We are borrowing from Graham Hancock’s proposal that the official history of humanity is wrong based on the evidence that has been emerging in recent years. In fact it is wrong in a very fundamental way.
The idea that humanity has achieved high sophistication and knowledge thousands of years ago, before the current era for which we have recorded history, may be unsettling for historians and archaeologists, and even some evolutionists, but it should be exciting and inspiring.
Could there be a lost civilization lurking as yet undetected somewhere far back in remote pre-history?
Graham Hancock
Scientific Hubris
This brings to mind various thoughts. The first of those is the arrogance that is disguised as science and history in our time. Certainly, the arrogance has been there for a long time and our time has no unique claim on that. But the very idea of the enlightenment, and the constant drumbeat of the loudest proponents and avowed champions of science, is that science should be independent of considerations other than that of determining the truth, the facts.
Those who would defend the Catholic Church or a variety of other Christian heritages in the west have been told over and over that even if the truth is uncomfortable, and contrary to what we have believed all of our lives, it is still the truth and when verified by science, all other ideas must give way.
If that is the case for individual claims of science that challenge prior claims by religion, how is it any different for individual scientific claims that challenge prior claims by science?
The Great Irony
Graham Hancock has experienced more than his share of derision, hostility and character assassination simply for, as a journalist, assembling and collating information from scientific discoveries in one or more fields and applying them to the big picture, in this case, history.
For someone outside of the rarefied air of institutional science it would seem obvious that new evidence should be welcomed and the adjustment of the storyline a given.
Clearly, new discoveries must be verified and their significance assessed, but the hostility that greets anyone who messes with the official storyline, no matter how credible the person or how solid the discovery, is far from what science always claims is its method.
The monolith that is the scientific/academic establishment is every bit as arrogant and territorial as any Catholic Bishop or Pope of previous centuries. And like their religious forbears, their objections are motivated by something other than science. We know this because their reaction is so often viciously un-scientific. If it were simply a matter of science it would be treated in a professional manner.
The irony is that they have become what they profess to hate.
This is one backdrop for what we would think is an even bigger problem, a domestic issue in The House of History.