Shatner, Dante, and the overview effect

In his recently released memoir, William Shatner recounts the unexpected emotional experience of going to space and seeing Earth:

I thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. . . . It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

Later, he writes, he learned that this profound feeling was his experience of the “overview effect,” something commonly felt by astronauts. As summarized by NPR: “The overview effect is a cognitive and emotional shift in a person's awareness, their consciousness and their identity when they see the Earth from space.” Smallness, delicacy, beauty—the overview effect, per its name, gives perspective to a place too big to comprehend in ordinary life.

As is my wont, I immediately thought of Dante, who describes precisely this effect in Canto 22 of Paradiso. Flying through the highest reaches of the heavens with Beatrice, she tells him to look down.

My eyes returned through all the seven spheres
and saw this globe in such a way that I
smiled at its scrawny image: . . .
I saw Latona’s daughter radiant,
without the shadow that had made me once
believe that she contained both rare and dense.
And there, Hyperion, I could sustain
the vision of your son, and saw Dione
and Maia as they circled nearby him.
The temperate Jupiter appeared to me
between his father and his son; and I
saw clearly how they vary their positions.
And all the seven heavens showed to me
their magnitudes, their speeds, the distances
of each from each. The little threshing floor
that so incites our savagery was all—
from hills to river mouths—revealed to me
while I wheeled with eternal Gemini.

This is not only Earth but the entire solar system, from moon (“Latona’s daughter”) to Saturn (Jupiter’s father), and Dante—working purely from imagination six hundred years before the advent of space travel—correctly predicts the shrinking and sharpening perspective that a sight of Earth as a tiny blue orb between his feet would impart. All “our savagery” plays out in nothing but a “little threshing floor.”

“Everyone's overview effect is unique to them,” according to NPR, and Shatner’s, sadly, is a formulaic mélange of environmental admonitions and therapeutic bromides:

The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. . . .

[The overview effect] can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart. In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware—not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.

Dante, by contrast, has no call to action, no language of collectives or harmony or nurturing or “human entanglement” or false humility about “our planet.” He offers pure, unflinching perspective. Confronted with the Earth in all its smallness, Dante

smiled at scrawny image: I approve
that judgment as the best, which holds this earth
to be the least; and he whose thoughts are set
elsewhere, can truly be called virtuous.

Real hope begins with a properly oriented overview effect—it should begin with not only a sense of physical, planetary scale but of eternal perspective, so that even the things Shatner both laments and praises will be seen in their true smallness.

You can read a longer excerpt from Shatner’s Boldly Go at Variety here. NPR talked to him and got more disappointing soundbites, with outside commentary by the man who coined the term “overview effect,” all of which you can read here. The translation of Paradiso XXII is that of Allen Mandelbaum; you can read the whole thing at Columbia’s Digital Dante.

I’m not saying Ancient Aliens is racist…

…but it’s racist. Or can be.

The other day I ran across this excellent short post by Michael Heiser. Heiser is an Old Testament scholar and expert in ancient Semitic languages who has side interests in UFOs, cryptozoology, esotericism, and pretty much “anything old and weird,” as he puts it. A lot of his work in these areas is to correct or debunk the pseudoarchaeology of “ancient aliens” theorists like Zechariah Sitchin, who popularized the Annunaki as the extraterrestrial explanation for everything, or the godfather of the whole movement, Chariots of the Gods author Erich von Däniken. In this post he addresses some of the racialist assumptions behind these “ancient aliens” theories.

Bad assumptions

Like Heiser, I’ve had an interest in “anything old and weird” since childhood and, like Heiser, I have an interest in learning why people believe things like “ancient aliens” theories. My main concern, as an historian, has usually been to expose the chronological snobbery behind theories like this. As Heiser summarizes it:

some presume that humans in antiquity were so primitive they could not build these things without the assistance of non-human intelligence.

The presumption, inherited from the Enlightenment and given a scientific gloss by Darwinism, is that our technological sophistication somehow indicates our superior position in the eternal upward climb from barbarism. We today are superior technologically, scientifically, and—skipping over a number of premises—therefore morally.

With this assumption fixed firmly in place by years of progressive education, crude and condescending depictions of the past in popular media, and now historically illiterate activist messaging on social media, the recipient of “ancient aliens” theories is primed to believe that the pyramids, the Nazca lines, Stonehenge, etc. are too carefully constructed, too perfectly aligned with things “we” only understand now through “science,” to be the work of ancient man. Heiser:

All (and I mean “all”) of the examples of “impossible” architecture foisted on viewers of shows like Ancient Aliens were indeed built by humans. They weren’t primitive savages just because they didn’t have cars, cell phones, or the internet. Their technology solved their problems and met their needs, not ours. All the techniques they used are demonstrable from applied physics (which isn’t a physics that needs atom smashers).

Side note: I’m struck that aliens seem to have assisted all the fantastically remote civilizations of antiquity with projects like pyramids—a pile of stones with a square base, laborious to build but by no means difficult to design—but not the Romans with their extremely sophisticated hydro-engineering projects or the medievals with the gothic cathedral. The gravitation of these theorists to things that already have a certain mystique should be suspicious.

The race card

I’m a fanatic on the topic of chronological snobbery, but Heiser’s post directs us to another dimension of “ancient aliens” theories: the racial. A number of such theories rely on a narrative proposing that

an elect super-race taught by aliens could mediate that esoteric knowledge to poor savages in the New World by a select / advanced super-race descended from the Atlanteans, the original inheritors of alien knowledge.

Or something similar. Call such theories legion, for they are many.

Heiser links to two longer posts by archaeologists Jason Colavito and Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews. Both concern a specific book by the aforementioned von Däniken in which he apparently makes a lot of assertions about prehistorical races that are cartoonishly off-base, and both provide good examples of racism in discredited archaeology like Nazi racial theory (based on the work of Madison Grant, which gave us the notion of “Aryanism” we associate with the Nazis) or the racially-motivated misreadings of sites like Great Zimbabwe. Colavito even notes how von Däniken’s alien theories lead him not only into racialist ideas of human development but to eugenics and all sorts of other mad scientist projects:

Von Däniken asserts that the “extraterrestrials did choose a specific race.” He won’t say what that race is, but he leans heavily on Jewish claims to be the chosen people, which we have just seen him connect to the white (European) race. There can only be one conclusion, even if unstated. He then advocates eugenics, suggesting that modern genetic research will advise which combinations of races “are beneficial and which should be eliminated.” He seriously asks whether the aliens want “strict segregation” of the races, and he advocates human cloning to perpetuate the very best superior specimens in the event of disaster.

Both posts are worth reading, but Fitzpatrick-Matthews—whose post “Is pseudoarchaeology racist?” prompted the other two—demonstrates how the chronologically snobbish assumptions behind “ancient aliens” theories can bleed over into racialist thinking. Fitzpatrick-Matthews:

In part, this is a reflection of the discredited view that human history follows a linear progression from technologically unsophisticated to sophisticated . . . Bad Archaeologists are unwilling to do the background research into the societies that produced the monuments they present as mysterious, so either they do not appreciate the evidence for ancient complex societies or they deliberately withhold this evidence from their readers. What is more pernicious, though, is that while they can accept that locals (Greeks, Romans and so on) were responsible for the ancient monuments of Europe, they are unwilling to countenance the same explanation for people on other continents, especially Africa and South America.

He concludes by noting the use such theories have been put to by radical racialist groups. Having both personal and academic interests in early medieval Germanic peoples, Anglo-Saxon England, the Norse, and similar topics, I run across these people all the time. The unwitting aid given to racists by bad historical theories—whether they involve aliens or not—only muddies the waters and casts doubt on those with a legitimate interest in these fascinating peoples and their lives.

In short: ideas have consequences.

The ultimate failure

To take it back to Heiser, who brought all this to my attention:

I’ll point out again that there are no Bible verses that have the nephilim building anything, or possessing super-knowledge. . . . The reason is simple: books like 1 Enoch were concerned with the idea of intelligent evil lurking behind the human propensity toward self-destruction and idolatry, not architectural prowess or tyranny of the less enlightened savages through technology. Books like 1 Enoch and material in the Bible never put forth the idea of advanced human technology being bestowed to a master race for control of inferior races, or to condescendingly pass on their super knowledge. The concern is theological or moral, not the singling out of an elite race “blessed” by such knowledge.

And that’s the ultimate irony. Chesterton described bigotry as “the failure of the mind to imagine any other mind.” People who adopt “ancient aliens” explanations for our history don’t just demean the past through their assumed superiority, they show that they are not even interested in the past for its own sake. “Ancient aliens” theorists don’t do the hard work of trying to perceive what the people who built the pyramids or took the effort to write ancient texts were themselves interested in or why they chose to do what they did. See Heiser’s comment from near the beginning of this post that ancient peoples’ “technology solved their problems and met their needs, not ours.” The theorists, having lost sight of the humanity of the ancients, can only see these things as evidence for their own pet theories of extraterrestrial influence.

Whether for reasons of chronological snobbery or racism, whether naively or knowingly, their fault is a lack of charity.

More if you’re interested

Read Heiser’s full post here and the longer posts by Colavito and Fitzpatrick-Matthews here and here, respectively. Heiser also runs an excellent video channel at Vimeo (though he still uploads most of his videos to YouTube as well) in which he briefly investigates popular esoteric theories and sheds some critical light on them. For a good sample, here are his videos on the Annunaki and supposed depictions of aliens in Egyptian art. Erich von Däniken also gets namedropped in several of the late great Charles Portis’s novels, notably Gringos, which you should definitely read. And I’ve written about chronological snobbery many times here before, notably here.

Neil Armstrong, in memoriam

Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) aboard the lunar module after his first walk on the moon.

I wrote the following post for a now defunct website following Neil Armstrong’s death seven years ago at the age of 82. I repost it here, lightly emended, for the 50th anniversary of Armstrong’s first steps on the moon tomorrow. —JMP

I had a poster on the wall beside my bunkbed showing the planets—Pluto included, back then—in their orbits around the sun. I had more toy space shuttles than I could keep track of, and enough booster rockets and rust-orange external tanks to launch all of them into orbit above our trampoline. I went to Space Camp, ate dehydrated ice cream in vacuum-sealed packaging, and wore my blue NASA jumpsuit and pilot wings to school. I wanted to be an astronaut.

And when I thought of “astronaut,” I thought of him.

Neil Armstrong died this weekend at the age of 82, just over 43 years after taking man’s first steps on the moon. It was that moment and those words—broadcast worldwide on television—that cemented him forever as The Astronaut.

But he wasn’t just an astronaut. He was a few weeks shy of his 39th birthday when he landed the Eagle in the Sea of Tranquility, and the vast majority of those previous years he had spent behind the stick in hundreds of planes. He learned to fly before he got his driver’s license and, after joining the Navy, became a test pilot. As the horrific opening chapter of Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff makes clear, testing aircraft was one of the most hazardous and demanding jobs in the US military. Equipment malfunction or failure was part of the job, and pilot error, even among the coolest, most daring pilots in the country, could kill a man even when everything else went right.

And Armstrong was one of the coolest and most collected of those pilots. Though he declined to be interviewed for the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, in the film his fellow Apollo astronauts speak of his bravery and cool. Archival test footage—which shows Armstrong ejecting from a flaming military prototype just above the ground, seconds before the vehicle crashes and explodes—amply back up his reputation for courage.

He was born to do his work. “Pilots take no special joy in walking,” he wrote, “pilots like flying.” And it was as a pilot that he approached the crowning moment of his career and of the space program. “The exciting part for me, as a pilot, was the landing on the moon. . . . Walking on the lunar surface was very interesting, but it was something we looked on as reasonably safe and predictable. So the feeling of elation accompanied the landing rather than the walking.”

He returned home a hero, and remained a hero the rest of his life. He retired from NASA and worked as an educator, teaching aerospace engineering and devoting himself just as wholly to that as he had to his career in the Navy and the space program. “I am, and ever will be,” he said, “a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer.”

He avoided the limelight, increasingly so as the years went by, declining interviews and attention from the media. He even stopped giving out autographs after learning that scalpers were hawking his signature for exorbitant amounts of money.

As a child, I didn’t know much of that and wouldn’t have understood if I had. I was obsessed with Armstrong for strictly one mission and one moment and wanted to emulate him, though I never saw him on TV. I had to content myself with photos in my many books about space and NASA, and the black and white footage I saw when Apollo 11 was commemorated every year. I think that added to his legend for me—he was the man who walked on the moon, the first to achieve all my astronaut dreams, and then he disappeared.

Now I understand, and my childlike worship has matured into real admiration as a result—Armstrong was humble.

As far back as Cicero and Dante, writers have imagined the awe that must come with seeing Earth for what it is, in the context of all creation. How would man, such a tiny creature, feel about himself upon seeing that his home and all he knows and loves is hardly bigger than himself against the backdrop of the universe? For a wise man, the experience should be humbling.

Neil Armstrong knew that humility. He experienced what the ancients could only imagine. Standing on the surface of the moon in 1969, the aviator, astronaut, engineer, and representative of all mankind to outer space looked up at home. “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant,” he said. “I felt very, very small.”

Beyond his courage, his cool, and his willingness to risk all in the pursuit of his mission, that humility is why Armstrong is a hero—and why he will remain one.