The Myth of Ancient Wisdom

"Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the past?" Ralph Waldo Emerson

Human tendency to adore ancient wisdom as sacrosanct often comes up as innocuous attempts to idealise the past as pristine and wholesome when compared to contemporary life. One often hears people authoritatively declaring that science is skin-deep while wisdom bequeathed to us by our ancient traditions is far richer than what science and technology and modernity have bestowed us. The best way to overcome the problems wrought us by scientific advances, says the apologist of ancient wisdom, is to reconnect ourseves with our traditions and traditional knowledge which science has sidelined in its march to enforce its hegemony of rationality.

The portrayal of science as just one way of understanding the reality and its corollary argument that there are multiple ways of understanding it often gain credence in social circles. Such a depiction of science is based on the argument that the ancient wisdom that represents different modes of understanding is no less important than the rational way of understanding that makes science what it is. It is well said, except that it is not true. Let us see why.

The fetishism of ancient wisdom runs deep even in the minds of people who are otherwise so passionate about their dependence on gadgets that science and technology has produced. In everyday life we can't even imagine what life would have been, had there been no science and technology. But many of us have no problem rubbishing science and technology for all the wrong reasons. Their criticism of science stems from a wrong idea that science is supposed or claims to know everything.

If you criticise science for not knowing everything, you are barking up the wrong tree, because science has never claimed that it knows everything. It is true to say that science does not know everything, but it is equally true that science has made us know many things which we did not know in the past. Calling science skin-deep is just a rhetorical exercise because science is not known to have ever claimed that it can or does know everything. Knowing everything is not the business of science. Science is not a religious dogma that claims to know everything.

The love of ancient wisdom and suspicion of science stem from the general human inclination to show fascination towards the unknown. Science is always sought to be confronted by the question of the unknown just to make it seem helpless and powerless while trying to unravel the unknown even as science has unravelled many unknown phenomena and continues to do so. Since scientists are generally not polemicists, the vociferous pseudo-scientific arguments built on the idea of the unknown always seem to receive high prominence.

Is ancient wisdom worth our paying serious attention to? Let us face the facts. Very little was known in ancient times about our universe or human anatomy or anything that was very useful for the mankind. It was scientists who unravelled the unknown and unknowable mysteries that defined people's understanding of life and universe in the ancient times. If ancient wisdom is to be taken as a sacred truth, we will still be living on a flat earth, burning witches for our real and imagined problems, practising blood-letting to cure our diseases and happy with an average life expectancy of 40.

Fifty million people died of the Spanish flu at the end of the World War II. Smallpox is believed to have killed half a billion during the 20 th century alone. In the 20th century, tuberculosis killed an estimated 100 million people. If we were still practising ancient healing methods that are part of what we call ancient wisdom, millions of people would still be dying of diseases caused by deadly viruses and bacteria. Discovery of penicillin, and not the folklore ancient wisdom, saved from death or amputations tens of thousands of soldiers with infected wounds during the World War II.

Giving too much importance to tradition and culture that are integral to the idea of ancient wisdom is a futile exercise. We have to look at the present problems as challenges that can be solved by applying our knowledge based on rational inquiry and empirical experiments, and not by what we have been bestowed by our forefathers. Don't think that ancient wisdom is a key to understanding all or any of our contemporary problems. The only key to unlock the mysteries and the unknown is the rational inquiry and experiments which have made our life easier, happier and more livable than what life was in a hunter-gatherer society.