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>"Our times are different" thrown around without care is a very widespread cognitive error. Absolutely right. The Book of Ecclesiastes talks about this at grea

• michaelmrose 7y ago
  If we were on the decline since Homer we would already be living in caves grunting at each other. Perhaps what is being lamented is that the successful found their offspring lesser not just because the properties that made themselves notable weren't heritable that they ultimately arose from circumstances they naturally strove to prevent. If adversity results in 70% dead or broken, 20% damaged, and 10% triumphant what survivor of adversity gambles with his loved ones. The weaker children of better men then aren't an example of universal decline but rather the result of softer situations.
  • xamuel 7y ago
    Caves would be a step up from tent cities, and we grunt at each other these days in 140 characters or less--even our kings! People follow their GPS systems off of bridges into lakes, our ancestors could navigate by the stars. Our bards earn their fame via marketing, and sing their songs using autotune, the bards of old memorized huge corpuses and sang them live. Our ancestors built the Great Wall of China, the U.S. struggles to build the Great Chain-Link Fence. Our academics hack p-values and they publish their work behind for-profit paywalls. When Archimedes discovered how to measure volumes of irregular objects, he ran naked through the streets shouting "Eureka!" When was the last time anyone at the Large Hadron Collider did that? Our self-help books are generally not worth the paper they're written on. They're written by charlatans and marketed by professional marketers. None of them will be remembered fifty years from now. Ancient self-help books like the Gospels, the Tao Te Ching, the Proverbs of Solomon, these stand the test of time and help countless people every day. They are timeless and evergreen. They'll continue helping people a thousand years from now. "So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet: 'I will open My mouth in parables; I will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world.'" ~Saint Matthew, quoting a Psalm which was already ancient in Jesus's time
    • michaelmrose 7y ago
      You are wrong on nearly every point. - Most of us aren't living in tent cities. - We are conversing in this thread in more than 140 characters per response - Trump isn't our king. - I a poor person have more really good music on my hard drive then the average person would have been privileged to hear in their lifetime. Most of everything has always been crap but digital copying and cheap gear makes it possible to filter more gems from the dross than you can probably listen to. It has always been fashionable to compare whatever some consider the best of the last several decades to the last several months, ignore the nature of the comparison and bemoan modern music. - We struggle to build a great wall of America because its a stupid measure to appease racists who think the brown people are coming for their country. - To create and distribute the written word has never been cheaper. Imagine if you and I had to write hundreds of letters to all of the readers who have chanced across this thread!? To compare your preferred edition of the Christian bible solely to crappy self help books and ignore all the really good works out there is either ignorant or deceptive. - Academia has never been pure. It's never been free of ignorance, bias, pride, liars, asshats of all stripes, outright stupidity. Science is the merely a method to gradually build upon existing human knowledge despite human foibles. You believe your religion and its wisdom eternal only because you lack perspective. If the human race lasts thousands of years it will likely little resemble we poorer cousins as ill equipped as a 3 year old is to predict adulthood. Open your eyes! I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
      • xamuel 7y ago
        Nice quote. I love the double-meaning in that poem. "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair", intended by Ozymandias to mean "despair because you are so much weaker", but the double-meaning is "despair because my fall reveals how all human things decay". Look upon my great scientific works, my great technological strides, my space stations and satellites, ye Mighty, and despair! We could keep talking past each other. Instead, let me short-circuit that and hand you the victory. All you need to reveal what a child and a fool I am is to recite my own Bible back at me: "Do not say, 'Why were the old days better than these?' For it is unwise of you to ask about this." (Ecclesiastes 7:10)