Fire and Knowledge

The first obstacle to a proper appreciation for “old books” is this common failure to understand that our own world is also merely a “period” in intellectual history, with many unquestioned assumptions that later generations will find absurd. It is certain that those later generations will look back at the ancestors that we despise or mock and conclude that they got many things right that we got wrong. (And after all, do we not sometimes say there was wisdom in ancient Greece or Rome or China or India that the modern Western world has neglected or forgotten?) But this is a very hard lesson to learn in an age that believes that its rapid technological development must be accompanied by like progress in morality and wisdom. [C. S.] Lewis was not even convinced that technological changes should regularly earn the label of “progress”—he thought that buttons served far better than zippers to keep the fly of his trousers closed, and he dipped a pen in an inkwell to the end of his days—and was thoroughly skeptical of any claim that we morally exceeded our ancestors.

–Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis (2005), p. 166