new, mortal threat of atomic war, that, from his psychological perspective, flying saucers were collective, visionary mandalas, whose circular shape made whole, at least to the visionary imagination, what humankind had split asunder in fact. Though we live now after the Cold War, the cognoscenti are quick to remind us the threat of nuclear war remains, a threat along with increasingly acute environmental degradation and global warming. There’s a grim synchronicity in Loeb’s book’s appearing hot on the heels of the publication of a widely-publicized paper in the journal Frontiers of Conservation Science titled “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.”

Just how do such anxieties arguably underwrite the desire to discover other “advanced” societies? Jung was right, I think, in seeing the appearance of “flying saucers from outer space” as compensating for the worries of his day. Rather than affirming the phenomenon’s dovetailing into his theory of archetypes, however, I would argue that the very idea of UFOs’ being from an advanced, technological civilization, an interpretation put forward spontaneously by the popular, scientific, and military understanding, is a response to the growing concern over the future of the earth’s so-called advanced societies. Such evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence seems to confirm that technology (as we know it) and the kind of intelligence that gives rise to it are not the result of a local, accidental coupling of natural history (evolution) and cultural change (history proper) but that of more universal regularities, echoing, perhaps, however faintly, those cosmically universal natural laws that govern physics and chemistry. That such intelligence and civilizations spring up throughout the stars suggests, furthermore, they all share the same developmental vector, from the primitive to the advanced, and that, if such regularities hold, then just as our visitors are more advanced than we are, then we, too, like them, might likewise negotiate the mortal threats that face our own civilization, enabling us to reach their heights of knowledge and technological prowess. That we might learn just such lessons from extraterrestrial civilizations we might contact has been one explicit argument for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The very idea, then, of a technologically-advanced civilization embodies a faith that technology can solve the problems technology produces, one whose creed might be said to reword Heidegger’s final, grave pronouncement that “Only a god can save us”, replacing ‘god’ with ‘technology’. What’s as remarkable as it is unremarked is how this tenet of faith is shared equally by relatively mainstream figures, such as Loeb, Diana W. Pasulka, and SETI researchers, and more outré folk, such as Jason Reza Jorjani, Steven Greer, and Raël/Claude Vorilhon.

Conversely, discovering the traces of extraterrestrial civilizations that have failed to meet the challenges ours faces could prove no less significant, as Loeb himself has proposed: “…we may learn something in the process. We may learn to better behave with each other, not to initiate a nuclear war, or to monitor our planet and make sure that it’s habitable for as long as we can make it habitable.” Aside from the weakness of this speculation, the idea of such failed civilizations is based on the same assumptions as the idea of successful ones, thereby revealing their being ideological (positing a social order as natural). Imagine all we ever were to discover were extraterrestrial societies that had succumbed to war, environmental destruction, or some other form of self-annihilation. Technological development would then seem to entail its own end. Indeed, that this might very well be the case has been proposed as one explanation for “The Great Silence”, why we have yet to encounter other, extraterrestrial civilizations. We might still cling to the hope that humankind might prove the exception, that it might learn from all these other failures (à la Loeb), or we might adopt a pessimistic fatalism, doing our best despite being convinced we are ultimately doomed. In either case, advanced technological society modelled after one form of society on earth is projected as unalterable, inescapable, and universal. The pessimistic conception of technological advancement, a blinkered reification of a moment in human cultural history, arguably expresses from a technoscientific angle the sentiment of Fredric Jameson’s famous observation: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

The consequences of this technofetishism are manifold. However much technology is not essentially bound up with capitalism, it is the case that technology as we know it developed under capitalism as a means to increase profit by eliminating labour, a development that has only picked up steam as it were with the drive to automation in our present moment. When this march of progress is imagined to be as natural as the precession of the equinoxes, it is uncoupled from the social (class) relations that determine it, reifying the status quo. In this way, popular or uncritical speculations about technologically advanced extraterrestrial societies are arguably politically reactionary. But they are culturally, spiritually impoverishing, too. This failure, willed or otherwise, to grasp our own worldview as contingent legitimates if not drives the liquidation of human cultural difference and of the natural world. Identifying intelligence with one kind of human intelligence, instrumental reason, and narrowing cultural change to technological development within the lines drawn by the self-regarding histories of the “advanced” societies, we murderously reduce the wild variety of intelligence (human and nonhuman alike) and past, present, and, most importantly, potentially future societies to a dreary “eternal recurrence of the same,” a world not unlike those “imagined” by the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises wherein the supposed unimaginable variety of life in the cosmos is reduced to that of a foodcourt.