Truth Programs Quotes

“In his thoughtful essay Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? the classicist Paul Veyne remarks that in classical antiquity belief-like assertions were social assertions that interlocutors did not take to refer to the everyday world in the same way that later Europeans would assume that they did. ’The Greeks believe and do not believe their myths. They believe in them, but they use them and cease believing at the point where their interest in believing ends’ (1988:84). All humans, he writes, hold contradictory commitments. These different commitments are managed with what he calls different ‘truth programs’: different sets of ideas, practices, and interests that belong together in some social world and are held with a particular attitude. ’A Greek put the gods ”in heaven,” but he would have been astounded to see them in the sky. He would have been no less astounded if someone, using time in its literal sense, told him that Hephaestus had just remarried or that Athena had aged a great deal lately’ (1988:18).”
― Tanya M Luhrmann