When the situation on the planet, or on the particular small patch were we have chosen to pitch our tent, gets tangled up and we can’t seem to find a peaceful way to get unsnarled, you will hear talk of going back to “the wisdom of the ancients”. This wisdom is supposedly contained in the scrolls and codexes and books that are stashed away in musty libraries, often in churches since religions have a large stake in defending their versions of history against the versions of other religions. We think that if we can only dig it out and decipher it properly, think we can find “the answer”. Why do we fall for such a stupid idea?

If the ancients were all so all-fired smart why are we in this mess in the first place? Why didn’t they apply their fabled wisdom and solve our problems before they reached us? What could there possibly be in the mumbo jumbo passed down from generation to generation in the name of ritual or gospel or “national narrative” that we have been overlooking for these thousands of years while our precarious toehold on the planet grows ever more tenuous? And what leads us to believe that in our ongoing search for ever more knowledge we have learned nothing useful about confronting our daily problems — something new that was not known to the ancients but that we moderns have discovered and might prove useful?

Did Aristotle dream of frozen shrimp in a refrigerator in every home, ready to be thawed out and consumed (with a properly tasty dip) on a moment’s notice? That would be one example of something we have learned since the ancients passed into history — painfully acquired smarts built on a long train of discovery and invention. We wouldn’t turn to the wisdom of the ancients to help us deal with an electrical outage that threatened our frozen shrimp supply. We would want the latest information we could get about what went wrong with the circuits in the freezer — the coolant, the electrical relays, the thermostat. Modern knowledge. So when Donald pulls his Julius Caesar act and tries to make everyone cower before his glory and majesty why do we imagine that there is some magic formula in old documents that will help us cope? If there were any formulas to help us then, they apparently didn’t work, and they are not likely to help us now. What we need is a new way of looking at things that will let us see not Rubicons and red lines but a new understanding that in the Age of Pollution and Global Warming we will all sink or swim together.

The wisdom of the ancients may have been good for the ancients (or not, that’s a matter of opinion, they did leave us a pretty screwed up world after all) but it won’t stack up against the skill of the refrigerator repairman with his modern knowledge and his new tools. Are we really supposed to believe that all the experience we have painfully acquired over the centuries has been just so much distraction from the real issues?

What are the real issues anyhow? Aren’t they life and death? What else really matters? If the current recommendations for discovering a peaceful rapprochement between Islam and Christianity (or between Shi’ism and Sunnism, or between North and South Korea, or between Kurds and Turks) involve the deaths of millions of people who want nothing more than to be left alone in their everyday struggle to make a living and feed their families isn’t this sufficient evidence that the wisdom of the ancients has been a flat out failure? We have been studying and polishing and extolling that wisdom in academia and our daily newspapers for thousands of years by now, and a today a photograph shows a 12-year-old Yemeni girl with every bone in her body starkly visible is slowly starving to death because two groups of well-fed “diplomats” don’t want to look in her direction. They want to look underground at black pools of oil. You would think by now we would have been able to ferret out whatever wisdom there was in the ancient scrolls and apply it to save one poor innocent girl’s life.

The ancients didn’t have any more brains or wisdom than we have. They impaled helpless babies on their spears and raped helpless women to satisfy their gods or their land-hunger or their desire for loot or status and sexual satisfaction. We do exactly the same things today, using barrel bombs, gas canisters, and drones, calling it “diplomacy” or “sanctions” or “revenge”, just as the ancients did. No progress. No signs that we are ready for new approaches. No indications that over thousands of years we have learned anything about controlling our evil impulses. Admit it. We are stupid, shortsighted, blind, unreasoning, and proud of it. Ask Donald. He says he was well educated at Fordham and Wharton. He brags about it. How come he kept his ears stoppered? Did his father’s money so bedazzle the school administrators that they couldn’t admit they were dealing with a moron? It took Rex Tillerson only two days to figure that out. Anyway, if there is any wisdom that will save us it will not come from anyone’s musty archives, it will have to come from the realization that we are bound together by our mortality more tightly than we are separated by the color of our skins or the details of the ritual words we mumble in front of our altars.

If there is any wisdom it will have to be found in the best most up-to-date thinking of our best minds in the face of all the incontrovertible facts we have managed to discover during our long trek from the African Rift Valley to Brussels. Forget the ancients. They had their shot and they blew it. It’s long past time for a new crowd to take over.