My last post was partly about the impossibility of psychic phenomena — especially telepathy. That is, the impossibility of thought to travel between minds in any other way than by a physical signal receivable and readable ultimately by the private machine language of the brain. In other words, I was taking a firmly materialist assumption of thought. Mind exists in matter, and cannot exist apart from it. But even as I was putting that argument into words, I felt uneasy, even (dare I say) “dirty.” I wasn’t sure if I actually believed what I was writing.

Do I actually think thoughts can only be material? Do I really not think that consciousness could have any kind of existence outside of physical neurons or circuits? Why do I think this?

The part of me that adheres to such a view is the product of Enlightenment rationality and psychology. Science has never questioned that the brain was the seat of thinking. The study of anatomy and observation of people with brain injuries since time immemorial has made clear the brain’s special role in thought—if only as some kind of transducer. It is possible even the ancient Egyptians knew about the special functions of certain of the brain’s lobes. By Freud’s time, even though neurons were not yet understood, he could create a theory of how the brain was essentially a machine for thinking. (The metaphor he used was hydraulics, because electricity was still new.)

Now, more than ever before, science is able to actually show us “thinking” as it occurs in the brain. We can map out what kinds of thoughts, what parts of our mental life, arise from activity in which areas and involve which specific circuits. It is even possible to record the firing of individual neurons and know their function in the organism’s behavior. From a rationalistic point of view, these advances put the material basis of thinking beyond question. They make it easy to dismiss the notion that a person’s mind, memories, sense of self, etc. – their “soul” – could depart the body, or survive beyond the decay or destruction of the body. The brain is more than a transducer, it seems: It’s where thought is born and lives, and where it has to stay. This makes most who study the matter of the mind dismissive of the notion of anything like the soul.

Why, then, do I feel like some kind of resentful spoilsport when I follow suit? I have no counterargument or alternative explanation for the self-evident materiality of mind, so why do I feel a twinge of guilt when I argue against psychic phenomena or disembodied thoughts in a blog post? Why do I feel like I have diminished myself ever so slightly? I’ve written before about the “rudeness of science,” but I don’t think my reaction was just guilt at being impolite or arrogant at dismissing what other people believe. I really think it is because this rationalistic/materialistic part of me is just that – a part of me, but not the entirety. I know that the brain is in the mind as much as the mind is in the brain.

“Diminishing oneself” is a real thing: pretending to be smaller than you are, crouching down to fit inside the cramped box of an identity (such as “rational skeptic”) – rather than standing tall within the fullness of your possibilities as a human. This kind of “crouching down” means restricting your vision, narrowing your gaze to only include some segment of what lies within your larger purview or field of awareness. Because any identity box is just an idea, it’s apparent limitations don’t really exist, so to make them convincing to ourselves and others they must be “mimed.”

I think we are all, even the wisest of us, to some extent like mimes doing the “trapped in a glass box” thing. It’s more than just playing or acting out our social roles; I’m referring to something inner, an inner sense of oneself. A banker who thinks that his identity as a businessman exhausts his possibilities as a human, is really just miming a reduced model of himself. A depressed person who keeps trying to fit every fact about their life into their diagnosis is likewise caught up in a mime act. Same with any identity: Black, White, Woman, Man, Gay, Straight, Christian, Jew, Atheist… When I, even in the privacy of my own head, put on the pompous airs of a scientist who can explain why the soul doesn’t exist, I am really miming a constraint in my thinking that doesn’t necessarily need to be there. I’m pretending to be smaller or more limited than I really am.

There are certain “glass boxes” we have a hard time questioning. Science, because it is so persuasive and powerful, is one of them. But the more a thing seems self-evident, the more it should be questioned and challenged. In this way, we make ourselves bigger. (That kind of fundamental skepticism should help sharpen science, too.)

All this is to say, I suppose, that I’m going to try to be more open minded.

[Note (3/13/10): In the first version of this post, I began by proposing--I thought somewhat originally--that UFOs were like the laser pointers used to entertain cats. A reader pointed out, however, that that the UFOs-as-laser-pointer idea was offered a couple years ago by Mac Tonnies on his blog Posthuman Blues (September 29, 2006). I had not been aware of Tonnies' post when I wrote mine, but he surely deserves credit for coming up with the analogy first. I have now edited and shortened my post to its more essential argument on holography, to reflect this.]

“I believe that UFOs are physically real. They represent a fantastic technology controlled by an unknown form of consciousness. But I also believe that it would be dangerous to jump to premature conclusions about their origin and nature, because the phenomenon serves as the vehicle for images that can be manipulated to promote belief systems tending to the long-term transformation of human society.” –Jacques Vallee.

“People love to think. We are all detectives. We love to observe, we love to deduce. It is great to pay attention. We have a lot of fun this way.” –David Lynch

“The aim of [contradictory] commands from the viewpoint of a control system is to limit and confine. All control units employ such commands.” –William S. Burroughs.

I have argued in this blog, rather unoriginally and, I now realize, based on prevailing cultural assumptions, in favor of a variant of the extraterrestrial hypothesis or ETH, originally put forward in the 1950s by Daniel Keyhoe: the notion that UFO sightings and encounters represent the presence either of alien visitors or, perhaps, visitation by automated and self-replicating constructs (von Neumann probes) created by far-advanced civilizations. But after reading more on the history of UFO sightings and UFO research, including the bombshell volumes I and II of UFOs and the National Security State by historian Richard Dolan and classic works by Jacques Vallee such as Messengers of Deception, I am coming around to the view that the UFO picture can’t be fully explained by the ETH, but may represent technology and intentions that are much closer to home. The suspiciously hominid appearance of “ETs,” their theatrical and often B-movie behavior, their travel in clumsy and large ships that seem to crash with great frequency, and their mysterious need for cattle genitalia or human genetic material, suggest a phenomenon simultaneously more bizarre and more mundane than visitation by super-advanced beings.

The main popular alternative to the ETH has always been that UFOs represent advanced aerospace technology, kept “above top secret” by their creators, likely the US government or some secret group within the government. But critics of such a view sensibly point out that the behavior of UFOs, their incredible maneuverability and speed, their ability to change shape, defy gravity, even become physically insubstantial, just renders an explanation of advanced military propulsion technology too farfetched. The idea that such technology may be reverse-engineered from captured extraterrestrial craft, or given to us by ETs, only begs the question, and brings us back to the ETH as the ultimate explanation for UFO sightings and encounters.

But there’s another possibility that I find quite intriguing. In his blog, Posthuman Blues, Mac Tonnies likened UFOs to the laser pointers that are one of the ultimate toys for entertaining cats and their owners. Like the moving red dot that cats find so irresistible, UFOs tantalize us and fascinate us and, just as we seem on the verge of catching them, they zip out of our reach. And I find that, besides the pure play factor, laser pointers also are a good tool for “social control.” I use mine to distract my cats from mischief, or to lure them out of closets I don’t want them to be in. You could say that a $9.95 laser pointer is a highly useful (and cost-effective) tool for deceiving and manipulating members of a less-advanced civilization. What if UFOs represent an advanced laser technology designed for deceiving and controlling humans, holograms deployed to “lure us out of the closet.”

Whatever the state of research into “antigravity” propulsion seemingly used by “flying saucers,” holographic technology has been around just about as long as the new breed of UFOs—the illuminated boomerangs and triangles, the shape-shifting vessels, and the alternating solid/insubstantial light formations that now seem to dominate the UFO literature. The real-world holograms most of us have seen in museums and on credit cards are actually illusions of depth on a two-dimensional solid surface; the far cooler kind, volumetric holography—that is, three-dimensional projections of images in thin air, like R2D2’s projection of Princess Leia in Star Wars—has been only a matter of science fiction until recently—or so Wikipedia would have us believe. But various means of producing volumetric simulations of three dimensions have already been developed and demonstrated on a small scale. It is not at all farfetched to think that such technologies have already been developed and tested on a larger scale, in secret, by the military or by defense contractors.

The simplest method of volumetric display projects lasers onto a physical substrate, sort of like the way the beam from a flashlight is only visible in fog or smoke. According to Wikipedia, “Several static-volume volumetric 3-D displays use laser light to encourage visible radiation in a solid, liquid, or gas. For example, some researchers have relied on two-step upconversion within a rare earth-doped material when illuminated by intersecting infrared laser beams of the appropriate frequencies.” I don’t know what “two-step upconversion” means, but “rare-earth-doped material” in the form of an airborn gas or powder does call to my mind some of the physical traces, like mysterious radioactive powder, found in the aftermath of UFO landings.

The latest approach to volumetric display doesn’t need a substrate at all. Wiki goes on to say (and please bear with me) that “Another technique uses a focused pulsed infrared laser (about 100 pulses per second; each lasting a nanosecond) to create balls of glowing plasma at the focal point in normal air. The focal point is directed by two moving mirrors and a sliding lens, allowing it to draw shapes in the air. Each pulse creates a popping sound, so the device crackles as it runs.” The interesting part is this: “Currently it can generate dots anywhere within a cubic metre. It is thought that the device could be scaled up to any size, allowing for 3D images to be generated in the sky.” (My emphasis.)

Check out a cool picture of this thin-air holography–albeit on a small scale–here.

The theoretical ease of using ground-based or, who knows, dirigible- or balloon-based laser arrays to produce believable images of solid or semisolid, astonishingly fast and even mutable aerial vehicles suggests holograms as a possible explanation for many UFO sightings. Some of the descriptions and photographic evidence produced both by the Arizona Lights event and the recent wave of sightings in Stephenville, Texas, for example, seem like they could be consistent with volumetric holography.

The purpose could be testing: They could be tests of laser projection systems ultimately meant to be used in warfare. One can imagine that projecting believably menacing holograms of nonexistent bomber squadrons, for example, could be useful for subduing an enemy in a war zone. Or projected UFOs may be used to create an ET cover story for more mundane, secret projects—who knows, perhaps involving abducting people and mutilating cattle. After all, the black helicopters are never far behind. It could be a combination of both of these things.

The uncertainty itself opens the door to the social control and manipulation Vallee warned of in his books. Like my cats chasing a laser dot, we may be watching and chasing laser projections, simultaneously thrilling to their mystery, the exotic possibility that they may be actual visitations by beings from distant stars, and also suspecting that there’s an all-too-human hand responsible for the spectacle. Is the Wizard real or is he just an Air Force engineer behind a curtain?

Police Chief Wiggam chides his nosy son in one Simpsons episode: “What IS your fascination with Daddy’s forbidden closet of mystery??” Part of the fun in any mystery is holding multiple interpretations simultaneously in mind; it’s also what tends to immobilize us or keep us glued to our seats as passive audience members. The same way cats can’t resist chasing a moving object, humans can’t resist playing detective. We love mysteries, so the contradiction between the two plausible interpretations of UFOs (they are real/they are fake) may be the strongest tool of our manipulation. It puts us in a double bind, and the result could be a heightened receptivity to social control.

The long history of tantalizing information and disinformation propogated by government agencies suggests not merely a “coverup” but, rather, an interest in perpetuating the ambiguity of UFOs, keeping both possibilities alive in the public consciousness by burying the signal in noise.

How many times in the history of ufology has flip derision been the media’s or the government’s reaction? Arizona Governor Fife Symington’s farcical, dismissive news conference after the Arizona Lights incident, for example (as shown in James Fox’s terrific documentaries Out of the Blue and I Know What I Saw). Or the vaguely comedic spin given to UFO stories in the media (see Richard Dolan’s essay, “How to Marginalize an Astronaut”). Dismissive reactions by the media are often attributed to the long history of government or military interference and manipulation aimed to discredit the phenomenon (and thereby keep it out of public consciousness, other than as a joke). But I don’t think it is necessary to always invoke “the government” to explain the belittling of UFOs and ufology.

Although I have no doubt that government manipulation has occurred and still occurs—Dolan’s UFOs and the National Security State, Volumes I and II, document it extensively (and depressingly)—I suspect the reasons the mainstream media and even just “people on the street” fail to take the subject of UFOs seriously is somewhat less sinister: the plain human unpreparedness to confront troubling philosophical subjects. People are quite happy accepting that UFOs may be real and that we are not alone, but they don’t want to have to think about the implications until absolutely necessary.

It’s a normal way of dealing with big and traumatic subjects. Death is a good example: We all can accept “intellectually” our own mortality, but most of us go about our daily lives pretending it won’t happen to us and not facing squarely its significance. Whether it is because it is upsetting, or because we just don’t feel philosophically up to the task, or because we are just lazy, we don’t think about death except in the abstract unless and until we are forced to. More often, we make jokes and belittle the subject. Gallows humor.

The probable existence (and possible presence) of much-more-advanced or intelligent beings is perhaps not on par with death, but as worldview-altering truths go, it is not too far from the top. Consequently, busy people deal with it the way they deal with other philosophically complicated matters they really don’t know how to confront squarely at the time—they laugh it off. To his credit, Symington, who was among the many astonished witnesses of the lights over Phoenix that night in 1997, later acknowledged that his flippant news conference had sort of this motivation.

Frustration at this apparent dismissiveness inspires ufologists to want to shake the public’s lapels, but they should recognize that people are probably more affected by the subject than they let on. Ordinary people just don’t want to have to get serious, then and there, in public, about something they are not prepared to get serious about.

Even the most rationalistic and empirically minded people are fundamentally governed by nonrational principles such as aesthetics. Like the rest of us–though they may not acknowledge it–even “hard scientists” are guided in their inquiries and in their interpretations by what feels most elegant and beautiful and right.

It is hard not to appreciate the elegance and beauty of the standard SETI picture of extraterrestrial civilizations: They are distant, ancient, and serene. “Contact” will take the form of radio signals sent years or centuries or millennia ago “across the sea of space.” It is a picture I like to call the “scientific sublime,” and Carl Sagan was its great prophet for a generation of young would-be scientists. Every Sunday morning we were glued to PBS, watching Sagan sail his “ship of the imagination” to the stars and explore the “intricate machinery of life,” and we felt inspired by this vast cosmic vision and the weirdly inspiring sense of the insignificance of ourselves and humanity.

Freud wrote of the “oceanic feeling” that stimulated religion. Sagan was a kind of prophet of science-as-religion; you could get that oceanic feeling from thinking about space and time and the incredible complexity of nature. (The recent “Symphony of Science” remixes of Cosmos and other classic science programs are nice reminders of this.)

In other words, the cosmos was, in Sagan’s picture, like God—a God we could actually believe in and celebrate because he was essentially indifferent to our tiny affairs. Throughout his career, Sagan was highly dismissive of UFOs, even though he acknowledged that it was statistically probable the earth would be visited by extraterrestrial explorers every 20,000 years or so.

I suspect this cherished sense of man’s insignificance in the cosmos is at the root of many scientists’ dismissal of UFOs: It simply violates their sense of aesthetics. It seems like a B-movie version of a state of affairs (“we are not alone”) that ought to be far stranger, far more awe-inspiring and serene. And it feels distressingly (and dangerously) human-centric, flying in the face of the wise and ethically inspiring cosmic vision Sagan and other proponents of SETI preached—the earth as a vulnerable tiny blue speck in the vast cosmos.

Other intelligences, in this view, should be far, far away, not buzzing around our planet like gnats. Alien minds should be contemplating the incredible intricacy of nature, the mysteries of existence, amid inconceivable monuments of glass and stone, not furtively spying on our army bases, molesting our livestock, and abducting suburbanites. An ET presence among us feels cheap and tawdry, deflating that sublime sense of distance and scale.

The “UFO movement” (to slap a label on something that is highly diverse and varied, I realize) tends to contain a lot of highly human-centric assumptions. Almost any interpretation of the phenomenon assumes that humans figure in the plans of higher beings, or that they want something from us, or that they are intensely interested in us. If abductees are to be believed, aliens want to do things with, or take things from, our bodies, or they want to breed with us; perhaps they “need” our genetic diversity, or want to control us by creating some kind of alien-human hybrid. More optimistically, they are preparing to contact us and share their knowledge with us. Or they are here to protect us from destroying ourselves. Or they want to elevate us, facilitate our evolution to a higher, “posthuman” state, like the slabs in 2001.

In short, UFOs encourage us to think of ourselves and our planet as special—which, unfortunately, is a dangerous and retrograde perception—a throwback to the Middle Ages.

Is it possible to accept the UFO phenomenon and also somehow preserve the sublimity that Sagan preached? Some ufologists potentially do so by departing from the ET hypothesis. Mac Tonnies, for instance, thought UFOs could be “cryptoterrestrial” rather than extraterrestrial. Yet, he also liked the alternative view that they represented an ancient machine intelligence, and also blogged intelligently (and wrote a book) about the possibility of ancient ruins on Mars—more sublime visions. Jacques Vallee likewise believes UFOs may be far stranger than anything we can imagine–psychological or interdimensional entities–but that they don’t represent beings from outer space.

There may be no single answer to the UFO question. It’s quite possible or even probable that we’re not even talking about a single phenomenon. But I do think that much if not all of what we are dealing with represents beings that are more or less indifferent to our affairs or our existence. This indifference, to me, preserves at least some of the sublimity of whatever vast and ancient intelligences UFOs might represent.

[edit 1/10/09 -- The original post is now clarified and expanded in my article "Dreams and the Art of Memory: A New Hypothesis About Dream Bizarreness"]

Every few months a psychologist—or now, more often, it is a neuroscientist—aggressively promotes their new theory of why we dream, and it gets picked up in the press as the latest scientific explanation, the final answer. The New York Times this week is reporting on the latest theory by J. Allen Hobson, that dreams prepare us for emotional experiences during the day, like a kind of early-morning workout.

Usually the journalist gets lots of facts wrong—in this case, he misleadingly summarizes Freud’s now-supposedly-discredited “wish fulfillment” theory as the notion that dreaming was “a playground for the unconscious mind.” Actually, Freud thought dreams were more like a totalitarian regime than a playground: Repressed wishes, like revolutionary communiqués, had to be smuggled to the outside world in code. But I’ve recorded and studied thousands of my own dreams and I know from experience that Freud was, at the very least, on the right track. Hobson isn’t.

Of all modern views of dreaming, the soundest hypothesis is that dreams have to do with memory-building. It is well-known that during REM sleep new neural connections are formed, and it is known that recently learned stuff is remembered better after being “slept on.” Yet researchers like Hobson refuse to admit the possibility that dream images are memories, simply because dream content is absurd—on their surface, dreams don’t look anything like an accurate representation of our waking experiences. The Nobel laureate Francis Crick argued that dreams are just the discharging of mental static, random and meaningless associations, essentially the brain farting. Hobson’s view, although slightly more nuanced, is just as dismissive of the notion that dream content might be interpretable. Hobson has devoted his career, in fact, to debunking any notion that dream content might be meaningful in any interesting way.

I call the latter the “literalist” view–if it ain’t literal, it ain’t meaningful. “Hard” scientists, true to the stereotype, often do lack imagination and feel uncomfortable with things that are nonliteral or irrational (like symbolism). But if they would step outside of their laboratories and stroll through the humanities stacks in their library, they might detect that there is method in dream madness. They might find ample circumstantial evidence for the real essence and function of dreaming in other fields like art and history and philosophy. I’ve come to believe that the very “absurdity” that causes scientists to often regard dreams as meaningless is precisely the clue to their very sensible, even rational, function.

To understand what dreams really are (he says oh-so-confidently, certain that future research will vindicate him), it’s useful to approach the problem of dreams from the side of memory, specifically the method used by people in nonliterate societies and in the pre-Gutenberg world to remember things they have learned: Use free association, puns, and vivid, bizarre images and situations to help latch new material onto what we already know–a method that has been called simply the Art of Memory. Dreaming, I suggest, is simply the Art of Memory operating automatically during sleep.

To read the complete argument, see “Dreams and the Art of Memory: A New Hypothesis About Dream Bizarreness.”

The time has come for a new Copernican Revolution. Such a revolution would be, not merely a realization and understanding of our place in the order of things, but a true coming-to-grips which painfully and profoundly reorders our thinking. The realization must be this: Humans are not the apex of sentience or consciousness or intelligence or evolution. We are not forerunners in our universe, but latecomers. I’m hardly the first to say this, but it bugs me that even people who agree with this view “intellectually” still don’t bother to seriously grapple with its existential implications.

As I’ve written here, many sensible, scientifically minded people are persuaded of the validity of thousands of well-documented UFO encounters throughout the latter part of the 20th century (and even before). But it is not necessary to accept this evidence to still accept the likelihood that we have been visited by advanced ETs. Statistics alone—i.e., the Drake equation and its variants—dictates that this state of affairs is highly likely, even if “they” have never shown themselves or sent us radio signals. ET neighbors (or their machines) will have had ample time—millions or billions of years—to master interstellar flight that approaches or exceeds the speed of light; there has been ample time for they or their probes to propogate across the galaxy; incredibly advanced technology ensures that such beings or their machines will have the ability to manufacture new probes from local materials and that such probes would be inconspicuous if they wish to be. If we have near or more distant neighbors that are thousands or millions of years in advance of us, it only makes sense that our existence and our progress as a species would be monitored.

Besides the statistics of the matter, I do accept the UFO “best evidence.” Of course, the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is not the only legitimate explanation for UFOs. Other speculations include that “UFO pilots” come from other dimensions, from our own future, or that they are more-advanced hominids, “cryptoterrestrials” as Mac Tonnies called them, that live secretly on earth. (It’s not an absurd proposition: If isolated pockets of “slightly less advanced” hominids like Sasquatch exist—and it is surely at least possible—why not “more advanced” ones that have already mastered space travel and choose to remain hidden?) These are all possibilities, but it is hard not to find the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis most parsimonious, and the one that best fits with our current understanding of physics and astronomy. And in any case, other explanations would not alter my fundamental point here: We are not assuredly and perpetually, and perhaps not even now, masters of our fate. Homo sapiens is not the only game in town, and we’re way behind the curve in terms of the level of our civilization and our technology.

In speculating about “their” motives, whoever they are, I think the most parsimonious line of thinking is, again, simply to extrapolate from the present—in this case, what we know about our own scientific and security motives. Long-term monitoring of human affairs—what could be called “deep anthropology”—would most plausibly be motivated by the likelihood that humans will one day be astropolitically relevant or even a potential threat. If they are ETs, that time is surely long in the future—hundreds or thousands of years from now—yet deep anthropology would be a totally sensible insurance policy. In a millennium or so, our spacefaring descendents’ every move will be totally predictable due to the vast amounts of data on our species already accumulated and stored and analyzed. (Analyzed for patterns of which, in our commitment to a belief in free autonomous will—human unpredictability—most nonscientists would prefer to deny the existence.) Many of the best-attested UFO reports, having occurred near political centers and military bases, near space flights and missile launches, and in the context of air warfare and maneuvers, bear out such an interest in our military development and behavior.

I know the view I’m expressing will seem paranoid, although on the paranoia scale I consider myself only about a middling 5 or 6. I think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone; I don’t think the Knights Templars have any modern relevance. And as a very minor blogger, I’m not so paranoid as to think I actually have more than about one or two readers. Again, I base my “extraterrestentialist” argument partly on the simple statistics about what most probably is the state of affairs in our galaxy.

The lack of radio evidence, cited by SETI proponents, is no counterargument: Why would advanced civilizations necessarily still communicate in the radio band? Highly directional lasers (or something else we don’t even know about yet) are more likely. Civilizations like ours that do go through a “radio phase” probably do so for just a few hundred years, or less, and the probability of “radio simultaneity” (adjusting for the speed of light, of course) is infinitesimal—precisely the lack of technological parity that dictates at least some of our interstellar neighbors are going to be wildly in advance of us. What the standard Drake equation fails to factor in is the certainty that civilizations will not arise contemporaneously. And obviously the Fermi Paradox—“if there are so many of them out there, why haven’t they gotten in touch”—a priori denies the validity of the substantial UFO evidence that they are already here. They simply have no interest in actually contacting us. Why would they?

Radio is relevant, though, in the opposite direction: If UFOs really did begin to visit in droves only in the forties (and thus that it wasn’t merely an artifact of increased air travel or Cold War paranoia), radio explains it: This is about the time it would have taken for our first radio transmissions to have reached the nearest star systems and whatever listening posts may exist in our immediate stellar neighborhood, and then for the first visitors or probes to arrive here to investigate.

I am paranoid enough to accept that “the government” has more knowledge of ET visitation than the general public, and has done its best to cover up what it knows. The intense interest in UFOs by at all levels of the government and military since the 1940s has been extensively documented by Richard Dolan (UFOs and the National Security State). The reasons for such a coverup are perfectly sensible, and they are even a matter of public record. In a report commissioned by NASA in 1961, the Brookings Institution warned that awareness of more advanced civilizations  would possibly undermine social cohesion. The report consequently suggested that government should consider maintaining secrecy about extraterrestrials should their existence become evident. The recommendation was based in part on the advice of no less an authority on intercultural contact than the anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Homo sapiens really is in the position similar to that of the stone-age tribes of Melanesia and Polynesia when the metal birds of the White men first visited them early in this century. Like those tribes, many people nowadays have developed harmful beliefs in the beneficence of extraterrestrial visitors—expecting ETs to bring us boons, as in Close Encounters, or (as in 2001) to be interested in our protection from ourselves or in our elevation to a higher consciousness. In Melanesia, such widespread expectations took the form of cargo cults; in his book Messengers of Deception, the eminent astronomer-cum-UFOlogist Jacques Vallee (the basis for the Lacombe character in Spielberg’s film) writes about such beliefs, and such movements, as they already exist on the fringes of American and European society. He worries that such beliefs could be used by very earthly groups for purposes of manipulation.

As I’ve suggested, it is much more likely that extraterrestrials (or their automated machines, if that’s what most UFOs turn out to be) are as indifferent to our affairs as biologists are to the animals they study, or as CIA analysts are even to the most backward societies they monitor. Even tribal people in Pakistan could pose a threat if they acquired weapons of mass destruction, so our analysts study them with an eye to our nation’s long-term security interests. Advanced civilizations will, similarly and sensibly, always be planning for their long-term safety, preparing for any long-term contingency. Any “latecoming” civilization’s acquisition of spacefaring and destructive technology would be such a contingency.

And lest we think we’re special in posing a future threat, statistics also dictates that we are probably only one of hundreds or thousands of civilizations in our galaxy in the same less-than-enviable situation of being monitored indifferently for “future relevance.”

I think it behooves us to really think about this likelihood, and thus ponder anew our place in the universe. Because of our almost-certain lateness on the galactic scene, humans will likely always find ourselves in a position of deference to far more advanced beings. Should this depress us? Only if we continue our present beliefs about our (high) place in the order of things. Despite the sense of insecurity it may engender, realization and acceptance of this reality should supplant willful ignorance or denial. It will have to happen sooner or later that we accept we are not the center of “God’s creation,” any more than the sun or the earth are such a center. We withstood the latter realization in the Middle Ages, and will likely do so again. We are resilient, after all. I suggest that only the humbling (yet also sublime) realization of our relative insignificance in the order of things will allow our further development and evolution as a species.

ETs aren’t about to contact us, and they have zero interest in lifting us to a higher plane of consciousness so we can be their friends. It’s up to us to lift ourselves. But acknowledgement that ETs really exist, right in our own backyard, can help us do that. Coming to grips with the reality that our species is not only cosmologically insignificant but also “exoanthropologically” backward is itself an incentive to get our collective act together, get serious, and evolve.

I just finished reading Lierre Keith’s new book, Vegetarianism is Moronic, and I’m speechless. It’s passionate, brilliant, and amazingly well written—a must-read.

Well okay, that’s not the real title. It’s what I would have called it. But Keith is far more sympathetic to the dietary philosophy she is addressing, because she spent most of her life embracing it. The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability is, to me, a perfect followup to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, which I waxed ecstatic about a couple years ago. Such a powerfully as well as sympathetically stated case against all the arguments underlying vegetarianism is long, long overdue.

Keith, a former, very committed vegan, takes the reader through her own long journey and ultimate disillusionments, considering carefully the full range of initially compelling reasons why idealistic people, especially young women, become seduced by the vegetarian lifestyle: the desire to not kill, the desire to be better to the planet, and the belief that eating only vegetables is the best thing for the human body. She beautifully chronicles her own acceptance of these arguments and how, in the end, all of them fell apart—along with her body, which was devastated by this lifestyle. Women who have drunk or are in danger of drinking the kool-aid of vegetarian thinking should be captured and forced to read this book.

The symbolism and psychology behind vegetarianism has always interested me. A huge force behind the modern vegetarian movement was feminism. Vegetarianism became popular when women became empowered. After the hippies died out, the major demographic duped into eating only vegetables was women. Don’t deny it: Most of the vegetarians you know are women.

The reason for this link between womanhood and vegetarian ideals is simple: In our society, as in most if not all societies around the world, vegetables (and by extension grains) are symbolically linked to femininity, and meat to masculinity. There’s the obvious male/hunting, female/gathering thing. It’s not a myth. Anthropology pretty much bears out this division of labor for most societies. Even in a modern, urban world, stereotypes of food gathering break along the same gender lines: Men hunt or ranch; women (and sort of “metro” men) garden and shop (when they aren’t doing yoga, which is the most ineffectual martial art after Tai Chi—but that’s another post).

It was no accident that the idea of putting lots of veggies on our plates came to dominate nutritional thinking exactly when women were struggling for equality, during the sixties and seventies. Vegetables were empowered along with women: The same way women took back the night, vegetables took over our plates. Suddenly, coincidentally or not so coincidentally, meat started to be viewed by nutritionists as unhealthy.

I grew up during this period, in a household dominated by the belief in vegetables. We weren’t vegetarian, and my mother was a little too old to be a “feminist” per se, but she gardened heavily and made my dad and I eat lots of really boring and tasteless vegetables–squash, tough fibrous beans, more squash, sweet potatoes, and so on—because they were good for us.

I’m not denying that some vegetables are good for you, and a healthy diet makes a place for them, and always has. But the symbolic nature of food sometimes trumps nutritional reality, and during the period I grew up—the period of female empowerment—the reputation of meat eroded right along with male self-esteem, and that wasn’t a good thing. The problem was, the basic rationale for vegetarianism had nothing to do with nutrition. It had to do with changing our symbolic constitution. Even today, vegetarians are not eating vegetables. They are eating symbols of all things moral and peaceful and wholesome and nonviolent and loving toward the planet.

Don’t underestimate the symbolic power of food. Among the other food insults I endured during the seventies was wheat bran. Every morning we had to stir a tablespoon or so of bran in water until it dissolved and drink it down. LOL. I just made a joke there, but you probably didn’t get it. Bran doesn’t dissolve. We had to stir vigorously to get the brown flakes suspended in the water, then chug it down fast before it could settle to the bottom. It always made a big lump in our throats. Sometimes I choked.

Bran tastes like sawdust, because that’s basically what it is. I suppose it cleansed our bowels, scouring them bright shiny healthy pink. I saw my colon in live action once, during a colonoscopy; it was like a big twisty cavern, and besides the amazing paleolithic artwork, its walls were indeed nice and clean and pink. But the main benefit of all that bran was symbolic: Bran was a way of getting trees into our bodies. Trees, those symbols of ecology and purity and all things good and wholesome and peaceful and feminine. Things to be hugged and not shot. Getting lots of fiber in your diet is really the ultimate form of tree hugging.

(Yeah, I know bran is not actually wood. But you know what I mean.)

The fact is, any nutritional argument for vegetarianism has been shown to be baseless. Research studies supposedly supporting it, such as The China Study, have been blown out of the water—the authors fudged their interpretations of the data and were card-carrying members of PETA. They were bad scientists because they were biased. If you don’t believe me, just do a bit of research. And I’ve already written about the physical and mental advantages of a Paleolithic diet (i.e., high-protein and fat, no grains), so I won’t repeat.

And lest you think that vegetarianism saves animal lives, guess again. Keith devotes a section of her book to how how cultivation of plants and grains kills animals, kills whole species, and kills ecosystems.

But the one argument for vegetarianism that always seemed persuasive to me was that meat eating is unsustainable and basically unfair. The argument is that you can yield more calories by cultivating vegetables, and better yet grains, from an acre of land than by pasturing livestock on it, and thus meat eating is ecologically irresponsible in a world full of hunger. It’s the whole Francis Moore Lappe Diet for a Small Planet idea, which progressives embraced during the seventies.

I always assumed Lappe was right, and so resigned myself to the possibility that the human dietary optimum might not be optimal for an overpopulated planet. Nutrition vs. ecology could, I figured, present us with a choice as insoluble as the fiber my mom made us drink. But the great thing about Keith’s book is that she shoots the nonsustainability argument out of the water too. This was the eye-opener for me. She makes a persuasive case that our diet of refined grains and factory farmed vegetables is as destructive and unsustainable in planetary terms as it is for our bodies, and that pasturing animals on grasses is the best remedy for both (an argument that dovetails well with that of Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma). Factory farming of grain is horribly destructive to the environment; just think of all the petroleum and chemicals it floods the environment with–creating for instance a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey. I’m still not 100% convinced that pasturage and the whole food movement could sustain the world’s population, but Keith makes a strong case, and provides a much needed corrective to Lappe. I’d say this argument is the most important and unique contribution her book makes to current debates about diet.

There’s a reason that the walls of my perfectly healthy colon are covered with ancient paintings having hunting themes: hunters with bows and arrows chasing herds of bison and woolly mammoths, shamans dressed in the skins of animals, just like the fingerpainted images that come alive in the flickering torchlight in the caves at Lascaux, France. Humans evolved to eat animal protein and fat. Meat and fat are good for you. If you want to be healthy and happy and not beset by inflammatory bowel disease, vitamin deficiencies, acne, and tooth decay, you should eat meat and fat. And if you want to do a favor for the planet, you should stop eating grains. However much vegetarians want it to be true that their diet is making them pure and healthy, all it gives them is gas and bad skin, and in the long run makes them fat and diabetic (from all the grains, rice, and potatoes they eat instead of meat).

You know this—you just haven’t admitted or acknowledged it to yourself. Consider this post (and The Vegetarian Myth) an intervention. I’m not against feminism, obviously. But sorry, gals. A diet based solely on veggies and grains is bad for your bodies, and it’s bad for Mother Earth.

Even when we acknowledge the social and economic factors that lead to obesity (cheap, fattening food; huge portion sizes; marketing soda to kids; etc.), don’t we all still, ultimately, blame a person’s weight on their lack of self-control? A fat person just lacks willpower. The most compelling and novel part of Good Calories, Bad Calories (see previous post) is Gary Taubes’ radical reconsideration of the relationship between diet, exercise, and willpower. Basically, he takes the latter out of the picture: Appetite and exercise are governed by our metabolism, not our mind, he argues. A person with a dysregulated insulin system craves food and lacks energy, because essentially they are “famished”; more and more fuel is being stored away in fat cells, but it can’t be accessed and burned.

Taubes doesn’t mention it, but there’s an emerging body of very interesting psychological data on metabolic aspects of self-control and executive mental functions, which could complete the causal feedback loop when it comes to diet and exercise.

It has long been known that the forebrain — the seat of forethought, self-control, willpower, all the “human” aspects of our behavior — is one of the most energy-hungry parts of the body, consuming 25% of the body’s energy. That’s an astonishing amount. Research by psychologists Roy Baumeister and Matt Gailliot has refined this picture: It is now known that executive faculties like concentration and self-control depend specifically on blood glucose, the same fuel used by muscles, and that exerting concentration or control in one task depletes the ability to exert concentration or control in a subsequent task. Experimental subjects who exercised self-control in a task and who temporarily replenished their blood sugar with a sweetened drink were better able to master a temptation in a subsequent task than a control group of subjects who received a beverage with an artificial sweetener. A number of elegant recent studies have replicated this kind of finding, both for glucose and for glycogen, the form in which glucose is stored for future use. (Click here and here to read about this research.)

Superficially, it sounds like drinking sugar aids your self-control. In fact, though, any spike in blood sugar results in a sugar crash (and craving for more sugar) later. The larger takeaway point of this research is that a steady supply of glucose is necessary to power the muscles of self-control, concentration, all the higher mental functions that mark us as human beings. A Paleolithic diet ensures a constant, steady supply of blood glucose, whereas a Western, high-refined-carb diet causes wild swings in blood sugar throughout the day, and over time, a desensitizing of the hormonal homeostat that governs our intake and use of glucose fuel.

There is ample anecdotal evidence from those who have attempted a Paleolithic diet that mental clarity and energy increase when you eschew refined carbs. I originally tried giving up sugar and carbs to lose the fat around my midsection, but the effect I didn’t anticipate, and that became the main selling point for me, was increased mental focus and physical energy. I no longer needed strong coffee to get me through the day or long naps every afternoon.

Not enough large-scale research has been done on this “brain fog” effect of easily digested carbohydrates, but what if the Western diet is not only making us physically sick but also robbing us of the honed mental faculties that are our species birthright? Proponents of a Paleolithic diet liken the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to Paradise before the Fall. Myths of a primordial Eden and subsequent expulsion to a life of sickness and toil may reflect, in the idiom of mythology, a memory of the Neolithic revolution and the lifestyle and health sacrifices it entailed. But what if it’s more than a metaphor? What if all our error and folly, the tendency of our plans to fizzle or go awry, the tendency of our relationships and projects to fail or fall short, and the inability to master our temptations are rooted, at least partly, in the dysregulation of blood sugar?

There is no way to test such a hypothesis — that our lives are fucked up basically because our diet is sapping our cognitive potential — but the possibility that the way we eat has something to do with our inability to follow through with plans, our inability to control our emotions, our inability to be as smart and compassionate as we somehow think we should be is intriguing. At the very least, it will be important in coming decades to find out the size of the brain-fog effect.