My roleplaying group played last Friday night at a friend's house in Virginia. We were supposed to start at about five-thirty. Normally, it's an half-hour drive from where I live in Maryland over to where he lives in Virginia, but it was rush hour, so I left at four-twenty.
I didn't get there until six.
There weren't any accidents, there wasn't any snow remaining on the freeway. It just sucked. Bumper to bumper the entire way. And not Los Angeles bumper to bumper, where one is at least moving fifty or sixty miles an hour, even if one can't get out of one's lane and winds up in Long Beach rather than at the Cheesecake Factory. No, this was DC bumper to bumper, where ten miles an hour would panic most drivers on the road into uncontrollable urination.
So it took over an hour and a half.
Anyway, aside from ranting at everyone else taking up space on my road, I got in some contemplation. And one of the interesting things I contemplated was the existence of the concept of "proof". More specifically, how in our modern culture, we have a very different concept of proving things than mankind has had prior to us.
It seems like a very fundamental concept, as evidenced by the ease with which children grasp it. (And subsequently bludgeon us with it.) "Prove it" is a common phrase at a certain age.
But the proof that they are demanding, and which as adults we seek, is an absolute sort of proof. Because of the pervasiveness of science in modern culture, we expect that things can be proven absolutely. Coca-cola dissolves nails. Light is made up of different color spectra. Germs cause disease.
And when these absolute truths don't quite cover things, we add caveats. Not all germs cause disease, but the plague bacillus will. But we approach things from a standard of True or False - all the time, in every situation - and then work backward from there.
Whereas cultures prior to ours didn't look at things that way. The idea of proving something true or not simply didn't occur to them. Or rather, not beyond a locally applicable sense. If something was true, then it was true at the time and to the people involved - and no assumption that it was always true for everyone everywhere was made. None was needed.
In fact, the very nature of the word "to prove" is very different now than it was to start with. It used to be a synonym for "to test". Hence the expression "the exception proves the rule", which means that the exception tests to see if the rule is correct. And so, if you "proved" something, you tested it to verify its veracity - but in any other similar case, you would assume the next person would prove that thing over again.
It was only with the development of advanced mathematics, wherein things could be shown to be absolutely true because we had made up the ground rules, that the idea of proof being absolute really took hold. And once the Enlightenment applied the rules of mathematics to the world around them, and transmuted Natural Philosophy into Science, did that idea of proving something absolutely spread into the general population.
Now, I daresay ancient Greeks and Romans and Persians discussed absolute truths. Some of them almost certainly attempted to prove things absolutely. But such proof was always approached as a special case - in other words, they would have always had to modify "proof" with "absolute", whereas we today assume "proof" to be absolute and then have to modify it with "circumstantial" or "dependant upon". In fact, if it is not absolutely true, we generally wouldn't call something "proven".
I'm not trying to get at anything. There isn't a point to this commentary. It's just an interesting thought exercise, to realize that all of your antecedents going back to the beginning thought differently than you do. That language and culture shape the way we think to a really tremendous degree. What ways of thinking did our ancestors indulge in that we don't; what did they assume as commonly conceivable where we simply accept as normal that things can be proven?
- Sun Ra