Disposable Lit Reviews

Feral House, 2001
253 pp.
ISBN 0-922915-65-2

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Donna Kossy’s first book, Kooks, is an absolute personal favorite of mine. It profiles a number of strange individuals and the jawdropping beliefs which they actively proselyte. (Your Aunt Edith may believe that Hitler is alive and well and directing his fleet of flying saucers from beneath the Antarctic icecap, but she isn’t a kook until she stands on a streetcorner passing out fliers to that effect, or self-publishes her own dense proof of the idea which she then advertises in the backs of magazines.) Although she didn’t know it at the time, Kossy was also documenting the end of an era. After all, any yutz can get free webspace these days and effortlessly e-publish their insane manifestoes; back in the old days, it took hard work and perseverance to distribute hardcopies of your psychoceramic treatise.

Strange Creations is in many ways a flipside treatment to an overlapping subject, that of irrational ideas about human origins. Where Kooks profiled many disparate people whose viewpoints were unique even within the territory of garden-variety looniness, Strange Creations surveys the main categories of bizarre beliefs toward the subject at hand, examining the main thread of thought while mentioning in passing notable divergences from the main tenor of believers.

Kossy divides the field into several overlapping categories of belief, the first of which is “Extraterrestrial Origins,” focusing mainly on the idea that ancient astronauts were responsible for the evolution of humans from ape stock. She cites both the standard paperback-potboiler authors such as Von Daniken, as well as those who make their message more overtly religious such as the Raelians, and observes that the entire spectrum of belief seems to focus on adding back the sense of purpose and destiny which evolution sapped from many more mainstream faiths. It’s a new Creation Myth for a post-religious, Star Trek-informed culture.

Second examined is “De-Evolution,” a second reaction to evolutionary thought which fights mostly against a flawed undestanding of evolution itself, i.e., the idea that all of nature, and humanity in particular, are necessarily and inexorably improving. By this philosophy, mankind is slowly degrading and becoming less perfect, whether through racial mongrelization (a concept which gets greater play in a later chapter) or such less obvious flaws such as human cannibalism. It’s the venerable “Good Ol’ Days” syndrome, expanded to include all of human history and prehistory.

Next up is “Race,” which encompasses such ideas as the separate evolution of each human race from a different kind of ape, to the existence of lower-than-human pre-Adamites whose admixture with human blood has created the various races. Naturally, most of these schemes of race value place Caucasians at the top of the pyramid, although Kossy also examines the black racism at the root of Nation of Islam-style Afrocentrism which styles Africans as the true species of human and declares white people to be a kind of mutated ape.

The chapter which follows, “Eugenics,” is, I think, Kossy’s surrender to her research. Technically, it’s not a theory of human origins, but rather a philosophy of guiding future human evolution (in contrast to the Social Darwinists, who instead believed that the naturally superior human genes would necessarily rise to the top by definition). I don’t mind the diversion, since it gives an opportunity to see how ideas of de-evolutionary and racially polygenic human origins were brought to bear on a modern population, as well as giving concrete examples of how unquestioningly ethnocentric both of those ideas were from their conception on.

Naturally, we have to deal with literalist “Creationism” next, both in its first incarnation rejecting science wholesale as an affront to the Bible, and in its more recent “Scientific Creationism” guise with lip service paid to science in the employ of scriptural inerrancy and moralistic catastrophism. More than any other belief system referenced, Scientific Creationism requires an amazing level of cognitive dissonance and intellectual dishonesty/.

The final full chapter is something of a departure, because the “Aquatic Ape” theory is not a rejection of evolution as a whole; rather, it’s an elegant little idea that most distinctively human physical features, from hairlessness to bipedalism to female breasts, can be explained by positing that, between the trees and the savannah, proto-humans spent an age living a semi-aquatic lifestyle. Though largely just an anthropological hypothesis that hasn’t been borne out by the evidence, the Aquatic Ape theory earns its place in this book for two reasons: One, its main popularizers (such as Elaine Morgan) first found it appealing not because of its scientific value, but because it could be spun as a distinctly feminist version of evolution to counter the excesses of gender-unequal “Mighty Hunter” anthropology. And second, because enthusiastic laymen still catch hold of it with incredible fervor on first discovery, overlooking such little things as a complete lack paleantological support, as well as more recent findings that those unique features aren’t as much a break from our apish cousins as we may think.

The book ends with a chapter on some philosophies that couldn’t be fit into any other category , including the interstellar bureaucracy of the channeled i>Urantia Book and the physical ascention-to-Heaven ideas of H.I.M. (known better since their mass suicide as the “Heaven’s Gate” cult). Unfortunately, beyond there’s no concluding chapter or afterward, nothing summing up the human tendencies which foster these anti-evidentiary belief systems Even a short set of conclusions, pointing out the universality of ideas of destiny and purpose in these theories (along with the near-universal trend toward exclusivist hierarchies that devalue the Other), would have been welcome.

Despite that omission, I recommend the book heartily as a clear survey of the development of intellectual (and anti-intellectual) strains which inform the individualized excesses of the denizens of her former book Kooks. If they weren’t published in such disparate sizes, I’d say that a boxed-set edition of the two was in order.

Nathan Shumate