My friend asked for my thoughts on this article a sociology post-doc (as far as I can tell) wrote on flat-Earthers. This is basically me complaining about the article itself, and offers no real insight on the subject. Posting it anyway, assuming a couple other friends will also read it.
It boggles my mind that this dude was given a PhD in sociology and yet this article is so underwhelming. Check out his Tide Pod article. Both of these articles reference Michel Foucault. He’s just regurgitating boilerplate postmodern canard. It’s like he’s writing a fucking undergrad English paper to a stereotypical ivory-tower Marxist professor that all the right-wingers bitch about but I never actually saw in my college career. And yet, here he is, in all his splendor.
He picked his narrative angle before he began (resistance to power structures), and he missed the really fucking interesting sociology:
“Yes, flat earthers do seem to place a lot of emphasis and priority on scientific methods and, in particular, on observable facts…. Multiple competing models were suggested throughout the weekend…”
He even links to a video about a flat-earth model that took a reasonable amount of time to put together.
So, we have a group of people who have at least some deference to the scientific method spending a ton of time arguing for something that is unequivocally provable to anyone but hardline solipsists. There’s a glaring contradiction in these people’s epistemological outlook. It’s sociologically interesting.
“The level of discussion however often did not revolve around the models on offer, but on broader issues of attitudes towards existing structures of knowledge, and the institutions that supported and presented these models.”
And literally the next thing he does is link to a youtube video that shows a model of a flat earth cosmology that purports to be consistent with observations, i.e. a valid alternative hypothesis. The video is bizarre and the model is utterly unsubstantiated, but it appears to be logically consistent. More importantly, it says nothing about “the institutions that supported and presented these models”. It may be that these kinds of comments showed up at the meetings (and I assume they do), but this isn’t supporting evidence of it.
So then he name-drops Foucault, describing him as “a famous and heavily influential 20th century philosopher who made a career of studying those on the fringes of society to understand what they could tell us about everyday life”.
To the extent that Foucault is famous, it’s basically as a postmodernist philosopher. He had a few specialty areas, sure, but to say he earned his fame by studying “those on the fringes” is a borderline panegyric that smacks of drinking the proverbial pomo university koolaid, and Christ, it just sounds like such a cliche to say that, but…
But anyway, the book he references is Discipline and punish (sic), which, to the extent I can glean, is about the history and evolution of the prison system, and a tractate on how systems punish people. As far as I can tell, this book wouldn’t offer insight as to why flat-earthers believe or act the way they do. And the author doesn’t bother to explain his point, so I’ll take a stab at it: he’s insinuating that flat-earthers have some issue with power structures vis a vis their control of knowledge. Foucault sure as hell wasn’t the first guy to make an argument germane to this line of reasoning, but honestly, his book The Order of Things is probably a better place to look for insight. In that book, he coins the term episteme, which he seems to use to mean something like an established orthodoxy for an epistemological viewpoint. And certainly that’s a fruitful area of discussion for modern science communication. A lot of science communicators tend to hold fairly facile epistemological views (Karl Popper tends to get credit for establishing them as dogma) referred to colloquially as “scientism”. Is Neil Degrasse Tyson’s incessant pedantry turning people off science? Al Gore’s glorified Powerpoint that won a Nobel? Or did people have their minds made up already?
The author continues, “In the 21st century, we are witnessing another important shift in both power and knowledge due to factors that include the increased public platforms afforded by social media. Knowledge is no longer centrally controlled”
For somebody with a hard-on for Foucault and analyzing power-structures, it blows me away that he would posit this so casually, and it seems to undermine his own interpretation of Foucault he made earlier, i.e. that power structures merely shift how knowledge, etc. is controlled to adjust to changes in technology, etc. How can flat-earthers rebel against “science” if there is no authority of knowledge to rebel against?
“as has been pointed out in the wake of Brexit – the age of the expert may be passing.”
Can you hear that sound? That’s my eyes rolling so far back into my skull they’re snapping the optic nerves. The idea that something as historically trivial as Brexit is a watershed moment is again, something I would expect from an undergrad poli-sci kid, not someone with a goddamn PhD. The idea that it was a novel, unprecedented event brought about by some new epistemological anti-authority zeitgeist is just facile and myopic. Christ, Socrates told Phaedrus reading would make everybody retarded because they wouldn’t bother memorizing things anymore. Plato thought democracy would fail because people were idiots. De Tocqueville and De Maistre reiterated that eloquently for the modern era.
“It is also clear that we’re seeing increased polarisation in society…”
How do people not get this out of their system by the time they’re out of undergrad? It’s facile bullshit, and he cites a goddamn Pew survey. Seriously, Brexit is what he comes up with for polarization in the UK?! Not, idk, like a hundred other way more extreme political realities in English history? American Revolution, maybe?
“This was something of a reoccurring theme throughout the weekend, and was especially apparent when four flat earthers debated three physics PhD students. A particular point of contention occurred when one of the physicists pleaded with the audience to avoid trusting YouTube and bloggers.”
See, that’s interesting. Smart scientists with shit epistemology skills. That’s a good, perennial point of discussion. Experts in knowledge acquisition don’t necessarily make good philosophers of a topic, let alone communicators. There are undergrad philosophy students who probably would have avoided that argumentative faux pas.
“At the same time as scientific claims to knowledge and power are being undermined, some power structures are decoupling themselves from scientific knowledge, moving towards a kind of populist politics that are increasingly sceptical of knowledge. This has, in recent years, manifested itself in extreme ways “
Sigh, this is just bad writing. He already established that control over knowledge had been decentralized, but is now implying that this is a new thing. And it’s demonstrative of his preconceived narrative, which is basically just spoonfed, milquetoast center-left editorial mainstream opinion. Durr, the mouth breathers in the flyover states all hate smart people. Yeah, sure, some people do, but it’s still a facile argument. He wants to write pap for the fucking Guardian, not study sociology.
“In many ways, a public meeting of flat earthers is a product and sign of our time”
This is hack work. Fuck, Cracked has better sociological insight than this (e.g. their story about how Arthur Conan Doyle thought fairies were real). Flat-earthers exhibit all the hallmarks of pseudoscience enthusiasts, which have a history that I can list off back into the 1800s which I’m sure existed earlier. The UFO craze and Roswell, ghost hunters, cryptozoology, seances, ESP (hell, the CIA blew money on ESP research). All of these have, I’m sure, a good deal of sociological research put into them, and this guy can’t be pissed to talk about none of it. He just wants to muse about politics badly. And this is supposed to be fucking postdoc research. He’s an education “lecturer” at universities, and our fucking textbooks don’t even tell us how we figured out the world was round. Ugh. C’est la vie.