Image text by Robert Sheckley
The desire for fundamentalist simplicity and insular locality implicit in the resurgence of ‘flat earth’ ideology, flattens the very global ambitions originated by that desire in its imperially expansive mode. The scientific epistemology of actual imperial expansion was global. With the advent of the Internet, a level of electronic homogeneity emerges, both the dimensionality and directionality suggested by the metaphoric of an ‘information superhighway’. Here, at this levelling of information interchange, a communicative superconductivity begins to occur, and epistemology becomes subject to all kinds of cultural reflexivity.
Geometry, is the measurement of Earth (geos).
Whatever the currently dominant geometric figuration of Earth may be, as immediately intuitible, extraterrestrial cosmic shape; such a unitary outline and the epistemology of global responsibility it might suggest, do not account for differential forces of desire residing within the apparent borders of that outline yet not bound to any responsibility for it.
That presidential assent has been given to human exploration and colonisation of Mars, contrasts in a most interesting way with presidential deletion of ‘climate change’ information; the silencing of the ‘call of Earth’. The immediately suggested contrast, is between the Martian symbolics of war and the ‘one world’ ideology of ‘peaceful togetherness’ on Earth.
The actual hegemonic impetus is consumption, with various ideological ‘Earths’ and ‘worlds’ hallucinated in accord with this impetus. Whether the spatiotemporal stability of cosmic process apparently hosting these hallucinations can survive their onslaught; or perhaps require them and their effects, for continued survival; is an open question.
I’m not going to delineate the seemingly destructive factors currently held to be in play. The deep entrenchments of ‘dominion ideology’; various political and religious hysterias; and so on. All of these ideological mechanisms are susceptible to casuistical contextualisations; their essences, natures, and functions, contingent on contextualisation. And as can be seen, at the level of their explicit interchange, concurrence of contexts seems most often to occur as conflict rather than any clarity of unanimous accord. Thus, a complex, multi-dimensional scenario, beyond the flat simplicity of any ideology, and perhaps even beyond the Platonist idea.