You can also find this article here: https://joeyamazaki.substack.com/p/are-we-worthy-to-demean-the-past ... In the 21st century, we are abundant in material wealth, prosperity, and progress. From the technology we create, improve, and iterate on, to the vast interconnectivity we have between each other through the use of the internet, it seems that our way of life is the ideal that thousands of years of civilization “coveted” for, or at seemingly desired in our eyes. With the power of the sun in our hands, it seems that our advent towards limitless growth is rather inevitable. Who knows what we are even capable of? But, are we that sort of civilization in the first place? Were we even ready for this limitless growth? Do we perceive ourselves too highly? The answers to these questions: I do not know. But, one thread is visible: we are in a period of utter perplexity. Sure, certain advents in human history are unfolding and creating a sort of paradigm shift in human civilization, such as Artificial Intelligence, but is that really the pinnacle of human endeavor? Compared to the intricate metaphysics the Indus Valley Civilization that came up with or the complex philosophy and way of thinking that the Greeks came up with, especially considering the legacy of of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, did we really reach a sort of apex that builds from these previous lines of thinking and even transcends it? In what way is Artificial Intelligence helping us on a sort of metaphysical level? Yes, it helps automate many tasks and provides a sort of accuracy that humans lack. Doctors can use artificial intelligence to diagnose, catching some health threats on time. Humans can use Large Language Models, LLMs, to enhance their learning experience: The amount of complex yet digestable information you get once you prompt a question in an LLM is amazing, and people can learn at a rapid rate. Or at least that is the hypothesis? Yes, you can generate code, debug your faster, automate your tasks, learn quicker, but what about at a metaphysical level. What has AI provided that helped further our understanding of being? Or is that the right question? In Plato’s Republic, we have the groundworks of a government, which aligns our being to a sort of ideal we should always ponder upon and flesh out. Thomas Aquinas, Maminodes, and many other philosophers connect reason with faith, further bridging a sort of rift in our being compared to before faith and reason were at contradiction, or at least seemingly contradictory in our human experience. Maybe they were always connected or even one and the same thing, but this discussion is for later. What is the question that is right to ask that would could compare our accomplishments with those of a sapient traditions, such as those of the Vedic, Greek, Judeo-Christian? The best questions I can ask are these: Are we really wise to abandon these sapient traditions that have persisted for thousands of years and only have recently been disregarded due to the advents in Western civilization? Are we really wise to let just scientific community to give us a sliver of truth, despite its dogmatism, lack of transparency, and somewhat noticeable stagnation plaguing its own endeavors? Are we really more well off that the civilizations that came before us, considering the amount of material wealth we have? Is that a sign that we should just solely pursue our reason, or is it is a sign that we have abandoned something really essential to our being? Let us discuss this further… Socrates came up with this intricate concept of questioning an idea to its first principles and even going further than that, so we can ascertain absolute truth “embedded” in reality, or more rigourously, an absolute truth that “is” reality—reality as we are able to perceive it and the reality that is beyond our reach in this human life. Through dialogue, the Socratic Method, we are able to discuss, formulate, rectify, and elaborate our knowledge of the world. The Socratic Method is so revolutionary that it just did not open this idea of exploring ideas through discussion, but it also opened also raised questions in our understanding of human cognition. In general, it seems that the way we interact with the world and come up with our own values and ideas is through internal dialogue with ourselves. Sometimes, it seems that our ideas come out of nowhere, but the Socratic style of questioning and refining goes beyond just a sort of classroom discussion. It is also the way we try to understand our being in relation to the reality that we perceive and do not. Socrates’ influence was so radical that even Plato went further beyond the human perception. He came up the world of forms, which is not even within our human perception. How is it even possible to understand higher worlds, or even discover them in the first place, if they our beyond our human perception? My answer to that question would be that only the pursuit and love for wisdom could help a human see beyond his perception. Many people like to say that reality is just what we perceive. Some thinkers say that the reality we perceive can just be broken down into subatomic particles, despite the fact that they can’t explain the subjective realm of experience that people have. Such as the feelings that arise when they fall in love or when they experience a pleasent scenery. Yes, you can explain it in terms of chemical reaction and then subatomic particles moving around, but that does not explain the feeling in itself. But, this critique is beyond the point I am trying to get at. The wisdom that our elders came up with are so complicated that it is not even obvious some times that we stand on their ideas. Without the Jewish Law that God gave Moses one Mount Siani, would we even have a conception of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution today? My answer would be, I guess not. Our ideas are like a connected branch that extends backwards in time for thousands of year. That branch is still emerging, but it seems that we want to break this branch in half, so we can just pursue the ideas we have today and abandon the ones of the past. The Atheists, scientists, or seemingly rational people, diminish religion to its absolute core without realizing the sort of ideas that the ancient people of these religious traditions carried on for generations. There is a visible thread between the ideas in modern law, family life, and general culture today and to the way of life in the past. We live through these traditions and the wisest of us expound on them further with the applications they could have. For an encapsulating term, the traditions of today arise due to the sapient traditions of the past, bringing us closer to God. In a sense, God reveals himself when we build upon these traditions rather than demean them. Today, we say that we are much more sophisticated than the people of back then, so we conclude that we have our strength alone to move forward without honoring and building upon this ancient wisdom, despite the fact that many of the ideas we preach today come from these sapient traditions! I think the problem lies with the fact that it is hard to trace back an idea to its origins because you can go in loops. For example, this concept of individualism can be traced back to Greek philosophers, when Plato preaches this idea of the soul, where he attributes the identity of a person to its soul rather than his material goods, material body, and material way of life, implying that their is an individual inside of him. It can also be traced back to the Burning Bush, where God says “I am who I am,” which enables us to think that we are a part of God in some way because I, as a person, am who I am, so I, as an individual exist because “I am” enables me to do so. Ultimately, it is hard to trace back its idea to its origin, but that is not a good reason to abandon tradition completely. We are poisoning ourselves when we say that we are better than the ones that came before us because our ideas are better than theirs. That is a delusional way of thinking. Their wisdom lives through us whether we like it or not, and it seems obvious that building and extending off of that tradition and potentially adding more to it is the wisest thing we can do. Free burning bush holy encounter moses called illustration So, establishing the point I was trying to make of saying that their is a value in preserving and adding to the wisdom we have gained through the centuries, I would like to ask this final question: What would our civilization look like today if we did not have the sapient traditions of the past? What would our civilization look like if we did not have the Greek or Judeo-Christian thread of ideas today? This question does not have a straightforward or simple answer. But, there is one thing: We stand on the shoulder of giants. If we did not have these traditions today, we would be at ground level, doing who knows what. Maybe still living in a state of barbarianism. I am not sure. Who knows what other factors played a part, such as psychedelics and the mystical traditions in all sapient traditions, but that is a discussion for another topic as well. It seems to me that our idea of civilization would not even be conceived if we did not have the traditions of back then. There is a value of having these traditions, and it seems to me that value is much more important that we realize as we see our society slowly deteriorate, as they cut themselves off from these traditions and adopt a very narrow mindset and having the arrogance of saying that their traditions reign superior than all those that came before. I am talking about the scientists, the Atheists, the ones who claim that we can reason through everything. Where is the doubt? Where is the humility? I am not saying you shouldn’t have confidence in your beliefs, but questioning your understanding is the basis of Socratic thinking, and that is what created the legacy of Greek thought that is so prominent in our civilization today. As a reminder and warning, we stand on the shoulders of giants, and when we cut off the giant’s legs, the giant falls as well us.
