the illusion of modern knowledge

Old News

I feel many currently experience a deep disconnect with the past. We have the silly idea of being “modern”. I got old news for you: every civilisation throughout history thought they were modern.

Nobody walks around thinking: “Ah yes, I live in the stupid era before the real people arrive.” Every time period thinks it is the present, because it is. Every culture thinks its rules make sense, because it was raised inside them. Every City thinks its own streets are the obvious ones.

I hate how we laugh about the European Middle Ages, as if the people living back then were dirty pest-ridden imbeciles who blindly obeyed the church. Or how we laugh at pagan tribes with their funny druids. Or the classic funny joke about our prehistoric ancestors in the caves, grunting at rocks and accidentally inventing everything we still depend on.

We have an inherent advantage over those people because we have profited from all their amassed knowledge. All that we have now would not have been ours without those old “imbeciles”. We are standing on a mountain of dead people’s solutions and pretending we climbed it alone.

Inherited Knowledge

I once heard about the levels of declining intelligence across time. Sorry, forgot the source. Maybe Google it.

But when you think about it, the idea makes sense if you define intelligence differently. I do not mean intelligence as “modern IQ test score” or “can solve abstract pattern under fluorescent lights while mildly stressed”. I mean intelligence as skills for survival and life fulfilment with available tools. More modern street smart than modern exam smart.

The more facts we inherit from older discoveries, the less we need to think of new solutions to common problems. The problem is solved before we arrive. Fire exists. Wheels exist. Glass exists. Agriculture exists. Writing exists. Maps exist. Plumbing exists. Antibiotics exist. Electricity exists. The internet exists. We wake up inside layers of solved problems and then start feeling superior to the people who solved them.

This creates the Illusion of Modern Knowledge: the feeling that because our society knows something, we personally understand it.

We have more knowledge available than any civilisation before us, but that does not mean we know more. It means we can access more. That difference matters.

The Great Oracle

We become used to “knowing it”. We become used to having experts in all kinds of domains. We become used to consulting the internet as the great oracle. Ask the glowing rectangle and the glowing rectangle shall answer.

This is amazing. I am not pretending otherwise. The internet is one of the strangest miracles our species ever built. You can learn ancient history, chemistry, knot-tying, mushroom identification, Latin insults, bread making, and why your washing machine is screaming at 2 a.m. Wonderful.

But access is not wisdom. Having experts is not the same as understanding their craft. Being able to search something is not the same as carrying it in your body. We know how to use knowledge that we could not rebuild if the system disappeared tomorrow.

Most of us use antibiotics but could not make them. We eat bread but cannot grow wheat, mill grain, or build an oven. We live in houses but could not build one. We use GPS but cannot navigate by stars. We use electricity but cannot explain the grid. We carry smartphones more powerful than old empires and cannot repair the little cursed glass brick when it breaks.

This does not make us stupid. It makes us specialised, dependent, and very confident in a way that might be funny if it were not also a bit dangerous.

Examples of the Illusion

Take modern medicine. Modern medicine is powerful. Surgery, vaccines, antibiotics, imaging, anaesthesia, trauma care, childbirth safety — these are not small things. I am not here to LARP as a medieval peasant rubbing herbs on a broken femur while chanting at a suspicious goat.

But modern medicine is not perfect. Very far from it. Many diseases are still not cured. Sometimes we know what happens and have a good treatment. Sometimes we kind of know what happens and have a drug that kind of works. Sometimes we manage symptoms, reduce inflammation, suppress immune response, control pain, and hope the body or the next test reveals the plot.

Better than medieval leeches, yes. Though, annoying plot twist, leeches still have real medicinal uses. The past keeps refusing to be as stupid as we want it to be.

Or imagine having to build a telescope. Pretty old-fashioned thing, who uses telescopes anymore? Anyway, nowadays you go online, find step-by-step instructions, order lenses, order tubes, order little screws from a warehouse where a tired worker packed them under fluorescent misery, and boom: you are Galileo with next-day delivery.

But how would you have done that in 1600 AD? Where do you even begin? How do you come to think of inventing a telescope if no one has ever seen one before? Googling a telescope is not the same intelligence as inventing one in a world where no one has ever looked through glass that way.

Or go back further, even more primal. You go camping and want to make a bonfire. Many options today, right? Matches, lighters, camping gas, little fire starters, flamethrowers, etc. Now remove all those options. Cave people had no flamethrowers :(

They had rocks. Fire rocks. Could you have gotten the barbecue party started back then?

Making fire feels primitive only because someone already did the thinking for us.

C’est la vie and it ain’t easy

Another thing we have completely forgotten is how fucking harsh Life is.

People who come into contact with serious disease often break through the Illusion of Modern Knowledge. Suddenly the great machine does not have the answer. Suddenly the doctor says, in more polished language: “We do not know how to treat you. You gon’ die.”

This is traumatic in a society where death feels like something that should never have to happen. One guy from my uni actually thought of ageing as a disease he wanted to cure. Wanting healthier ageing is reasonable. Pretending death is merely a technical bug is something else.

Oh, the human folly of immortality! dramatic sigh

Back in the past, death and severe injury were much more common. Ate the wrong berries? Dead. Caught in a random war for some random reason? Dead. Falsely blamed of stealing something? Scoop out that eye. Broke ya leg? Limpy for life. There was no infinite net to always catch you, and there still ain’t.

Travelling to the next village was a happy life memory. Getting through childbirth was near miraculous. Surviving a harsh winter was like defying the gods. Winning a war was a divine experience. A tooth infection could become a death sentence. A bad harvest could decide the fate of a family. A small cut could become a serious problem because bacteria do not care about your plans.

Many of us in the decadent West are protected from ancient forms of hardship, while drowning in newer, quieter ones. I do not want to erase poverty, disability, loneliness, domestic violence, chronic illness, addiction, homelessness, or the many modern hells people still go through. But compared to most of human history, many of us live inside a softened world and then forget that it is softened.

We lost a certain contact with danger. And when danger fades from daily life, happiness becomes strange. How to keep a hold of happiness if there is no danger of it ever fading?

Maybe this is why modern people invent so many invisible emergencies. Status emergencies. Career emergencies. Notification emergencies. The wolves left the forest, so we became wolves to ourselves.

The Roman Exception

Strangely, there is one time period that seems generally exempt from the common contempt described earlier: the Roman Empire.

I think it has to do with the fact that Rome projects a very manly image: war, gladiators, legions, arenas, eagles, marble men with serious faces, soldiers marching in sandals as if that is not already funny.

It is safe to say that a very specific kind of heterosexual male imagination has a predilection for this time period. I also think most of them are severely deluded as to how life looked back then.

Pretty much everything these gents are against today was common in Ancient Rome. If we transpose their current social status into that time, many of them would likely have been slaves, low-level soldiers, farmers, or all three at once. Not sure they would enjoy being openly exploited while someone in a villa debates virtue over expensive fish sauce.

Also, the idea that the Romans were simply brutish hypermasculine conquerors is backwards. Yes, Rome was brutal. Yes, Rome conquered. Yes, Rome loved power. Obviously. But elite Roman culture also adored rhetoric, poetry, law, theatre drama, bathhouse gossip, luxury, religious ritual, omens, magic, political theatre, and extremely extra emotional displays.

Some emperors loved men, and one placed statues of his lost male lover across the empire out of grief. Not gay in the modern identity-tax-form sense, relax. But definitely not the clean little hypermasculine statue some modern men are imagining.

Ancient Rome was kinda gay and witchy, like me lol.

They revered penis gods, and gladiator sweat made them hard. There were amulets, curses, gods everywhere, household spirits, sacred chickens, public baths, erotic art, foreign cults, slaves, philosophers, poets, and extremely dramatic rich people. Muscles mattered, yes. But elite Romans valued the mind perhaps even more than muscles.

So if your fantasy of Rome is just legions and beard oil, I have old news again: history is not your gym poster.

The Future Will Laugh Too

I could name a few things that are super normal today and will probably seem completely barbaric and atrocious to our descendants.

Factory farming. Letting children grow up inside algorithmic attention machines. Treating loneliness as personal failure instead of public decay. Building concrete cities without shade, insects, birds, water, or the smell of soil. Making people work meaningless jobs until their bodies collapse, then calling them unproductive. Normalised cosmetic shame. Cutting infant bodies for tradition. Letting old people die in institutional loneliness. Destroying ecosystems for quarterly profit. Forcing people to prove poverty before helping them.

The future will laugh at us too, if there is still enough future left to laugh.

This is why laughing at the past too easily is dangerous. It gives us moral anesthesia. We point at medieval punishments, cave people, pagan rituals, Roman bloodsport, old medicine, and religious superstition, and we think: “How could they?”

Then we go back to living inside our own normal barbarisms.

What Can You Do With This?

If you want a good future, it is smart to learn from those past “imbeciles”. We are still trapped in many of the same spirals as them: power, fear, hunger, sex, status, war, disease, pride, family, death, myth, technology, inequality, beauty, cruelty, Love, and the endless human talent for making the same mistake in a fresh outfit.

Wanna be really free? Learn history. And not just about the Roman army or the Viking beard aesthetic. Learn how people ate, loved, suffered, built, worshipped, farmed, healed, punished, migrated, traded, lied, survived, and explained the sky to themselves.

History broadens your mind because it breaks the illusion that your present is the only possible shape of Life. It shows you that humans have lived in many worlds before this one, and some of those worlds were horrific, some beautiful, most both at the same time.

For Timeseers, it is imperative to learn about history. How else will you build the broad cognitive model necessary for Timesight? If you do not know history, every old pattern looks like a new crisis.

This is not a philosophical or academic essay. It lacks nuance, yes. But the core is defensible. I want to make a point without having to write a long book nobody would read anyway.

Modernity is useful. Knowledge is precious. Science is beautiful. Experts are necessary. The internet is a miracle. But do not mistake inherited access for personal wisdom.

The past was not stupid.

It was human.

And so are we.