Hancock

I am naturally disposed to liking people called Hancock.

The best rower I ever rowed with was called Mark Hancock - a man with such fantastic feel he routinely rowed rowers thirty and forty seconds faster than him on rowing machines out of the boat in seat race matrices. While some of them were living proof of the adage that ergs don’t float, even when they weren’t I could tell when Mark was in the boat it felt alive when he was. It wasn’t just me. Everyone else who rowed with Mark felt the same. Peter Holmes, brother of late, great double-Olympic champion Andy, is on record as stating that Mark was the most talented rower he ever coached - and Pete has coached Henley winners and Olympians.

I didn’t just like Mark because he was a great rower. I liked him because he was a great person and a better friend, but I did love being in a boat with him. This is Hancock, helping us win at Durham back in the day. Look at the form on display. It’s next level. A good bow pair will not save a bad eight, but if the rest of the eight is also good, a good bow pair will elevate it. Hancock always did.

I also like things called Hancock because when I was a child I used to go to the Hancock Museum in Newcastle with my Mum.

There was a lot to like. We’d see the whale, look at the Egyptian Mummy and I’d usually come out ahead of the game with a model dinosaur - Triceratops for preference, but I’d take a Stegosaurus or Tyrannosaurus at a pinch. Those trips created a lot of happy memories, nurtured an already burgeoning love of natural history, and left me with a lot of residual good feeling about that particular monument to progressive city fathers. Those residual good feelings have lasted even though it’s now called The Great North Museum. I take my own children, it’s still great, and now you can buy actual dinosaur eggs that actually hatch.

Seriously.

I get them for me, let alone them.

So when it comes to Graham Hancock, a man who has drifted across my radar while lying in bed ill and desperately trying to recover from COVID / Long COVID, I’m inclined to regard him with a certain degree of benevolence, not least because I was off my face on pain medication at the time.

If you don’t know, Graham Hancock holds and proposes a number of theories about ancient civilisations and lost lands, suggesting that an earlier advanced iteration of human civilisation was wiped out at around the time of the Last Glacial period around 10,000 years ago. Graham Hancock’s hypothesis is that survivors passed on their knowledge to hunter-gatherer tribes, allowing them to subsequently develop the civilisations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica from whence our present contemporary realities evolved.

Alongside this idea, he proposes that as a result history as we know it is false and that everything we know is wrong.

Listening to Graham is a little like knowing someone who believes the moon landings were faked, or someone who believes that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was based on a true story, or someone who believes that there’s a secret society who rules the world. They’re fundamentally decent human beings, they generally contribute positively to the world around them, they get out of bed in the morning and go about their day, but they have a pet hobby horse that they occasionally like to ride around the paddock. There’s no harm in it or malice as long as it’s just stuff that they chunter on about, but when it starts replacing reality …

That’s a problem.

Now, in one sense, Graham Hancock is right.

Everything we know is a lie.

But not in the way he thinks.

Everything we know is a lie because history is nothing more than a lie agreed.

Napoleon was short, Corsican and a power-hungry demagogue but he got that right.

Except he didn’t.

Because history is, in fact, incredibly precise, incredibly ambiguous, incredibly contested and constantly changing.

What doesn’t change is collective representation.

History tells us that there was no such thing as the good old days.

Collective representation tells us that everything was better back in the good old days.

And that’s because one is a disciplinary peer-reviewed science …

… And the other is people - and people are capable of being clever, intelligent and reasoned … and completely irrational and blind at the same time.

Here’s why:

Human beings are pattern-recognising, pattern-forming creatures.

History, like mythology and religon, is a narrative we create to explain who we are, how we got here and the world around us, individually, collectively, communally and nationally.

Unlike mythology and religion, which create a fictional version of that narrative, historical narratives are constructed from two things: facts and causal explanations.

All histories are informed by agendas, but within them the facts - times, dates, places, what happened, where, and to who - are inviolable. The facts stay inviolable right until they aren’t because unlike mythology and religion, people test and challenge history’s representative narratives and change them as understandings and interpretations of what the facts are change.

But even when the facts change or are reevaluated or repositioned, they’re still there, like stepping stones stretching back through time. The causal explanations are us hopping from stone to stone, explaining how we got from one fact to the next. The causal explanations also change as the facts change, or as new facts are introduced.

Graham Hancock is touring the world, presenting on social media, and constantly alleging that the facts have changed, and as such so should our narratives about the past, and with them our understanding of our past.

That’s fine. He can say whatever he wants. He could say the moon is made of cream cheese and its phases are because it’s eaten by space giants. Nothing wrong with that idea. Very imaginative.

But in another sense, Graham Hancock isn’t right.

There are very few agreed facts that support his argument.

Indeed, from what I can see, he’s interpreting evidence selectively to support his hypothesis.

Graham does so brilliantly and persuasively. His writing and his podcast appearances move from fact to idea to supposition with a fluency that’s beguiling. Graham regularly uses phrases like ‘Reasonable to suggest … It would seem … It’s logical … If we can accept this … and we can accept that … then surely … if this looks like that, and that was found here and this was found there, then we can say … ’. In using rhetoric like this, he links ideas in such a way that it gives them the gloss of agreed fact that says as he builds his narratives: we can all agree about this, and if we agree about this we can also agree that this seems similar / related, right? This gives what he’s talking about a sense of narrative inevitability. He might start from one agreed established fact, but by the time he’s come to the end of his point, you find yourself thinking: Yes. It all makes sense!

This, however, when it is not supported by actual agreed facts, is called critical disambiguation. It’s a professional no-no, and anyone who does it, from a clinical psychologist presenting a case to a trained journalist presenting a story, will or should be shot down in flames by their peers. The peer review system has its flaws, but on the whole, even with those flaws, it works to ensure that hyoptheses and conclusions that aren’t supported by agreed facts are shown the door.

Facts are different to opinions and ideas.

Opinions can be supported by facts, but you can also have an opinion that doesn’t have a single verifiable fact in it.

Just go on Twitter if you don’t believe me.

As for ideas and opinions, an idea or an opinion can be anything from let’s have kippers for tea to you’re an idiot to let’s build a spaceship and explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy.

Facts are provable.

We had kippers for tea (fact). I prefer the ones from Craster (opinion).

Facts are verifiable.

We did build a spaceship, but we didn’t manage to get it from the top of the stairs to the further reaches of the galaxy (facts). I think using the laundry basket as a chassis might have been the reason (opinion).

Facts have been tested and have been found to be true.

We might disagree on the causes of the Second World War. But it’s a fact that it officially started on 1st September 1939.

We might disagree on whether William won the Battle of Hastings or Harold lost it, but we both agree on the fact that it was fought on 14th October 1066.

The We might disagree bits are the causal explanations Paul Ricoeur wrote so eloquently about.

The facts are the things that he also noted were things you have to have in order to develop causal explanations from them - and they are agreed because they are proven.

Graham Hancock’s facts have yet to be proved - and so they remain opinions.

Graham’s reaction to the academic response to his work that points this out has been to suggest that historians and archaeologists are working against him to suppress the truth. He’s done it everywhere on every platform he’s been on.

This is where my benevolence and tolerance becomes a little more qualified.

The idea that ‘The Establishment’ silences dissident voices is a fairly common one when dealing with conspiracy theories, even if those conspiracy theories do sometimes turn out to be bang on the money and ‘The Establishment’ does sometimes try and silence them. Galileo was right, after all. But most of the time, they aren’t and it doesn’t. There are very few actual Galileos when compared to the amount of conspiracy theories at every given time. So most of the time crackpot theories aren’t silenced because they’re too close to the truth. Most of the time they just wither and die because often the only thing supporting them is the oxygen of the person proposing them saying that the truth is being ignored / suppressed / silenced over and over again.

The idea that there are secret societies that rule the world is also nothing new. These ideas go right back to when we first swung down from the trees and started experimenting with banging two rocks together. You know the sort of thing: these rocks are great, but did you know that other members of the tribe are hoarding the best rocks and keeping them for themselves? It doesn’t matter whether its the Illuminati or the Knights Templar or the Masons or the Papists or the Jews … there’s always someone prepared to suggest that select groups of people meet up in secret and decide the fate of the world. The reality is that they do, they’re called rich people, and they don’t bother being remotely secret about it. As my Jewish Grandfather used to say, the one who went through the Death Camps and renounced his religion as a result, we control the banks and the media, do we? How come so many of us are so poor, and there’s never anything decent on TV then?

Where Graham falls over is the idea that academics are working in concert to keep the truth from the world. Yes, it’s the go-to of conspiracy theorists everywhere but it also betrays a fundamental lack of knowledge about how academia works.

Academics, whereever they are in the world, operate on one central principle:

Every man for himself.

This is usually dressed up in the seemingly more genteel sounding slogan publish or perish but it means much the same thing.

You know something?

You’ve discovered something?

You’ve proved something?

You get it out there and you talk about it.

You prove it in debate. You marshall your facts, you show how the supporting evidence supports those facts, and how those facts lead to your causal explanation - and when people say ‘yes, but, what about … ?’ and ‘But y says … ‘ you bring more facts and supporting evidence to show that yes, y did say that, but they failed to consider x, and when looking at your what about, you need to take into account a, b or c.

Which he doesn’t.

You don’t say ‘well, I don’t acknowledge x, or y, or z, because they’re trying to silence me / they’re in a conspiracy against me / because …’

Because I’m onto something, they know it, and they want to silence me because the implications of my work changes everything.

Which he does.

Here’s the thing.

If any academic working in the field of history or archaeology had evidence of civilisations that pre-exist what we already know about human history they wouldn’t suppress it.

They’d publish it.

They’d gather all of the evidence, they’d amass all of the facts, they’d make the arguments for and against, come to a conclusion and they’d publish it.

They wouldn’t suppress it.

They’d publish it, prove their case, make Professor, and watch their salary go up.

They wouldn’t meet in secret in a smoky room and discuss the best way to suppress it with the rest of the secret hide the truth society.

They’d publish it for the same reason that Higgs published his work about the Boson and Einstein published the General Theory of Relativity.

Because when academics have something of world-changing significance on the table, they don’t sit on it.

They publish it.

In fact, academics publish things even when it won’t change the world. It’s their job. If they don’t publish, they aren’t an academic and they don’t have a job. So if you think they’d sit on or suppress something that changes our understanding of human history, you’re out of your mind.

If an academic had evidence that would change the way we look at human history, that would see them plastered over the front page of every newspaper in the world, be on every talkshow, and do Joe Rogan …

… they’d publish it.

Because the rise of social platforms based on antagonistic algorithims and yes / no binary code has democratised the belief that having an opinion is the same as being right, I’m going to break this down even further.

In the UK, what you tend to see in most undergraduates is that they’re at university because they’ve been brought up to think / believe / expect that’s the next step after school - even if that and the 90k average of resultant debt might not now be the smartest move. Their parents, or their school, or their background or all three have encouraged them to go because … they did / it’s family tradition / having a degree helps you get on (it can, but only if you do something that ends in a recognised vocational or professional qualification). The course they’re on tends to be the course that their A-levels / Higher Exams lets them do at university, and their A-levels / Higher Exams have usually been picked based not on what they want to do at University or with their life, but what they were okay at school, or had a bit of aptitude for. It should be the other way round (What do I want to do? What do I need to do to get on that pathway?) - but it usually isn’t. Schools aren’t going to change the paradigm, because they’re graded not on whether their students go on courses that will help their lives and ambitions but on metrics of retention (how many stayed on) and progression (how many went directly to university from A-levels / Highers), even though all educational evidence indicates that at year between the school and university has significant benefits to both the students and the receiving institution. Goverments aren’t going to change it, because otherwise every year they get a couple of million eighteen year olds suddenly appearing on the employment lists and people asking them why unemployment figures have gone up.

So, most people are at Uni … because.

And that’s fine because most people who are there are bright enough and capable enough to do okay at whatever course they’re on because most human beings are capable of learning - even if all they’re learning is how to kind of get by on something that they think is okay, but wouldn’t necessarily go to the wall for.

As well as learning this, and the basic ideas / contents of the course (which are usually couched in the surrounding contexts of the discipline (how it came about, how it relates to other related fields, what its purpose is), they’re also learning (hopefully) professional skills: analytical and evaluative thinking, critical reasoning, thematic developments in the field, evidential analysis, creation of hypotheses, development of argument / counter-argument, supporting evidences, measured conclusions …

What most sort of get, but not really, is that like music, or art, or literature, or engineering, or any human endeavour, everything is built on what went before and that you’re getting marked on your ability to recognise that, engage with it, learn from it, challenge it, and if you’re really good, add to it. What tends to be seen in the sort of personality that either wants to be seen to be brilliant or doesn’t want to do the work, or both, however, is a refusal to engage with that reality. I lectured / taught / researched / published for ten years at one of the highest-rated universities in the country for my discipline at every level from foundational to doctoral. The proportion of people who were just there for the reasons above dropped at each of those levels as the proportion of those who wanted to prove something / be seen as brilliant / both, but without working for it rose. Rather than acknowledge that brilliance comes from mastery of the details and their place in the big picture, there comes an increasing tendency to come up with a brilliant idea that no-one had ever thought of before …

… and then to shove their head in the sand / refuse to acknowledge it when you gently pointed out that Gallagher had already had that idea fifty years earlier (academic antiquity when what is published more than one REF cycle ago is now considered out-of-date), establishing the dominant thinking in the field at the time (with its host of attendent papers); but Peney had suggested an alternative twenty years later, but her theory had been reconsidered by x, y, z in the great theory wars of the new millenium, while new objective evidence published by a, b, c why only in this very Department last year indicates that …

… and they really had to know this stuff; and you did tell them where to look, but they didn’t bother.

Because yes, it can be deflating to realise that your brilliant paradigm shifting idea has been thought of before and you’re going to have to do some leg work, but believe me it’s even more deflating when your examiner marks your guaranteed First / Masters Diss / PhD submission down as a derivative, poorly-researched and supported 2:2, pass or referral simply because you were so convinced of your own rightness that you refused to engage with the work of those who have gone before.

Graham Hancock is that bright student who thinks he has the idea that will change the world … and he doesn’t want to acknowledge that … actually, he doesn’t.

And the Hancock supporters would say …

Well, you would say that. You are an agent of that system.

No. I’m someone who learned the hard way that mileage makes champions, not flashes of divine, dimly-intuited brilliance and certainly not forming a cohesive pattern based on little more than contiguities … and fragmentary and contested contiguities at that.

Graham Hancock strikes me as someone unwilling to do all of the work, but who still wants to be acknowledged as being right.

And that’s not to say that Graham Hancock isn’t right.

There might have been human civilisation before the last Ice Age.

But we don’t know.

We don’t know because there’d be very little left for anyone to discover in North America and other places after a mile of ice had sat on it for a thousand years. Something that’s often forgotten when talking about the past, especially anything past about 500 years ago, is the reality that there is very little physical evidence and even less documentary evidence left. Take The Bible, for example. It’s framed as the inviolable word of God by its adherents. Yet we know, for a fact, that hundreds of different Christian sects sprang up in the four hundred years before it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, just as we know for a fact that less than 1% of 1% of all written material in this period survived and came down to us. So what we have is not the written word of God, but the version that came down to us - and given you should know what the Church did with Classical texts from Greece and Rome the idea that they didn’t mess about with the word of God in that process is an absolute non-starter. The Renaissance showed just how feverishly they rewrote, overwrote, suppressed and corrupted anything that they didn’t agree with. So, knowing this, we can confidently state that The Bible isn’t the word of God. It’s the word of someone in Early Antiquity quite literally making stuff up. Similarly, when it comes to physical evidence, even something as comparatively well-documented as the Roman period is still a minefield of interpretation and re-evaulation. By the time we get to the Stone Age, frankly, we’re guessing. It’s all an educated guess - and for it to be educated, the educated bit has to acknowledge what others consensually agree to be true at the time of discussion and what others agree to be true has to be tested, discussed, and agreed.

But let's ignore all of that.

Let’s agree with Grahama. Let’s say human history is longer and more complex than we have been led to believe.

Let's say that there are ancient civilisations that we have lost contact and knowledge of.

Let's say that 10,000 years ago, a comet or a meteor hit the North American eastern seaboard.

And let's say it caused the Younger Dryars Incident that send tsunamis across the world, and wiped out the mega-fauna and started the last Ice Age.

And let’s say the Ice Age wiped out evidence of lost, advanced civilisations.

Let’s say it wiped out all of their megaliths and super-structures while also, weirdly, leaving all of the ephemeral evidence of hunter-gatherers that were around at the same time.

Funny that.

Yeah, but we haven’t fully explored the Sahara or the Amazon yet. There might be stuff there.

Yes, there might be and no, we haven’t. But a) archaeology is data-driven, and the models are very, very good so we can say fairly confidently that we’ve found all that we’re going to find in both. b) There are earthworks in the Amazon, massive ones, but the Amazon is so full of life it’s positively hostile to life so if you think you’re going to find the Lost City of Z, grow up, c) ‘We haven’t explored everywhere yet’ is not a valid argument. Humans tend to be where humans were before and see above about data-modelling. Stop being a child saying ‘But we haven’t explored all of the cookie jars in the house.’ I’m telling you now as the person who does the shopping, they’re all empty.

And let’s just say that the remaining survivors of these civilisations showed the remaining hunter-gatherers how to build megaliths, and start farming.

Let's say Graham Hancock is right. 

What does it actually change?

What does it actually change about our modern day contemporary reality?

The answer is nothing.

We'll still have mobile phones. We'll still all go to work in the morning. The world will look much the same. People with power and money won't suddenly give up their power and money. We won't suddenly move to a new paradigm. We'll still drink coffee. We'll all look for reasons why our lives aren't what we want and we'll all put off changing them.

It won't change anything because the only thing that we can deal with, the only thing we have any agency over is ...

… right now.

Conspiracy theories always flourish in uncertain times, which because there’s never been a time in human history that wasn’t uncertain is why there have always been conspiracy theories. It’s part of the human condition. The late-Victorians had the rise of charlatans like Blavatsky, a woman who’d claimed to have been given the secrets of the estoeric in the mountains despite being so grossly overweight she could barely climb the stairs. After the First World War, people turned to spiritualism to deal with the apocalypse - believing that they were communing with the ghosts of loved ones lost in the war rather than hearing the knee-knocks of frauds. Then as now, supporters claim exceptionalism. Blavatsky’s supporters claimed she was attacked because she threatened the vested interests of the Church and scientific community, and so on and so forth …

See a pattern developing here?

So, yeah, we can chase the tail, and run after the rabbit, but it doesn't change anything.

If Hancock is right, history will be rewritten.

But it won’t change anything.

History is always being rewritten.

That's the thing about history.

So we can chase the tail, and it's fascinating to do, but it doesn't lead anywhere.

Because it doesn’t change our now.

We have no past.

We have no future.

All we have is right now.

That my brain doesn’t work anymore thanks to Covid / Long Covid - something we can see because I’m trying to rebuild my intellectual capacity by discussing Graham Hancock’s work - is depressing. But one thing that serious life-threatening illness does is give you absolute clarity about that.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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