Links for February, 2025

Aliens, apes, babies, demons, comics

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Here’s my monthly roundup of items from around the internet.

Cowen and Douthat on the Supernatural

Recently economist Tyler Cowen interviewed Ross Douthat on his new book arguing for faith in God. In the modern West, supernaturalism has greatly retreated from public life, especially from the world of intellectual elites. Thus it’s a little strange to hear this highbrow discussion covering God, demons, and aliens.

One of Douthat’s ideas is that various kinds of supernatural experience are real, though not always accurately interpreted. For instance, some polytheistic pagan deities are actually real supernatural beings, such as demons.

My impression is that this interpretation of pagan or tribal religion isn’t that unusual in the history of Christianity. More interesting is that he applies similar thinking to UFOs (and presumably other modern weirdness). In Links for September 2023, I mentioned the varied responses of American Christian leaders to the initial wave of UFO sightings. Douthat is suggesting flying saucers and alien abductions could represent a similar instance of the supernatural impinging on our world, though now interpreted in scientific (or science-fiction) terms.

Folklorists like Thomas Bullard note that alien abduction tales bear a suspicious resemblance to old stories of being kidnapped by faeries. Their take is that both sets of stories are false, with folklore evolving into new forms as technology progresses. People who believe in alien abductions say both sets of stories are true accounts of aliens, but people in the olden days interpreted aliens in accord with their culture. Douthat’s take is that both sets are true accounts of the supernatural, with people in each time interpreting them in accordance with their culture.

Douthat sees the recent sightings of UFOs by the US Navy — which come with fairly strong evidence that actual strange objects were involved — as being related to the alien abduction stories that were prominent in the 80s and 90s.

I honestly don’t know what to make of the craft-zipping-around stuff. That’s part of why it’s interesting. I have difficulty fitting it into a non-supernaturalist paradigm. I think you can. You can say the best argument would be, these are extraterrestrial drones sent from deep space…. This is what you’d expect from an advanced civilization many light years away….

If you make that argument, then you have to separate that from all the kind of paranormal UFO abduction stuff and say, ‘Well, these are just separate things. One belongs to the realm of religious, supernatural, Jungian experience, and one is literal aliens visiting us.’

I find that’s unsatisfying. I feel if they aren’t Chinese drones, [laughs] if they aren’t native earth tech . . . I don’t know if it’s probabilistic reasoning or not. My mind wants there to be a connection between weird abduction stories and Navy pilot sightings.

I suspect that here he’s following the original formulation of Occam’s Razor: “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.” But since most accounts of alien abduction involve memories “recovered” by therapists using hypnosis, he ought to recall that this known entity includes false memories of child sexual abuse and memories of past lives. If you’re going to admit the entity of “memories made up with a therapist under hypnosis” for any of them, it costs you no complexity to attribute alien rectal probes to the same source.

Notably, alien abduction stories often include a sort of sexual abuse — aliens love messing with people’s private parts — and some even include past lives. One of the abductees described in Edith Fiore’s Encounters describes how he came to inhabit his current body as a kind of retirement plan from an alien military. His narrative of his past life doing combat drops on other worlds are an awful lot like the “memories” of someone who read Starship Troopers or The Forever War, or was maybe just a really big fan of the film Aliens.

Cowen, for his part, thinks UFOs (or UAPs, as the cool kids call them now) should raise our priors about the supernatural:

Because even I would say this: UAPs have increased my probability that there’s a God because there are not many explanations for them. There’s China. There’s Russia. There’s craft of our own. There’s alien drone probes. There’s what you could call broadly supernatural. So, there’re five explanations.

I would add that there’s an option that they’re a natural phenomenon we don’t yet remotely understand or even know how to conceptualize — but that is ultimately understandable with scientific methodology.

Or option seven: they’re time machines. I’d like that one, as it means I might live long enough for a time-drone to give us footage from the distant past.

Links of the Apes

Chimpanzees and humans have similar patterns of violence. Among both, for example, groups of males sometimes stage offensive raids into enemy territory. This video clip narrated by David Attenborough shows one such raid.

I show the clip in some of my courses to illustrate the deep roots of raiding, feuding, and tribal warfare. I also show students the Wikipedia entry for the Gombe Chimpanzee War, which is written in the same style as entries on human wars, including start-end dates and casualty figures.

While most collective violence occurs between groups, chimpanzees will occasionally gang up on one of their own. A common scenario is when several lower ranking males form a coalition to depose an alpha male. In one case, a West African chimp leader — called Foudouko by researchers — was first deposed and exiled from the group:

Foudouko gained alpha status in his late teens and ruled alongside his right-hand chimp, Mamadou, the group’s beta male. In 2007, Mamadou was severely injured and separated from the group for weeks, returning frail and holding a lower rank in the social hierarchy.

Because Foudouko maintained an alliance with his now-weak partner, he was ostracised and then ousted by the others. He lived alone on the outskirts of chimp society for years, only being observed by researchers in the field once or twice a year.

When Foudouko attempted to return to the group years later, the deposed tyrant was given no leniency: His former clan-mates beat him with rocks and sticks, bit him, and ate him.

For another example, here’s a short video of East African chimps mobbing their group’s top-ranking male.

Violence isn’t chimp’s only similarity to humanity. They have the rudiments of culture, in the broad sense of traditions passed on through social learning. A recent study suggests that differences in gestures between chimpanzee groups are analogous to dialects of speech among humans. And like human dialects, they might go extinct: A distinctive “knuckle knock” gesture fell out of use when all the adult males of a community were killed, leading to a gap in cultural transmission before new males arrived to take their place.

Whether it’s instinct or learned behavior, apes can also use medicine. An article in Nature describes how orangutans use medicinal plants to treat their face wounds:

Thirteen minutes after Rakus had started feeding on the liana, he began chewing the leaves without swallowing them and using his fingers to apply the plant juice from his mouth directly onto his facial wound. This behavior was repeated several times and lasted seven minutes….Rakus then smeared the entire wound with the plant pulp until the red flesh was fully covered with the green leaf material.

The use of medicinal plants had already been documented in chimpanzees.

Boom, Baby, Boom!

If we’re to understand the current global decline in fertility, we ought to also understand the Baby Boom. At Our World in Data, Saloni Dattani and Lucas Rodes-Guirao provide “The Baby Boom in Seven Charts.” They address much I didn’t know, including that birth rates were rising across many wealthy countries before World War II was over — and in the US well before it entered the war. The boom was also connected to higher rates of marriage and a lower age of motherhood.

On X, Ben Podgursky, comments:

The explanation for the baby boom I wish more people took seriously is that the boom is primarily the gap between breastfeeding (natural birth control) falling out of style after 1940 and hormonal birth control pills starting in 1960.

At Institute for Family Studies, Dan Hess argues for a mix of factors that encourage having babies, including high rates of marriage and a culture that values children.

Concern with the baby bust often brings attention to high-fertility subgroups like the Amish. I recently saw the claim on X that the Mennonites of Bolivia have a population that doubles every ten years — twice as fast as the US Amish. According to Wikipedia, the Mennonite population did more than double between 2013 and 2023, though it’s not clear if it’s all from natural increase rather than immigration.

The Wiki led me to the bizarre story of the Bolivian Mennonite gas-facilitated rapes — a series of attacks by a rape gang whose activities were initially attributed to demons.

Seems like I can’t pick a topic that doesn’t somehow involve violence or demons! Now let’s move onto some comic books about violence and demons.

Rippaverse Rising

I’ve given positive mentions to a few comics from indie publisher Rippaverse (see “Year in Books and Films”, “Links for January 2024”). My overall impression so far can be summed up as “pretty good.” The latest books in my mailbox are excellent, and make me think the company and its fictional universe are really hitting their stride.

First was The Horseman: Welcome to Florespark, by writer Chuck Dixon and artist Joe Bennett. It's the story of Hector, a Philadelphia-area war veteran whose family thinks he’s working night shift at a factory. In truth he’s a brutal masked vigilante who pays the bills with the money he takes off dead gangsters and drug dealers. When he gets in over his head, he must move his family to the fictional city of Florespark, Texas — where he once again quickly gets in over his head. Only now, in addition to gangsters and crooked cops, he’s got superpowered weirdos to worry about.

Dixon wrote Batman and Punisher, as well as a string of vigilante justice novels, so the topic is well within his wheelhouse. It’s comic comfort-food. The remarkable thing is that he finds new juice to squeeze out of the masked vigilante premise. He clearly made an effort to make the protagonist differ from the rest: Unlike loner Frank Castle, Hector still has family to care for; unlike grim crusader Batman, he’s a practical cat with an economic motive. He’s a stoic tough guy, sure, but more personable and likeable than other examples.

Dixon also avoids some tired cliches. While Hector lost friends in war, he seems generally well-adjusted and doesn’t dwell on his trauma. There’s not that obligatory scene of him waking up in a sweat from a combat nightmare. Nor does he have much guilt or trauma over the events that led him to become a vigilante — sure, it was his sister getting shot and paralyzed that started it, but each has in their own way adjusted and moved on with life.

Most importantly, the story grabbed me, with a great flow of rising stakes and problems going from bad to worse. Hector is very fallible, and winds up making problems whose solutions cause more problems. But you like him and his, and want them to get clear of the escalating mess.

Joe Bennet’s a veteran artist who can mix kinetic storytelling with illustrative detail. His splash pages are always beautiful to behold, even when they’re soaked in blood. My only quibble is a couple of panels where Hector’s anatomy looks unrealistically blocky — maybe a side-effect of Bennet having made his name drawing the Hulk, or the artist himself being pretty massive. I might add that the backsides of the women characters were clearly drawn by a Brazilian, but I’m certainly not complaining. (IYKYK.)

The other new book was Bloodruth #1, written by Jen and Sylvia Soska and drawn by Michael Montenat. Now this one is a doozy. It’s a horror comic following the adventures of Sydnee Bloodruth, last scion of a Southern Gothic family who hunt vampires, demons, and devils. Picture a young Pam Grier as Van Helsing with a dash of Jefferson Twilight, Blackula Hunter.

[3/1/25: And I guess Hellblazer, too, though I never read much of that one.]

The character first appeared in Isom #2, where we see her dwelling in a castle in the Texas desert with her two wolf familiars and a tame dragon. It made me smile at the mad-cap creativity you can get in the comics medium. But the thing about Bloodruth is that the Soskas, who made their name doing horror movies, treat this fantastical character with complete dramatic seriousness. There’s an earnestness here that’s become rare in Western genre fiction. By the end of the book, you’ve swallowed the premise that this magical lady rides on a dragon and are just worried about her getting out of a jam with her body and soul intact.

The soul part is interesting, because the writers take the religious aspects of the story seriously as well. The opening panels show us Abel sacrificing a lamb to God while the Devil whispers in the ear of his jealous brother Cain. In this story damnation is a real threat. The monsters are disgusting and terrifying in part because they’re not content to kill — they want to debase and defile and corrupt.

I’ve never been into the religious horror subgenre, though I always thought it had a lot of potential in concept and this book proves it can be done in an exciting way.

The combination of religion with other wild genre elements also reminds me a bit of Garth Ennis’s Preacher — which one reviewer complimented as “****ed-up strange” — but without the blasphemy.

And with less black humor. There’s not a lot of levity to be had amidst Sydnee struggling with demons of the past and present. Though I do think the writers were having a little fun with the contrast between Sydnee’s formal and dramatic speech pattern — almost like the intentionally stilted samurai-speak of the Bride in Kill Bill — and the understated folksy speech of the tech wiz Goodyng. “It’s a doozy!”

[3/1/25: I forgot to mention they also sneak in a few humorous references, including what I’m pretty sure is a quotation from The Princess Bride.]

And I have to give special mention to the art of Michael Montenat. Rippaverse founder Eric July has collected a stable of good artists, but even among those talents Montenat — who got discovered in a fan art contest — stands out.

I ordered the black and white edition of the book, largely because I saw a preview of his uncolored drawings and thought they were perfect in that state (but maybe also because I want my horror comic to feel like an 80s underground book). The art is absolutely gorgeous, even when it is horrifying. I must have stared at the opening panels of Cain and Abel for ten minutes, soaking in the emotions conveyed by the art. And whatever work the writers did describing the story’s strange demons, the artist did an amazing job bringing them to life.

4 out of 4 stars, Joe Bob says check it out.

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