The bit about biblical literalism treating the text as immune to genre is fair, and it's a complaint the tradition was already making about itself. Augustine warned against reading Genesis flat-footed centuries before any modern science forced the question. He basically says don't go to the wall for a literal reading when the passage may well mean otherwise, because you'll embarrass the faith in front of people who actually know the subject. So the flat reading isn't the old careful way with modern interpretation as the upgrade. The careful reading is the old way. The lift-one-verse-out-of-context habit is the shortcut, and it isn't more biblical, it's just lazier. Read the whole chapter and most of these literalism fights dissolve.
Were people really any dumber in the past?
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There is a habit in modern thinking that treats the past as a kind of half-awake state, as if the Age of Enlightenment woke us up. People imagine ancient societies as crowded with superstition, as if belief itself was less disciplined before modern science arrived to rescue it. It is a comforting story because it makes the present feel like an intellectual peak rather than just another arrangement of limits and assumptions.
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The bit about biblical literalism treating the text as immune to genre is fair, and it's a complaint the tradition was already making about itself. Augustine warned against reading Genesis flat-footed centuries before any modern science forced the questio
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There is a habit in modern thinking that treats the past as a kind of half-awake state, as if the Age of Enlightenment woke us up. People imagine ancient societies as crowded with superstition, as if belief itself was less disciplined before modern science arrived to rescue it. It is a comforting story because it makes the present feel like an intellectual peak rather than just another arrangement of limits and assumptions.
But it does not make sense to think, when taking into account what those societies actually built.
Rome did not maintain roads across an empire stretching from Britain to Syria through guesswork or mystical habit. It did it through surveying, material science, and an administrative discipline that's still impressive today. The aqueducts alone require a level of hydraulic understanding that cannot be reduced to “they didn’t know better.” They knew exactly what they needed to know to move water across terrain with minimal loss, and they repeated it at scale.
Medieval Europe is often treated as a period of foggy irrationality, but that caricature collapses the moment you look at the institutions it produced. Universities appear there. Scholastic thinkers argued with a technical precision about logic and causation that would feel familiar to anyone trained in formal philosophy today. Even when their conclusions were shaped by theology, the structure of reasoning was not casual or primitive. Their theology was often more scientific than many forms of scientism today.
Across the Islamic world, scholars preserved, corrected, and extended Greek mathematics and developed new tools in algebra and optics that later became foundational for European science. This is not a record of people trapped in superstition. It is a record of people working carefully inside the limits of their instruments, languages, and inherited frameworks.
What often gets labeled as superstition is usually something more specific: inference under uncertainty, or symbolic thinking doing work that modern categories have separated into psychology, religion, and early science. That separation makes earlier worldviews look incoherent when they were often internally disciplined, even if we no longer share their premises.
None of this requires romanticizing the past. People then were not more enlightened in any simple sense. They were constrained differently. Illness, weather, inheritance, and mechanical failure were harder to model. When causes are hidden, interpretation fills the gap. That is not stupidity. It is cognitive necessity under limited information.The irony is that modernity has not removed superstition. It has only changed its shape and location.
Flat Earth belief persists in the presence of satellite imaging, global navigation, and easily available demonstration. We have far more data and proof to show the exact shape of the earth and some folks still decide it's not true Some forms of biblical literalism treat text as if it were immune to genre, history, or translation, despite centuries of interpretive tradition that explicitly warns against exactly that simplification.
What makes the whole story uncomfortable is that we tend to assume intelligence moves in a straight line, as if more time plus more technology automatically produces better judgment. But judgment is not stored in the tools; it is exercised by people, and people are always vulnerable to selective trust, narrative comfort, and the temptation to flatten complexity into something emotionally usable. The past does not look primitive because its thinkers were incapable, but because we are reading their reasoning after stripping away the context that made it necessary. It's very easy to make fun of them with the advantage of hundreds of years of context built precisely on their thought.
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The line about it being a comforting story is the part I felt in my body. I grew up deep in the evangelical world and left in my late twenties, and the thing nobody warns you about is how much the leaving rhymes with the staying. The new friends who assumed I must now think everyone still inside was an idiot were running the same script, just inverted: we're the awake ones, they were asleep. Altar-call certainty and trust-the-science certainty have more in common than either camp wants to hear. Feeling superior to the past is mostly a faster way to stop thinking about it.
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The bit about biblical literalism treating the text as immune to genre is fair, and it's a complaint the tradition was already making about itself. Augustine warned against reading Genesis flat-footed centuries before any modern science forced the question. He basically says don't go to the wall for a literal reading when the passage may well mean otherwise, because you'll embarrass the faith in front of people who actually know the subject. So the flat reading isn't the old careful way with modern interpretation as the upgrade. The careful reading is the old way. The lift-one-verse-out-of-context habit is the shortcut, and it isn't more biblical, it's just lazier. Read the whole chapter and most of these literalism fights dissolve.
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The strongest version of the optimist's case is real and I want to grant it before reframing: a medieval peasant and a modern office worker do differ enormously, and the difference is genuine. But it is not located in the skull. It is in the institutions standing between the individual and reality. Mass literacy, the printing press, the university opened to more than clerics, public record-keeping, the scientific society that lets strangers check each other's work. None of those make a person smarter. They change what one ordinary mind is plugged into. The honest framing is not "we got smart and they were dumb," it is "we built a much better cognitive infrastructure and then took personal credit for living inside it."
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C.S. Lewis already named the exact reflex this piece is describing. He called it chronological snobbery: the uncritical assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited, as if a belief expired simply because the calendar turned. What is worth noticing is that this is a fairly young attitude. It is downstream of a 19th-century faith in progress as a law of history, Comte and the positivists and the Whig story of liberty marching ever upward, that quietly replaced an older sense of standing on the shoulders of giants. We did not discover that the past was dim. We inherited a story in which the present had to be the summit, and then read backward to confirm it.
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Love that the proof we got smarter is a guy on a flat-earth forum using GPS satellites he doesn't believe in to drive to the conference where they explain the earth is flat.
the Romans built aqueducts. we built a machine that knows everything and use it to ask if the moon landing was fake. call it a draw.
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Good piece, but notice what the celebration of Rome and the medieval universities quietly writes out: those cathedrals of reasoning were built on a labor base that was never allowed near the books. Scholastic precision was the leisure of a clerical class fed by serfs who could not read the Latin they were being saved in. So "were people dumber in the past" is the wrong axis. The right question is who got access to the tools of disciplined thought and who paid for it. The aqueducts were brilliant and they were maintained by enslaved people. Intelligence was never the scarce resource. Access was, and access is a property of an arrangement, not of a brain.
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I agree people in the past were not stupid, but the article quietly slides from "not dumber" to "basically our equals," and that second claim is where it overreaches. Raw cognitive horsepower is roughly constant across history, sure. The thing that actually changed is not the brain, it is the method. Controlled experiments, double-blind trials, error bars, and the habit of trying to prove your own hypothesis wrong are recent and they are not optional decorations. A brilliant Roman engineer and a mediocre modern epidemiologist will both beat the brilliant Roman on whether a treatment works, because one of them has a method for not fooling himself. "Same hardware" does not mean "same reliability."
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The straight-line assumption is the one bit I keep snagging on. My hunch is we didn't get smarter, we just got better tools and quietly handed the hard parts over to them, so it feels like progress in our heads when most of it is progress in our pockets. Could be wrong, happy to be talked out of it.
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This whole thread is going to run in circles until somebody splits the word "dumber," because it is wearing at least three meanings at once.
Innate reasoning capacity: the raw ability to draw a valid inference. No evidence this moved.
Stock of available knowledge: what a given person can access. This obviously grew, and it is not a property of the person.
Measured IQ on standardized tests: this rose sharply over the 20th century, the Flynn effect, mostly on abstract-pattern items.
The article is defending point one, half its critics are attacking point two, and someone below will invoke point three as if it settles either. Three different claims, one word. Pick which one you mean and most of the disagreement evaporates.
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We have run this exact thread before, just with worse fonts. Every few years it cycles: one camp insists the ancients were superstitious cave-brains, the other discovers the Antikythera mechanism and decides the Romans had wifi. Both of these can be true at once and both camps will find that unacceptable. The past produced Euclid and also bled people to balance their humors. The present produces vaccines and also crystal subscriptions. Same species, same mixed bag, new packaging. I don't know why we keep needing either era to be the dumb one.
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