Are We Better Than Our Ancestors?

Are we better (not just better off) than our ancestors? I believe it is delusional to think so. The record of history to date says no. That we are wiser, nobler, gentler, smarter people than our ancestors is hard to maintain, given recent history. The greatest delusion may be that human consciousness evolves from an inferior to a superior state, over time, which is gospel among progressives. But does human consciousness improve, given enough time, or does it vary in health from age to age?

At a hypothetical round table discussion of prominent men and women from different epochs, a format that was used by Steve Allen in a old PBS television series called Meeting of Minds, the chips would fly over the notion that modern people are superior to “historical people,” an assumption based more on hubris than on reality.

In the Middle Ages, Europeans built cathedrals that drop the jaws of architects today, and during the Renaissance, they enhanced town centers with breathtaking sculptures inspired by the wonders of antiquity — they invested excellence into the arts and sciences. The idea that reaching for things higher and beyond themselves was “backward” is comical. Then, as ever, thoughtful people deemed such activity essential to the flow of consciousness through the generations, feeding the growth of civilization.

In the almost three hundred years preceding our own, John Adams scoured the world, while diligently pursuing his regular work, for many different models of government to study, as preparation for designing the best government for America. Peter Roget pored over many thousands of words to arrange them into a Thesaurus, without the aid of a computer.

With the exception of science, technology, and the performing arts, there appears to be a devolution in the quality of human thought and activity. Although true science and technology move ever forward in quality, can we say with a straight face that the same holds for progress in human quality?

The alleged raising of the bar of human consciousness and quality of life is contradicted by the current activity of world elites working feverishly to establish a world inhabited with humanoid substitutes for real people.  What part of “better humans” might that be?

But more seriously, how about other forms of progress that supposedly set us above our forebears? For example: longer life expectancies; computers, smartphones,  and countless other digital devices for convenience’s sake; we don’t routinely club one another (yet) over food, or attack people we don’t like without incurring punitive damages and/or incarceration; women have managed to build legal shields against vile men; feelings of inferiority are alleviated with counseling and drugs . . . the list goes on.

Some questions are in order regarding such evidence of progress. Regarding living longer — is it not simply existing longer? As for the long list of other improvements, in what vital ways have our gadgets made us better humans? What happens when legal measures against wrongdoing are abused and turned against the innocent? What kind of progress is it that daily “life” leads many to drugs, therapy, insanity, suicide, or an early grave?

An honest comparison of our ancestors to ourselves, along any line of essentially human criteria, would indicate that our alleged “progress” consists in changes in manner, not in substance. In such areas as brutality, compassion, vengeance, love, hate — to cite a few — modern people are no different from people of past ages. Consider the masses suffering under current tyrants, or under the plague of child trafficking and abuse, before denouncing the suffering of the masses under tyrannical rulers of the past. What has really changed?

Can anyone seriously believe that the people of the 21st century are more virtuous than they were 100, 500, or 1,000 years ago? Or more compassionate? Or more forgiving? Or more self-reliant? Or smarter? (The last two can be tested by doing without one’s digital devices for a day or more.) Those who can really believe that people are generally better today than in the past — not just better off — are not completely awake or are absent from the real world. 

Turning the focus onto the related topic of “what makes humans better people,” I offer the following additional discussion.

The quest to improve humanity straddles two major, opposing beliefs. One is the belief that human beings improve through natural evolution. The other is the belief that human beings improve by way of guidance from their Creator. While the latter stance is biblical, the former has its bibles too. Here is one still followed.

Progressive intellectuals tend (à la John Locke empiricism) to look upon humans as “blank slates” (tabulae rasae) that nature “writes upon,” while intellectuals of equal acuity regard humans as incomplete and flawed beings that God “writes upon.” (The latter refer, of course, to the Word of God as manifest in biblical scripture.)

The choice, need it be said, has a direct and real bearing on human progress. Those who have dropped God from their calculations continue to argue that in order for humans to improve, the retrograde ways of the past must be terminated and replaced with a new order of human being, in a new order of existence, a world, it must be emphasized, without God. This “new world order” replacement for the existing world, touted for many decades, is already succeeding — in what? In turning the world upside-down, to use a phrase on almost every tongue.

The justification? Well, the “world of the past” relied on rules that are too rigid and that makes it “obsolete.” Elaboration of this stand remains ever-clouded in a rhetorical fog too thick to discern clearly. Oh, but the mandates are very clear.

So, even the Ten Commandments, for instance, are obsolete and must be rejected, something the current pope seems to be comfortable with, judging from his silence on the matter. He has in fact deemed much else from scripture excessively backward and rigid. Pope Francis apparently prefers to heed and affirm the objectives of U.N. leaders, Climate Change activists, World Economic Forum operatives, and other organizations that have no use for Christianity, than heed and affirm the teachings of Christ, the true calling of every Christian pastor. His stand is based on “a God of surprises.” The coincidence between the emerging insights from the “God of surprises” and the agenda of the organizations cited above takes the breath away. 

But how, it must be asked, do these “prophets of human progress” get around the rigidity of their vision of the world over any other?

Well that’s easy. Force über alles, is their “how” and that of tyrants in every age.