Faking It

How to fake science, history and religion

An investigation into the invented histories of Atlantis, pre-Ice Age civilizations and cosmic catastrophes

One of the epigraphs that punctuate Invented Knowledge is from Pascal: "It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false". Whether it is natural or not, it would seem that the false – the extravagant, the fantastical, the grandiose – can at times be so seductive that we suspend our critical faculties in its consideration. Ronald Fritze, a historian and dean at Athens State University in Alabama, is concerned about, and clearly fascinated by, the pseudo-histories and pseudo-sciences – the stories of Atlantis, pre-Ice Age civilizations, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and cosmic catastrophes – which, as he argues, developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and are still with us. "The delivery system for pseudohistorians and pseudoscientists of all stripes", Fritze writes, "now encompasses a charlatan’s playground of film, television, radio, magazines, and the net." Fritze, a committed positivist, finds them at times dangerous and always a threat to the standards of "objective" history.

Recognizing how "tricky" it is to define pseudo-history, Fritze suggests we begin by asking, What is history? – "a vexed question for people living in a postmodernist age". But apparently not for Fritze. "A simple and elegant definition for history is a true story about the human past", he tells us, ignoring the epistemological anguish that has troubled historians from well before the arrival of the postmodernists. So, pseudo-history can easily be defined as an untrue story about the past. But, how do we reckon with the fact that pseudo-historians also insist on their stories’ truth? Through evidence and "objective" empirical methods, Fritze tells us, again without raising any questions of method and evidence. While objective historians look at all the facts, guarding themselves against presuppositions, pseudo-historians choose only those that support their case.

Plainly, Fritze is no epistemologist, though he is a careful scholar with a gift for summarizing theories, however crackpot. He takes a historian’s delight in uncovering connections between the various pseudo-histories he describes. His approach is textual, quite literal, and while, at least implicitly, he recognizes the importance of contextual influences, he underplays them or treats them in too general and often banal terms; for example, he attributes the rise of pseudo-histories to "the conditions of modern society", citing, as one might expect, the shattering effect of Darwinian evolution – and, more generally and less specifically, modern science – on "the Christian worldview of a 6000-year-old-history with its six-day creation of a fixed natural world and humanity". Whatever happened to the Enlightenment? Fritze lives and teaches in the American South.

Though Fritze mentions other pseudohistories, he focuses on six: Atlantis, the oldest of such "historical" confabulations; preColumbian exploration and colonization of the Americas; the role of false history among such racist religious groups as Christian Identity and the Nation of Islam; "histories" of cosmic catastrophes and interplanetary visitations; and, finally, the scholarly brouhaha over Martin Bernal’s Black Venus.

The history of beliefs about Atlantis is perhaps more interesting than the postulation of the existence of a lost continent that hosted a highly civilized empire, which fell into decadence and disappeared with the continent itself. Unlike the other pseudo-histories, the Atlantis myth can be traced back to a single source: Plato’s Timaeus and his unfinished Critias. (It is worth noting that, like so many false histories, its origin remains fragile. Plato must have got it from somewhere: the Egyptians, inevitably, or from some story connected to the volcanic eruptions that destroyed the Aegean island of Thera in 1525 bc.) The existence of Atlantis has been in question ever since. Aristotle considered Plato’s story a fiction; Plutarch believed it. Francis Bacon’s fable, New Atlantis, contributed to its identification with the Americas, but it was given many different locations. Perhaps the most preposterous was by the seventeenth-century Swedish physician, Olaus Rudbeck, who not only located it in the vicinity of Uppsala but believed it was the source of all civilizations. Atlantis was, of course, picked up by cultists: Madame Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner and Edgar Cayce. Nazis claimed it as the original Aryan homeland. Like other pseudo-histories, Atlantis has now become a commodity. Disney animated it in 2001 in Atlantis: The lost empire. Fritze surmises that many of the pseudo-historians write mostly for the money.

Wild theories about the discovery and peopling of the Americas began in 1493, when Columbus returned to Spain from his first voyage, and have continued ever since. Aside from the ancestors of the native Americans and Leif Ericsson’s Norsemen, ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks fleeing the Trojans, shipwrecked Romans, Buddhist missionaries, Mongols, Arabs, African merchants, Hindus, Chinese refugees and super-travellers, and interplanetary visitors have been given credit for getting there first. Bibliographers have found more than 6,000 items treating the subject. Columbus’s claim to the discovery was already disputed in his lifetime. He was said to have received a chart from an unknown pilot, the sole survivor of a trade ship that, having been blown off course to a far-western island inhabited by naked people, lost its way back home. Columbus was not much liked, a poor governor of Hispaniola, and in litigation with the Spanish court over his share of the enormous wealth generated by his discovery. The court encouraged any rumour that would discredit him.

Other early claims of first discovery reflected national greed. Among the most persistent was England’s claim that the Welsh Prince Madoc had established a colony in America in the twelfth century, proof of which was supposedly found in the "fact" that Welsh was spoken by at least one Indian tribe. Interest in first discovery waned over the centuries, but has been recently renewed with the manufactured success of Gavin Menzies’s 1421: The year China discovered America, in which Menzies makes the incredible claim that an enormous flotilla of Chinese ships, under the leadership of a Turkish eunuch, travelled around the world and not only reached the Atlantic coast of the Americas, but sailed through the Straits of Magellan and up the western coast of South America.

The Bible (and the Qur’an for the followers of the Nation of Islam) has inspired pseudo-histories ranging from British Isrealism to Immanuel Velikovsky’s "neo-catastrophism" and his attempt to correct prevailing chronologies of ancient history. It has certainly fostered their frequent apocalyptic scenarios. Often there is a contradiction, as in Velikovsky’s Ages of Chaos, between literal readings of Scripture and untrammelled readings of history and science. Fritze carefully skirts the question of pseudo-historical passages in the Bible and Qur’an themselves.

The most blatant contradiction in pseudo-historical trajectories is the reversal of philo-Semitism in the early development of British Israelism and the violent anti-Semitism of its recent avatar, Christian Identity, which flourished in the 1980s in the United States and could, Fritze speculates, resurface with the advent of economic recession, renewed fear of a cold war, and, "ironically", the collapse of the Evangelical Right which now holds the extremists at bay. As in so many pseudo-histories, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel figure in the rise of British Israelism, which began in 1840 with the publication of John Wilson’s Lectures on Our Israelitish Origins. On the basis of simplistic phonetic similarities, Wilson argued that the Ten Tribes, having migrated to northern Europe, founded the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic nations. The tribe of Ephraim, Jacob’s favoured son, settled in England. Edward Hines, Wilson’s successor, revised the theory: Germans were descended from the Assyrians, and the tribe of Manasseh settled in North America. The movement became increasingly anti-Semitic in the United States, with support from figures like William J. Cameron, the editor of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, who published the infamous International Jew series.

In the 1950s and 60s, Gerald L. K. Smith, an ally of the virulent Huey Long, transformed British Israelism into Christian Identity. How can one account for white superiority, Christian Identity asks, if everyone is descended from Adam? As for many Southern whites in the nineteenth century, the answer lay in the existence of an inferior pre-Adamic people, namely blacks, who intermarried with Adamic whites producing the other races. The Jews, though, are descended from Cain, the son of Eve and Satan, and this accounts for all their nastiness. To this amalgam Christian Identity added apocalyptic worries which have fostered violent survivalists and paramilitary groups.

Fritze’s last two chapters raise the question of evidence in recent pseudo-histories – those by Velikovsky, Charles Hopgood, Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock – and in Black Athena, a scholarly work. Though Velikovsky and Hopgood tried at first to work within a scientific framework, however dubious, von Däniken and Hancock have simply decorated their fictions with pseudo- history and science claming to be real history and science. They are clearly influenced by science fiction (a point Fritze ignores). Hopgood is an interesting case, for he began with a theory of Earth’s crust sliding, which, he claims, accounted for periodic changes in the location of the poles and in glacial formations, and ended up postulating a pre-glacial high civilization in Antarctica. (Fritze takes them seriously, arguing that their theories were plausible given the state of science and archaeology half a century ago.) Von Däniken hardly bothers about evidence in his insistence that extra-terrestrial astronauts landed on Earth, bringing their civilization with them. Through genetic manipulation and intermarriage with human women, they produced superior humans and a super-race of giants, and tried to rid the world of inferior humans by creating the flood.

Fritze ends his book with a chapter entitled "Professors Gone Wild", which treats the scandal surrounding Bernal’s Black Athena. Put simply, Bernal argues that the white racism which developed with colonialism and slavery was responsible for the devaluation of the role of "black" Egypt (and Phoenicia) in the rise of Western civilization. Classical scholars and other historians not only criticized Bernal’s scholarship, but also accused him of greed and of catering to Afro-centric and feminist audiences. Many of their accusations were embarrassingly ad hominem. Indeed, Fritze himself seems to go wild, losing his literalist cool or, as he would put it, "objective empiricism". It is when we read the following sentence, hinted at in his view of history, that we appreciate the fear that must have motivated his book. "Furthermore, Bernal’s approach to scholarship at least indirectly promotes a relativism that is so extreme as to be corrosive of all knowledge or a cynicism about scholarship that is equally corrosive. Facts would cease to exist, all learning would become opinion and all opinions would be equally valid."

Fritze has a mission, but he prefers to illustrate the play of imagination that produces false histories and sciences than to develop any theoretical position. What is striking about pseudo-histories and sciences is how repetitive they are and, despite their extravagant speculations, how limited their visions are. They are mechanical and lack the éclat – the surprises – of science and history. What is their allure? What are the circumstances of their rise and fall? What is – and was – their audience? These questions are probably impossible to answer in anything but a hypothetical way, but Ronald Fritze’s mission, closed in on itself – rather like the subject matter of his book – seems to preclude their consideration.

Ronald H. Fritze
INVENTED KNOWLEDGE
False history, fake science and pseudo-religions
304pp. Reaktion Books. £19.95 (US $29.95).
978 1 86189 430 4