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"Ancient Apocalypse" on Netflix has been a break out hit. Some of the reactions have been... interesting.
The Guardian declared it the most dangerous show on Netflix.
Boingboing says Archaeologists reveal the white supremacist nonsense behind Netflix's "Ancient Apocalypse"
So what's behind this?
Hitler famously cherry picked some ideas from archeology / anthropology to push his agenda. Post WW2 academics found that it was easy to push out rivals by claiming their ideas could result in a new Hitler.
As a result anthropology is filled with people who think that they have a vital role as guardians of society.
This mostly results in making historical narratives more dishonest and less cool. The Bell Beaker culture is often referred to as the Corded Ware culture. They claim it was spread as a peaceful diffusion of culture. Genetic testing that showed that as the culture expanded neighbouring Y-DNA haplogroups disappeared. This is dismissed as one of those great mysteries.
When a body is found carrying a spear and multiple hand axes, they are ceremonial trade goods instead of weapons. The arrows in the back of the body were presumably his change from the trading. That joke was stolen from an academic I can't track down.
Ancient Apocalypse is really just fun and harmless, but the reactions point to a deeper problem.
Well, I read the linked Guardian article expecting to find what you claimed: accusations of white supremacism and fake history being pushed in its place.
That's not what I found. The show is hosted by Graham Hancock, so yeah: we're Discovery Channel Tomb of Jesus or History Channel All Hitler All The Time levels here.
Fun rubbish popcorn for the brain? Sure. But anything more serious than that, no. I've read some of his books from the 90s and he's been at this a long time. It's the Erich von Daniken version of prehistory, the Theosophist Ancient Lemuria and Mu Ascended Masters version. Cherry-picked narratives are indeed the problem here.
Most people won't take it as anything other than light entertainment. Some people may believe it's true, however. And I guess some of those might believe in some ur-Aryan white master race nonsense, but I can't be bothered to get het-up about that.
The danger is fake history, and yeah, it's on all sides of the divide today. Which is why it's better not to get your history from Graham Hancock, fun as it might be.
Not to come down too hard on what might be an off-hand comment, but exactly what salient or urgent "danger" does fake history present?
I can see how historical narratives (fake or not) could motivate conflict. For example, stories of dispossession can establish a deeply felt grievance that can be pointed to various destructive ends. But:
Not all dangerous narratives are in fact fake.
Those stories can just as easily be pointed at various constructive goals.
Most history isn't emotionally inflammatory.
Our understanding of history is constantly undergoing revision. Do discarded historical narratives count as fake? Are they prima facia "dangerous"?
The stories are open for (and usually attract) rebuttals.
When I was a kid, everyone read von Daniken's Chariot of the Gods, spent a few weeks mind-blown, then moved on to adulthoood.
Isn't the real danger here, the great, recurring theme of the internet era, the crisis of authority?
A well-deserved crisis, I'd say, but also genuinely dangerous to a great many people.
None, but if "fake history" is dangerous then "real history" is important. Every field inflates the dangers of its own doctrinal enemies to inflate the importance of its own contributions to society. See how many extremely online dissident rightists blame everything on twitter Blue Checks and twitter Bluehairs; everything wrong with society is blamable on the people they fight with on the internet. Teachers blame lack of education, priests blame lack of religion, unions blame lack of unions, scientists blame lack of science, historians blame lack of history. Like clockwork.
This is all downstream less of a crisis of authority than it is the repudiation of historical materialism as a philosophy by both right and left academics, and the total lack of real life experience for so many of us. The superstructure and the spectacle are fought over, while the material base from which they grow is ignored. This severing of class conflict from our debates, class only reappears in the conscious output of our culture only in a mystified and racialized form for right or left, produces the idea that the war of ideas that one engages in online is the single most important war being waged.
I agree and see it as manifestation of iron law of beurocracy. Many fields you mentioned are ossified and require external financing. Hence the need to serve their own respective beurocracies. An ideal example is let's say intelligence communities: did we prevent some terrorist attack? See, it is working we need to do more. Did we not prevent a terrorist attack? We are underfunded and we need more resources. It also explains creeping of activism into sciences and by activism I mean one-sided single issue analysis of a given topic without any consideration given to any counterargument that can weaken the ultimate goal of getting more funds. Every study ends with "further research into this groundbreaking and important insight is needed".
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