Flat Earth

I'm reading this new book called Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, by Christine Garwood. It's a really fascinating discussion of how and why crackpot science takes hold; the most interesting thing about it is that, rather than the usual Darwin wars, she's chosen to chronicle the notion of the flat Earth -- and yet the two turn out to be related.

Garwood spends a little while at the outset establishing something that those of us who study the Middle Ages already know, but that the general reader might not know: namely, that the flat Earth is not a medieval idea. Every educated person in the Middle Ages knew that the Earth was a sphere; this idea had first been proposed by the Pythagoreans in the 6th century BC, had been picked up by Plato and Aristotle, passed to Ptolemy and Boethius, and gotten entrenched into Western Christianity by the church fathers. The early church fathers like Jerome and Augustine did not read the Bible literally, and were generally friendly towards the best scientific knowledge of their day.

This setup is by way of demolishing the Columbus myth. Again, as all medievalists know, Columbus did not discover that the Earth is round; everybody already knew that the Earth is round. What Columbus discovered, by accident, was that there was a continent in the way of his attempted journey to China. Most people at the time assumed that you couldn't sail west from Europe to China, not because you'd fall off some edge, but because the distance was just too far to go without running out of food (they were right, or would have been if a previously unknown continent hadn't been in the way).

So where did the flat Earth idea come from?

Well, before the Pythagoreans in the 6th century BC, many ancient Near Eastern cultures had mythologies that suggested a flat Earth, including the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and the Hebrews. This flat-Earth cosmology was written into the Hebrew Bible, although it was not an important part of it. But, as I mentioned, the early church fathers tended to read the Bible allegorically not literally, so the flat Earth notion pretty much vanished, and didn't play any role in European thinking.

That is, it played no role until the 19th century. That is when the flat Earth idea really started up. With the rise of evolutionary theory (first Lamarckian, then Darwinian), a number of people became convinced that science was going to destroy the foundations of religion; some of these people looked at their Bibles and noticed that the Bible not only spoke of six days of creation, but also seemed to imply that the Earth is flat -- and that's when the trouble really began.

At this point, Garwood's narrative becomes a study of how knowledge is produced and disseminated in a complex modern society. The flat Earth idea is proposed and promulgated in Victorian England by a colourful cast of con artists and eccentrics, the leader of whom is a quack doctor and snake oil salesman who calls himself "Parallax." He is a smooth debater and a clever self-promoter who leaves audiences dazzled; the real scientists who take him on have reason on their side, but no sense of how to communicate to a popular audience. Parallax plays the anti-elitist, inviting his audience to use their common sense and focus on the "facts" they all know, while leaving the speculative "theories" of establishment science in the dust. The round Earth, he declares, is merely a "theory" for which no actual proof has ever been found, and is a central part of a sinister conspiracy to undermine piety and true faith by a troop of atheistic scientists and their liberal, pseudo-Christian allies in the established mainline churches. And he's getting famous and making quite a lot of money with this stunt.

Is this all sounding familiar?

While Parallax and his merry pranksters are gallavanting around England, playing thousands of people for suckers and infuriating the astronomers, biologists are experiencing the first round of the evolution wars. Amid the conflict, they begin to look for rhetorical tools to fight off their attackers, who are in deadly earnest. Also their attackers are using a brand new type of Biblical reading -- literalism -- to try to debunk evolution, while claiming that this new form of reading is actually traditional Christianity (it isn't).

Some of the biologists pick up on the flat Earth controversy, and use it as a label to stick onto their opponents. Additionally, one prominent writer, Andrew Dickson White (first president of Cornell University) picks up the false idea that medieval people believed in a flat Earth; he gets this idea from Washington Irving, who had invented the notion from whole cloth and stuck it into his biography of Columbus. White takes Irving's fiction as if it were real, and uses it to create a false version of history in which science and religion have been at war for centuries. In reality, they'd only been at war for a few decades.

Nonetheless, White's narrative is tremendously influential, because it's useful. Attaching the idea of a flat Earth to the Middle Ages allows White to tell a new and simplified story of human progress: a simple morality tale of good reason versus bad superstition, in which natural common sense such as that represented by Columbus comes into conflict with repressive dogma, such as that represented by a newly invented, wholly fictional cast of characters: the educated friars and churchmen who laughed at Columbus for thinking the Earth was round.

Quite a tale, no?

There are a few things I think are worth noting here: one is that the flat Earth wars and the Darwin wars were entwined right from the start; the second is that in both cases, social class played a major role: the underlying tale of an eggheaded elite being challenged by common sense is what gives shape to both conflicts. And the third is that the growth of pseudoscience is not the survival of older superstitions from previous eras; it is a distinctly modern phenomenon, and is a direct reaction to the rise and growth of real science. What all that suggests is that science may never wholly eradicate pseudoscience, and that the notion that scientists are in the business of fighting off old superstition is an oversimplification of the truth. What they are actually in the business of doing is finding out how things work; and one unfortunate side effect of this is the creation of wholly new superstitions, which must then be debunked one by one.

Overall, Flat Earth is a really fine piece of intellectual and social history; it's Garwood's first book, and I look forward to more from her in future.