UFOs - Leslie Kean [147]
Third, however, and in our view most important, the extraterrestrial possibility calls into question what we call the anthropocentric nature of modern sovereignty. By this we mean that, in the modern world, political organization everywhere is based on the assumption that only human beings have the ability and authority to govern and determine our collective fate. Nature might throw us a curve ball in the form of a pandemic or global warming, but when it comes to deciding how to deal with such crises, the choice is ours alone. Such anthropocentrism, or human-centeredness, is a modern assumption, one less common in prehistoric and ancient times, when Nature or the gods were considered more powerful than human beings and thought to rule.
Significantly, it is on this anthropocentric basis that modern states are able to command exceptional loyalty and resources from their subjects. Because a possible explanation for the UFO phenomenon is extraterrestrial, taking UFOs seriously calls this deeply held assumption into question. It raises the possibility of something analogous to the materialization of God, as in the Christians’ “Second Coming.” To whom would people give their loyalty in such a situation, and could states in their present form survive were such a question politically salient? Our contention is that the political survival of the modern state depends on that question not being politically salient. As such, an authoritative taboo on the UFO is functionally necessary for rule to be sustained in its present form.
In sum, the UFO creates a deep, unconscious insecurity in which certain possibilities are unthinkable because of their inherent danger. In this respect the UFO taboo is akin to denial in psychoanalysis: the sovereign represses the UFO out of fear of what it might reveal about itself. There is therefore nothing for the sovereign to do but turn away its gaze—to ignore, and hence be ignorant of the UFO—and make no decision at all.
Maintaining the Taboo
The suggestion that the UFO taboo is functionally necessary for modern, anthropocentric rule does not mean that it will be automatically maintained. Such a strong prohibition takes work. To be clear, this is not the conscious work of a vast conspiracy seeking to suppress “the truth” about UFOs, but the work of countless undirected practices that help us “know” that UFOs are not extraterrestrial and can therefore be disregarded. The work of the UFO taboo is paradoxical, however, because unlike the days when the visions of shamans and prophets were taken to be authoritative, in the modern world we know things by making them visible and trying to explain how they work—which in the UFO case would be self-subverting because it could lead to a validation of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. So what are needed are techniques for making UFOs “known” without actually trying to find out what they are. One might distinguish at least four ways of doing this.
The first is authoritative representations, or descriptions of what UFOs are, as provided by those having the authority to stipulate what defines official reality—governments, the scientific community, and the media. Four such current representations are especially noteworthy: (1) that UFOs are known by science to have conventional explanations, for all the reasons we criticized above; (2) that UFOs are not a national security concern,10 which allows states to wash their hands of the problem; (3) that any study of UFOs is by definition pseudoscience, since UFOs do not exist; and (4) that UFOs are science fiction, which displaces the existentially scary aspect of a potential extraterrestrial encounter into the safety of the imagination. We are not saying that modern authorities are consciously trying to protect the UFO taboo when they make such representations. Our point is that whatever the concrete intent in particular instances,