I recall a general disdain for the towns of Axton and Kitridge, that were each located within 45 minutes of my hometown, and which were the two other largest towns in the area, the nearest viable peers and competitors. And in truth we all mixed continuously. People from one town worked in another or went to church or went shopping in the other or had relatives there. In fact we had more in common with one another than with anyone else on the planet, and we shared the same space and resources and challenges. It was the rivalry of family, of siblings seeking to define their own existence in a shared context.

Of course, there are many other cultures divided by much larger differences of time and place and history and character. My point is simply that such rivalries (even among commonality) emerge at the most basic level, among the closest brethren, and progress from there. We all justify and identify ourselves within our own value system, what matters to us, and it gives us to confidence to stand up next to our peers.

Of course, both within a family and among nations, where greater problems and greater feelings arise is when there are larger differences in outcomes. If you have a brother who, like Crain’s brother Abel, succeeds everywhere he turns, and you don’t enjoy the same success, it’s very tempting to get resentful or disdainful or jealous. Insofar as we have slightly differing priorities and goals and strategies, it’s easy enough to maintain our confidence and contentment insofar as I succeed at my goals and and good at what I value and get what I want. What can drive both worship and imitation as well as resentment and animosity is when someone else succeeds better at my goals than I do. Because that’s an indictment of me.

But, to return to the question of what blinds societies, because we have different priorities than other cultures, it’s very easy to rest confidently in our own superiority because of how much further we have taken a particular value compared to some other group. And we don’t care very much about the things we’re not doing that those people valued. Meanwhile, were that other group able to observe us and comment on us, no doubt they would find much to be impressed by, as well as much to question and plenty to despise.

It’s easy, in our time of inherited technological ease and superiority, to imagine ourselves as vastly more wise and well developed than people of other times and places. And in some senses we may be. It depends on the view you take of human nature, as well as its relationship with the products of human effort: knowledge, technology, art, wealth, infrastructure. Is it unfixed and of no specific nature? Is it fairly fixed and uniform but is gradually changing and improving over time? Is it diverse and non-unitary and is simply found in very different forms through different times and places, and does not proceed but rather mutates into differing breeds of no particular continuity? Or is it broadly fixed, but of a vast and adaptable nature that inhabits various personalities and superpersonalities across time and space.

This last seems most likely to me, for many reasons, and seems to reflect human experience from the lowest family level to the highest cultural level. It matches our story best and explains our many ups and downs and diversions. And although human nature remains fairly fixed, it is pluripotent, able to take many forms, more forms than a single creature or even a single culture can contain. However our nature may be both fixed and changeable, able to take better or worse forms for the world that confronts us, able to experimentally favor those forms that give success, both in living and through the effort of thought, we carry with us something that is fixed and heritable: the legacy of the past.

We stand at the forward point of whatever produced us. So we enjoy and have access to the product of human lives, thought, and efforts past. Is it more impressive to have inherited and be able to make use of those great resources or more impressive to have produced them in difficult circumstances with less inheritance? I will not say no inheritance, for even those mathematicians who first did astounding work were the inheritors of all the cultural accumulation of human capital (stability, governance, language, security, food production, social complexity, family structure, the really fundamental and astounding resources that keep humanity going).

It is very impressive that I can, with little effort, learn what shape the world that I experience only as an undulating plain extending the distance of my own eyesight actually is, and how large it is. As it turns out, it’s a vast sphere of so many miles in diameter with vast oceans and continents of various character and peoples and history. I can discover that, I have access to it, despite the fact that at present my senses do not extend literally beyond the boundaries of my own bedroom, a space of merely a few hundred square feet with only myself and a few objects in it.

But various Greek mathematicians, without the benefit of thousands of years of accumulated written knowledge, with no way of knowing the details of the character of what they discovered, with access to travel of only a couple hundred miles in their lifetimes, successfully calculated using basic observations of the stars, angles, shadows, and distance, that the Earth was a sphere of so many miles in diameter. Go back and read Aristotle and Plato, consider how much less they had that proceeded them, how vast and easy to access was the wealth of knowledge available to them compared to ourselves, and then evaluate how impressive, exactly, the acquisitions of your own understanding are. Ask yourself what qualities you actually possess that make you so much wiser and superior to those people of another age.