Are The Ancients Wise?

No!

Lots of people seem to think that the ancients had some unique wisdom that we in the modern-day lack. Many people—I won’t name names, not even Curtis Yarvin’s—seem to think that the following is a valid inference rule: an old book says P therefore P. Now, for some people, this is excusable—if you’re a Catholic, for instance, you’re theologically committed to thinking that a bunch of statements made by old dead popes are infallible (they didn’t make them when they were dead, to be clear). But many seem to think that this is just generally a good way to reason about things—find out what a bunch of people thought about some subject 2,000 years and then grumble about our supposedly impoverished modern conception of that thing. Here are some statements that I found while searching Twitter for the words “modern” and “ancient” that should give you a sense of what I’m discussing:

Now, I’ll be happy to grant that if all else is equal, and the ancients believed something, that gives you some reason to believe it. Most things the ancients believed were true, but that’s just because we have so many random trivial beliefs, like that 1+1=2 and that swords are sharper than olives. But these people seem to generally think that when there’s a conflict between the moderns and ancients, we should side with the ancients.

I just have no idea why anyone would think that. I’ve previously criticized history of philosophy on the grounds that it weirdly fetishizes ancients who had nothing like our modern store of knowledge, and who frequently made crazy arguments like that virtuous people would be exactly 729 times happier than vicious people (the guy who made that argument isn’t some obscure ancient—his name is Socrates). This is crazy! We all know that virtuous people are no more than 155 times happier than vicious people.

Over time, we’ve learned new things. We’ve come to new conclusions about, for example, sexual ethics, less driven by disgust and more driven by aiming to enhance human welfare. Why in the world would anyone expect Aristotle or other random Greeks from thousands of years ago to have unique insights into whether particular arguments against a liberal sexual ethic succeed? Aristotle didn’t even get right that men and women have the same number of teeth! And he was way better at reasoning than most of the other ancients.

It’s not that the ancients never had anything useful to say. Of course, if one collects all the things anyone has ever said, some of the things said by people a long time ago will be true. But by and large, the ancients were just not good at getting true beliefs about philosophy or politics—which are the contexts in which these arguments are most often employed. This is why when doing math, we don’t take the fact that Newton said something to be a good reason to believe it. Newton of course got a lot right, but he was maybe the most talented mathematician in history and knows less than modern college students who have taken a few classes in calculus. Knowledge builds on other knowledge, so the people who we should expect to be closest to truth are the ones who have the vastest truthful foundation.

So why do people make this argument so much? I think it’s because we’re supposed to respect and revere the ancients. People who read old books are seen as wiser and deeper than those who read new books, just as people who read books are seen as wiser than those who instead watch TV. Furthermore, there are lots of topics on which people don’t have any remotely convincing arguments, so all they can do is appeal to the fact that lots of people a few thousand years ago agreed with their argument. You rarely find analytic philosophers who have highly technical arguments for things appeal to the ancients because they actually have arguments for the things that they believe.

I once joked with Dustin Crummett that to figure out how to resolve a new anthropic argument against theism—which I’ll discuss in my next article—I looked to the early church fathers. This was funny because it was so ludicrous. None of the early church fathers knew anything about anthropics. Find a random philosopher at a middle-ranking university and they’ll know more about anthropics than literally anyone born before the year 1900.

These arguments are also applied selectively. It seems that they’re only used to argue for views about purity. Virtually no one argues against charging interest in loans, on the grounds that it was reviled by most of the ancients. It just seems like there’s a certain type of person who, upon finding some behavior gross but having no good argument against it, decides to bring in the ancients as backup. This is, I think, rather silly.

When I wrote my previous article about why history of philosophy is a backwater, lots of people made a bunch of objections that totally missed the point to such an extreme degree that it was genuinely surprising. So let me clarify what I’m not saying. I am certainly not saying that I or other moderns are gifted with unique cognitive faculties such that were we in the time of Newton, we would have invented calculus. That’s obviously false. My claim is that we have lots of extra information which allows us to have better ideas. Thus, pointing out that modern information was built on the ancients does not refute my argument, and is, in fact, the core point that I am making.

It’s true that when one learns calculus they are learning things discovered by Newton. But they rarely actually read Newton, because modern sources are better and more complete. Additionally, as Hanania notes:

It’s a curious pattern that whenever we have objective measures of something, the best performers are always from the recent past. This holds for running, darts, field goal kicking, weightlifting, memorizing the digits of pi, and chess. It’s only in subjective fields that require aesthetic appreciation that we see the supposedly “best” performers being from long ago, in areas like theology, philosophy, and literature. The simplest explanation for these regularities is that humanity is getting better at everything all the time, due to increased population, more leisure time, greater wealth, the Flynn Effect, superior training, and more access to previous work and knowledge. But in areas where quality is subjective, people delude themselves by having a kind of affirmative action for the past. Exceptions to this rule that nothing was better in previous centuries might exist in some fields like architecture where an artistic production depends on the complex interplay of political, historical, technological, and economic factors.

So let’s do away with this style of argument. The fact that old dead people think something provides very limited reason to believe it. There’s nothing profound about quoting ancients with names like Plotinus agreeing with you, for if they were alive today, they’d have different views, as a result of the accumulated wisdom of the last several thousand years. The so-called “wisdom of the ancients” often reflects flagrant dogmatism, believed unquestioningly for most of human history, never seriously analyzed until the modern day, where it’s mostly rejected.