Why do people imagine that they know more than the generations that went before them? Because in an abstract sense it is true. The best modern libraries are more comprehensive than the best older ones and the content of books has never been more universally or easily accessed. Humanity allows its children to stand on its shoulders.
But libraries are not individuals and ‘humanity’ is nobody at all.
Chronological snobbery is silly. Yet our habit of mind today is to imagine that because an idea has gone out of fashion that it has been discredited. But it is not as simple as that. What comes after a newly unfashionable idea doesn’t necessarily transcend it or take it into account. Moreover, old truths have to be passed from generation to generation, and many batons get dropped along the way.
Nobody would deny this with respect to, say, music. A little more than a century and a half ago, the work of J.S. Bach had been out of fashion for so long that his very existence was known only to a specialists. (Fortunately one of these was the grandmother of Felix Mendelssohn who ‘rescued’ Bach for the modern world).
The vitality of a culture depends in part on its ability to engage the past.
We don’t know more things today, we know different things, and suffer from our own generational blind spots. Our strengths are technological and practical: theologically and morally we are thin as paint. It’s a disquieting combination.