Shaq, Kyrie Irving, the Flat Earthers, and Donald Trump
And so it continues. Former NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal, speaking on “The Big Podcast with Shaq”, made waves among the Flat Earth crowd recently by claiming he had jumped on the bandwagon.
He walked back the remarks several days later, saying “I’m joking, you idiots”, but the story got a good amount of attention before he announced that he’d just been trolling us all.
“The Earth is flat”, he said in his original comments, “I drive from coast to coast, and this shit is flat to me.” You gotta love the guy.
For those who don’t follow the NBA, or for any fans who have been living in a (presumably not very deep) hole in the ground, Shaq was riffing off of statements that were made earlier in the year by Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Kyrie Irving.
Irving, in between handling the ball like he has four arms and crushing the hearts of Golden State Warriors fans with impossible fade-away jumpers, sent sports commentators into a tizzy when he revealed his own point of view on the subject while speaking on the “Road Trippin” podcast with a couple of teammates:
“The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat”, Irving insisted. He then launched into a diatribe about his views on the misinformation disseminated by an undefined “they”.
“They’re particularly putting you in a direction of what to believe and what not to believe”, he remarked, in addition to starker quip of “They lie to us.”
What’s relevant about this bit of contrarianism is not what a millionaire athlete or two believes, but what it represents. In a subsequent interview, when asked how he could count himself among the flat Earth truthers in the face of photographic evidence to the contrary, Irving said the following:
“I’ve seen a lot of things that have…that my education system has said that was real, and turned out to be completely fake.”
Shaq (joking or not) expressed a similar sentiment:
“Oh satellite imagery - that could be, that could be drawn and made up.”
So there you have it. Regardless of whether Irving has done much of his own analysis as to the planet’s shape, one thing is clear – he has no faith at all in what he’s been taught or told.
As adorably tragic as this sort of mindset is, it also seems to echo a wider trend that has been seen across the country. On the political scene, there may not have been a single aspect of the 2016 election that more frustrated Clinton supporters than when Candidate Trump made wildly counter-factual claims with no repercussions. Despite any number of efforts on the part of the mainstream media, they seemed wholly unable to interest the Trump base in even acknowledging this as a problem.
The result, apart from the election of our 45th President, has been the introduction of phrases such as “post truth”, “post fact”, and “fake news” into our daily conversations. Put another way, “this shit is flat to me”.
But people didn’t suddenly decide that there were no facts; they simply didn’t see truth in what was presented by the traditional media. Just as Irving has decided that the education he received growing up bears so little relationship to his reality that he dismisses it altogether, many Americans feel that the daily fodder coming out of CNN and MSNBC have nothing to do with the world they live in.
It’s hard to blame them for this. Try watching a major news network while living in an eviscerated Appalachian mining town and decide if the coverage seems in touch with the problems in that community.
There’s no clear endgame here. If things continue as they are, our collective ability to use evidence to differentiate fact from fiction is only going to get worse. Shaq is right – these days anyone could just Photoshop together a satellite image of the Earth. It’s getting easier to do this by the day. It isn’t hard to imagine what confusion will be wrought when fabricating a true-to-life video of anyone on the planet becomes as easy as removing red-eye from a picture is today.
In a world where we are continually bombarded with information of unclear origin, a way forward may be to focus more on how we think than what we believe.
A good case in point, incidentally, can be taken from the flat Earth idea. Thankfully for Kyrie, we don’t need pictures (real or fake) to show that the Earth is a sphere. As far back as 240 BC, a DIY demonstration was made that he could go out and do on his own.
At noon on the summer solstice, a Greek polymath by the name of Eratosthenes measured the shadow cast by the sun in two cities - one about 800 km to the north of the other. If the Earth were flat, there ought to have been no difference between the two shadows.
But, of course, there was a difference. As this is impossible on a flat surface, unless the sun is right on top of you, there’s only one answer. The Earth is curved. In fact, the difference in the shadows was so pronounced that he was able to go a step further. With a little quick geometry, he figured out the Earth’s circumference. The first person known to have done so.
This is the difference between an education system that force feeds facts and one that teaches people how to work things out for themselves. When information is presented as if it were Scripture, it only takes a few cracks in the edifice to make people lose faith in the whole thing (is eating fat still bad for you? or is that carbs? or sugar? I forget).
Most of modern science, like a lot of national policy, has become too loaded in scope and detail for laypersons to work out individually. But that doesn’t mean we lose sight of the basics. Someone who’s been taught to show for themselves that the world is a sphere is a lot less likely to dismiss the pictures sent back from NASA. A person whose daily newspaper reports on the local county elections might be more inclined to believe what it says about events on a national level. When we see a process grounded in our own reality, the specifics don’t seem quite so conjured out of thin air.
Any institution that wants to be taken seriously, be it the scientific community or The New York Times, should take note here. If they don’t, they may need to get used to having their hard work and rigorous fact-checking shrugged off with the same four words: The Earth is flat.
