The Arrogance of Our Age

One of my wife’s pet peeves, an extremely valid one too, is me. The other is how TV shows on stations like the Discovery Channel and the History Channel portray ancient civilizations as being made up of morons who were lucky enough to just stumble on the process of building an aqueduct.

It’s hard to remember that 35 years ago computers weren’t as common place as they are now. That made the world bigger. If we wanted to know what people in Europe were doing (and why wouldn’t we, because Europe is where its @) we had to wait for someone who spent 20 years saving their money so that they could see cousin Olaski on his death bed to come back home and tell us what they’d seen (besides cousin Olaski on his death bed *shiver*).

But the invention of the computer seems to have given us, as a society, the misperception that if we were to be transported back in time any culture we would encounter would look upon us as gods. We could toss them a coke bottle, or boot up our lap top, and they would fall to their knees and worship us.

I don’t think this is the case.

I read a lot of fantasy novels and one of the main themes of this type of literature is the unlikely hero; a man or woman plucked from their own time and transported to another far more brutal time; so say you or I were transported back into the time/location of the ancient Mayans; I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t look at me as a god. A sacrifice for a god maybe.

We seem to have evolved a certain arrogance in this age. We feel that we’ve conquered the world around us, and I guess in a way we have – we’ve certainly beaten it into submission; therefore any and all generations that came before us were inferior.

But I bet they all thought that way too.

The thing about Ages – at least any age with humans in it – is that they have humans in them. Sometimes when you throw a lot of humans together strengths can overcome flaws; more often than not I think, and I am a humanistic pessimist, what happens is those flaws are magnified. Hence societies fall. You can bet the warriors of the bronze age thought they were pretty skookum until the first guy got his hands on an iron weapon of some sort and his weapon went through their armour like a hot knife through blubber.

So here we sit in the 20… somethingth century thinking that we’re the evolution of society – it maybe this arrogance that keeps us from developing as a culture. While technologically we increase our understanding of the smaller pieces of the world, we ignore the larger parts of it. Arts and culture go by the way side in the pursuit “the next big breakthrough”; we better our lives, but we do not better ourselves.

Those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them, but those who neglect the triumphs of the past are doomed to forget them and thus we spend wasted years relearning things that previous civilizations have already known. Somewhere there’s a scientist with a government grant to reinvent the wheel.