I used to always enjoy watching the History channel, but recently its been driving me pretty crazy. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy the occasional episode of swamp people and modern marvels, but the name History implies that it should discuss history.
Instead, the only history that the history channel has been trying to explain to me is how aliens somehow were the cause of virtually everything in the ancient world. They helped the Incans build Machu Pichu, the Egyptians build the Pyramids; they gave them language, religion, art, and morality. Pretty incredible, who knew? Segments like "Ancient Aliens: Aliens and the Secret Code," "Ancient Aliens: Alien Devastation," "Ancient Aliens: Angels and Aliens," pop up as this week's alien flavor. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of eager historians to share there new 'facts' about aliens in the ancient world.
But the History Channel is probably one of our last cultural institutions to grab a hold of these aliens. I couldn't even begin to tell you the number of movies that have been made over the last couple decades with a plot involving alien influence, invasion, struggle or whatever. And if you walk into a Half-Price book store the section of Science Fiction is taking up more and more space.
But why is this? Maybe I could pass off this growing belief in science and history that aliens do exist as actualities of rationality, but I really don't think that's the whole truth, nor really anywhere close to the truth if I'm honest. We live in a culture dominated by materialism, rationalism, naturalism; even in post-modernism, even if science isn't the driving mind to our culture anymore (which I still think it is, just maybe more subtly and deeply than we know), the fundamental belief of most westerners is that the universe contains no other answers but material ones. Our place in it is simply a natural progression of it and we are nothing more than that. Even if I desperately disbelieve those principles, I find many of its tenets and conclusions stuck somewhere in me, ingrained in me by the world I live in.
But even in this world, we still search for meaning, purpose and beginnings, we still are looking for mysteries, we still look for the alien. The movie plot lines of alien invasion and encounter generally follow these basic lines:
1. Aliens are invading us because we are destroying the earth or we are incapable of being peaceful, we are inherently messed up and should be destroyed. Sometimes the heroes save the world and therefore redeem it by giving a new morality of courage to us. Sometimes there's an alien who comes to warn us before we are to be destroyed by other aliens because he sees 'potential' in humanity... he has an unwarranted love and compassion for us.
2. Aliens are coming to tell us something, share or show us some deep moral truth, some overarching principle of the universe. Or maybe they're some kind of moral judge over us, choosing the good and bad ones from among us, separating the wheat from the chaff if you will.
3. Aliens are something new and exciting to blow up or kill or just something mysterious to throw into a story to make it more attractive to the viewers. They are a new adventure if you will.
I think I covered the basics. I haven't read all the science fiction dealing with aliens and I'm sure its more complicated than that, but I would bet many of the same themes are presented. But what are these themes saying about us, from where are they emanating? Are they not essentially the same kinds of themes we deal with when we talk about religion or mythology? Could it be that we have simply replaced super natural mythology with naturalistic, extraterrestrial mythology?
A mythology that supports our need for a basis of morality (really a purpose for life), a hope for a salve to our wounded humanity or a salvation for it, and an alien otherness, a mysterious being to relate with but also be terrified by. All these things are instinctively mystical and outside of our rational way of viewing the world. Its as if we have projected our human mysticism into our deeply ingrained materialism even though it is constantly at war with this desire within us. This ideology was supposed to give us freedom from our irrationalities, yet if i may dare say it clearly hasn't. We are born with something that not even the most anti-mystical ideology can wipe from us. We need to have a purpose to live for and a principle to live by, even if it was given to us by some alien from a world called oz. We feel utterly messed up and out of place all the time. We seek a redemption for us and the world because we constantly feel our hearts both drifting from what is right and in the wrong place to begin with. And maybe most of all, we desperately seek that which is alien, holy, mysterious because we feel alien in this world and because we feel the need to be in awe of something.
The truth is that Christianity has always dealt with these questions and has always answered them.
The otherness of aliens is distinctly what attracts them to us. The description of God as well, his holiness, his absolute otherness is both supremely terrifying but yet awesome and desireable to us. The alien in God is part of the reason we desire him. The implanted desire for His holiness in many has been projected by people into the infinite material universe on some alien life form.
But maybe that's to simple for you. Argue the semantics of whether aliens exist or not all you want, but that's just not the point. Our hearts and minds often get mixed up more than we think. Our worldviews and desires for the world and universe create the history and science of the universe way more than we are willing to say, and the overwhelming feeling of our modern world desires aliens to exist. To me the why we desire them is the important question because it leads us back to the nature of humans and what, if anything, is already written into our hearts and minds at the inception of our consciousness.
