Customer Reviews

Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The perils of reviewing books that one has patently never read!

Garwood's book actually goes far beyond the ground covered by Burton Russell's excellent study of the Columbus myth. In fact, the main focus of her book (in chapters 2 through 11 & epilogue) is a different, albeit related, topic - the Victorian public revival of the flat earth idea through flat earth societies that existed in the period 1840-2001. The book is also based on a great amount of original archival research (including a series of unexplored archives of modern day flat earth societies in UK, US and Canada), has 28 pages of end-notes and a bibliography 23 pages long. Contrary to what R.B Cathcart claims, it is an exemplary piece of historical research by a professional historian.

The moral of the story? Bother to read the book before publishing public reviews!!

You remember the story about the frightened sailors who went with Columbus in 1492, but were sure that they were going to sail off the edge of the world. They almost mutinied, they were so scared. But Columbus got to land rather than to the enormous cataract, proving to the satisfaction of everyone ever since that the world was not flat but round. If you do remember all this, perhaps you also remember being told it was all bosh, but perhaps not; the story of Columbus bravely proving the world was round is such a satisfactory myth that it will probably never die. In _Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea_ (Thomas Dunne Books), Christine Garwood, a historian of science, starts with debunking this myth, but then shifts to the modern flat-earthers, those from the nineteenth century until now who insisted, starting with the Bible as a foundation and attempting to co-opt science in the flat-earth cause, that the "globularists" were involved in a scandalous conspiracy to turn people away from the Bible. Garwood's often hilarious book is a serious look at an aberrant belief and those who took it up in modern times, centuries after the flat Earth had been scientifically dismissed. Flat-earthism may be nonsense, but it was an anti-science stance taken up by those who believed in a literal Bible, and as such, comparisons may be easily drawn between flat-earthers and creationists.

Educated medieval people did not believe the Earth to be flat. In fact, if they studied their Plato, Aristotle, or Euclid, they knew the shape of the Earth. The Columbus story was appealing to those who unnecessarily wanted to promote a view of science in eternal warfare with religion. The dispute between the two realms over the shape of our Earth seemed to be settled, but was revived in England by a loud, smart, confident, and energetic socialist quack from Lancashire, Samuel Birley Rowbotham, who started touring England in the 1830s. He urged people to take the Bible literally and also just to look around: anyone could see we were not walking around on a sphere. The Earth was a stationary disk, he taught, and the Sun was only 400 miles above it, and if ships disappeared over the horizon, it was just a play of refraction and perspective, not evidence that the surface of the water was curved. He had many followers, and Flat-earthism didn't stop with the Victorians. There were Flat Earth Societies of different kinds during the twentieth century. The American fundamentalist preacher Wilbur Voliva took over the utopian city of Zion in Illinois, and used his radio station in the 1920s not only to broadcast intimidations of hell-fire but also to spread such explanations of sunrise and sunset being only optical illusions. The Canadian Flat Earth Society is different from any other group described here, since it was not religiously inspired. It was a bunch of writers and philosophers who took up the cause as a bit of serious fun, to push concepts of epistemology. To poor, serious Samuel Shenton, founder of the International Flat Earth Research Society, fell the task of defending the concept of a flat Earth while astronauts went around it and to the Moon. He asserted that Christ himself had warned of "a great deception which might shake frail Christian faith," and he was furious that astronauts had radioed "the opening verses of Genesis... as a deceptive cloak" concealing the promotion of globularism. The new flat-earthers were eager to promote their own "scientific" views, but their arguments harked back to those of the previous century. For instance, they asserted that people could sail east to west around the world just like a needle sails around a phonograph record, but no one sails around it north to south, because that would take one into the edges of the disk, a realm of forbidden cold. Others also pointed out that in sailing from Australia to America, a passenger did not get on board ship upside down, and did not sail upwards around a globe. And of course, the ocean looked flat during the whole trip.

Almost all the flat-earthers here mount their beliefs from knowing that, as one wrote, "the Bible is a flat-earth book", and from feeling that God had called them to refute astronomical treachery. In many ways, they were more fundamentalist and more literalist than the current creationists; indeed, the head of the International Flat Earth Research Society of America denounced the Creation Research Institute as a "criminal gang" and "the worst enemies of the truth" for ostensibly defending the Bible while it was actually undermining it. The flat-earthers had faith that could not be shaken by anything scientists had to offer. Science eventually had even photographic proof, but the pictures of our orb were denounced as a hoax that "just makes the whole Bible a big joke." The faith of some flat-earthers was strong enough to withstand, for a while, at least, even science's photographic assault. Garwood draws analogies, of course, between them and our creationists whose faith is also currently great enough to withstand scientific objections, and who, like the flat-earthers, insist that accepting science is the same as discounting the Bible. In the current case, though, scientists can't muster, for instance, simple photographs that show evolution in progress. Garwood's book shows just how doggedly faith in an unscientific idea can hold.

The pathways through which the history of scientific progress can be mapped are strewn with the remains of overturned ideas and outdated pronouncements, some cranky and (with hindsight) nonsensical, others perfectly reasonable given the state of knowledge at the time. Newtonian physics, though sensible at the human scale, suddenly fails to convince at a subatomic level, not because of any failings on the part of Newton, but because technological and mathematical advances have allowed modern physicists to probe closer and deeper. Similarly, in biology, many established taxonomic ideas concerning the evolutionary relationships between major groups of flowering plants, mammals and other large clades are, thanks to molecular phylogenetics, shown to be erroneous. And so science advances, from the clearly wrong to the (probably) correct, leaving in its wake the cast off ideas of previous generations.

Except sometimes, when science (or at least fringe perceptions of scientific understanding) takes a backwards stride of such length that one begins to question whether scientific "facts" mean the same thing to everyone. The concept of the Flat Earth may be a unique example of how a fact (the globularity of the Earth) could be established very early in the development of the rational analysis of nature, only to be rejected by a minor, but vociferous, cohort of "true believers". As this fascinating book by Christine Garwood relates, observations by Aristotle confirmed the true shape of the world, and there were no serious challenges to this idea until the 19th Century. Mediaeval scholars accepted a spherical Earth (mappae mundi, I was interested to learn, were symbolic, not cartographic, in intention) and the fears raised by the prospect of Columbus plunging over the edge of the world were a Nineteenth Century fiction concocted by the author Washington Irving.

The emergence of flat Earth views in Victorian England as a serious (at least to their promoters) attack on received scientific wisdom has to be seen as an unusual reverse in thinking, not least because the "Zetetic" Flat Earthers sought to use science against itself to accumulate evidence to support the idea of the Earth as a plane, not a planet. In this vivid and well researched account, Christine Garwood moves easily between historical scholarship and popular science to follow the development of Flat Earth thinking from its rejection by the Ancient Greeks through to its Victorian revival, when learned men as distinguished as Alfred Russell Wallace could be convinced to take part in parochial experiments along England's canal system to try to prove that the Earth was a globe. Darwin, Huxley and others saw little value in rising to the Zetetics' bait, and Wallace himself regretted his involvement in later years (but seems to have needed the cash at the time).

As the author demonstrates, the death of the early major movers in the sphere of Flat Earth promotion was followed by the emergence of other, equally committed and frequently just as eccentric personalities, until eventually popular support for the notion of a Flat Earth ebbed away with the first manned space flights, and the photographs and experiences which were returned to Earth. Flat Earthism did not entirely die, however, and no amount of "proof" could dissuade the opinion of zealots such as Samuel Shenton, founder of the International Flat Earth Research Society. Like fundamentalists of all persuasions, he had an answer for everything, however contrived and paranoid. In Garwood's thought provoking book our understanding of the development of fringe ideas in the history of science is advanced through an analysis of the primary sources relating to an intriguing subject. The book is scholarly but accessible, at once entertaining and authoritative, and also topical in the context of the increasingly widespread anti-evolutionary views promoted by some religious groups. Unsurprisingly Garwood finds parallels between Creationism and Flat Earth thinking, not least because until recently they were promoted by groups with similar world views and memberships.

Flat Earth ideas continued to be advanced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as both an academic jest with serious anti-establishment overtones by the International Flat Earth Society of Canada, and as a continuation of Zetetic thinking by other groups. Currently these ideas are defunct and even the most literal of Biblical literalists reject the notion, making it unlikely to re-emerge. Even if it did, no modern scientist would risk credibility by debating it. Creationism is a different matter entirely and some professional scientists (myself included) have opted to debate with Creationists despite the views of (amongst others) Steve Jones and Richard Dawkins that such exposure only provides oxygen for their cause. Unlike the Flat Earth theorists, however, anti-evolutionists are not simply going to fade away and their influence is now felt in American classrooms and textbooks. How should scientists respond? With reasoned arguments that convince the public and politicians (if not the fundamentalists, who can believe what the hell they like as far as we're concerned) or by ignoring them and hoping they might disappear in their own infighting?

Both Flat Earthism and Creationism reflect wider social and attitudinal differences regarding the role of Homo sapiens in nature, as rapacious exploiter, careful steward or ecosystem component. Science can provide data and theories and models, but it is up to individuals how they choose to interpret and act on such information, or whether they decide to deride or ignore it. Christine Garwood's first book is a marvellous insight into just how deeply self-delusional beliefs can become embedded in the minds of intelligent, but blinkered, individuals, and it is hoped that her subsequent books examine these themes in more detail. Perhaps her successors 200 years in the future will be similarly taken to write about the incredulous movement that denied that Earth's climate was changing and that the human species was fundamentally altering the biosphere through pollution and over-exploitation of resources, despite the weight of data. And let us hope that we still have a society that can appreciate the irony.

The idea of a flat Earth has always been with humanity, and evidence to the contrary has not always been persuasive for those with a desire to believe the Earth is flat. Christine Garwood's fascinating history of belief in the flat Earth lays out ancient ideas from Greek theorists to arrive at a set of assumptions about the nature of the Earth ranging from a flat disc concept advanced by Homer to the sphere envisioned by Pythagoras. This was not formally set until the sixteenth century, but numerous groups have emerged since then to question this conception and flat Earthers exist to the present.

Garwood begins with a bit of debunking of the myth that Western Civilization believed that the Earth was flat in 1491 and it took Columbus with his idea of sailing to India by way of traveling West to break that longstanding tradition. She notes that educated society certainly understood the truth about the nature of the Earth as a sphere and Columbus's bold initiative had less to do with a flat Earth concept than other concerns. Even so, her real contribution is in documenting the persistence of an idea of a flat Earth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The longstanding presence of this idea is perhaps best explained by the perspective of humanity as it was limited to the surface of this planet. As recently as 1945 belief in a flat Earth was listed as the second of twenty critical errors in history. Garwood introduces such fascinating individuals as Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816-1884), who took the pseudonym "Parallax," and began what he called "Zetetic astronomy" to promote a flat Earth theory. This "Zetetic" theory has fueled the modern concept of the flat Earth and it persists with formally organized groups to the present. Sometimes those adopting this belief, such as Wilbur Glenn Voliva and his followers in the utopian community of Zion, Illinois, were motivated by biblical fundamentalism. At other times, such individuals as Robert L. Schadewald led opposition to a spherical Earth for seemingly cantankerous reasons. All of these groups, and many others, are described in this insightful history.

One of the most interesting organizations in this arena was the Flat Earth Society of Canada, organized in 1970 by Professor Leo Ferrari, St. Thomas Aquinas University. Ferrari took a decidedly post-modern approach to this subject and argued for personal decisions about the nature of the Earth. He asked everyone to overturn the authority of experts in favor of their own observations, and asked if individual perceptions were that the Earth was round of flat. It represented a fascinating and cockeyed perspective on modern society, made all the more so by outrageous street theater from Ferrari's group.

This informative and engaging book is certainly the current state of the art when it comes to research into belief in the flat Earth.

Belief that the earth is flat has an amazing history - and this fascinating book appears to cover most of it. In the first chapter, the author guides the reader through more than two millennia of human thought on the shape of the earth (and the structure of the solar system) - from ancient antiquity up to the nineteenth century. She debunks the myth that the earth was generally thought to be flat during the Dark Ages and points out that widespread belief in a globular earth really began during the fifth century B.C. From the second chapter onwards, the author discusses the re-birth of the flat earth concept in the nineteenth century and its evolution and continued existence up to the present time. Along the way, the reader is introduced to a variety of interesting personages - most of them serious, some less so - who have promoted the flat earth idea for reasons varying from religious to philosophical (and not really related to the shape of the earth). The writing style is clear, elegant, accessible, authoritative and quite captivating. This book can be enjoyed by anyone, but science buffs who read it may often shake their heads in awe at the reasoning used by various otherwise-seemingly-intelligent flat-earthers over the past century and a half.

No doubt the book's publisher overstates the case when lauding this book as the "first" comprehensive discussion. That honor MAY go to an earlier book: Jeffrey Burton Russell's INVENTING THE FLAT EARTH: COLUMBUS AND MODERN HISTORIANS (Praeger, 1991, 117 pages). Russell's book is well documented, annotated and professional.