The 'Wisdom of the Ages'

This is part of a larger area I've been studying in the past few months (origins of political conflict) and is a definite work in progress. Consider it a few errant notes for your consideration.

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Twenty minutes of internet searching found the most reliable statistical analyses and guesswork concluding that there are between 6.85 and 10.5 billion Bibles in usable print. We can estimate that the Qur’an, Hadith, and Bhagavad Gita number in a significant fraction thereof. The Bible’s oldest book, that of Job, is a scribed story told between 2,000 and 1,400 B.C. The Gita was written around 150 B.C. and the Qur’an between 610 and 632 A.D. The great works of philosophy and politics are similarly ancient with Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Gautama Buddha, Zhuangzi, and Confucius all teaching 2,300 years ago and earlier. It has been said that the succeeding works in each established line have merely been commentaries on the original discourses. Why is it that we study and follow such old ideas?

 That question is laughable to some but highly relevant to others and one’s response is based on how one views history. The Progressive, as per his name, tends to see history as the story of progress to the ‘deimos’ or ‘divinely-appointed time:’ the here and now. The people in such a high story grow fundamentally better as the species goes on. A Progressive thinks knowledge and morality compound over time, especially when technology jumps to a more advanced level. With this understanding, the above books and authors should be rejected as outmoded, old fashioned, and to blame for the world’s problems.

As they never lived in an era of modern technology, we are far more suited to make judgments about the human existence as we know more of the secrets thereof. The ancients made assessments of humanity based only on the tiny number of people they came across in person; even then their interactions were distorted by manners and tiny vocabularies. How could they know that much about people when they never encountered a mass sociological study or networked with hundreds on the internet? Their conclusions should not be trusted, either, given their origination in mileu of sexism, racism, homophobia, class biases, castes, etc. The Progressive thus says we should flush out references to such ancient ideas from not only our educational systems, but our ‘society,’ as their makers were far more morally tainted and intellectually deficient than we are today. We can then proceed with ‘modern’ understandings of justice and fairness until we’ve built utopia! The small, nitpicked problem with this perspective is that it’s dead wrong in every way.

Most people view history as ‘didactic,’ as a teaching resource, with its characters combating flaws in their static human nature. People 2,300 or 4,000 or 16,000 years ago were just not that different from us. Their examples and experiences can tell us how to see and confront problems involving the same flaws in ourselves. Their thoughts on the deepest questions of life help us to see from new eyes. This description, though, is not entirely incompatible with the Progressive’s view.

Knowledge would thus compound over time and those who contain more of it –meaning those who are more educated- are the most advanced morally. They should thus lead and organize the rest of us in a sort of technocratic aristocracy. It’s spooky that the Progressive’s thinking stops here and all of their policies (from Obamacare to environmentalism to labor) follow the goals set by the academic elite, the methods acceptable to the academic elite, and direct enrichment/empowerment/employment of the academic elite. One can make a very detailed historical critique of this mentality and show well how immoral and stupid the ‘rule of the virtuous’ has been. The Progressive rejects it because, in his view, the educated have learned from those experiences and won’t screw it up this time (when they do, men like Obama and Carter blame the public for not being as subtle and sophisticated as them). The Progressive would have to check his ego if he had taken his thinking one more step, as most people do.

That step is considering the implications static human nature has on individuals’ experience. It is to say that, as human nature remains the same, a person’s experience also remains the same. Naturally this is not an economic judgment because not everyone acquires the skills to thatch a roof, churn butter, build a computer, or genetically modify a pear tree. It does imply that everyone, everywhere, pan-temporally is confronted with the same metaphysical questions and the same interpersonal situations. Everyone that has ever been has had the same capacity to answer the Book of Job’s question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” because they all operated entirely on relativism.

What you find to be “good” and “bad,” positive and negative is entirely based on what you have encountered and personalized in your experience. For example I’m currently out of milk. I have to drive my car for five minutes to the store and spend some insignificant fraction of my wealth to purchase a pasteurized, refrigerated, attractively-packaged gallon of 2%. I can’t help but see this as a burden. I’m behaviorally comparing my situation to my childhood, when my mother always kept milk in the refrigerator and I had no idea where it came from. In short I don’t have magic milk and I see that as a tolerably bad thing. Similarly, someone who had to raise their own cow and milk it themselves -having had someone else do it earlier in their lives- would see their situation in the same light of tolerably bad. Despite major differences in the quality and speed of access to the product, our attitude and the experience we take away is pretty much the same. Even if my milk had always been delivered for me, I’d still have to wait for it to get there, etc., and I’d be even more particular about the burden of pouring and tasting my milk. Perhaps I’d be turn my attention to its quality, whether it was grown with “hormones(!),” what the attitude (happy or sad) the cow had, etc.

Here are more examples of this equivalence (be sure to think from the appropriate cultural perspective):

-‘Safety-net’ advocates said a century ago that a federal government spending 4-7% of the national income can’t effectively help the poor. Today, ‘Occupy’ moonbats say with the same ferociousness that a federal government spending 53% of the national income can’t effectively help the poor.

-George Takei says that North Carolina’s decision to not pay gays for coupling is a “shame.” I’m sure that was the attitude of passive onlookers as their town’s stableboy was hanged for being in some way queer.

-The complacent attitude about Michelle’s vacations: “Well she is first lady” with a shrug. The attitude of those who carried Xerxes’ throne on their backs: “Well he is a god” without, of course, a shrug.

-Disapproval/defense of abortion today, disapproval/defense of drowning ‘unfit’ babies yesterday.

-Present disapproval of what we call 'public nudity,' the Puritans’ disapproval of women rolling up their sleeves for work.

-I’ll add more as complaints roll across my Facebook home page.

                I don’t mean to make the situations equal, I mean to equate the attitudes about different situations. From our own perspectives we view things as more severe/reasonable differently than others, especially our ancestors. A person’s attitudes about scope and scale are completely relative their past experiences alone, not the past experiences of the species. One may spend his whole life in the attempt to internalize the conditions of a single place at a single point in history, but no one can presume to speak for the broad experience of humanity. This is where the Progressive fails in his ideological hopes to remake the world. He overestimates his personal experience and actually believes his professors’ egotistical tangents about him being “elite.” This makes him quite a bit more unwise than the rest of us as he would reject potential gains from the 'wisdom of the ages.'
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Further reading on this subject:
-Thomas Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions" 
-Steve Pinker's "The Blank Slate" 
-Ralph Emerson's "History"