I was struck forcibly many years ago thinking about history. Thinking that using gunpowder in the middle ages completely changed warfare and I thought of the generations before the discovery, how people fought and all the time gunpowder existed, we just did not know. It’s a thought exercise you can do for anything from disease control to mechanics, just thinking what would have been different and how lives would have been different before we knew or discovered something new.
That is just a game until you realise that we live in the same world of ignorance as our ancestors. That we do things because actually we have not learned there is a better way of doing them. That we think we have no choice in the way we do things.
The way we look at men who tried to climb castle walls and were thrown back by determined resistance until gunpowder came along and blew holes in walls, is the way people will look at us in a thousand years. How we sweated trying to climb all kinds of walls when, if we had only known, we did not need to.
That is why every nation and every generation is described as living their ignorance with equal force as those who describe us as advanced.