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Around the world, and against all scientific evidence, a segment of the population believes that Earths round shape is either an unproven theory or an elaborate hoax. Polls by YouGov America in 2018 and FDU in 2022 found that as many as 11% of Americans believe the Earth might be flat.

While it is tempting to dismiss flat Earthers as mildly amusing, we ignore their arguments at our peril. Polling shows that there is an overlap between conspiracy theories, some of which can act as gateways for radicalisation. QAnon and the great replacement theory, for example, have proved deadly more than once.

By studying how flat Earthers talk about their beliefs, we can learn how they make their arguments engaging to their audience, and in turn, learn what makes disinformation spread online.

In a recent study, my colleague Tomas Nilsson at Linnaeus University and I analysed hundreds of YouTube videos in which people argue that the Earth is flat. We paid attention to their debating techniques to understand the structure of their arguments and how they make them appear rational.

One strategy they use is to take sides in existing debates. People who are deeply attached to one side of a culture war are likely to wield any and all arguments (including truths, half-truths and opinions), if it helps them win. People invest their identity into the group and are more willing to believe fellow allies rather than perceived opponents a phenomenon that sociologists call neo-tribalism.

The problem arises when people internalise disinformation as part of their identity. While news articles can be fact-checked, personal beliefs cannot. When conspiracy theories are part of someones value system or worldview, it is difficult to challenge them.

In analysing these videos, we observed that flat Earthers take advantage of ongoing culture wars by inserting their own arguments into the logic of, primarily, three main debates. These debates are longstanding and can be very personal for participants on either side.

First is the debate about the existence of God, which goes back to antiquity, and is built on reason, rather than observation. People already debate atheism v faith, evolution v creationism, and Big Bang v intelligent design. What flat Earthers do is set up their argument within the longstanding struggle of the Christian right, by arguing that atheists use pseudoscience evolution, the Big Bang and round Earth to sway people away from God.

A common flat Earther refrain that taps into religious beliefs is that God can inhabit the heavens above us physically only in a flat plane, not a sphere. As one flat Earther put it:

They invented the Big Bang to deny that God created everything, and they invented evolution to convince you that He cares more about monkeys than about you they invented the round Earth because God cannot be above you if He is also below you, and they invented an infinite universe, to make you believe that God is far away from you.

The second theme is a conspiracy theory that sees ordinary people stand against a ruling elite of corrupt politicians and celebrities. Knowledge is power, and this theory argues that those in power conspire to keep knowledge for themselves by distorting the basic nature of reality. The message is that people are easily controlled if they believe what they are told rather than their own eyes. Indeed, the Earth does appear flat to the naked eye. Flat Earthers see themselves as part of a community of unsung heroes, fighting against the tyranny of an elite who make the public disbelieve what they see.

The third theme is based on the freethinking argument, which dates back to the spirited debate about the presence or absence of God in the text of the US constitution. This secularist view argues that rational people should not believe authority or dogma instead, they should trust only their own reason and experience. Freethinkers distrust experts who use book knowledge or nonsense math that laypeople cannot replicate. Flat Earthers often use personal observations to test whether the Earth is round, especially through homemade experiments. They see themselves as the visionaries and scientists of yesteryear, like a modern-day Galileo.

Countering disinformation on social media is difficult when people internalise it as a personal belief. Fact-checking can be ineffective and backfire, because disinformation becomes a personal opinion or value.

Responding to flat Earthers (or other conspiracy theorists) requires understanding the logic that makes their arguments persuasive. For example, if you know that they find arguments from authority unconvincing, then selecting a government scientist as a spokesperson for a counterargument may be ineffective. Instead, it may be more appealing to propose a homemade experiment that anyone can replicate.

If you can identify the rationality behind their specific beliefs, then a counterargument can engage that logic. Insiders of the group are often key to this only a spokesperson with impeccable credentials as a devout Christian can say that you do not need the flat-Earth beliefs to remain true to your faith.

Overall, beliefs like flat-Earth theory, QAnon and the great replacement theory grow because they appeal to a sense of group identity under attack. Even far-fetched misinformation and conspiracies can seem rational if they fit into existing grievances. Since debates on social media require only posting content, participants create a feedback loop that solidifies disinformation as points of view that cannot be fact-checked.

More here:
I watched hundreds of flat-Earth videos to learn how conspiracy theories spread and what it could mean for fighting disinformation - The Conversation

Just a decade ago, intellectual history was considered an outmoded sub-field of history. The long decline of intellectual history was the result of a deliberate effort by a generation of social historians to push it from the halls of academiato banish the unfashionable emphasis on the ideas of preeminent Western thinkers. Classifications such as race, class, and gender replaced the study of history as ideas.

By the 1980s, social history had morphed into cultural history, which borrowed its approach from a host of mid-20th-century anthropologists more interested in symbolism and language than in social structures. But then cultural history struggled to lay firm foundations for the historical profession, as challenges to cultural anthropology became legion by the early 1990s. Gradually, cultural history lost its vogue, as many self-styled culturalists began publishing works that mirrored the intellectual histories their dissertation advisors sought to displace decades ago.

This revival of intellectual history would have happened much more slowly had it not been for a group of young scholars who founded a blog for U.S. intellectual history in 2007. This new generationwriting on the internet about their field, free from the constraints of traditional academic publishingdiscovered so many enthusiasts within the ranks of the professoriate that they hosted an inaugural Society for U.S. Intellectual History Conference just two years after the launch of their USIH blog.

One of the founders of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (S-USIH) is Illinois State University historian Andrew Hartman. His first bookEducation and the Cold War: The Battle for the American Schoolwas a consideration of how the politics of the Cold War fueled fierce public debates about the nature of education in the face of communism. Building on that monograph, Hartman broadened his research and has now written one of the first comprehensive looks at the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

In A War for the Soul of America Hartman argues that the late 20th centurys cultural conflicts were born out of the tumultuous 1960s. To most observers this might not seem a particularly provocative thesis, but recent literature, as Hartman shows, has tried to downplay the radicalism of the 60s by demonstrating that this era was also a period of great growth for conservative ideas. Where Hartman diverges from this view of a more moderate or balanced 1960s is in claiming that these years universalized fracture, thus setting up a wide plane of debate between the left and right that grew to a fever pitch decades later.

Hartman positions A War for the Soul of America against three other books that speak to the culture wars. The first is Whats the Matter with Kansas? by the left-wing journalist Thomas Frank. Hartman eschews Franks approach to the culture wars, which dismisses most conservatives as voters who betray themselves by supporting politicians who oppose their economic well-being. Hartman has somewhat more sympathy with the view taken by sociologist James Davison Hunter in his 1991 volume Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Hartman believes that Hunters thesis of a secular-religious split in American life still holds some truthbut history reveals more complexity than Hunters work admits.

The final text that Hartman engages is Daniel Rodgerss Age of Fracture, which serves as both an influence and another point of departure. Rodgerss 2011 book made fracture a catchword for intellectual historians looking to explain the impossibility of a common cultural language in the late 20th century. His thesis in Age of Fracture is that unfettered markets made consensus impossible, as all language was boiled down into smaller units, leading personal identity to become more important than institutions.

Hartman observes that fracture became evident in the 1960s as the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant consensus disintegrated. And according to him, The culture wars were the defining metaphor for the late-twentieth-century United States. He begins the story in the 1960s, with New Left radicals who challenged the idea of normative America. Opponents of the New Left included former Leninists and socialists who became neoconservative intellectuals, along with familiar conservative political figures such as Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

What helped to make the culture wars a decades-long feature of American life, Hartman argues, is that the affluent radicals of the New Left took over higher education precisely during its period of greatest growth. The concept of normative America then fell away as the identity-based movements of the sixties offered the promise of cultural liberation to those on the outside of traditional America looking in.

As the culture wars heated up, conservatism enjoyed resurgent popularity at the ballot box. Hartman does not see this as a steady rise to power of the traditional right following Barry Goldwaters loss in 1964. Instead, a mixture of neoconservatism and an innovative embrace of white working-class values gave the Republican Party new resonance with voters. The neoconservatives benefited from their Marxist background, as they understood the difference between New Lefts politics and the consensus liberalism that the right had been fighting all along. They showed how what remained of consensus liberalism could now be claimed by the right as an ally against the New Left counterculture.

Hartman, although primarily interested in the intellectual side of things, convincingly draws connections between ideas and events throughout the book. In his second chapter he moves adeptly between the novels of Saul Bellow, the Moynihan Report, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisisin which a Brooklyn teachers strike led to flaring racial hostility between blacks and Jewsin revealing how neoconservatives and the New Left created the dialectic that we know as the culture wars.

After setting the stage in his first two chapters, Hartman details the clash between left and right in the next seven chapters, each of which is a historiography of disputes that defined the culture wars. Subjects include debates about race, religion, gender, art, school curriculums, and history, with close examination of key episodes such as the rights outcry against Andres Serranos Piss Christ exhibition funded by the National Endowment for the Artsand therefore by taxpayers.

But what stands out about A War for the Soul of America is the trajectory that Hartman traces. For him the 1950s were indeed normative America, grounded in white middle-class mores, and efforts to reveal a radicalized society in the United States before the 1960s are a fruitless endeavor. (A significant body of scholarship disputes this: the late historian Alan Petigny, for example, argued persuasively in his 2009 book, The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965, that the country was already giving way to loosened moral standards in the 1950s, with the pedagogy of Benjamin Spock, the art of Jackson Pollock, and the music of jazz musician Charlie Parker.) And paired with Hartmans revisionist historiographical claim about the continued importance of the 60s as the beginning of fracture for normative Americaa point on which conservatives are likely to agree with himis his belief that the metaphor of the culture wars is dead.

The logic of the culture wars has been exhausted. The metaphor has run its course, Hartman writes in the conclusion. Possibly this is true, as the baby boomers who have so long supplied the defining metaphors of American politics give way to a generation that sees the world differently. Yet it seems that the rising generation is quite comfortable with many of the old metaphors, even if they are tired of using them.

Conservatives may dismiss A War for the Soul of America as the work of a left-leaning scholar despairing of the lost paradise promised by 60s radicals. But Hartman is insightful on the working out of global capitalism and something he calls the cultural contradictions of liberation, in which the appearance of choice is often the negation of cherished valueswhether those of the left or right. The ensuing historical ironies abound in Hartmans account, encompassing such examples as the Christian corporate raider or liberal homeschooling parents.

While the culture wars inspired a great deal of farcical, eschatological rhetoric, they also brought about an era of public discourse between left and right that is worth remembering, perhaps even imitating. Surely Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Allan Bloom, for example, communicated something remarkable to us about the soul of America. In the retelling of this conversation, Hartman proves to be both an outstanding historian and a public intellectual mapping the terrain for a new conversation. Compared to this era of the hashtag presidency, we have reason to envy those bygone decades in which political debate appeared on the pages of print newspapers and mass-marketed books.

Seth J. Bartee teaches intellectual history at East Tennessee State University.

Original post:
How the Culture Wars Began (and Ended)

Next, Im describing a world in which divergence turns into conflict, especially as great powers compete for resources and dominance. China and Russia clearly want to establish regional zones that they dominate. Some of this is the kind of conflict that historically exists between opposing political systems, similar to what we saw during the Cold War. This is the global struggle between the forces of authoritarianism and the forces of democratization. Illiberal regimes are building closer alliances with one another. They are investing more in one anothers economies. At the other end, democratic governments are building closer alliances with one another. The walls are going up. Korea was the first major battleground of the Cold War. Ukraine could be the first battleground in what turns out to be a long struggle between diametrically opposed political systems.

But something bigger is happening today that is different from the great power struggles of the past, that is different from the Cold War. This is not just a political or an economic conflict. Its a conflict about politics, economics, culture, status, psychology, morality and religion all at once. More specifically, its a rejection of Western ways of doing things by hundreds of millions of people along a wide array of fronts.

To define this conflict most generously, Id say its the difference between the Wests emphasis on personal dignity and much of the rest of the worlds emphasis on communal cohesion. But thats not all thats going on here. Whats important is the way these longstanding and normal cultural differences are being whipped up by autocrats who want to expand their power and sow chaos in the democratic world. Authoritarian rulers now routinely weaponize cultural differences, religious tensions and status resentments to mobilize supporters, attract allies and expand their own power. This is cultural difference transmogrified by status resentment into culture war.

Some people have revived Samuel Huntingtons clash of civilizations theory to capture whats going on. Huntington was right that ideas, psychology and values drive history as much as material interests. But these divides dont break down on the neat civilizational lines that Huntington described.

In fact, what haunts me most is that this rejection of Western liberalism, individualism, pluralism, gender equality and all the rest is not only happening between nations but also within nations. The status resentment against Western cultural, economic and political elites that flows from the mouths of illiberal leaders like Putin and Modi and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil sounds quite a lot like the status resentment that flows from the mouths of the Trumpian right, from the French right, from the Italian and Hungarian right.

Theres a lot of complexity here the Trumpians obviously have no love for China but sometimes when I look at world affairs I see a giant, global maximalist version of Americas familiar contest between Reds and Blues. In America weve divided along regional, educational, religious, cultural, generational and urban/rural lines, and now the world is fragmenting in ways that often seem to mimic our own. The paths various populists prefer may differ, and their nationalistic passions often conflict, but what theyre revolting against is often the same thing.

Continue reading here:
Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun.

David Brooks: Over the last few decades, as Republicans have been using cultural issues to rally support more and more, Democrats have understood whats going on less and less. Many progressives have developed an inability to see how good and wise people could be on the other side, a lazy tendency to assume that anybody whos not a social progressive must be a racist or a misogynist, a tendency to think the culture wars are merely a distraction Republican politicians kick up to divert attention from the real issues, like economics as if the moral health of society was some trivial sideshow.

Even worse, many progressives have been blind to their own cultural power. Liberals dominate the elite cultural institutions the universities, much of the mainstream news media, entertainment, many of the big nonprofits and many do not seem to understand how infuriatingly condescending it looks when they describe their opponents as rubes and bigots.

The Republican Party capitalizes on this. Some days it seems as if this is the only thing the party does. For example, Republican candidates could probably cruise to victory in this falls elections just by talking about inflation. Instead, many are doubling down on the sort of cultural issues that helped propel Glenn Youngkin to the governors office in Virginia.

See the article here:
Why Democrats Keep Losing the Culture Wars

Religion Unplugged believes in a diversity of well-reasoned and well-researched opinions. This piece reflects the views of the author and does not necessarily represent those of Religion Unplugged, its staff and contributors.

(OPINION) We tend to pay attention to news that impacts us most directly. So for Americans, the culture war playing out between religious and some nonreligious traditionalists and social progressives is most compelling.

Halfway around the world, however, another building struggle over religion and culture has heated up yet again. This one has direct international ramifications and has the potential to negatively impact global religious-political alignments, perhaps as much or more than Americas nasty cultural war.

It also contains an important lesson about the possible consequences of governments and politicians employing divisive culture war tactics for political gain (more on this theme below.) I do not think it absurd to fear that our homegrown culture war could become just as bad, or worse.

Im referring to India, a constitutionally secular nation wracked by interreligious conflict between majority Hindus and minority Muslims. Christians have been caught in this imbroglio, too, but put that aside for the duration of this post.

Heres a recent overview of Indias situation from The Washington Post. And heres the top of that report:

NEW DELHI After a spokeswoman for Indias ruling party made disparaging remarks about the prophet Muhammad during a recent televised debate, rioters took to the streets in the northern city of Kanpur, throwing rocks and clashing with police.

It was only the beginning of a controversy that would have global repercussions.

Indian products were soon taken off shelves in the Persian Gulf after a high-ranking Muslim cleric called for boycotts. Hashtags expressing anger at Prime Minister Narendra Modi began trending on Arabic-language Twitter. Three Muslim-majority countries Qatar, Kuwait and Iran summoned their Indian ambassadors to convey their displeasure. The governments of Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Afghanistan on Monday condemned the spokeswoman, Nupur Sharma, as did the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Inflammatory comments by right-wing activists and political leaders in India often make headlines and spark outrage on social media. But rarely do they elicit the kind of attention that Sharma drew in [early June], which sent her political party and Indias diplomats scrambling to contain an international public relations crisis.

Lets step back from the news coverage for a moment to consider some underlying dynamics and their impact on journalism.

Culture wars, to my mind, are in essence political struggles in which one group seeks to impose its values, structures and narrative its world view, in short on another. At least, this is the way the term is used in most mainstream coverage, as opposed to the actual work of the sociologist James Davison Hunter who wrote the most influential book on this topic.

Individual and societal values drawn from religious sources provide the ammunition for clashes over gender and sexuality issues, religious tolerance and intolerance, acceptable speech, immigration and other hot-button topics spurred by todays unprecedented rate of social change.

Americans have seen how ugly culture wars can become when electoral politics are caught in its talons. Witness the vitriol that dominates the news out of Washington and various state capitals these days.

Witness the level of culture wars manipulation that occurred under former President Donald Trump of course pro-MAGA conservatives will argue that progressive Democrats are the problem. And witness what happened in Idaho, where 31 anti-gay demonstrators were arrested for allegedly planning to riot at a gay pride parade last Saturday. The Coeur dAlene incident underscored how dangerous Americas culture war has become and what we might expect more of.

The situation in India the worlds largest Hindu-majority nation with the third-largest Muslim population after Indonesia and Pakistan is arguably even worse. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party have long been accused of rallying their Hindu nationalist base by sowing, for example, Hindu fears about Muslim men seducing Hindu women.

In truth, many Muslims seem no more accepting of Hindu-Muslim unions than are Hindus. This Hindustan Times story from May underscores this reality.

Heres a bit more explanation from the Post piece to which I linked above.

The (insult) controversy highlights one of the challenges to Indian foreign policy at a time when Modi is seeking a greater role on the world stage: Although his government has cultivated strong diplomatic ties with many Muslim nations, including both Saudi Arabia and Iran, his party has come under growing criticism for its treatment of Indias Muslim minority. It is accused by rights groups of stoking Hindu nationalist sentiment and turning a blind eye to religious violence.

India under Modi has been quite deft in dealing with the Muslim world, but this was almost inevitable, said Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at Indiana University. At home, a lynching takes place and Modi remains deafeningly silent. Now, he feels compelled to act because he realizes the damage abroad could be extensive. When it comes to foreign policy, the stakes are high.

The Indian government has sought to downplay a string of local religious controversies in recent months, including a ban on headscarves for female students, the razing of Muslim neighborhoods after communal clashes, and efforts by Hindu nationalists to reclaim high-profile mosques (that were once Hindu temple sites).

To better understand Indias complicated religious landscape, read these two partisan pieces. The first is from an Indian Hindu perspective. The second is from a Muslim viewpoint, featured at Religion News Service.

Whats my bottom line? Governments and groups that stir conflict by focusing on religion and culture, for their own preservationist desires, are playing with fire.

Examples abound: From the American Civil War to Nazi Germany, from Israel and Palestine to Northern Irelands Protestant-Catholic troubles, to Myanmars treatment of its Rohingya Muslims and Chinas claim that its minority Muslim groups all represent a terrorist threat.

The reality is political leaders have long perhaps always used so-called culture war tactics to harden their support. Is it worse today? I cant really say.

What I can say, however, is that the deadliness of modern weaponry a category that includes the internet as well as tactical nuclear weapons raises the specter of culture wars becoming bloodier than ever. That includes the United States of America because were no smarter about these incessant problems than are Indians or any other of the other nationalities mentioned here.

That, dear readers, should worry you. It should also make you wonder about the responsibility journalists have in this issue.

My take is that its not enough to just regurgitate manipulative comments from leaders on both sides and then call it fair and objective journalism. I think we need context and the courage to challenge those who care more about careers than the country.

Walking that path is, of course, far from easy. It has its own set of problems that are far too complex for me to detail here. But if you simply give additional serious thought to this issue, Ill consider my work here done.

This piece is republished with permission from GetReligion.org. Ira Rifkin is an award-winning journalist and author specializing in the intersection of religion, culture, and politics, with special emphasis on globalization. He was formerly the news director of Belief Net, a Washington-based national correspondent for Religion News Service and has contributed to many publications, including the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun and others.

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What Responsibility Do Journalists Have When Covering Incendiary Wars About Religion And Culture? - Religion Unplugged