Returning to James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed:
There is a moment during the acceleration of an aircraft down the runway when the co-pilot calls 'Rotate!' The pilot pulls back the control column and a hundred tons of metal carrying over three hundred people at more than 150 miles per hour rotates about its latitudinal axis by a small number of degrees and rises into the sky. The passengers are on board because they believe it to be a fact that this is what will happen.
Like every other fact that underpins our relationship with the technology structuring our lives, we trust it. We are trained to accept the facts of science and technology no matter how frequently the same science and technology renders them obsolete. Yet the concept of the generally accepted 'fact' is a relatively new one. It came into existence only five hundred years ago as a result of an event that radically altered Western life because it made possible the standardisation of opinion.
...The medieval adult was in no way less intelligent than his modern counterpart, however. He merely lived in a different world, which made different demands on him. His was a world without facts. Indeed, the modern concept of a fact would have been an incomprehensible one. Medieval people relied for day to day information solely on what they themselves, or someone they knew, had observed or experienced in the world immediately around them. Their lives were regular, repetitive and unchanging.
...What medieval man called 'fact' we would call opinion, and there were few people who travelled enough to know the difference. The average daily journey was seven miles, which was the distance most riders could cover and be sure of return before dark.
That's as may be. While we might be able to travel farther, faster with modern technology (even the 2/3 of Americans who don't have passports), and can communicate without traveling, we still have a tenuous relationship with facts.
I mean, I grew up thinking Mikey from the Life cereal commercials was killed by Pop Rocks and Coke. And fake news is, well...quite real, and spreads quickly over the intertubes.
I blame the loss of Weekly World News, and a weakening Pentaverate (now that the Queen has gone tits up like the Colonel).
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