THE EARTH IS FLAT

(This is an old entry, which I wrote in one of those light-headed moods that are perfectly all right for as long as they can be later modified into something slightly more respectable and reasonable. But in this case, the whole idea of the flat earth is so bizarre, yet intrinsically practicable, that light-headedness can easily pass off as a product of the tongue-in-cheek genre, and as long as a few excesses are brought under control, the end result, though still wacky, may be the best to harmonize with the wackiness of the real thing. Anyway, this is a nice follow-up to the entry discussing William James’s undue respect for pragmatism unchained.)

Continuing our discussion of various hypotheses, here is another one, whether you like it or not. It is wholly false, through and through, yet it prospers, and I see nothing wrong with that. What can we say today about the shape of the earth: Isn’t it flat, after all?

Do not dismiss all this out-of-hand as sheer silliness, because my question has an overwhelming redeeming value. The seemingly absurd flat-earth hypothesis is taken for granted in modern schools, and its practical applications are the staples of every school curriculum. And I am not kidding…

Euclid’s geometry is based on the assumption that the earth is flat (a patently false foundation, of course, as science has long proved beyond any doubt, and everybody, even the uneducated, knows it well, yet this fact does not really delegitimize Euclid’s theory, but on the contrary has conspicuously preserved it in all school science curricula, at the expense of far more accurate science theories. We may not have given it that much thought, and maybe even no thought at all, but such well-familiar branches of standard school geometry as planimetry and stereometry operate with demonstrably fictitious, imaginary surfaces, which are products of mathematical fancy, and do not even exist anywhere in reality. But these imaginary constructs being fiction aren’t subjected to the fact-finding court of judgment, and therefore must be true, following George Bernard Shaw’s immortal witticism, so what can we say to that? By the same token, in describing any social contract (all of them having morally suspicious origins), the only social organization that meets the moral standards of Christianity, for instance, is communism. To summarize the above-said, in matters of practicality, such as mathematics and social engineering, the concepts such as ‘true’ and ‘false’ have no meaning. The criteria of legitimacy are initially posited in cultural and national consciousnesses, and their progress and outcome are by no means dependent on their intrinsic value or worth, but only on their sheer practicality in application: this one works, that one does not work, and so on.

How does all of this apply to Henry James’s “God hypothesis” as his response to philosophical skepticism? As I said before, in the previous entry, I agree with his use of the God hypothesis quite enthusiastically, but in a very limited area, and only in part. The use of any hypothesis is not predicated on its ethical value, but on its ability to deliver a certain product which we may then employ in some practical applications. Thence, the flat-earth hypothesis, which is the subject of this entry, does not give credence to the statement that the earth is flat. In fact, no such hypothesis has any authority whatsoever to render credibility to anything that it postulates.

By the same token, the God hypothesis, being a hypothesis, and at the time of its inception not pretending to be a fact (which it automatically becomes only after its acceptance, and then not universally but only within the restraints of its application), must not be generalized, or its moral neutrality infected by infusing morality from the outside, and must neither confirm nor deny the independent subject it postulates. Let that subject speak for itself and be accepted or rejected on its own merit or demerit.