There are thousands of ‘flat earthers’ all around us, in fact I sometimes think I’m surrounded by them.
They live in almost every town in the UK and are daily being reinforced in their flat earth assessment of the world by our cultural and educational establishments.
Let me explain what I mean.
There is a way of seeing the world that, despite being seriously deficient, is nevertheless believed and promoted by thinking people everywhere. It’s a way of seeing the world that reduces truth to scientific labels and assesses everything in terms of utility and function. It’s a way of seeing the world that empties it of ultimate meaning and flattens an otherwise interesting landscape.
I find it in churches and offices alike, schools and football stadiums, hospitals and hotels. I believe that it’s partly borne of the instinct that seeks security. In a world where much is beyond our control, security can be achieved by reducing the amount of mystery and chaos. This is perhaps the reason why we google unknown curiosities that come up in conversation, and it’s why we insist on explaining where every ache and pain comes from in our body. To not know something scares us since it reminds us of our powerlessness. We are therefore all cartographers who make maps in our minds that drive back the fog of not knowing.
The trouble is that in a society like ours, generally the explanations we accept are ‘flat’ ones.
Ever since the 18th Century we’ve been constructing a carefully curated view of the world that has divided it into what we call ‘facts’ and ‘values’. By this rubric a fact is true whereas a value may not be. Facts are ‘true for all’ but values may only be ‘true for me’.
A fact is anything observable, repeatable and explainable. Facts can’t be argued with, and are what we run into when we realise we’re ‘wrong’. Values, by contrast, are socially upheld ideas or privately held beliefs. It may be a fact that the earth revolves around the sun, but it’s a value that names God as the one who makes it so.
Fact tells me that if the soft tissue around my eye socket comes into contact with a hard object its blood vessels will burst and their clotting will give the appearance of discolouration. Value names it a ‘black eye’.
Fact says that the ups and downs of the cliffs by my house were caused by coastal erosion over millions of years, Value names it ‘beautiful’.
Fact calls ‘microbe exchange’ what Value calls ‘kissing’.
Fact presents the world as flat, Value offers it meaning and depth.
In our fact based flat world belief in God, and religion in general, are assessed solely by their usefulness. “How does it enable me to achieve my goal?” I ask.
Here, mental health is talked about only in terms of regulating our neuro chemistry and spiritual practices are co-opted or cannibalised for their utility. Things like sabbath or meditation, yoga or prayer are cut off from the life force and meta-narrative that created them and are harvested simply for their therapeutic benefits.
In all this we squash reality into two dimension and we become flat earthers. Our bodies don’t mean anything and have no higher significance. We are simply machines and nature is just a tool.
Flat earthers.
People are genuinely mystified by the rise of so called ‘flat earthers’ on the internet; these people who who reject the fact of a spherical earth. They are a tragic by-product of our post-truth age. The real concern however ought to be levied against the secular materialist and utilitarianist whose prioritisation of fact over value, and who’s insistence on technical explanations of things is so clearly deficient for life in the face of reality as it presents itself to us.
Victoria Falls is more fully known by its local name Mosi-oa-Tunya (the thundering smoke), since the label gives a truer name to the experience of the waterfall.
When Solomon calls his bride a garden in Song of Songs he says something far richer than when we know her only as an adult female. The cruel treatment of the women in the novel The Handmaid’s Tale is expressed by Offred’s tragic statement: ‘We are containers, it’s only the insides of our bodies that are important.’
Naming a pregnant woman a ‘container’ may be factually true but it is less true than calling her a garden, since ‘garden’ involves a deeper blend of fact and value than the alternative label.
Literalist and materialist readings of the world are less true and less real and are therefore, less helpful than an offering that treats us as actors and symbols in a world full with meaning and purpose.
A society that rejects its calling to be Gardners with regards to its treatment of creation, opting only to be cannibals makes trouble for itself. A school that teaches only the rules of grammar but not the expression of sentiment, or who trains its students to accurately label duty but not become dutiful is on a pathway to trouble.
An employee who is only a worker and not a creator or a curator or a co-labourer with Christ, is of less value to his company and less happy in himself.
A husband who ignores his meaning to be Christ to his wife becomes a danger to her and flatter version of himself, and a wife who rejects her calling to be Church takes on a burden far less fulfilling and life-giving for herself.
It’s not the flat earthers on the internet we ought to be alarmed by, it’s the ones on our street and in our churches that ought to bother us the most.
Beware the instinct to flatten the world. Embrace symbol, story, metaphor and meaning.