Søren Kirkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript has a funny little story: a lunatic escapes from an asylum. He goes into the city and knows they’ll toss him right back in there when they catch him, so he settles on a way to definitively prove his sanity. The madman finds a little round ball and puts it in his coattail, and every time it hits his ass he remembers to say something absolutely, incontrovertibly, true, so people will know for certain he’s not crazy. He meets friend. Ball hits butt. The Earth is round! What are you talking about? Ball again. The Earth is round! Why do you keep saying that? Ball—butt. The Earth is round! And so they shunted the poor man back off into the madhouse, and only because he clearly stated the truth, because he proclaimed the objective facts which govern our world, just a bit too strongly. 

 

 

Kirkegaard was using the story to illustrate a point about the inward nature of sanity, but the example is telling. The round Earth is a well-acknowledged stand-in for ‘a truthful thing’ in the modern world, yes, but not believing in it is also funny in a way not many other false beliefs are. Being wrong about a maths problem or a street name or a take about the current state of the indie music scene is not really that hilarious, but as Kirkegaard showed, Flat Earthers have been the ball-hits-butt of the joke for a long time. Why?

 

 

Inside of you are two wolves: thinking and laughing. We know this because we laugh about it a lot. We’d like to feel we’re all thought, that we’re perfect disembodied rationality, and piercing powers of the mind, and utilitarian bonus points—clever little souls who could just burst out of this flesh-lump we call a body and be none the worse for it. But we’re not, and that’s funny. Henri Bergson wrote in Laughter that one laughing matter is when the constant movement that defines modern life is broken up by sudden inelasticity: an important guy with an important job is always going somewhere, going from home to the train to the office to lunch to the tube—until he slips on a banana peel in front of everyone and lies with his ass flat on the ground, watery eyes towards the sky. Feeling important now, big guy? Ha Ha Ha. The ‘two wolves’ thing is funny for the same reason. We know deep down we’re not made of fluid thoughts. There’s something else there. 

 

 

If the banana peel story was what we might today call ‘dark humour’ or ‘ironic detachment’, Bergson would also write about the one we associate with Flat Earthers: humour as a social enforcement mechanism. We laugh at people who are ‘weird’ or think differently not because the weirdness itself is that funny, but for a covertly moralistic reason, because we want to root out a certain behaviour. Bergson saw what every socially awkward person already knows about banter—it’s scary. ‘By the fear which [laughter] inspires, it restrains eccentricity… Laughter, then, does not belong to the province of esthetics alone, since unconsciously (and even immorally in many particular instances) it pursues a utilitarian aim of general improvement.’ What holds back our theoretically unrestrained thinking side? Laughter, the other wolf. 

 

 

Enough philosophy. To state the obvious: I am not a Flat Earther. I am really, really not a Flat Earther. But still, it’s pretty much impossible to see the curvature of the Earth with the naked eye. It’s a common schoolchild thing to get up on a high point and say that you can, but it’s usually the eyes playing tricks. I’m sure I could prove a round Earth with the established methods if I wanted to, but I’ve never seen evidence for it with my own eyes. I go to a field—looks pretty flat to me. Why do I so obstinately stick to Round Earth Theory, then? Because I’m a liberal arts student and don’t feel like spending my time on stuff like this. I think the scientific community is fine and not hiding a worldwide conspiracy from me. I trust them. But what if you have a reason not to? 

 

 

The Industrial Revolution was the tyranny of the engineers. Like so many modern regimes, it started in the cities but didn’t stop there. It was captured in novel form in Dickens’ London, but another of the most iconic novels of the Industrial Revolution was set in the countryside: Émile Zola’s Germinal. The novel takes place in the flat, previously rural plains of Northern France, now carved up by the intrusion of industrial-scale coal mining. The miners live in ‘Village 240’. Their rows of poverty-stricken houses are arranged in perfect lines across the plain. Zola is a bit too fond of insect/animal metaphors for the countless miners filing into their industrial duties. When the protagonist, Étienne Lantier, examines the landscape, he sees the plains gashed across their face with a canalised river flowing in a perfectly straight line. 

 

 

It was in such conditions—not weird internet forums or YouTube channels—that the beliefs of modern Flat Earthers flourished. The ‘freedom’ brought by scientific progress seemed to be an empty one, directed only at wringing increasing efficiency out of the wage slaves. In Germinal, it was the engineers, not the bourgeoisie, who went down directly to the mines and shouted at the exhausted workers and cut their pay. The engineers also insisted the world was a sphere (not in Germinal, but the novel would have been better with more Flat Earth theorists and less bug metaphors). If the Earth is a sphere, why are my eyes lying? Just trust the engineers. They have your best interests at heart, don’t they? With the workers going to the mines at around age eight to better serve those engineers’ plans, they weren’t exactly taught any better in school. And so modern Flat Earth theory first developed in Victorian socialism. If you’re wondering why Marx spends a big chunk of the Communist Manifesto trashing other contemporary socialists, it’s because of stuff like this.

 

 

But in an important way, Victorian Flat Earth theory was a revival of the tradition of the eccentric, uneducated philosopher, sitting alone and questioning all conventional wisdom. Flat Earth theorists likely do have much more astronomy knowledge than the average person just from aggressively absorbing raw facts—it’s their epistemology and lack of trust in the scientific community which makes them wrong. 

 

 

Of course, it’s true that Victorian Flat Earthers were hopelessly antiquated. The most educated people have known the Earth was round since the ancient Greeks, but that was only proven for certain relatively late into the Hellenistic world. Before it was a mathematically sound theory, Plato already believed in it. He wrote in Phaedo, without providing any evidence, that ‘my conviction is that the Earth is a round body in the centre of the heavens’. Not very reasonable at all. A silly crank, standing in street corners, meant to be laughed at: The Earth is round! The Earth is round! The Earth is round!∎

 

Words by Myles Lowenberg. Image by Jules Ferat via Picryl.