Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Ancient Wisdom: A Rant

WOAH WHAT THE BLOG IS BACK AGAIN
Okay, first, a bit of news: I'm informally disowning everything on this blog before "Dadaist Baseball," sort-of-except the posts about my life, maybe-except my Twilight rant, and especially "Irreligion."
Second, this blog post is essentially an introduction to a more specific point that I will be making soon.
Finally, I have a rant for you today, this time on the idea of "ancient wisdom."
I'm sure most of you have heard something come recommended because it is the "wisdom of the ancients" or something like that. The thinking seems to go like this: older people who are alive today generally tend to be wiser than younger people who are alive today, so older people who aren't alive today - i.e. the aforementioned "ancients" - must be way wiser than young people alive today!
Those of you who have spotted the problem with this logic already, give yourselves a pat on the back.
The problem with this argument is that the older people who are alive today have accumulated experiences of their own lives, plus accumulated knowledge of all the time that humanity has been alive as a sentient species (insert joke about how old people are all clueless Luddites who aren't likely to draw on this knowledge, blah blah blah). The ancients had all the accumulated knowledge of living their lives, but this is not as good as that of people today for two reasons: one, the vast majority of dead people have lived in a profoundly different culture from today's, and I would posit that all of the people who are cited as dispensing the "wisdom of the ancients" have; and two, everyone who dispenses ancient wisdom has access to less information accumulated by society than we do today.
You can look at literally any aspect of first-world human life today for confirmation of the fact that a more or less enlightened society tends to get better at things the longer that it exists, but for some reason we seem to persist in the belief that this doesn't apply to Deep Wisdom. If you take issue with the idea that knowledge can't accumulate about the kinds of "metaphysical" things that Deep Wisdom likes to talk about - nature of consciousness, nature of intelligence, nature of the universe - well, I would point you in the direction of quantum physics, evolutionary psychology, and rationality in general. All of which didn't exist or were in profoundly worse states around the time the wisdom of the ancients was being doled out. (And yes, I realize it wasn't the wisdom of the ancients then. I'm making a point here.)
So what do you do with this new information? Well, I'll give you some general advice (as in, advice to actually apply, in situations in your life, including but not limited to receiving the wisdom of the ancients) that tends to help: when presented with advice, don't think too much about the source of the advice if the reasoning behind it is in your grasp. Question authority, which gets the same kind of worship as the wisdom of the ancients (and really deserves its own blog posts). And I encourage you to actually think about advice you are given - including this advice - rather than accepting it or rejecting it based on whether or not it is modern. That's the same problem in a different guise.
Up next: applying this advice to English class, an exploration of authority-worship, and a discussion of the situation in Egypt, not necessarily in that order.

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