When Jon Haidt arrived at the University of Virginia in September 1995 for his first academic job, he was assigned to teach Psych 101, a large lecture class:
I found myself inserting quotations from ancient writings, East and West, to show that there is continuity and some degree of universality in humanity’s experience of being human. The ancients knew little worth preserving about physics or chemistry, but they sure were insightful about consciousness, relationships, suffering, and human nature more broadly.
Once I had been granted tenure in 2001 and had the freedom to follow my curiosity, I decided to write a book about ancient wisdom. I would categorize it and analyze it through the lens of modern psychology. Five years later, I published The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.
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As people spend ever less time reading books and ever more time watching very short videos, the vertical hand-me-down of culture from previous generations is being replaced by a flood of horizontal transmission, mostly low quality content that was made recently and will be forgotten momentarily, along with everything else that passes by in an hour of mindless scrolling. As AI begins to create much—and eventually most—of the content we all consume, the loss of connection to the past will accelerate, and people will be increasingly cut off from everything humanity has learned, or felt, or judged to be worth keeping around.