Orphans' Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote Book

I've been to parties with this guy.

Well, not _this, guy, but this _guy_. They weren't pleasant. Heck, I think there are times when I might have been this guy. I try not to think of those times.

Jason Colavito has it all figured out. And, as it happens, it is the exact obverse of what he used to think. Except that it's all a conspiracy, all part of a seamless whole. It's just that the bad guys have changed. And instead of being on the brink of a new world, were on the edge of the Kali Yuga.

Colavito admits at the beginning of the book that he used to be an aficionado of the so-called ancient-astronaut theory. This is the idea that human evolution was spurred--if not started--by alien interventions. For fictional examples think of 2001 or the recent movie Prometheus. He watched all the pseudo-documentaries on the pseudo-learning cable channels. He read the books. He researched the subject on-line. And then he ran into one niggling inconsistency--at least this is how he explains it in the introduction--and decided based on that one exposure to overthrow his theory of life and embrace its opposite. The ancient-astronaut theory and alternative archeologies are all bunk; science is correct, the one and only path to truth. He want to college and studied anthropology (as well as journalism) to prove this fact to himself. He also came to embrace Jacques Barzun's book, from Dawn to Decadence, as his new vade mecum. He decided that the proliferation of alternative archeologies--and the efflorescence of other so-called pseudo-sciences--betokened not a new knowledge, but the collapse of the Enlightenment project. We are the New Rome, and this is the end of the cycle, a return to Romanticism. He says this process has repeated itself again and again throughout history, but never fleshes this out.

Which is about par for the course, with this book. Colavito is fond of making sweeping claims, not so much with making detailed or nuanced arguments.

His thesis here is that the ancient-astronaut theory is entirely attributable to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, who penned some famous weird stories in the 1920s and 1930s. Colavito is obsessive in tracking any link between later advocates of alternative archeology and Lovecraft, but does not ever bother to weight the importance of those links, Lots of people read Lovecraft, especially people interested in the outré: that doesn't mean they absorbed and expanded on his ideas. What Colavito actually discovered is that Lovecraft was a node in the translation of Theosophical--and, more generally, esoteric Christian--ideas into a more scientific vocabulary that often involved aliens and flying saucers.

Except that this isn't a discovery. It's a point that's been made repeatedly. And here Colavito makes his argument ad nauseum. Poor Lovecraft is left in October 1926, pen in hand, ready to write "The Call of Cthulu" for three chapters! Colavito goes on to describe various permutations of the alien genesis theory, taking time to point out all their foibles. But he doesn't do so as well as other books that cover the same ground, such as Curtis Peebles Watch the Sky! And he does not do so carefully, incessantly ignoring his sources insistence that Lovecraft was not their source, and thta other Theosophical-inflected traditions were more important. If you haven't been exposed to the argument that UFOlogy repackages a lot of nineteenth century religious revivalism in America, then perhaps the book will be interesting, Otherwise, it's a rehash, and not a very good one.

Colavito further argues that tis religious tradition is the new religion, replacing the Christianity that has been discredited, and heralding the return to a more Romantic, or religious, epoch. To make this claim, though, requires him over-emphasizing the importance of the flying saucer beliefs on actual practice, and completely ignoring the continued flourishing of Christianity, especially fundamentalist Christianity.

But that is only one of his many sins as a historian. In two pages he claims first that a French book had no influence because it was never translated--and, of course, all history is American--and then admitting that the ideas in the book were taken up by later authors. He assumes that there is some transcendental division between science and pseudo-science that has been extant since the birth of the Enlightenment, and that anyone who embraced, say, spiritualism, at any time, was necessarily anti-science. He reifies _everything_. Hence the 1980s were "no0nonsense," and so there was no interest in flying saucers or alternative sciences. (Poor Ronald and Nancy Reagan, consulting their astrologer, get no respect.) The 1990s were "New Age."

One gets the sense that most of Colavito's historical arguments are based on either brief forays into the literature (France's sense of identity was completely destroyed in World War II and had to be rebuilt from the ground up--by borrowing earlier elements?) or his own sense of things. Thus, Ithaca College would rank high on the list of most liberal cities in America (because that's where he went to college). Thus, political correctness corrupts educational institutions (because he resents his own schooling). Thus, the 1990s were New Age-y (because that's when he was interested in New Age subjects).

It is worth noting that the book is put out by Prometheus, a publisher associated with the "skeptical" movement of the 1970s. Such books, which read more like extended grad-school essays, do the publisher and the movement no service. The book could have been edited more tightly. The prose, though, is generally good--it's an easy read with especially large print. The citations and bibliography are limited.