13
Jun
2013
All Tom Woods, All the Time
==> Here Tom explodes the notion that the medieval folk believed in a flat Earth.
==> Here Tom continues his modern-day crusade against Michael Lind. Tom does an impression of Lind and writes:
The U.S. is not a practical arrangement to be evaluated according to objective criteria. It is a mystical, self-justifying entity. It is metaphysically impossible that it should ever grow so large as to be dysfunctional. Other countries may split into smaller units by mutual consent, but being the awesomest of the awesome, our political unit is not subject to such considerations. We are to treat it with reverence and devotion.
One of the confusions about the spherical Earth is that the “antipodes” meant a couple different things – including the population of humans living on the other side of the Earth. There was a lot of debate over whether humans could be living on the other side of the Earth.
The question of what “medieval folk” believed seems tough too… certainly the church and cartographers were for the most part in agreement on a spherical Earth (wasn’t there real disagreement very early on though – I thought Augustine believed in a flat Earth and he seems like an awfully substantial figure). Anyway even if the Church reached a consensus pretty quickly it wouldn’t surprise me if the average person thought the world was flat. Do we know this one way or the other?
Sea people must have knew. Sea is visibly round on the horizon and ships “go down” when they leave the port, conversely “go up” when they come back to it. And if those falks knew why wouldn’t anyone?
Yes, we know: uneducated people didn’t have access to these arguments. Their intuition said the earth was flat.
They made up 99+% of the population.
“People in the middle ages though the earth was flat” is broadly accurate.
Universal literacy and education is a modern phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_radius
On the whole the Catholic Church had a pretty good opinion of the Classic Greek philosophers.
If you follow the link through to Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī, he also worked on measuring the radius of the Earth around 1000 AD. Biruni was Muslim, not Christian, but Europe did borrow heavily from the East when it came to mathematics, chemistry, etc. Very hard to believe the Christians had no idea of what sort of science was coming out of Persia.
Excellent! It is well worth noting cases where the church did not teach twaddle.
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