It's got to have a beginning somewhere
I was reminded, following a side-riff in comments yesterday, of the probably apocryphal but nonetheless ben trovato reader-response to those 1970s books (?von Daniken) about superior beings coming to Earth during The Dawn of History and putting primitive humanity on the right track - the anecdote alleged that astrophysicists were impressed by the depth of Egyptological knowledge displayed, and Egyptologists were blow away by the author's grasp of astrophysics, but both groups felt that there were major weaknesses in those arguments concerning the fields they were actually expert in.
Which is a salutory reminder, certainly.
But what even back then made me sceptical about any such claims (apart from the overall woowooiness) was that, surely massively advanced beings had to have come from somewhere to begin with and they were probably heaving themselves up from Ye Olde Primeval Slyme at some point in their development.
Unless, of course, you posit that they too had been visited at some critical point in their evolution as a species by some other superior race giving them a hand up the ladder...
But really, unless you assume some godlike species created all-knowing and all-wise from the get-go, surely at some stage, some ur-being had to pick up a pebble and develop the notion of tools, etc etc, otherwise there is infinite regress inbuilt into the model.
And then it struck me that this kind of reasoning - they are too coarse and primitive to have ever achieved anything remotely resembling civilisation without help from somewhere - is surely at play in the anti-Stratfordian case, in which the Author of Shakespeare must have been someone of breeding and srs formal education and courtly knowledge, because provincials in a despised profession, with basic literacy skills and the ability to magpie-like pick stuff up, never produce works of Great Literature.
Oh, wait...
That is actually just who does produce works of Great Literature.
Partner and I were having a discussion about this the other day and trying to name individuals who were actual aristos who could be considered Great Artists. Um. Tolstoy. Toulouse-Lautrec. Di Lampedusa (The Leopard). Visconti (the film director). It was hard.
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1536362.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.