Review of Behind The Curve

A film about flat earthers, which tries to be sympathetic but not uncritical. It doesn't really debunk or answer their "proofs" that the earth is flat and covered by a dome. Some of them look a bit ridiculous, but others seem nice and concerned with evidence and argument...it's not inconceivable that a naive person could watch the film and be led into becoming a flat earther. In fact, the podcasters and YouTubers featured in the film have said that it has increased their fan base.

There are interviews with the flat earthers, some of whom are bitter foes with each other...one of them argues on his YouTube channel that his rival is a Hollywood actor, hired by Warner Brothers but working for the CIA. And this hints at the main weakness in the film; although it does show that flat-earthism is more of a socio-political belief than a cosmological one, and it does show that the devotees are conspiracy theorists, it plays that down and makes them look mostly harmless. There's a hint that some of them blame the Jews (along with the Freemasons or the Vatican) for the 400-year hoax, but the nasty side is not emphasised.

Which leads rather nicely into my second criticism - the suggestion that the best thing to do it to treat them as genuinely intellectually engaged and to try to draw them towards an evidence-based approach to the rotundity of the earth, without ever shaming them. Lots of talking heads of scientists saying this, but they are for the most part natural scientists - physicists and astronomers. They are interviewed as experts, but they are talking about a subject in which they have no expertise. It might very well be that shaming is exactly the best way to deal with them - not enjoyable for them, or even for the people doing it, but it might be more effective than treating them as folk-scientists. That's a question for social science. 

The film makes it clear that however they became flat earthers, they now have emotional, and social, and even financial reasons for not abandoning their "theory" (as they point out credentialed scientists also do). So maybe emotion-based and social-based approaches will work better - if not at rescuing these heavily committed individuals, then at least in helping to prevent others from coming under their influence. If this was only a cosmological belief there might be an argument for letting them continue to think whatever they wanted (as long as they weren't involved in say aviation planning) but it's not. They need to believe that there is a hoax, and that there are dark powers behind it, and that's a political theory with bad consequences. 

I note in passing that the scientists in the film know a lot about their subject matter, but they have a very unsophisticated understanding of Science as a social phenomenon. They spout a lot of warmed-over Popperian falsificationism, as if that's how Science really worked; fifty years of social studies of science, and empirical research on the functioning of scientific institutions and communities, might as well never have happened. No-one seems to have an understanding of science that's more nuanced than "Science is True" or "Science is all made up". This is a pity, especially in the face of the present conversations about the pandemic and climate change.