The World is Flat? (Part I)

I was against reading the World is Flat from the beginning. I get enough of Friedman’s globalization cheer-leading in his New York Times column. I also spend most of my working days studying terrorism and radical Islam so the idea that globalization is somehow triumphing over religion, ethnicity and regionalism is something of a non-starter. But having taken a pre-marital pledge to lose thirty pounds, I found myself in need of an audiobook for the treadmill and thought I could at least knock this endless topic of dinner party conversation off my list.

Now an hour and 20 minutes into the updated and expanded 15 hour marathon, I am already struggling. Freedman buys into one of my pet peeves since 5th grade. He contends that Columbus set out to prove the world was round. According to historians, most people in 15th century europe did not believe the world was flat. What Columbus set out to do was discover a new route to India. This journey, of course, was interrupted by running into the “New World.”

Freeman, however, goes one step further and actually suggests that Columbus did prove the world was round. He only could have done this if in fact he had made it to India. Discovering the Americas in no way proved that the earth is a sphere. I won’t get into why the metaphor is bad in the first place, but here’ a link to one of the funnier book reviews I have ever read.

The author, Matt Taibbi, had some vague fear when he first heard about the book: “Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake well into your 50s.”

Taibba goes on to explain the difference between a level playing field and a flat world and tears Friedman a new… “The significance of Columbus’s discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the “flat world” into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.” Read the whole thing for a good laugh.