How to Fake Science, History and Religion

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the...

"One of the epigraphs that punctuate Invented Knowledge is from Pascal: "It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false". Whether it is natural or not, it would seem that the false – the extravagant, the fantastical, the grandiose – can at times be so seductive that we suspend our critical faculties in its consideration. Ronald Fritze, a historian and dean at Athens State University in Alabama, is concerned about, and clearly fascinated by, the pseudo-histories and pseudo-sciences – the stories of Atlantis, pre-Ice Age civilizations, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and cosmic catastrophes – which, as he argues, developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and are still with us. "The delivery system for pseudohistorians and pseudoscientists of all stripes", Fritze writes, "now encompasses a charlatan’s playground of film, television, radio, magazines, and the net." Fritze, a committed positivist, finds them at times dangerous and always a threat to the standards of "objective" history.

Recognizing how "tricky" it is to define pseudo-history, Fritze suggests we begin by asking, What is history? – "a vexed question for people living in a postmodernist age". But apparently not for Fritze. "A simple and elegant definition for history is a true story about the human past", he tells us, ignoring the epistemological anguish that has troubled historians from well before the arrival of the postmodernists. So, pseudo-history can easily be defined as an untrue story about the past. But, how do we reckon with the fact that pseudo-historians also insist on their stories’ truth? Through evidence and "objective" empirical methods, Fritze tells us, again without raising any questions of method and evidence. While objective historians look at all the facts, guarding themselves against presuppositions, pseudo-historians choose only those that support their case.

Plainly, Fritze is no epistemologist, though he is a careful scholar with a gift for summarizing theories, however crackpot. He takes a historian’s delight in uncovering connections between the various pseudo-histories he describes. His approach is textual, quite literal, and while, at least implicitly, he recognizes the importance of contextual influences, he underplays them or treats them in too general and often banal terms; for example, he attributes the rise of pseudo-histories to "the conditions of modern society", citing, as one might expect, the shattering effect of Darwinian evolution – and, more generally and less specifically, modern science – on "the Christian worldview of a 6000-year-old-history with its six-day creation of a fixed natural world and humanity". Whatever happened to the Enlightenment? Fritze lives and teaches in the American South.

Though Fritze mentions other pseudohistories, he focuses on six: Atlantis, the oldest of such "historical" confabulations; preColumbian exploration and colonization of the Americas; the role of false history among such racist religious groups as Christian Identity and the Nation of Islam; "histories" of cosmic catastrophes and interplanetary visitations; and, finally, the scholarly brouhaha over Martin Bernal’s Black Venus."