The month of January tends to be a time for reflecting on the previous year, in addition to planning for the year ahead. A lot can change in one year. In fact the world seems to be changing at an accelerating rate. The past century has seen the invention of digital computers, people walking on the moon, the rise of the Internet, cell phones for billions of people, medical care that is better than it has ever been, etc.[1] Younger generations are said to be advancing over the previous generations because of growing up with computers and mobile devices. With all our modern advances, past generations seem to intellectually pale in comparison. Is that really the case?
While the modern world seems full of advancements in science and technology, one thing that stands out about past generations is a stronger connection with the supernatural. They reportedly believed in all kinds of bizarre things like superstitions, ESP, magic, ghosts, curses, and other strange beliefs. Disney did not invent fairies, as profitable as they have been for that company. Nowadays, things like seances and fortune telling are more for entertainment instead of a paid service one would take seriously, like in the past. Why would anyone believe in these “silly” things? Were the people of past generations crazy? Delusional? They certainly seem different from us, based on this supernatural aspect alone.
Ironically, some people argue that our bodies haven’t changed from our distant ancestors as much as we would like to believe. Some decades ago, it was suggested that we should be mainly eating foods that were available in the paleolithic period.[2] Other people advocate traditional ethnic diets.[3] Both groups seem to reject modern convenient processed foods in favor of more natural forms. Why? It seems that we are not adapting quickly enough to modern foods to consider them totally healthy for us.
In terms of biology, if our bodies aren’t that different from our ancestors, then maybe our brains aren’t either. Granted today’s younger generations have the advantage of learning to use modern technology at a young age, there are people in their seventies and eighties who are just as capable of using such technology. Nor is the ability to achieve intellectual feats limited to modern times. History shows us plenty of important inventions and discoveries from past decades, centuries, and millennia. For example, research indicates that surgery inside the skull was successful a thousand years ago, and the start of the practice itself dates thousands of years earlier.[4]
But we seem to have so many more modern achievements. If we accept the possibility of them being nearly as intellectually capable as us, then what exactly did they do? Inventions and discoveries need to be considered in their proper contexts. For one thing, we now have many tools and techniques that were not available to past generations. That makes our modern advancements easier, which may make it seem like the past generations didn’t do as much. Also, maybe their accomplishments just didn’t get recorded as thoroughly. Today it is much easier to record and share information with others. We may think we are busier than past generations, but maybe we are simply not privy to all the things they got to think about.
And then there’s the weird stuff of past generations. For all their advancements, why did our ancestors even bother with such things as the supernatural? For the most part, that stuff seems silly to us now. I think there are a variety of reasons for that difference, such as the obvious differences between their level of science and technology and ours. In a sense, they may have been naive, compared to us. But also I think there’s a cultural difference. Without our modern technical vocabulary, of course some of their descriptions are going to sound strange to us. And when something needs explaining, just so it can be discussed and reasoned about, sometimes you have to make the best of what concepts you have available. I would like to know what useful knowledge can be derived from their supernatural “nonsense”.
It’s easy to picture people of past centuries as having less knowledge than us. While that may be true to some extent, I would also argue their knowledge was quite different from ours. They probably knew more than we realize. Then some of those stories of magic, witchcraft, magical beings, etc. may have more truth to them than we think. In the very least, such nonsense could be useful as anecdotal evidence of something, even if we don’t know what yet. In fact, they likely knew many things that we still don’t. I suspect we not only underestimate our similarities to people of the past, but also how much we could learn from past generations.
References
[1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world
[3] https://www.supermarketguru.com/articles/traditional-diets-combat-obesity-and-other-diseases/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3876527/
(c) Copyright 2020 by Mike Ferrell
Odd STEM 