It was science back then, it is science now. Using technologies at the time. 2000 years from now, some people will look at our era as barbarian and unscientific.
Well, the fun thing is to look at what we do know and wonder what horrible stuff people will see that should have been more obvious to us in the present day.
You seem to be advocating the meme of old wives tales. The idea that things back in the past were very knowledgeable, and that all of modern society with their modern methods aren't nearly as good as ancient traditional folk tales. That's silly, the scientific method, empiricalism, and modern material science has lots to teach traditionalists.
I wouldn't really call it the "wisdom" of the era. It's much more defined by the lack of wisdom than by its presence, meaning we do a whole lot of short-term work on confirming biases and antagonizing and only on larger time-scales do we see the power of refinements to the scientific method. "Current" science for any value of "current" is majorly fraught with bias and vast divergences, and time puts a low-pass filter on the concepts which become over {years, decades, centuries} cemented as "truths". And thankfully, even on long timescales there are people willing to put in the work to challenge assumptions and refine the scientific method so that we, as a civilization, strive for improvement in spite of/against our prejudices.
In today's age we do still acknowledge and notice differences which need to be accounted for, and correlate with skin color or whatever people call "race"[0]. This isn't racism, because racism is scientifically unsound, because racism is not a science or an academic field, it's a prejudice associated with beliefs. Science has been done by human beings and human beings carry prejudice, but science itself doesn't. What we see nowadays is an increase in useful acknowledgement of differences (useful in the sense that if we are blind to these differences we will negatively impact people, for example by disregarding genetic differences between people and treating them sub-optimally[1].
Whatever bullshit was sold as being the difference between whites and blacks wasn't scientific as much as it was the expression of prejudice made to sound scientific. Phrenology did the same with whoever society wanted to see as criminals (unsurprisingly, that would usually be a mix of the non-whites-of-the-time, the poor and the disenfranchised). On top of legitimizing prejudice, it also prevented doing actual work to help everyone equally.
There's no reality where we'll equate racism as the prejudice it is, with gender studies as the current attempt our world is making at understanding genders. There might however be many high-frequency oscillations in papers published today that will be filtered out by the field or fields benefiting from acknowledging differences and features that will stand the test of time and coming out of the current field of gender studies. You might say that many current claims around the emerging field will be looked at with distance and judged implausible, but certainly the idea of incorporating an understanding of genders and their differences is not something that in its entirety will be looked at as "implausible and frowned upon".
Because racism is prejudice and beliefs, and gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field of study.
edit: I also realize now that you would have had a slightly better claim if you had put phrenology where you put racism - with the difference that phrenology was never really more than a pseudo-scientific extrapolation departing from science to advance oppression of others whereas gender studies constantly faces scrutiny to reinforce scientific claims and is a proponent of empathy. Pretty diametrically opposed goals and methods, ultimately.
The things that you listed are scientific achievements. What I pointed out was human behavior, power struggles etc. These are two different things.
A Thousand years ago, various groups of humans were trying to control other groups of humans, with stronger groups setting rules and weaker groups following them. Today we're doing the same. A Thousand years from now, we'll likely be doing the same.
100 years later, we're rediscovering what we already knew. Common story in social sciences. Coming up next, Jews are smarter than blacks. Oh no, not yet! It's still taboo to even think that! But maybe in a few decades, the overton window will shift and researchers will allow themselves to study that honestly.
It’s funny to see someone, after realizing that humans in the past are just as intelligent as the ones today, interpret all past human beliefs through his own worldview rather than seriously considering that his worldview may be the one that is flawed rather than the most intelligent humans of the past. Believing that people in pre industrial societies had post industrial beliefs and were only pretending flies in the face of mountains of evidence both historical and anthropological.
It's a line of thought I frequently have when trying to think critically about many accepted practices in todays society.
It usually comes in the form of asking myself "Is this practice the kind society is going to laugh about in a 100 years?" or me imagining someone saying "Haha I can't believe this is what they did in 2016! Man were they dumb".
Most prominent non-tech example in these times for me is the meat industry.
I sometimes feel bad for some of these forward-thinking people from the past (relative to our time) that we can't share with them what we now know. Surely they would be thrilled to learn what has been discovered since their death. I'm sure future humans will feel the same about us and our absurd theories and ideas.
There is no backref, but the Magic Smoke¹ article to this one.
I've always quite liked both topics as seemingly reasonable explanations for observed behaviour, there is something both quaint and fun about them from a modern eye.
I saw a talk at the RIGB a few years ago where the speaker took a funny walk through things that had been pushed there over the centuries, and how our understanding has changed since. It was hugely entertaining, and very informative on the process of progress. [secretly hoping someone finds a recording and posts a link]
It's fun to think about what society would be like if all those "kids these days" denigrations, which are thousands of years old, were objectively true. The ancient greeks must have had secret fusion reactors and AGI that our blithering idiot archaeologists have yet to uncover. Our hypersonic aircraft are no comparison to the sumerians' near-lightspeed craft. Humanity has been on a downhill trajectory since the phoenicians figured out gravity field manipulation. Secrets lost to time along with our IQ points.
For people living 500 years ago, modern society would be a singularity. Much of the things we can do with technological would be considered magic or witchcraft. Our scientific understanding has revised our picture of the world in pretty radical ways.
That's an implication a lot of people will do a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid because it means you can't just ignore the misadventures of various societies throughout history by saying "we're smarter now" or something like that.
And yet 80-year-old academic theory holds up very well. Seems many neglected to study the basics, in favour of parroting whatever the ruling class wanted for self-interested reasons.
That's an easy and lazy characterization. Sure, there have been a lot of dumb theories, but there are plenty today as well (anti-vaxxers, for example). But folks 3500 years ago (or 100,000) were just as smart as the folks today, they just lacked a lot of tools we have. But some of their observations are apposite.
Just take your example: "Thousands years of experience, and yet medical practitioners wouldn't wash their hands less than two centuries ago." Well, I had some pretty religiously hardcore relatives. My Mum's uncle, who died at 95 in 1985 was such a hardcore brahmin that if the shadow of a lower caste person fell on his food it was discarded (given away actually). I found that enormously offensive, but at the same time I am fascinated that my longest-lived relatives were the ones who preserved ancient cleanliness rituals. The meat-eating, alcohol drinking ones all had heart attacks in their 60s.
Standard practice if you were sick (and upper class) in ancient Persia: have your servants bring you out into the street where you would ask folks if they'd ever seen those symptoms and what they did. And now "evidence based medicine" is a modern revolution?
Likewise, some of the Greek scholars had brain-damaged ideas, and some had good ideas that are irrelevant these days (like estimates of the diameter of the earth or the use of zero). But they also had good observations on life and human nature. And the opportunity for longitudinal observation.
I used to mourn that only 7 of Sophocles' 120 plays survived, but then I figured that they were probably the best 7. I suspect a lot of ancient crap has been discarded, and the density of cleverness per unit work is higher than the contemporary corpus. After all, nobody watches 99% of the movies from the 70s, just the good ones. Why shouldn't this be true from ancient thinking, when you have had so many years to winnow it down?
I wonder what our descendants will be laughing about when looking back at 21st century?
reply