CDED

 

In the United States, we just passed the holiday, “Confident but Deluded Explorer’s Day” (CDED for short), more popularly known as Columbus’ Day.  It is not a holiday at my workplace, but I guess government and bank employees get a day off to spend time with their families.  Truthfully, Columbus has too many issues for me to want to celebrate his “achievements.”

When people think of Columbus, they think of a man who spoke truth to power.  He stood up to the idiot scholars who believed that the world was flat.  He courageously sailed into the west, even as his sailors were quaking in their boots believing that at any moment they would sail off the edge of the world.  He was a man ahead of his time.

There is only one problem with this picture of the explorer.  It simply isn’t true.

Just like today, there were some people in the 1400s who believed in a flat earth, but most of the scholars knew the earth was spherical.  Even the ancient Greeks had known this and had calculated its circumference.  

The reason that no one tried to get to India or Japan by sailing west was because they knew that the distance was roughly 11,000 nautical miles.  No ship of the time could hope to carry enough food and supplies to travel so far a distance.

When Columbus traveled around, discussing his plans with various royal families of Europe, he confidently told them that he estimated the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan was only 2,400 nautical miles – a long way to be sure, but something the boats of his day could handle.  In a sense, Columbus was the ultimate irrational-confidence man.  He was someone who was willing to risk his life and the life of his crew on calculations that were dead wrong.

When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella agreed to fund his voyage, it was in spite of the objections of their scholars.  Columbus’ confidence and charm had won their support.

I feel as though little is different today.  People choose their pundits, not based on the factual nature of those “experts” say, but rather based on their confidence, charisma, willingness to inflate their own credentials, and general smoothness of delivery.

It bothers me because truth is deeper than any of these superficial qualities.  While I do not have the know-how to calculate the circumference of the globe, I would do well to listen to those who can and have done so.

Trusting a confident but wrong explorer may have worked out for King Ferdinand, but most of the time such trust is disastrous.  We would do better to find wiser men and women in whom to place our faith.