The video below from “The Late Show” is a few days old, but if you haven’t seen it yet, enjoy.
Notice the cheers erupting from the audience when singers announce that Jacob Chansley, the convicted “QAnon Shaman,” was sentenced to 3-1/2 years for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021.
We shake our heads over why so many people, otherwise ordinary people (Chansley not included), would believe conspiracy theories and the Big Lie, riot on behalf of Donald Trump, man of 30,000 false and misleading statements, and give their lives for him. Why? Because their world view has been shaken.
As the Webb telescope positions itself for a deeper look into the cosmos, consider Galileo. He was not the first to realize that Earth is not the center of it all. But from his perch at the University of Padua, with what he saw through his telescope, he was in a position to spread the idea across Europe as well as, eventually, to piss off the Vatican.
The Vatican Observatory’s website recounts:
In the 4th Session of the Council of Trent, the reformation council, the Catholic Church in opposition to Luther solemnly declared that Scripture could not be interpreted privately but only by the official Church:
Furthermore, to control petulant spirits, the Council decrees that . . . no one, relying on his own judgment and distorting the Sacred Scriptures according to his own conceptions, shall dare to interpret them according to his own conceptions, shall dare to interpret them contrary to that sense which Holy Mother Church . . . has held and does.
In 1613, over lunch at the palace of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Duke’s mother, Christina, became alarmed by the possibility that the Scriptures might be contradicted by private observations, such as those made by Galileo supporting a sun-centered universe.
As others had noted, a sun-centered universe appeared to contradict Aristotelian natural philosophy in the eyes of the Church. This philosophy was fundamental to Catholic theology at the time. If Aristotelian natural philosophy was wrong, was Catholic theology undermined as well?
That is, Galileo’s private observations, once published, threatened long-held assumptions about how the world worked. He was eventually tried for heresy in 1633. In 1992, Pope John Paul II officially declared that Galileo was right. It only took 359 years.
More was at stake than astronomy. That the Earth and humans were at the center of God’s creation was taken as given. The Bible account of creation and all that followed stood upon it. What did it mean if science contradicted that? What did it mean if our little sphere was just one of many floating insignificantly in an infinite cosmos?
Now consider everything that has happened since the Civil War. the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments recognized former slaves as citizens with voting rights (the men, anyway). The backlash to that spawned the Klan, a violent coup in Wilmington, a massacre in Tulsa, to decades of lynchings, and to 100 years of Black disinfranchisement. The Civil Rights movement that grew in the wake of WWII and Brown realigned politics in the South and created another backlash, spawning half a century of movement conservatism.
That White Christians stood at the center of economic, religious, and cultural life in America went largely unquestioned until the decade prior to the Civil War. For 100 years after, the Constitution notwithstanding, that perception refused to yield. For yet another 50, those whose place in the cosmos was defined by who they were better than resisted accepting the founders’ belief that all persons are created equal, and that this country meant to deliver on that promise.
Then Americans elected a Black man president. Once again, people lost their shit. We might as well have announced that the Earth is not the center of God’s creation.
This tumult is not over.
Update: Doh! Not enough coffee. Misreferenced the Bible creation on first pass. (h/t FS)