What knowledge does nowadays people lack, that past peoples did know… In particular, what things that people that nowadays people mostly don’t know influence how they think of the world and get them into trouble?
I wrote something in other thread about how the lack of knowledge of nature and animals get into societal discussions and arguments nowadays
Maybe some lack of experience of rituals is getting people into trouble nowadays?
What other areas do you think fit in here?
I’d love to see what you think about it
What knowledge do people nowdays have, would be a much shorter list…
We are talking about a day and age where a quarter of people cant cook and half of the admits that they struggle with basic recipes… writing and reading capabilities are declining too…
What consequences wholesale in society you see from lack of cooking abilities?
I’d see a higher prevalence of diabetes and cancer, lack of knowledge and control of nutrition, higher cost of living, a lack of relationship with nature and lack of control of portions. Since diabetes is linked to shortsightedness in rewards, you get that too. What do you think?
I think a lot of people are very out of tune with nature. People used to be able to predict the weather from clues. They used to be able to tell time by the position of the sun. They used to know about herbs and plants for medicine.
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self-knowledge and curiousity about what is going on in themselves - poor introspection and lack of interest in internal anomalies.
How did that evolve?
In 2001 A Space Odyssey the first monolith acts as a cosmic catalyst, awakening intelligence – representing the spark of human consciousness giving early man an evolutionary advantage over nature.
Did self-consciousness emerged at a specific turning point in human evolution?
At some juncture in an evolutionary process (I’m not saying there was), did nature grant humans the “beginning” of a thought-based mind allowing humans to think, possess ideas, and perceive themselves as separate from their environment, separate from the wholeness of nature?
I think it’s because the more you are separated from nature, the higher your status. But people used to know when it was going to rain, which herbs to take for illness, how to grow their own food, how to tell the time by the sun, and how to tell the season by the light. They knew how to find their way in the forest, when the raspberries and wild strawberries would be ripe, etc. If you ever get the chance, there is a little book called A Reverence For Wood. It’s all about the early settlers’ knowledge of the trees and how they could be used. How the natives made molasses from the seed pods of honey locust trees, and how shingles could be split from White Cedar. They could look at a tree’s bark and tell whether the wood would split evenly and straight for chair parts.
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I’m sure you’re not advocating returning to the stone age. Yet, human societies still functionally operate on primitive, stone age survival instincts despite our advanced technology. Despite thousands of years of philosophy and civilization, human beings are still brutal, violent, and driven by self-preservation. Modern man uses advanced intellect merely to ensure survival and dominance over others.
The question you raised made me pause and think for a while.
Modern people are not “knowing less” - we have exponentially increasing information. But you’re right, a certain holistic perception mode is indeed disappearing. Ancient people might not be able to explain solar eclipses, but they “knew” how to accommodate death in rituals, how to calibrate the body in seasonal cycles, and how to understand good and evil in myths. These are not “wrong information”, but a nested network of meanings embedded in practice.
The rituals you mentioned, I particularly agree with. Rituals are a kind of knowledge that cannot be argued with through language - they directly shape how people perceive time, relationships, transitions. Modern people have lost this, so they fill the gap with “efficiency logic” or “psychological terms”, and the result is often that concepts cover experiences, and people live in “theories about life” rather than in life itself.
I have been thinking about a framework recently, which might be related to the rupture you noticed. It’s called “Three Principles of Happiness”, but the core is not “making people happy”, but trying to rebuild a meta-level cognitive operating system:
The first principle: pursue one’s own happiness - here, “happiness” is not pleasure, but the holistic satisfaction of multiple needs (survival, expression, curiosity, dignity). It requires people to re-anchor knowledge to the real experiences of the subject, rather than the accumulation of abstract symbols.
The second principle: do not infringe on others’ happiness - this is the boundary awareness. Prevent certain types of knowledge (such as technological rationality, economic calculation) from colonizing the holistic life. As you worried, modern people invade “rituals” with “efficiency”, replace “perception” with “data”, which is a systematic invasion.
The third principle: build a happy environment together - knowledge is not something that is privately owned by individuals, but collaboratively generated. Ancient knowledge such as rituals and natural experiences require social inheritance and re-creation, rather than being preserved in a museum-like manner.
The ambition of this framework is to provide a standard for judging the value of knowledge: not how precise or useful it is, but whether it serves the generation of a whole person, and whether it can establish meaningful connections between different fields.
But I’m curious - do you think this framework captures the rupture you feel? Or are there any important things that it still misses? For example, silence, mystery, the inexpressible - do they have a place in the rational architecture of the three principles?