One should never get into an argument with a nutter, an idiot, a monomaniac or a person whose reason is slave to a grand idea. You will not win the argument because you cannot, and more than likely you will make yourself, not the other person, foolish trying to do so.
As a journalist, and sometime participant in public arguments, I sometimes find it difficult to remain polite to people simply not susceptible to reason, if only because one of the grand ideas behind journalism perhaps behind democracy is the theory that debate helps unveil the truth, and that it is the truth which sets one free.
But sometimes it is nice to see upwards from out of the pit. I've been reading this week Flat earth - the history of an infamous idea, by Christine Garwood (Pan, 436pp, $24.95) with particular amusement coming from having been, during the late 1960s, president of the Australian Flat Earth Society, and discovering how generally similar our rhetorical tricks were to those used elsewhere by flat-earthers over the past two centuries.
The Australian society was composed of schoolboy debaters. We promoted our theories at the Sydney Domain on Sunday afternoons, usually before about 300 or 400 people at a time. We were rarely bested by any of the thousands of people who, in those days, would flock to the Domain for an afternoon's entertainment, listening to political and religious speakers, cranks and nutters.
We had well-rehearsed lines for coping with all of the most obvious pieces of ''evidence'' proving that the world was a sphere - the disappearing horizon, solar eclipses and so on - and deliberately convoluted explanations for more complicated proofs (the precession of the equinoxes etc) that would more quickly bore the crowds with our interlocutors than with ourselves.
Man had already landed on the moon, but, we insisted, with a certain amount of innuendo about wicked Yankee imperialism, the whole astronaut thing was a fake with sinister undertones, and the moon photos, particularly of the earth, were Hollywood fakes. Indeed we would ourselves produce the photographs, drawing attention to shadows going in opposite directions.
Our earth was like a plate with the north pole (to which the compass pointed) in the centre and the continents spread out. A person circumnavigating the earth in an easterly direction was describing a circle on the plate. The edge of the earth consisted of icy mountains. The sun was moving in a generally circular way a few thousand kilometres overhead, focusing a beam on about half the earth at a time.
We had come to these deductions more or less by ourselves, if with some cross reference to what was said in the newspapers by the few famous international flat earthers.
As Garwood establishes, it is nonsense to think that most educated people believed in a flat earth up until some period (say Columbus's discovery of America), or that, say, the Catholic Church or public opinion punished sphericists during a period before the advent of Reason or modern science. There were always some dogmatic flat earthers, many of whom based their views on a literal reading of the Bible, but educated people since Ptolemy more than 2000 years ago had deduced or induced the broad facts.
Indeed public proclaiming a flat earth, and seeking hard to prove it, started only about 200 years ago, in part as a reaction to an increasing prestige for science, and in part from a view that sooner or later, scientific rationalism would come into complete conflict with religion, ethics and the words of the Bible.
In this sense, many of the flat earth arguments anticipate other arguments which developed about evolution, the age of the earth and whether there was a Creation (perhaps 6000 years ago) of the sort described in Genesis. Indeed I would go slightly further and say that strict Bible literalists should believe in a flat earth as firmly as they believe in the Creation story and deny evolution.
We of the Australian society eschewed Biblical arguments, and relied on the fact that most people simply assumed a spherical earth, thinking that they could ''prove'' it by common sense and the smattering of science they had learnt. Most couldn't, certainly not in mere argument without recourse to experiment, and things such as the horizon could be easily explained away.
Nineteenth century flat earthers tried to appeal to a pseudo-scientific reason, but via a form of scientific method which, while pretending to respect evidence, found it easy to reject any evidence which did not suit. One pioneer described this as Zetetics - a set of techniques now most commonly (ab)used by nutters who believe in the paranormal, messages from the afterlife, and the paraphernalia of the new age.
Occasionally deadly serious people, most famously the scientist Alfred Russell Wallace would be goaded by challenges from flat earthers to prove the rotundity of the earth. He could, indeed did, by a famous experiment on the Bedford Canal but failed to reckon with the capacity of his opponents to deny what they had seen, to misrepresent what had occurred and ultimately to claim their own vindication. It was he, not them, who was bamboozled and lost money and reputation, if only for his foolishness in ever getting involved. By then, anyway, true believers could cope with adverse circumstance or easy counter arguments. Adversity and diabolic reason, as so often for nutters, only renewed the sense of a noble crusade against powerful enemies.