‘Ancient Apocalypse’ Now.
Some thoughts on watching the Netflix docuseries ‘Ancient Apocalypse’, including a somewhat controversial reference to North Korea.
For those few of you who have been waiting, apologies for the long delay in posting on my blog. One reason is that I’ve been working on a new book, of which more in a future post. Another is that I’ve been busy in the studio, also more in a future blog. And another is that things have been getting so pear-shaped in the world that I’ve felt rather overwhelmed.
Fortunately, a Netflix docuseries has forced me to focus my attention and to share my thoughts.
The series (actually two series made between 2022 and 2024) is called ‘Ancient Apocalypse’, and the host is the best-selling English author Graham Hancock. He’s a very affable host. Very passionate and sincere. We get to see some weird and wonderful scenery and some amazing ruins.
The series, like the several books he’s written over the past 30 years, purports to give convincing evidence of something no archeologists seem to have noticed. According to Hancock, once upon a time there existed an advanced ancient civilization that was almost wiped out by a massive comet strike during the Younger Dryas, at the end of the last Ice Age, around 12,800 years ago. Some of the members of this civilization survived, and they traveled around the devastated world teaching what they knew to those scattered groups of more ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherers who had also survived. One of the things the survivors of the advanced civilization did was to bake into the new civilizations they were helping to found a warning about the inevitability of a future devastating comet strike, so humanity would be more prepared next time. Hence all the huge structures of more or less pyramidal shape dotted around the world that, Hancock asserts, are often much older than archaeologist claim, and are specifically oriented geographically towards certain celestial constellations. And hence, for example, the prevalence of snake-imagery, which he claims is a mythical visualization of a comet.
It must be stressed immediately that mainstream archaeology finds no compelling evidence that such a lost civilization ever existed. Nevertheless, there are certainly enough enigmatic holes and continual instances of revisions within the orthodox story of humanity’s development to warrant alternative hypotheses like Hancock’s. However, he goes so far as to claim that he is the victim of censorship and even of character assassination, that professional archaeologists have it in for him because of what he argues is a credible alternative explanation of ancient history, that is, of how we have got to where we are today. For Hancock has almost single-handedly created an alternative origin story of humanity, one that has made him quite wealthy, and now, with the Netflix series, even more wealthy and famous. Also notorious in some quarters, especially amongst those archaeologist who are aware of his theories. If you Google ‘Ancient Apocalypse’ or ‘Graham Hancock’ you can read a sample for yourself.
His narrative is basically a variation on the Atlantis myth, which was introduced into Western culture by Plato. Since the Ancient Greeks, Atlantis has risen and sunk beneath the waves of the human imagination, and nowadays Hancock doesn’t bandy the word ‘Atlantis’ around so much, having recognized that it has become associated with some dubious people whose ideas have been thoroughly debunked. He does not think of his ideas or of himself as in any way dubious. In fact, one gets the impression from his docuseries that he sees himself as a heroic, selfless outlier bringing the good news to a hungry people. He claims that the ‘experts’ are simply objecting to an ‘outsider’ who is impetuous enough to poach on their territory, and in the series he continuously asserts that mainstream archaeology is a kind of cabal intent on maintaining their spurious agreed upon narrative against credible alternatives.
This scenario reminds me of the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation. Hancock is like one of the more radical non-conformist Protestants, and like them, he claims that his insights into the truth come through personal inspiration, rather than prior authority. He willingly acknowledges that his theory is based on a hunch, an intuition about what really happened millennia ago. But it has, so he claims, been corroborated by the facts. This faith in a subjective, personal relationship to revelation is also characteristic of the anti-authoritarian tendencies within the Reformation, and later of the Romantics, who challenged the emerging replacement for religion, a newly legitimated worldview based on reason and science. This demanded assent to an new authority, to the scientists and other experts who represented reason, and to the technological and bureaucratic structures which the new system spawned. But what increasing numbers of people in the West craved was something a bit more mythopoetic, a bit more exciting, a bit more controversial. They missed the sacred aura of religion. From the standpoint of an consciousness hungry for mythopoetic resonances, the rational, scientific worldview inevitably seems grey and disempowering, and the Romantics were just the first to challenge it through placing emphasis on the imagination, subjective experience, and instinct. Hancock feeds into the contemporary scepticism increasingly felt by many people towards all the boring ‘experts’, the professionals who dominate our lives, all those who compel us to conform to a conventional version of reality, the ‘official’ version we’ve been taught at school. We resent the gatekeepers within our society, the ‘parents’ if you like, who have the annoying habit of curbing our desires, our imaginations, and forcing us to toe the line, and who, we suspect, may not have our best interests at heart.
I remember when I was a teenager devouring Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods (1970), a massive bestseller which claimed the reason for humanity’s remarkable achievements starting millennia ago was a series of friendly visits from highly advanced aliens. Wonderful! This was so much more interesting that the dull history of kings and queens, Acts of Parliament, and warfare that I was being taught at school. It was so much more grist for my lively imagination, and also fed into my distaste for the authority-based, rational, bureaucratic, alienation society in which I was living. Hancock doesn’t talk about aliens, but his story is another iteration driven by the same basic motive, which is to make the past more interesting, more exciting, more mysterious, more sacred, more resonant, for all us alienated people of the present who feel like anonymous cogs in the wheel. All such stories can ultimately be traced back to the Romantics.
Failing to emphasis the fictional status of his narrative, as Hancock does, is a serious omission. But of course he can’t say its just fiction, because he wants his cake and to eat it too. He offers a counter-narrative to the one provided by rational scientific research, but he also wants his version to be credible according to those standards. He knows his audience would be much less interested if he cast his story as a fictional one, because that would leave in place the existing regime of facts. But Hancock doesn’t contest these given facts by presenting cogently reasoned corrective facts. Rather, he present his opinions as facts. He appeals to people who want to believe that a fact is nothing more than an opinion that’s gained traction amongst those who hold the reins of power.
Unfortunately, an opinion is not a fact. As the philosopher John Corvino argues in an issue of the online ‘The Philosophers’ Magazine’, when we ask: ‘“What is the difference between facts and opinions?” what we’re really asking is “What is the difference between statements of fact and statements of opinion?”’ As Corvino admits: the fact/opinion distinction is therefore ambiguous, ‘and in trying to explain it, people typically conflate it with other distinctions in the neighbourhood.’ He concludes by proposing the following working definitions:
A statement of fact is one that has objective content and is well-supported by the available evidence.
A statement of opinion is one whose content is either subjective or else not well supported by the available evidence.
According this definition, it seems clear that Hancock’s thesis is an opinion. Making this distinction is very important, because, as Corvino writes, ‘precise thinking is valuable for its own sake.’ Another reason is more pragmatic: ‘Despite its unclear meaning, the claim “That’s just your opinion” has a clear use: It is a conversation-stopper. It’s a way of diminishing a claim, reducing it to a mere matter of taste which lies beyond dispute. (De gustibus non est disputandum: there’s no disputing taste.)
The schism between objective content and taste also goes back to the Romantics. It was they who first elevated subjective taste above objectivity. The Romantics saw facts as fundamentally alienating. They drained color from the world. But at that time, there was no real danger that taste would ever trump objective content. The Romantics only sought to keep open a pathway along which taste could travel.
As several commentators have pointed out, it’s no coincidence that the Netflix series includes a couple of segments with the podcaster Joe Rogan. He’s one of the most influential online peddlers of the idea that we should ‘do our own research’, or that having an opinion is as valid as the ‘precise thinking’ that brings to light the facts, or ‘objective content....well-supported by the available evidence.’ The ‘research’ we do rarely has this goal in mind. Rather what we are trying to do, unconsciously, is exchange one external source of authority under whose control we chafe, for one that we find more conducive to our subjective taste. In practice, this also means we are conforming our taste to that of a what he consider a congenial sub-culture, or a chosen ‘tribe’. But if science has taught us anything, it is to be aware that we are amazingly skillful at fooling ourselves, and that we need well-defined methodologies for hedging against inevitable and unrecognized biases. Scepticism is of course valuable. Unthinking acceptance of the ‘given’ is wrong. But when this questioning becomes systemic, and taste replaces facts, we as a culture are in big trouble.
And then there’s the implicit racism of Hancock’s thesis, which has also been pointed out by many critics. I’m sure Hancock himself is not a racist. But there are unforeseen consequences to his theory that are certainly racist, consequences he himself came to tacitly acknowledge. For example, he used to describe the surviving members of the lost civilization as ‘light’ skinned and bearded. Now he just says ‘bearded.’ But obviously, there’s an implicit racist implication in the idea that one advanced people from a particular region, who happen to share the same pigmentation as Hancock and Westerners, taught all the others, with darker pigmentation and who didn’t have the nonce to build anything bigger than a shack, how to construct massive pyramids. Couldn’t the aggregate growth in knowledge have evolved gradually via multiple channels of communication and cross-fertilization of ideas and technology from different cultures? After all, even within the orthodox version of history we are talking about tens of thousands of years.
So, Graham Hancock, I humbly suggest that your theory is an opinion. And I say this in order to diminish it to a ‘mere matter of taste which lies beyond dispute.’
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But what I’d like to do in this final section is suggest that Hancock’s theory is actually factual, that it’s not just an opinion, and that it does indeed have ‘objective content and is well-supported by the available evidence.’
Yes! ‘Ancient Apocalypse’ is all true.
But what kind of lost advanced civilization are we really talking about? Hancock seems to assume it was wholly benign. The survivors were like a team of boy scout leaders bent on teaching an adopted group of wayward youngsters how to do knots, build a campfire, help old ladies take out their garbage, etc. But what if they weren’t such goody-goodies?
Hancock argues that survivors of the lost civilization also taught other less advanced survivors how to farm the land. One of the strange discoveries of (admittedly mainstream) archaeology is that the shift from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society wasn’t a straightforward net gain for those involved. People’s lives were actually worse off once they adopted farming and became sedentary. People had to work much harder. Average life expectancy went down. Private property was invented, and unequal and oppressive hierarchies became entrenched.
Yes. So OK, they taught us agriculture. Thanks a lot. But perhaps we were happier when we were hunting and gathering.
Hancock also stresses sky and sun worship. This too, was a key lesson in the advance of humanity. But is it? As archaeologist and anthropologists show (again, mainstream experts), this form of religious practice supplanted animism. But was this a net gain for humanity? The jury is out. In fact, there are those (experts) who argue that animism is the most effective and benign way of theorizing humanity’s relationship to the world - to the non-human - because it treats us humans as part of the whole living ecosystem, rather than lifting us up to the top a pyramid where we can feel closer to the sun (and make plenty of human sacrifices to ensure people toe the line).
And, by the way, how were the spectacular monuments Hancock tours us around actually built? He never mentions the probably malign logistics of building the massive structures he shows us. He says that they must have involved a lot of people’s labor, a high level of collective organization - which would have been far beyond the capabilities of mere hunter-gatherers. But what kind of labor was it? Were they all volunteers? I doubt it. These monuments were probably the work of countless slaves who had been brutally forced to construct them.
The survivors of the lost ancient civilization used their superior know-how, and the threat of a new apocalypse, to enslave all the people’s they came in contact with. The snake is not a symbol that signals the existence of a an enlightened civilization, but actually the symbol of a brutal one.
OK. Here’s my final shocker: What if the lost civilization was actually like North Korea, or at least, what if the survivors, traumatized by the comet apocalypse. set about creating a kind of Paleo-North Korea?
I’m not entirely joking.
As readers of my blog known, I live within hypothetical walking distance of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, although if I actually tried to head north, I wouldn’t get very far, due to the presence of a very formidable and lethal Demilitarized Zone. But this means I often compare things to my neighbors. It can be salutary.
You can see the parallels already, I hope. There are more.
North Korean has developed an elaborate quasi-religious cult of leadership. A major aspect of its ability to maintain control over its subjects is the way it weaves a narrative in which the Kim dynasty is cast as composed of exemplary, godlike beings. Doesn’t this seem to be what the survivors of the lost civilization also instilled in the hapless hunter-gatherers they conquered. Isn’t this a major reason why of they could control the minds and bodies of their subjects?
I’ve mentioned before in my blog (see: ‘North Korea. ‘Theater State’, June 21, 2020) the anthropologist Clifford Gertz’s hypothesis that throughout history there have existed what he terms ‘theater states’, regimes in which the leaders do not base their power on providing security and prosperity but rather on providing continuous, ostentatious, participatory spectacles. The collective enterprise of producing massive public works and elaborately choreographed events is aimed at committing the regime’s subjects to the perpetual performance of roles within the grand theater of a fictional ideal society invented by the leadership. These roles, often compelled, but also willingly adopted, serve to give meaning to the lives of the people, and therefore help maintain the ruler’s power.
Perhaps, like the Kim family dynasty in North Korea, the survivors of the lost civilization instigated a ‘theater state’ system. This was a system which compelled or simply brainwashed people into working collectively towards the creation of spectacular structures and to engage in elaborate spectacles and ceremonies intended to embody and perpetuate the power of their leadership.
Isn’t this a plausible, if rather depressing, explanation of the lost civilization Hancock and his increasing number of gullible followers wants to believe in?
Actually, it just my opinion. A reflection of my gloomy taste. For all I know, the lost civilization really could have been Utopia.
Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang, North Korea, begun in 1987 but still remains unfinished. Another pyramid, but definitely not mentioned by Graham Hancock. Nor is it a warning about a future comet strike. At least, I don’t think so…..
NOTES
John Corvino is quoted from ‘The Philosophers’ Magazine’. https://philosophersmag.com/the-fact-opinion-distinction/