Every culture develops a set of basic assumptions about the way things are and the way things ought to be. They are the invisible water we swim in: Things so "obviously true" that no one bothers to question them. Yet when we look back through history, many of these foundational certainties look rather peculiar and even utterly unfounded to later societies (which, to be fair, are busily constructing their own collection of peculiar and unfounded assumptions to be deconstructed by future generations).
Consider the sheer variety of what humans have taken as "common sense." In hunter-gatherer and ancient societies, it was simply taken for granted that places and spaces were indwelt by spiritual forces and that the world was literally "full of gods". Move forward into the empires and monarchies of history, and people were utterly convinced of the "Divine Right of Kings". It was assumed that God (or the gods) specifically handpicked one inbred aristocratic family to rule over everyone else, and that questioning the king’s tax policy was tantamount to cosmic treason. Even the bright minds of the Enlightenment and Victorian eras had their invisible crutches: For centuries, physicists were certain that space had to be filled with an invisible, weightless jelly called "luminiferous ether" just so light would have something to ripple through.
Then there are the widespread everyday assumptions that can be downright hilarious in hindsight. For over a millennium, the height of Western medical science assumed that human health was governed by four bodily fluids— or "humors"— meaning that whether you had a fever, a bad mood, or a head cold, the obvious solution was to drain a pint of your blood or cover you in leeches. For centuries, Europeans assumed that bathing in water would open your pores to pestilence, that bad smells literally were disease, and, when the locomotive was first invented, that traveling at the breakneck speed of thirty miles per hour would cause a woman’s uterus to fly right out of her body.
It is easy to chuckle at leeches and the Divine Right of Kings from our perch in the twenty-first century, assuming we have finally traded myth for pure, objective fact. Yet we too have developed a rather peculiar habit of thinking in our own culture:
