May 22 2010
The Georgia Guidestones
The Georgia Guidestones are substantial slabs of granite stuck in a hillside a few miles north of Elberton, Georgia that provide instructions for rebuilding society after some unspecified apocalypse. I wish them well with that.
The Guidestones were erected by an anonymous donor calling himself “R.C. Christian” in 1980, who had local stoneworkers chisel into their sides a set of ten principles in eight languages that provide broad generalizations about how society should be run, while leaving out any helpful details as to how the principles might actually be applied.
Philosophically, the Guidestones are happily absurd. Artistically, they’re complete rubbish. Hearing someone dismiss any piece of art as “didactic” usually raises my hackles about as high as my hackles will go, but in this case I think it’s the perfect objection to the Guidestones as a work of art. They are didactic in the worst possible way, beating us over the head with a highly personal, highly eccentric view of the universe that insists on its own correctness. The only attempt at actually connecting with the audience is another granite slab that’s been placed in the ground a few feet from the monument that goes through the astronomical alignments and languages on the stone in excruciating detail. There’s no sense of mystery surrounding the stones, no sense of an attempt to connect with anything greater. The simplest neolithic stone circle has much more to say about the nature of the universe than these giants slabs. The effect is somewhat like being locked in a conversation with a conspiracy theorist, a point which was driven home to me when, while visiting the stones, I was locked in a conversation with a conspiracy theorist.
Because of its vague instructions about world government and controlling population, the Georgia Guidestones have become something of a touchstone for new world order conspiracy nuts, including a group of evangelical christians from a church in Marietta who apparently hang around the stones on weekends hoping to strike up conversations that will let them expose the workings of the antichrist in the world. I should point out here that after driving for seven hours on only a few hours of sleep, I was feelingly slightly punchy, and so while I appreciate the sincerity of their intentions, I’m afraid I may have been a little unkind when I gave them a lecture about Occam’s Razor. Still, I have to admit that I did get a certain amount of satisfaction when, after I told one young man that the simplest explanation that meets the available facts is most likely true, it was obvious from the look in his eyes that this was a way of looking at the world which he simply had never encountered before and thought there might be some merit in it. Maybe I converted an evangelist.
All in all, for a monument that aims to be timeless the Georgia Guidestones seem very dated. More than anything, they’re a monument to post-Watergate paranoia and the creeping malaise that Aquarian movement found itself in as the Seventies crept on. The combination of vaguely apocalyptic sentiments combined with helpless generalizations on how to solve things seems to be the perfect reflection of the mood of those times. In the hills over Elberton, Georgia has one more monument to the Carter years.