Who Peeps From The Unhewn Dolmen Arch?

A long while ago I posted about my interactions with Ms V, the historical ultra-sceptic whose shifting beliefs about the origins of Cerne Abbey and various other Dark Age issues gradually reduced me to incredulity. I concluded that to justify those ideas, someone would have to dispose of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon writing. Yesterday, as a result of a similar discussion about what may or may not have happened at Beckery just west of Glastonbury in the 5^th century (archaeological opinion at the moment is that it was a very early monastic settlement of some kind), I spent far too long discovering that yes, that is indeed exactly the proposition. Every document claiming to be prior to the 12^th century is a forgery. 

At this point, because it would be impossible not to, I will name Ms V fully as Harriet Vered. Her main claim to public notice is The Megalithic Empire (2012), a book arguing that the stone monuments of western Europe were markers in a vast system of trading routes. This is quite a fun suggestion taking advantage of the fact that we don’t really know what most of these places were, even if it doesn’t work in detail (a mystical earth-mysteries site, no less, has a nice review pointing out the gaps in the argument, especially when it cavalierly sweeps aside the possibility of water-based transport in prehistory). Meanwhile, this elderly website promoting the book does so in rather a light-hearted way, suggesting that it is, if not exactly satire as some have guessed, aimed modestly at injecting some new ideas into a field devoid of them; and who could object to that, even if one of the ideas is that modern humans originated not in Africa but the Arctic. It’s positive to have insights coming into the discipline of history from outside, even if they turn out not to have legs.

The Megalithic Empire’s co-author is Michael J Harper, a far more challenging figure, it turns out, than Ms Vered. His other books include 2003’s The History of Britain Revealed, which champions the idea that the inhabitants of the British Isles have always spoken English (not Old English, mind you, but modern English, the stuff I’m typing) and that French and German are derived from it; 2014’s Meetings With Remarkable Forgeries, arguing that ten axial historical texts from Caesar’s De Bello Gallico to Voltaire’s Candide are fakes; and the latest, Revisionist Historiography, which was only published last year and hasn’t received any reviews. It’s a bit expensive for me to try out, especially given the amount I’ve been spending recently.

I grappled with all this rather more than I should have done, but then much of my approach to the world has manuscripts and their implications at its heart. I’m used to people attacking the credibility of the Gospels, and have often made the point that compared to many other ancient texts their credentials are actually rather good, but at least Mr Harper is fair in asserting that virtually every important text historians rely on is fake.

As far as English historical documents are concerned, the Harper-Vered thesis is that there were two great campaigns of forgery, in the 12^th century and the 16^th, both politically-motivated: the first to cement the rule of the Norman kings and the Church they brought with them, and the second to bolster the Tudors and their pet Church as they justified a national identity separate from that of Europe and Rome. This is, I feel, not remotely likely: such initiatives were unnecessary, and the theory requires assuming, contrary to what we know, that texts are no older than the oldest datable copy: that inevitably leads you to look for fakes and forgeries regardless of the circumstances surrounding the texts themselves. Cast an eye towards this interview with Harriet Vered. The interviewer is generally very sympathetic to her ideas, but when (at 0.59) he asks why, given their absolute control over land, the Norman kings couldn’t just give their new abbeys and churches anything they wanted without engaging in an elaborate fraud involving inventing an entire fake history for a country, Ms Vered can’t answer, merely repeating that that’s what happened. At 1.09-1.10, discussing Samuel Pepys’s diary, she clearly thinks it’s prima facie absurd that such a document could have existed for 150 years without being published, and therefore that too must be a much later fake.

Because these assertions don't rest on evidence, I thought there must be a set of beliefs behind them, and so there is. Mr Harper and those he associates with call it Applied Epistemology, though it bears only a remote relationship to the philosophical study which goes under that title. In the account of The Applied Epistemology Library, this is translated into a set of rules to govern enquiry, to which a set of people are committed: AEists, they call themselves. The rules boil down thus:

- If the truth is not simple, prove it!

- If what was differs from what is, prove it!

- If different inputs will produce the same outcome, prove it!

I’m not clear where these dicta come from, and I’m not sure I can think of practical meanings for the last one, but on the face of it these are not particularly objectionable guides to thinking in a variety of disciplines. The AEists don’t often stick to them, though, because there are other motivations operating. It must surely be simpler to believe that English history is real, and its core texts genuine, than to assume they were all produced in two completely otiose campaigns of fraud.

In fact, the bigger rule and the one which clearly excites the AEists more than the stated ones, is the injunction to come up with interesting, unorthodox ideas, even if they involve contradicting yourself. Mr Harper says:

    an orthodoxy is established as soon as two people are agreed on something. This is the origin of the Applied Epistemological mantra 'Everything you say must be original to you (or it isn't worth saying)'.
    To an extremist, and all AE-ists are extremists, if you say something completely original except that you said it last week, an orthodoxy has been formed, and you shouldn't say it. But this is a counsel of perfection and, so as long as you feel a little uncomfortable spouting something you said last week, that is usually enough since it will force the brain to put a slight spin (even a literary flourish) on such a hackneyed thought.
    Obviously you would rip your own tongue out rather than repeat what somebody else said last week. … As long as you get your brain used to constantly 'diving down' you will eventually bottom out ie actually start being compulsively original.

This is, of course, an ideology – a counter-orthodoxy, if you will – and where it takes you is, for instance, claiming (as Mr Harper implied on well-known alternative historian Graham Hancock’s website in 2003), that the Ancient Egyptians created Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika as reservoirs and the northern course of the Nile is due to artificial engineering. One might counter that this is explanation is a lot less ‘simple’ than the Nile not flowing into the Indian Ocean or west to the Atlantic because there are bloody great mountains in the way, or that Lake Victoria doesn’t look ‘squarish’ at all, but one suspects Mr Harper is just saying something plainly ludicrous for the sake of it. Should you be tempted to believe any of this, consider the 14 species of Mastacembelus spiny eels unique to Lake Tanganyika, which would have taken longer than 5000 years to develop.

No, the root of AEism, if such a thing can be said to exist, lies not in high-minded rationalistic principles, but rather in the belief that people are largely liars or fools, and those who expose them should consider themselves superior. You will recognise this as the same energies that drive conspiracy theories. It produces ideas that dissipate when actual data are applied to them, but you have to wonder how much their proponents actually believe in them: perhaps they just find reality a bit dull. It's hard to tell. In Harriet Vered’s interview on Adzcast, she insists that ‘we don’t have a single Anglo-Saxon church in this country’ (which will be news to the good parishioners of Wing, Brixworth, or St Peter’s Monkwearmouth), ‘you can’t date a stone cross’ (pity poor Rosemary Cramp, then, who devoted her entire life to dating Dark Age sculpture), and alleges that orthodox archaeologists force their unsubstantiated ideas on the general public. In fact, for instance, English Heritage who own Stonehenge are quite open in stating that nobody knows what it was for (though they speculate, quite reasonably). Is she ignorant, malicious, or mischievous?

My contrary experience is that people, no matter their degree of ignorance about facts, are generally neither liars nor fools, though they might be either on occasion. And this is probably where my unconscionable credulity arises.