Is a2+b2=c2 just a narrative?
No, and yes.
I suggest it is an argument about geometry that stands the test of time.
It’s not real, but it helps describe what is real.
Is it some kind of immutable law? Who would dare presume?
But it’s reliable, at least.
Whoever came up with it, sometime in the late neolithic perhaps, probably had an inkling about some consistency they saw when surveying plots of land for the people and setting out foundations for construction using a knotted hemp rope, or something. "Hey, there's something in this 3-4-5 knot rule!"
Someone didn’t believe them - they were incredulous! - so they did some homework to build a body of evidence or case-law.
They used the rules and grammars of numbers to develop a testable and scalable argument, and set out explaining it to their peers or convincing their doubters.
“See, I told you so!”
I can’t help but see this as a discursive, social exercise that produced an empowering output or tool to actualise things into reality in reliable and repeatable ways – the orderly partitioning of space and designing of safe buildings and structures and things to inhabit and furnish our world and make it more livable, and lovable.
Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Plank, Bohr (dare I say Gates or Musk or Altman? probably not in the grand scheme) – the whole lot of em – they all had some inkling, some glimpse that others had missed, but none of them got to stake their claims of immutable laws onto their descriptions of things without a good old discursive tussle first.
That is, they had to first demonstrate they understood what their predecessors had done or thought or discovered or known, then, through various methods of reasoning and argument, use that body of existing knowledge to help describe or differentiate their new or modified insight. There was a call to which they responded or felt compelled to respond - and this is the discursive social exchange. And this cannot be separated from the broader social and historical atmospheres and contexts that called them forth and beckoned their responses either. Their new or modified insights cannot presume to have been pure lighting bolts out of the blue, but rather should be assumed to be contingent upon, and perhaps a necessity of or need within prevailing enabling conditions.
And the conversations are still ongoing with half of their stuff!
Even testable and repeatable lab data has to be brought into a temporal context with argument and reasoning to make it applicable, to give it actualising power.
So what is truth?
Some argue proof by potency, as in potential to make manifest, to build the world, or destroy it.
You sure know a bad truth when you come out the rectal end of a Stalinist Russia or Third Reich, or any violent political conflict.
So the thing I’m grappling with at the moment is not whether ideas are right or wrong, real or not real, true or false -
It’s what does an idea do to empower and give breath to our best or worst capacities, or disempower them, as individuals and as societies. How does an idea create or undermine the resilience we need to span times and epochs. How do we make sense of, integrate and meaningfully move beyond chaotic or destructive times with our hearts and minds and communities intact?
Centrally, what promotes the expansion and dominion of love over social, cultural and natural spaces while carrying us across times, especially times of crisis - versus the dis-integration and dehumanising entropy of love's opposite?
In early 2024, we find ourselves caught up in a metacrisis, which is above all a crisis of competing narratives. Whether or not this is partially or wholly manufactured or manipulated, we wield ungainly and volatile potencies in the technologies and social formations our narratives have made manifest.
Our balance and forbearance are being tested and pushed to new limits.
Our capacity to temper and tame these potencies requires nuance and sensitivity, trusting reliable pillars of accumulated wisdom of past centuries and millennia, using these as gravitational attractors to winnow the chaff and the scrap metal from the real and reliable nourishing substances, the non-perishables we can take on our journey forward that we know won't spoil.
Where is the highest bridge to help us cross amidst these rising rushing waters?
One thing I perceive from the positive outflow of Pythagoras’ theorem:
love and life defy entropy at every turn, in every time.
And I reckon that’s a reliable argument to stake the unfolding of all times on.