The Earth Is Flat

Previewing The King and the Swarm, week 6

Over the coming weeks, as I bring book-writing to its close, I’ll be previewing my forthcoming book The King and the Swarm here, in chapter-by-chapter summary form.

Then, a couple of times a month, I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the previews or any other themes you want to bring. The next AMA salon will take place on Thursday 13 August at 19.00 BST (14:00 EST, 11:00 PST) in the subscriber chat for this newsletter. (I’ll try and keep the thread questions from proliferating this time.)

Brazilian flat-earther Anderson Neves, with his model of the world. Image credit

So far I’ve made my case that the Singularity already happened, not once but three times. We looked at the deep differences between oral and literate cultures: the way learning to read rewrites our brains, and how this changed human societies at scale. We’ve explored the European manuscript culture that developed the wake of literacy: one deeply bound up with Christian faith, where books were hand-written and scarce, and where literacy meant not just reading, but also the cultivation of memory and reading aloud. Then we looked at the revolutionary effects of improving the scale and fixity of book production with print, even though people didn’t start out using it for anything very revolutionary (that came later).

Last week, I sketched the role print played in delivering “secularism”: that is, the belief that sets of propositions about moral and supernatural matters exist, called “religion”, which are entirely optional and which we can stand outside and comprehend objectively. This assumption is so foundational to being “modern” most simply take it for granted, but it could never have come about without the printing press. And since print has been overtaken, first by broadcast media and now by the digital kind, secularism has begun coming undone. That’s the subject of this week’s preview…