Flying saucers against capitalism
PETER BROOKESMITH surveys the latest fads and flaps from the world of ufological research
From beyond the Fringe...
True to his word, MJ Banias has continued his series on how ufology threatens capitalism (see FT354:26) and ergo why ufology remains an unserious subject for ‘the establishment’, which of course is so suffused with the assumptions of capitalism that it doesn’t know it. Vast swathes of the Left, who are more part of the establishment than perhaps they care to admit, might nonetheless be rather offended by that. However, one curious bit about Banias’s sidelong look at ufology is that in seemingly talking up its allegedly “purely democratic” nature, he exposes how batty it is, and reveals why only ufologists take ufology very seriously.
But before we get to that, I’ll take issue with the initial proposal that ufology is “purely democratic”. Democracy as invented in ancient Athens was an egalitarian mechanism for making decisions, each citizen having a vote and a voice of his own in the assembly. Democracy as we know it in the West is also a means to make decisions about things that affect our lives, although in various ways we delegate the actual decision-making – the power – to elected representatives, who in turn are subject to the internal power-structures of political parties. Observing this democracyat-several-removes with dry eyes led the late Viscount Hailsham (1907–2001) to describe modern democracy as an “elective dictatorship”.
In contrast, ufology is no more democratic than a swarm of midges, albeit often as irritating. Ufology as a whole (and Banias is right to say that means everything within it, “from reasoned logic to utter madness”, not just the bits you like), and as we know it, makes no decisions at all. It certainly hasn’t decided to be anti- or extracapitalist; as a body, ufology is incapable of making decisions. It is “a wild west of ideologies where anything and everything goes”, as Banias says, and because of “this ideological freedom, UFO discourse and debate is an example of a living and functioning discourse that counters modern ideological Capital”. There is a grain of sense in this, in that ufology doesn’t function along broadly agreed lines, and its anarchic ‘discourse’ would be less than helpful in organising the proverbial piss-up in a brewery, let alone running the brewery itself. Which incompetence is certainly counter to capitalism. But as such, ufology would be an equally useless contributor to whatever form of non-capitalist utopia you can think of – some of which wouldn’t take very long to shoot, hang, stone or incarcerate the lot of them.
Thus Banias is seriously off-course when he asserts: “It is the very nature, the fluidity, of UFO discourse that calls modern Capital into question.” It doesn’t, though, because it doesn’t, even implicitly, offer a pragmatic alternative model of economic and social organisation, even in principle, let alone as a blueprint – not that they’ve ever been much practical use, or even humane. And exactly what Banias means by capitalism and “capitalist ideology” he doesn’t say. Ayn Rand maintained that pure capitalism has never been tried, which is nearly true, but also probably just as well. Banias also digs himself into some mire by quoting Noam Chomsky’s confused proposition that capitalism and democracy are incompatible (tell that to the ancient Athenians). And so it makes no sense for Banias to say that ufologists “dabble in objects and ideas that pose a direct threat to the hegemonic thought system Capitalism generates.” Banias should attend a board meeting of a large company sometime, and observe how ‘hegemonic’ is the thinking of its members. But anyway. These are the kinds of reasons he proposes that capitalists have ensured that ufology must live on the fringe, “as a taboo subject, laughed at by popular media, and purposefully alienated by the elites who dwell within the halls of power”. It doesn’t occur to him that ufology is discreetly ignored and quietly mocked because most of it is indeed cacophonous, (self-) contradictory and, outside psychosocial commentary, has achieved precisely nothing in its seven decades of delusion and incompetence. And that’s just to deal with the second part of his argument. For the third, you can visit http://www.terraobscura. net/blog/part-3-feeling-alienated, and decide for yourself how skew-wiff Banias’s outlook is. Or isn’t.
…to behind the Fridge
Ufologists, for all their frustrations, do have something to be thankful for. The feminists haven’t come after them – yet. In a way this is surprising, given that the vast majority of ufologists are old, white, male, and hang out in the notoriously racist, misogynist, militaristic (&c &c) West and are therefore surely in need of severe correction, a radical dose of identity politics and perhaps a lashing of intersectionality. Now consider glaciology. An innocent pursuit, you may think – people poking about, doing a spot of mountaineering maybe, taking samples, ice cores, and measurements, reporting their findings.
No way is it innocent, according to Mark Carey, M Jackson, Alessandro Antonello and Jaclyn Rushing in “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist framework for global environmental change research” in Progress
in Human Geography, Vol 40 (6), Jan 2016, pp770–93. From the abstract: “This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework…. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic socialecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.” I wish there were space to quote more. But from here it goes downhill rather faster than your average river of ice, in a 24-page mish-mash of post-modernist cant and mostly unhinged assertions. So, ufologists, while you’re watching the skies, watch your back too, because sooner or later some crazed academic axe-grinder will be along to denounce you for what you are. Or rather, are not.
most ufologists are old, white, male, and hang out in the notoriously racist, misogynist, militaristic West