Chad Cooper wrote:
>Consider the fact that in Ireland before the industrial revolution, Fairies
>were commonly seen -not by everyone, but most everyone believed in spirits
>in the forest, and knew someone who had seen one. As people became educated,
>at the beginning of the Industrial revolution, the sightings dropped of to
>an extremely rare occurrence. Education to the reality of the world and
>science, made it impossible to believe in Fairies, without being called
>insane. Does this mean that before people were educated, they were somehow
>mentally ill, and that education made them sane?
<snip UFO note>
>...Before dismissing
>the rantings of common folk believing in fairies as insanity, consider that
>you may be ignorant to the causality of sightings.
First of all Chad, I consider myself an aspiring writer and student . . . I
am not a scientist; thus I am essentially one of those "common folk"...
hey, I sometimes even admit that I consider myself white trash! [And
somewhere around here there's a photo of the trailer I lived in once to
prove it.] ;p But I think "common folk" can be literate in the arts and
sciences if they try... in my country as in yours we have libraries and
basic education and a degree of luxury that allows a great many people
(though unfortnuately not all) the freedom to learn about almost any topic
if one wants, regardless of one's work-specialization. It's not optimal,
but with work it's possible. Being "common" folk is an excuse, I know
several people coming from far poorer backgrounds and tougher situations
than I have ever been in who also know more than me about a whole plethora
of topics, including science, even when it's outside their speciality.
That said, what I was dismissing regarding "faeries" was simply the notion
of their *literal* existence. This says nothing to the fact that the
experience has been widely reported. I just don't think there *literally*
are fairies and elves in the world. But this doesn't dismiss peoples'
EXPERIENCES of faeries. It just calls into question their interpretation of
that existence. For good reason, actually. I've spent a lot of time
thinking about the isomorphic nature of what we find in a great number of
these kinds of narratives that we find in a great many cultures: fairy
abduction, alien abduction, abduction by gods and devils and spirits,
descents into the underworld of Hades or of the orishas . . . It's like
there is a set of narrative structures that seem to be reshaped to fit the
society in which the person telling the story lives and tells it. (In the
same way that James Joyce apparently saw Telemachus from _The Odyssey_ and
Hamlet as kind of versions of the same character.) I'm sure there is an
explanation for this apparent deeper quasi-standard pattern, something to
do with experiences. All I am dismissing is the details of the literalized
explanations that various cultures concoct to explain such widespread
experiences. I dismiss faeries like I dismiss orishsas and the greek gods,
it's a level playing field after all. But the pattern of experience raises
interesting questions about the nature of the psyche, about imagination,
about the way social myths are sustained (I don't believe that everyone who
claims they've seen an alien has had an experience of it, by the way), and
probably it tells us a lot about the ways in which our imaginations are
shaped by our cultures, and about how we can "literalize" and "narrativize"
even the most befuddling experience.
Finally, I don't dismiss people as crazy just because I can't explain their
experience or beliefs. Beliefs are divergent -- there is no way to
establish an ultimate truth anyway, but within a kind of scope of tolerant
coexistence and respect and compassion it doesn't matter -- and
experiences are subjective. But I might question someone using inductive
logic to try establish "truth" from a subjective experience like having
seen a rasta-fairy-in (*groan*) the backyard garden. I wouldn't call
someone with temporal lobe epilepsy "crazy", by the way, but they sure see
some weird things. And I wouldn't call a depressed person "crazy", but
their subjective perception of the world (and especially other people) can
vary widely from that of a non-depressed person. [As I know from my own
experience in the black pit.]
It's just that, after all, lots of things in history were given mystical
explanations, such as the movements of the planets or an event like a whole
village suddenly bursting into St. Vitus's Dance. Many of these have later
been explained by the Copernican solar system and a more sophisticated
understanding of gravity and interactions of it between planets, or the
realization that ergot fungus growing in rye (or is it barley?) can cause
symptoms of what was called St. Vitus Dance (a natural source of some of
the same stuff that's in LSD, apparently). Suddenly you don't need legions
of angels and devils and other invisible beings (who occasionally are
visible according to a few people) to explain experience. Uncle Occam
strikes again with his sharp razor.
>You assumption seem valid to me. I would suggest that the only circumstances
>where we could have visited Mars, would have been from acts of Uplifting by
>you know who (and I don't mean God).
I think Uplift by fairies and elves is even more unlikely than Uplift by
Martians. ;p
>Check out
>http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/4_6_face_release/index.html
>Nasa went back to the same site to take pictures to answer the question. If
>you did believe in the Face, you will feel stupid after seeing this site
>(Unless you believe in NASA conspiracies).
Which is the standard (zzzz) response to NASA's Face-On-Mars rebuttal --
that *is* a conspiracy executed by "the man" to keep us ignorant of "the
truth" which is obviously "out there."
>There is no face on Mars, there are no canals, these are not the 'droids
>your are looking for...
Hahahaha. Indeed. There might be a few neat fossils, though, and maybe
*maybe* some kind of highly extremophile life under the surface or
something. *Maybe*. But I doubt it.
>It is my belief that the same thing that drives us to make babies, is what
>drives us to go to Mars. There is no explaining it -the Universe has
>hard-wired it into us. I don't think we need a reason. Someday, someone will
>be driven enough to make it to Mars, to satisfy this "cosmic" urge. Perhaps
>one may not feel the urge as strongly as in others, but be patient, Mother
>Nature is working on that!
I'm more than a little suspicious of that claim. Why would you say that
expansionism and frontier-seeking is an innately human thing? I'd contrast
that with the way China expanded as a nation (except for Xinjiang and
Tibet, I'm under the impression it was historically more of a case of
invaders becoming Sinicized ["Chinese-ified"] over time, and a lot of
working out of internal power structures and organization, rather than what
we see as the expansionist urge -- but this is a loose impression and I am
not a specialist in the history of Asia). It seems to me that a lot of the
"migration" of people was linked to resources, in the long historical view:
either following or searching for better grazing land for the herds they
either kept or hunted; or driving people out of a particularly rich or
convenient area of farmland or hunting, or whatever. This is different from
a kind of "driven to expand outward" in that nomadic existence seems to
center on "here" (being wherever you happen to be), where expansionism
centers on the place from which you expand out.
As for Mother Nature working on it, be careful about what you put on
Nature. :) In an environment where going to Mars routinely gets you killed,
Mother Nature would seem to be eliminating this self-destructive urge; in
an environment where trying to get to Mars is easily possible, and people
who do it thrive, prosper, and reproduce a lot, I suppose Mother Nature
might be imagined to be make such an urge widespread. But really I think
the playing field is a lot closer to the conscious side of us, our culture
and our values and our imaginations and our commerce and all of that --
the stuff that's all Nth order effects of the way our genes interact, and
environment, and all sorts of things. Does that make sense?
Gord
