Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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In what ways specifically were they primitive, or are we advanced? Which core elements of the human experience have changed, and how, between their time and ours? Do the experiences of death, pain, fear, glory, fame, popularity, joy, comfort, friendship, love, hatred, childhood, parenthood, learning, ambition, greed, jealousy, loyalty, uncertainty, risk, value, profit, loss, poverty, wealth, aging, madness, irrationality, bias, intuition, wisdom or any other significant aspect of the human condition operate differently now, relative to then? If so, how?
What is the specific empirical knowledge they lacked, and why does that lack make their analysis irrelevant? What is the precise empirical discovery that opened the doors of enlightenment to mankind?
How, specifically, has thought "progressed" since their time, such that their thoughts should contain no value? What were they wrong about, and how do we know they were wrong about it?
If what you say is true, the above should be easy questions to answer. I don't think they are, but perhaps I'm wrong?
Our experience of death has been totally revolutionized by science and medicine. It's gone from a capricious and incomprehensible god that strikes down half of your children in their most vulnerable years and everyone else randomly, to a mechanism we understand and successfully fight, and one that we've, for the most part, pushed back to the elderly years.
Pain - it turns out that physical pain can mostly be alleviated by molecules of 10-40 atoms or so. A fact of nature suddenly, once you understand the particular proteins behind it, becomes quite malleable.
Fear - was fear of the wiles of nature - not enough rain, too much rain, an evil spirit causes your crops to wilt - and then you just die. Fear of wildlife, random bands of raiders, plague. All of that is, if you're an upper-middle-class person in a western country, pretty much gone! Your fears are of doing poorly in school or at work, not doing well socially or with women, maybe having a medical emergency that doesn't fit through the bureaucracy. Of not having purpose or community. Or exaggerated simulacra of past fears that inflame the passions - fear of school shootings, fear of murders, fear of climate collapse, fear of islamic terrorism.
It isn't just knowledge they lacked, it's our whole economic and technological environment. They lacked knowledge too, though - not just scientific knowledge, but organizational knowledge, what it's like in a world where overt religious mystification is absent from the engines of the economy, little things like how to "court" women when the stakes are 'good sex, emotional connection, and shared experiences' rather than 'rather than 'navigating strong social rails, family and economic interests, and religious duty'.
... of course, I agree that old books have a lot of value, they're not pointless, so I agree with you as much as OP. For everything I mentioned as different, there are many more similarities. But I do think old books are missing a lot that modern writings and people have, core elements of the human condition sure are different today, and your comment seems to overstate the extent to which they're equivalent, or there hasn't been definable progress.
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Just to scratch the surface, an understanding of evolution, neuroscience, and atomic theory puts the learned modern person's understanding of human nature leaps and bounds above the ancients. Like, have you read some of the things they believed? It's embarrassing, but obviously they didn't know any better. That's my point. I truly struggle to think of something I'm more baffled by than the seemingly widespread idea that we ought to entertain these ancient people's ideas any more than we'd entertain a toddler's.
How? What specific insights about human nature do they provide? Additionally, are you familiar with the centuries-long history of "learned modern persons" claiming that science had given them special insight into human nature, and the uniform results of such claims?
I have read some of the things they believed. I did not note anything that they should be embarrassed about, nor have I seen any ways that we "know better". Again, the question is not whether we know empirical facts that they did not, but whether those empirical facts tell us things about human nature. Atomic, evolutionary, and neuroscientific theories and facts do not change the realities of any of the elements of human nature I listed in even the smallest way. Death is still death, love is still love, loss is still loss, and so on down the list.
Then it should be trivial to describe how our understanding of, say, death or love surpasses theirs. I've never seen someone actually do so, so if you can, please do. Be as specific as possible, if you can.
Knowing what we do now, it is kind of embarrassing that people believed curses and premonitions and local spirits were real, right? I'd be very embarrassed if I believed in astrology or faith healing today (many still do, but many fewer serious people do).
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Empirical facts about evolution provide us insight into why our minds and bodies are the way they are. They explain our emotions (including love), desires, perceptions, and so on. Everything that makes us what we are is the product of evolution. Atomic theory and neuroscience explain consciousness (although, of course, much mystery remains), personality, and provides good grounds to believe that no soul exists that can persist after death. All of this information informs our understanding of human nature.
Here are a few concrete examples just off the top of my head:
Modern neuroscience allows us to understand (and treat) mental disorders to a significant degree. These would have been mysterious to the ancients. But we understand, to some extent, how things like neurotransmitters affect depression, addiction, anxiety, etc., and that helps us come up with better ways to deal with it and also to sympathize with people who suffer from it.
Our knowledge of the cosmos, limited as it still is, allows us to better understand our place in it (or, perhaps most pertinently, our lack of importance within it).
Likewise, our understanding of evolution rather humbles our perception of our species' place in the world. It also provides insight into human universals such as sexual jealousy, coalitional warfare, the primacy of family, and probably a hundred other such examples. As an example of where a lack of this understanding goes awry, you're probably familiar with the Kibbutz - a feeble attempt by the Israelis to, among other lunacies, raise children communally. Evolutionary insight would immediately reveal the folly of that. But without an understanding of evolution, or at least trial and error, how do you suppose an ancient person would know that this project would be unlikely to succeed? Even if they could figure it out (probably by trial and error!) it seems obvious to me that an evolutionary insight into this aspect of human nature is a superior way to nip that sort of thing in the bud.
Also, even aside from advances in empirical knowledge, we have the advantage of two thousand years of history to draw from. For example, the US founding fathers took ample advantage of the history books to learn from prior empires' mistakes when designing the US system of government. All else being equal, people with more history to draw from will simply be better able to find enduring answers to timeless questions relating to how to organize society (politically, legally, etc.) and minimize common failure modes.
Like, honestly, the case you're making appears tantamount to claiming that superior empirical knowledge and a much longer "civilization bug report log" provides approximately zero advantage in understanding and improving people and society. And if so, like, why do you even bother to learn anything? I honestly don't understand.
Yes, that is exactly what I am claiming. I am claiming it because it appears to be straightforwardly, obviously true. The people who codified the general claim you are now repeating did so starting roughly three centuries ago, and they made specific predictions that went along with that claim: that their superior knowledge and understanding would allow them to fundamentally alter the human condition, ending things like ignorance, poverty, crime and war. Their predictions have been thoroughly falsified ever since. We still have ignorance, poverty, crime and war three centuries later, and in about the same amounts. Meanwhile, several branches of the ideological tree those men planted have produced the worst, most concentrated ignorance, poverty, crime and war the world has ever seen.
The truth is that we do not know how to improve people or society better than we did in the past, and in fact we sometimes are worse at it than people in the past were. We know how to make more and better things, how to manipulate the forces of nature better, but we have not made the slightest scratch in poverty, because poverty is and always has been relative. We do not know how to make people happy, or how to make them cooperate and follow the law. Our societies are visibly getting worse, and have been for some time without improvement.
Because, as the ancients understood, actions still have consequences, and wisdom is better than foolishness. There is a difference between a good life and a bad life, the good life is better, and knowledge and wisdom help greatly in securing it. Beyond that, while the strategy has not changed, the tactics evolve as new technologies are developed, and one must learn them if one is to use them. We have to work, we have to build, we have to band together and cooperate, we have to secure justice, peace and plenty, defend ourselves and build a world for our progeny. The exact details of how we do these things change over time, and the new methods must be mastered. The core nature of these things does not change over time, but it also must be learned, and that learning requires study and hard effort.
Learning things will make our lives better in a number of ways. None of those ways involve any change to the nature of the human condition. Our victories will be sweet, our losses bitter, we will love and hate, build and destroy, grow, age and die.
I am familiar with many, many claims to this effect. And then I watch rationalists discuss, for an example, ways to get the benefits of religion without the religion, something they've been trying to do for centuries without success. Or I see them claiming to have revolutionized the ordering of sexual relations, or to have developed a superior theory of government, or economics, or political organization, or education, or any of a dozen other things that should logically follow from actual, durable insights into why our minds and bodies are the way they are... And these reliably fail, as they always have and always will. Efforts to operationalize the sort of knowledge you're claiming exists have not been rare, nor lacking in resources or commitment. Some of them fail gracefully. Most of them unleash some form of industrial-scale horror. Take the satanic abuse panic for example, or the destruction of Detroit, for two obvious examples.
Modern surgery lets us heal what would have been crippling or lethal injuries, but they have not changed the core nature of what it means to be injured or crippled or killed. Planes have made travel hundreds of times easier, but they have not changed the core nature of travel. Firearms multiply the lethal power of a soldier, but they do not change the core nature of fighting or killing. In the same way, the fact that we can treat some forms of madness does not change the nature of madness itself.
It does not. At the dawn of writing, people fully understood the perspective you're alluding to here, and the additional detail has not added anything fundamental to that understanding. There were believers and atheists in 6000 BC, just as there are now. The purported insignificance of humans is not a novel insight of the modern era, nor a particularly useful one, nor one that is consistently applied. You can claim that we are insignificant, and yet you still hunger for justice and goodness, despite the insight you're claiming providing no basis for such a desire.
Naming is not explaining. The nature of sexual jealousy, coalition warfare, the primacy of family and all the rest of those hundreds of examples were well understood millennia ago. Evolutionary theory can provide an additional narrative purporting to explain such mechanisms, but I see no evidence that it explains or predicts them better than the explanations from previous millennia. That is to say, we cannot interact with any of these elements of human nature and the human experience better than our predecessors.
I am quite confident that the Kibbutzim believed that they were, in fact, basing their policies on the soundest possible principles scientific materialism could provide, among them their peerless command of evolutionary theory. Their mistake was obvious neither to them nor to their contemporaries; it is obvious to you only in hindsight. Likewise, the "science" of transgenderism is "obvious" to an apparent majority of American rational materialists now, despite the obvious pants-on-head insanity of the entire project. In another five decades, doubtless your grandkid will be telling my grandkid how a proper understanding of evolution would have made such mistakes impossible.
The knowledge available to us is bounded, so additional millennia of records do not help. The history that we have over those additional thousands of years confirms in excruciating detail that humans do not change, and neither do the problems that we face. The basic nature of our existence is immutable, and does not vary between vastly different times and places. From the ancient Hittites to modern New Yorkers, humans will inevitably human.
This shouldn't even be surprising. We each have a mind, scientific materialist claims to the contrary notwithstanding, and those minds are fundamentally closed to each other, scientific materialist claims to the contrary again notwithstanding. The human lifespan is limited. The ability to learn is sharply constrained, as is the ability to communicate what has been learned. And even when the data is available, the core of the problem, the nature and inclinations of one's own Will, is (thankfully!) not one amenable to engineered solutions.
The success of the US does not appear to derive from its system of government, but rather from the virtues of its founding population and the unusually fortunate position that population found itself in. As virtues and relative fortune fade, the system observably collapses. A virtuous people and an absurd, absolutely unprecedented abundance of land and natural resources can make nearly any system work well. As it is, America does not look to be on track to outperform far less sophisticated systems such as imperial Rome in the long run.
Hell I'd argue they were better at treating madness back then. Seeing it as a demon and casting it out probably works better than the bullshit psychiatrists get up to.
God damnit man, you are SO BASED! Can you write a book on this topic please? I would read every word.
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It's one thing to make arguments that the enlightenment doesn't deserve any credit for the industrial revolution, but this is straightforwardly false. We have vastly less of all of those things per capita.
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It appears to me that if you want to state philosophy ran its course at Ancient Greeks, and specifically at Ancient Greeks, the burden of proof is on you and not on someone who assumes the contrary - that since then, someone wrote better things, or even the same things but better.
I would be happy to assume the burden of proof, though I confess I'm not sure how exactly proving my point is supposed to work. Is it enough to simply take the above and recast it as assertive rather than interrogatory? Otherwise, how am I supposed to prove a negative?
I am aware of no way in which the core elements of the human experience have changed at any point since the invention of writing. The themes contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh remain perfectly salient to the modern human experience.
I am aware of no empirical knowledge acquired since the invention of writing that has provided novel answers to the basic questions of human existence.
I am aware of no progress in human thought since the invention of writing. It does not seem plausible to me that such progress exists, or even that "progress" in this sense is conceptually coherent.
I think that assertions to the contrary are artifacts of deeply irrational social consensus, and dissolve if subjected to even a cursory examination.
Obsolescence should not be a mystery. I know exactly why black-powder muskets are obsolete: they're relatively inaccurate, weak, unreliable, delicate, and slow to reload relative to a modern autoloading cartridge firearm. Detailing further specifics of their obsolescence and even edge-cases where they retain value is a trivial exercise. If the ancient philosophy of the Greeks is similarly obsolete, it should be similarly easy to lay out how and why. Oddly, no one ever does so when such obsolescence is asserted.
Come on dude, this is straightforwardly false.
The hierarchy of physical explanation that takes us from the mathematics, the standard model, and general relativity all the way to biology, evolution, and the history of the universe provides a compelling mechanistic explanation for most of the human experience in a way that was entirely absent before writing. You can trace most anything all the way back to the laws of physics and observed history if you try hard enough. An ancient man might wonder - why do foxes have fur? God's will - sure is mysterious, right? A smart modern says: Because foxes are mammals, meaning the genera descend from a population that diverged from other mammals sometime in the past, keeping most of their characteristics, one of which is body hair to (among other things) regulate temperature, which evolved by a long series of random mutation (including things like duplication, not just point mutations) in an ancestor of mammals that reused an existing protein (keratin) and extruded it in filaments from specialized organs, hair follicles, in skin.
This can provide strong partial answers to a ton of fundamental questions. Why, physically, are we here? What was here before us? Why is there war? Why is there suffering?
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Please write a book. I'm begging you.
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