A gigantic prank, or a sign of worse to come?
I suppose that in an increasingly fact-averse, science-denying world, I should not have been surprised to hear that the ranks of flat-earth believers are swelling rapidly (not to worry, they are still a teensy-beentsy minority). I admit I was, for an instant, a bit surprised, until I had this epiphany: oh yeah, the internet.
The internet has made possible the instantaneous widespread propagation of any—I emphasize ANY—crackpot idea that happens to resonate in certain susceptible minds.
What makes for a susceptible mind? There are a number of hypotheses (and mixtures thereof), but my favorite is sheer lack of imagination, as evinced by basketball great Shaquille O’Neal, who opined: “I drive from Florida to California all the time, and it’s flat to me,” he declared. “I do not go up and down at a 360-degree angle, and all that stuff about gravity.”
The O’Neal quote made me wonder if this Flat Earth resurgence might be part of an enormous prank. The Shack has demonstrated a pretty good sense of humor in the past.
I lifted the Shack quote from a satirical piece in the New Zealand Herald written by John Nash, who also gives a brief rundown of Flat Earth believers’ activities since the 19th Century. Here’s Nash, whose writing is even more entertaining than mine, if you can believe that: Nash on flat earth
Nash’s was written in December 2017. For a more recent, less satirical report see this in The Guardian, by Alex Moshakis: Flat Earthers and conspiracy theories
(In the Guardian, Moshakis goes into the psychology of Flat Earthers—the “susceptible mind” question, particularly their kinship with conspiracy theorists. There is a huge overlap between Flat Earthers and those who believe the moon landings were a hoax perpetrated by NASA for the purpose of—what? Having a good laugh? [The conspiracy theorists’ “official” explanation for the “hoax” is, to inflate NASA’s budget.] After reading Moshakis’s piece, I concluded there is no single good explanation of the phenomenon; it results from a confluence of factors, any one of which, taken separately in small doses, may make some kind of good sense in a sane and balanced mind. If such still exists in 2018.)
Not a prank: should we worry?
Moshakis’s account makes clear that Flat Earthers (as a rule) are not consciously engaged in a prank. They are deadly serious, and exert a good deal of mental energy inventing preposterous world landscapes (OK, maybe I was wrong about the lack of imagination; but it takes far more imagination to comprehend the wonders of our actual universe than it does to concoct the structural impossibilities required to embody a Flat Earth . One woman claims to have put in 8,000 hours of research. Another woman said: “You kind of discover that everything you’ve ever known is incorrect.”
“Everything you’ve ever known is incorrect.” Of course the speaker did not mean that literally—but it is a rather sweeping indictment of received knowledge of things that one cannot acquire firsthand—in this case, of the shape of the Earth.* What most of us perceive as know-nothingness (such as Shaquille O’Neal’s) is prized by Flat Earthers as open-mindedness. Apropos is Terry Pratchett’s quip that “The problem of having an open mind . . . is that people will insist on coming along and putting things into it.”
“Putting things into [“open minds]” is what happens on a colossal scale on the internet. It does not even require targeting—you just have to throw enough crazy things out there and some of them will fall into indiscriminately open minds, until some fragment glues itself onto an existing suspicion or prejudice that has been lurking in the mind’s depths awaiting a connection with the outside world.
Flat Eartherism itself is hardly a threat to civilization as we know it. What troubles me is what it’s a symptom of: an anti-science worldview combined with the unfiltered, anything-goes content that is spread on the internet. Conspiracy theories are nothing new, but their ability to leap from mind to mind globally unchecked at the speed of light is. What is also new is the deep suspicion of, and adamant resistance to, science and scientists. (It’s new, at least, to someone who grew up in the 20th Century when science was better appreciated.)
All that comes packaged with Flat Eartherism, and more dangerously, climate change denial.
Climate change denial reminds me of another conspiracy theory that has been around for ages: the fear that the Club of Rome, in collaboration with The Vatican, is scheming to take over the world—the New World Order—for the cause of (horrors!) sustainability, and make us all subject to its tyrannical agenda that includes reducing human population by draconian means. The Club of Rome conspiracy theory predates the rise in prominence of climate change as a political and economic issue—but, unsurprisingly, the “theorists” have now incorporated climate change action as another face of the sinister New World Order plot.
It is one thing to believe that the Club of Rome is trying to take over the world—a conspiracy theory having little to do with science. It’s quite another to believe that the vast majority of atmospheric scientists are concocting false evidence and perpetrating a massive fraud upon the public to make their case for Anthropogenic Global Warming. The purported motive for such a fraud, according to Climate Change deniers, is to kill the fossil fuel industry, halt economic progress throughout the world, and put people-hating environmentalists in charge.
(At the same time, the fossil fuel industry itself blames it on nonprofits in search of funding, and academics in search of grants—nothing like a global-scale fright to get funding, they say. That argument is taken up by pro-industry right wing politicians as a club to beat environmentalists with. The narrative goes, environmentalists and scientists are in it for the money, no matter how much damage it does to the economy. This point of view is natural to people who see most human activity through the lens of acquisitiveness, and expect everyone else to.)
The kidnapping, beating, and killing of polio vaccination workers by Muslim fundamentalists in the Third World is a clear case of the tragic consequences of anti-science bias coupled with paranoia; not so obvious was the crippling and death of hundreds of children deprived of the vaccine. Less damaging, although equally needless, has been children suffering from preventable childhood diseases in Europe and the U.S. on account of anti-vaccination movements—movements which were based on speculation and scientifically discredited claims resulting in science denial.
Is it harmless?
Given such massive problems as climate change and disease epidemics, why make so much of a phenomenon as innocuous as the Flat Earth movement? It shows us that that anyone’s thinking “everything you’ve ever known is incorrect,” is a meme that has infested the internet and can be applied to anyone’s pet source of paranoia. (An anti-depressant medication is found to increase suicide risk? Of course! Everything we’ve been told about antidepressants is incorrect!)
If you can say that of something as basic as the shape of the Earth, you can say it of climate change, vaccinations, evolution, disease, electromagnetism, GPS—things we (a dwindling number, apparently) believe science has much of the truth about.
Addendum: Flat Earth poser
Me wonders how Flat Earthers explain something as simple as the TV coverage of President (and would-be dictator) Donald Trump meeting with (real-life) dictator Kim Jong-Un in Singapore in broad daylight at the same time that it was totally dark in the eastern U.S. Surely, if the Earth were flat, some light would leak out of eastern Asia skies in our direction—unless the sun was very close to the Earth, so close it might burn up aircraft and balloons, fry all life-forms on mountains, and add a deeper tint of orange to Donald Trump’s visage.
Or maybe the sun is very close but not all that hot, the earth is flat and does not rotate—in which case it would be hard to explain why, on a sunny day, shadows creep so slowly across the landscape. A low sun, in order to get where it needed to hustle to, say Los Angeles from New York in three hours, would cast rapidly-moving shadows and . . . well I honestly can’t picture it.
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* Actually, if you were as clever as an ancient Greek (they don’t make ’em like that anymore), you could conduct experiments first-hand to demonstrate that the Earth is spherical, while staying right on the (deceptively flat) ground.