Over the Edge

 

The flat-Earther finally convinced me. By sharing pictures of six frying pans posing as planets, he had proved to me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was spending too much time on the Internet.

“I have no budget, yet I convinced you these were newly discovered planets.” He explained to the set of skeptics being interviewed on his podcast. “What makes you think NASA, with its billions, hasn’t been tricking us for decades?”

I’m paraphrasing now, but that was the gist of his message. I sighed and scrolled a few more moments, then I put down my phone and walked away. I glanced at the clock. Another five minutes of my life…gone.

Or, maybe it was the young lady who asked the question, in all seriousness, “Can we journey through the ocean to Mars?” Or perhaps it was one of the dozens of folks who suggested we are living in a computer simulation, or that reptilian space aliens have been shape-shifting the gears of global power for decades.

Regardless, they’d found me. After more than a dozen years of posting and scrolling on Facebook, the algorithm had finally led me to the absolute edge of reason. There I was, standing in my kitchen on a Saturday afternoon, listening to a grown man try to convince me – without a hint of irony -  Earth is flat.

Before continuing, I want to emphasize this is not a column designed to refute the flat earth theory, because if you are taking the time to read an actual newspaper column, more than likely you already know Earth is, well, you know, NOT flat, which is an empirical reality thoughtful humans have understood for thousands of years. I merely use such an example to illustrate the potentially dangerous place we have arrived in world history, and that’s because the end of what we might call “flat-earth reasoning” leads us to a set of very dangerous edges.

Primarily, flat-Earth reasoning suggests “the only evidence I can trust is my own evidence; that which I think I’ve seen with my own eyes and that which validates my own preconceptions,” and secondly, “no one who disagrees with me can be trusted;  all the ‘experts’ and leaders and scientists throughout the history of humanity have been in nefarious cahoots, and now it is time to rise up and wallow in our new age of Internet-fueled enlightenment.”

Speaking of human history, last summer I took my son to watch what we have been told is the final Indiana Jones adventure. We liked it in general and I am very appreciative of Mr. Ford for giving me this chance to share the theater experience with him. (My son, not the actor.) However, one particular line seemed out of place. During a conversation where he’s alluding to the many supernatural surprises that show up toward the end of his movies, Dr. Jones comments, “It’s not so much what you believe, it's how hard you believe it.”

This sounds like a strange thing to say in general, but it sounds particularly suspect (and a bit out of character) coming from a scientist who has spent most of his life searching for knowledge while often punching history’s most infamous “hard believing” zealots-- the Nazis--in the face.

 Perhaps the dialogue worked from a narrative standpoint, but even that is debatable.

Regardless, his comment does seem suited to our contemporary zeitgeist, unfortunately, because our world really is full of folks who believe things very hard that often have very little basis in objective reality.  Granted,  an allegiance to Nazism or any other racist ideology is hardly on par with the silly belief our globe is flat. Those are two very different trains of thought going to two very different places. However, I would suggest that both trains leave from the same station.

It’s the same station where folks buy tickets to watch aliens build the pyramids, where school shootings are a hoax, and where now even a performer whose entire career has been punctuated with very public romances is doing something nefarious by watching her boyfriend play football. It’s an increasingly crowded place, but there always seems to be room for just one more remarkable idea, and despite the very curved shape of the planet, all of these trains of thought eventually fall right off the edge.