There's a man in the middle of a parking lot / Wondering which way he should go / There's a star on the horizon /Sinking low, low - Bob Seger
I try to keep my worldview limber. Gymnastic, even. I’m not just open to the obscure perceptions and strange conceptions of others, I’m willing to give them a fair hearing. I’m genuinely intrigued in how anyone comes to believe in whatever they do. So if you have a belief system (BS) that others deem misguided, misanthropic or moronic, I’m prepared to listen.
But hang on, let me get some popcorn first.
Though I’m prepared to listen, I do have limits. Until recently, flat earth theory lay outside those precincts. I had zero interest in how anyone comes to believe the planet is a pancake composed of water and rock (worst IHOP menu item ever), and that gravity works downward in some absolute Newtonian sense.
Then a while back with nothing better to do, I watched a Netflix documentary on the topic. It turned out to be perversely fascinating. Pre-pandemic, Flat Earth believers packed auditoriums south of the border, which is surprising in itself whether you believe the planet leans more toward Kate Smith than Kate Moss in its dimensions.
In one scene, an American pair who are big stars on the Flat Earth scene are heading to a civic centre to give a talk. They are having a difficult time finding the place, so the woman turns on the GPS in her car. Yes, the Global Positioning System, which relies on orbiting satellites to feed polar coordinates to people just like this Flat Earth pair, guiding them flawlessly to their destinations.
There’s a beautiful, beautiful lunacy there.
Anyhow, it was an uncommonly sunny day in Vancouver, early December. I was on my way to the outdoor pickle ball courts when I came across a balding fellow webcasting from a park adjacent to the parking lot. He had a full setup with signs and pictures, and even a spirit level to demonstrate the horizontal. His car had Saskatchewan plates and was festooned with Flat Earth signs and paraphernalia. He looked as lonely as the legendary Maytag Repair Man, and I had time to kill before a game.
I asked if I could take a picture, and he replied brightly, “of course!” I had a few questions, I said. “Shoot,” he said, eagerly shifting in his chair and looking like a man loaded for bear but content to just blast a few chipmunks off his porch.
I mentioned that I recently came into a possession of a mid-sixties NASA publication on the Gemini space missions. The low-Earth orbit photographs clearly show the planet’s curvature. Since these pictures predate the digital era, how would he account for their doctoring?
He surprised me with his answer. It was something I had never considered about space and photographic trickery. I parried with some contrary information, which he deftly dispatched with rapier-sharp reasoning. He then slowly explained to me, like you would with a puzzled child, the paradoxes of sea level and how planes fly across the world in a straight line, not a curve. On a round Earth the planes nose would be constantly dipping down, which you’d notice.
There was only one explanation for these anomalies. I felt cognitive dissonance rising in me like a buoyant cork of fear, and tried weakly to offer a counterargument, which he quickly demolished. That wasn’t enough. He then moved on to sarcasm, peppering me with sharp asides. He even quoted Churchill in a contextually clever way. I had to face the truth. I was not just in the presence of a great mind; I was standing on a big-ass pancake made out of rock and water. I rubbed my forehead in consternation.
“It’s okay, dude,” he said, rising from his table and putting an arm around my shoulder. “It was pretty scary for me when I first woke up, too. It’s like escaping from the Matrix. Today you’re Neo.”
Kidding. Actually, the guy gave me a reality check that bounced. His response when I asked about NASA space photos, he said, “I don’t know, but I know they were doctored!”
“What about that?” I said, pointing to the sun hanging in the clear blue sky over his shoulder like a weightless Christmas bauble. “How do explain the sun?”
“I don’t know what it is. Scientists say it’s a ball of gas, but I don’t buy it,” he replied.
“So you have a theory about the Earth, but you don’t have a theory about the sun?”
Where does the sun go at night, when everything gets dark? “Far away,” he replied flatly. You mean it dips below the plane of Earth? “No, it goes far, far off in the distance.” (Apparently there is a major problem for Flat Earthers with objects in the sky dropping below the plane.) The sun is much, much closer to Earth when it is in the sky than scientists say, only a few miles away, he insisted. He reached for some photos he had taken himself - telephoto shots - of the sun against the clouds. His voice rising in agitation, he asked how is it that the sun can appear before the clouds like this. “Because the sunlight filters through water vapour,” I replied. “That’s what clouds are.”
These were some damnably agile chipmunks on his porch, and his rifle seemed to be misfiring.
Over 2,000 years ago, some ancient Greek dude was able to determine the curvature of Earth by measuring shadows cast by same-sized sticks at the same time in different cities. Centuries before Christ, not only was Earth’s shape known, but it’s size. So really, this Flat Earth fellow’s ‘reality tunnel’ wasn’t even pre-Copernican. It was pre-Christian.
“You’ve failed to convince me,” I said as I walked off toward the pickle ball courts and back to the 21st century. “Good luck with others.”
“You’re not spinning! You’re not spinning!” he yelled, a reference to the Flat Earth’s non-spin. “You’re brainwashed! You’re brainwaaaashed!!” He was still yelling like a banshee as I got to the court.
I love this planet. Whatever its shape.
The guy certainly seemed genuine. But in the off-chance he was doing some long-form performance art (he was there at least two days in a row), then kudos to him. May the Canada Council shower him and his fellow pranksters with grants.
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I am simply mocking this guy. Whenever people expand the distance between themselves and others the basis of beliefs, to the point of othering, everyone loses. I don’t have to buy into his flat earth theory, and I don’t have to accept the wonky postmodern viewpoint that all perspectives have equal merit, to recognize our common humanity (even if I will never have him ‘round’ for a beer). I feel that before we reject the quaint ideas of others outright, we should do a bit of work re-examining our own.
The sense that we are being lied to constantly on a whole range of things - by politicians, pundits and policy makers - has driven some people to suspect everything is a lie. Or at least all the important stuff. Rather than try to parse a mass of confusing and conflicting information on any given topic, they find a tribe that relieves them of such effort with an unlikely but appealing anti-lie, along with a community of fellow contrarians. Whether its Q-anon or the Flat Earth hypothesis, there are online tribes of every stripe that offer that blessed feeling of absolute certainty.
For most others, a similar process plays out in a much less extreme way. In gravitating to our favourite corporate portals, we prefer to believe all the information is properly sourced and vetted. At one pole is Fox News, Breitbart, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, etc. At the other is the NYT, WaPost, The Guardian, MSNBC, CNN, etc. I’m not arguing for equivalence, but both poles traffic in skewed information, which their followers pretty much take on faith, while accusing the antipodes of trafficking in “fake news.”
Secular or religious, you and I and everyone else have what the American writer and philosopher Robert Anton Wilson called “reality tunnels.” Catholicism, Protestantism, atheism, Marxism, libertarianism, Shintoism, Taoism, socialism, Democratic Socialism (Nazism), The 12-Step Program, Christian Science, the “Law of Attraction,” The Copenhagen Interpretation, and The Big Bang theory are examples of different reality tunnels. Wilson didn’t make judgements on their relative merits, he just advised we should try out the reality tunnels of others once in a while, if only out of some sense of human connection, and expand our own little reality tunnel into a “reality labyrinth.”
Yet he also advised skepticism about any given reality tunnel. The biggest BS (belief system) you should guard against is your own, he insisted. Personally, I would be surprised if there isn’t a notion or three floating around in my head that time will reveal as bent or broken.
Humans love belonging to a tribe of belief, and it’s been that way for a very long time. There are literally hundreds of millions of people on Earth who would never buy a story about Bigfoot or Nessie, yet believe in the literal truth of a book with a talking snake in it.
In any case, I never got a chance to tell the guy in the park I agree that Earth is not a perfect sphere. Astronomers say its an “oblate spheroid.”
Great exploration of how humans have BS that can hobble or help us. I've been amazed to see people I respect a lot cozying up to belief systems that are shocking - eg. Qanon, although one friend insists she doesn't believe it all... but the idea that Trump is some kind of healing savior makes sense to her.