The Flat Earth Society was founded in 1492 B.C.E., when Moses led the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt and received the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. That, at any rate, was the view of Charles K. Johnson, the president of the International Flat Earth Research Society until his death in 2001. His history was no better than his geography. But there are only a handful of reliable books on the history of flat-earth belief, to which Edward Guimont’s The Power of the Flat Earth Idea is a welcome addition.
Although the book is published (and priced) as a scholarly monograph, Guimont’s writing is energetic and entertaining, punctuated by digressions to correct egregious historical errors, discuss related pseudoscientific views (including geocentrism and creationism, predictably, but also cryptozoology, airship panics, and Velikovskianism), and explore literary appearances of the flat earth. His long and unbroken chapters would, however, have benefited from a modicum of internal organization.
A distinctive feature is Guimont’s concentration on flat-earthers on the African continent and in the African diaspora. Even in the first chapter, which provides a capsule history of astronomy from its beginnings in antiquity to the Scientific Revolution, usefully (though not originally) emphasizing the rarity of recorded flat-earthers in Europe from late antiquity to the Victorian era, he makes a point of including developments in Africa as well as in Europe.
The following chapter, misleadingly entitled “African Science in the Diaspora,” actually discusses the status of science and pseudoscience – the boundary was not always clear – in the American South until after the Civil War (1861–1865). William Carpenter, a white British immigrant to Baltimore, Maryland, and the white members of a short-lived flat-earth society in New York are the flat-earthers considered; Guimont attempts, not very convincingly, to connect them with his African theme.
But the African connection is undeniable for the bulk of Guimont’s flat-earthers, including John Jasper, a black preacher in Virginia who was famous for a sermon affirming the flat earth; John Edward Quinlan and Emanuel Vaun Mulgrave, two West Indians involved with a major British flat-earth society; Paul Kruger, the white South African political and religious leader; and contemporary Islamic flat-earthers such as those in Boko Haram, the jihadist group based in northeastern Nigeria.
Every flat-earther in Guimont’s motley crew receives a well-researched and thoughtful discussion, with ample historical context. That, combined with the fact that most of his subjects have been understudied in the literature, makes The Power of the Flat Earth Idea a substantial and original contribution. But Guimont also seeks to show, and explain, what he describes as “the power that came from Flat Earth belief” (p. xix). Here, unfortunately, he is not particularly successful.
Guimont provocatively contends that, at least for his subjects, flat-earth belief was associated with resistance to colonialism, imperialism, and racism (though obviously not for the white supremacist Kruger). Toward the end of the book, he adds that flat-earth belief is also construed as liberatory and egalitarian: if flat-earthers “are a minority on a spherical Earth, perhaps a Flat Earth would be more equal” (p. 290). Sometimes the considerations he advances are plausible; sometimes they are not.
But is flat-earth belief in fact powerful? Clearly there are advantages to holding the belief (it signals a strong commitment) as well as disadvantages (it is proverbially absurd). But a rigorous assessment of its power is unlikely to be feasible. The problem is that flat-earthers, at least before the internet, were typically also fundamentalists about the Bible (or the Qur’an), so the net effect specifically of their flat-earth belief on their power to catalyse political and social change is likely to be small.
For example, if Jasper and Kruger had not taken their fundamentalism so far as to endorse a flat earth, it is plausible that they still would have been able to recruit the same audiences to the same causes – saving souls for Jesus; establishing a Boer ethnostate – while also avoiding ridicule from round-earth outsiders. In contrast, if they had adopted a modernist rather than a fundamentalist understanding of the Bible, their careers clearly would have been quite different.
True, the situation is different with those for whom flat-earth belief was a consuming interest, starting with Samuel Birley Rowbotham (“Parallax”), who launched the modern flat-earth movement in Victorian Britain. But these are people who generally lacked political and social power. The most powerful of them was probably Wilbur Glenn Voliva, the theocratic ruler of the town of Zion, Illinois, for much of the first half of the 20th century – and Zion was home to no more than 7,000 people.
Guimont never attempts a rigorous approach to assessing the power of the flat-earth idea, and indeed he tends not to provide detailed arguments for the interpretations and explanations he offers in his book. That is not to say that these are implausible; they are often not only plausible but also insightful. And it’s fair to observe that relevant evidence is often not available: after all, Guimont can’t be faulted for not conducting interviews with the members of Boko Haram!
The lack of detail begins early. In his introduction, Guimont claims that flat-earth belief escaped from the internet to the real world in 2016 “through a particular vector: African-American musicians” (p. xiii). Oddly, only two of the ten people he names are primarily musicians; the remainder are better known as professional athletes. He adds that it was “not a coincidence” that flat-earth belief revived in “the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse” (p. xviii). No evidence is offered for these claims.
So readers seeking to understand the power of the flat-earth idea will be better served by the work of social scientists than by Guimont’s history, although, as with the history of flat-earth belief in general, there is not abundant reliable scholarly work to consult. But readers interested in learning about the history of flat-earth belief, especially the neglected figures whom Guimont considers, will find The Power of the Flat Earth Idea to be fascinating, stimulating, and worthwhile.
