It seems pretty common, nowadays, to believe that people in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat Modern depictions of Christopher Columbus often touch on the idea, either by implication or by arguing loudly, as in Hare We Go, the 1951 Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Bugs sails with Columbus, who had argued with King Ferdinand that “the world, she’s a round”. Bugs Bunny cartoons might be a better barometer of popular thinking than you’d guess.
The written evidence is pretty clear that people have known for millennia that the world was round, not flat. The ancient Greeks were well aware that the world was round, and demonstrated it in a number of ways. And yet even today there are people who at least claim to believe that the earth is flat.
There are plenty of other topics, particularly nowadays, where knowledge is ignored or rejected by large numbers of people in spite of it being well supported, easily proven, or pretty obvious. I say “nowadays” only because while I suspect this process isn’t new at all, modern examples are much easier to find.
The reasons people ignore or reject things that seem clear, supported, or obvious seems to have less to do with other things people think and more to do with who they think they are. There seem to be social and cultural processes at work that have to do with the way people construct their own identities or self-images that some beliefs — or “antibeliefs” — come along with all that. It’s culturally induced ignorance, and there’s a word for it:
“agnotology.”
“Agnotology”, being an “-ology”, is derived from the Greek word “logos” for speech. The prefix “agno-“ comes from another Greek word, “agnosis,” which means “not knowing.” So just as “cosmology” is “speaking about the cosmos,” “agnotology” is speaking about ignorance — specifically about willful ignorance that seems to be due to cultural systems.
The word “agnotology” is pretty recent. It first appeared in the 1995 book The Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes what we Know and Don’t Know About Cancer, by Robert Proctor. Proctor is a historian of science at Stanford University. He’s since expanded on the idea in a collection of essays published in 2008 as Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. In modern society the roots of ignorance are often financial. The tobacco industry fought very publicly for decades, not against the idea that smoking ruins your health, but against the belief in that idea. This doesn’t explain all cases of agnotologia, of course — I don’t think there’s much profit to be had in arguing that the world isn’t round — but as Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
