Today with the return of e.g. Indian yogic culture to fight modern mental diseases like screen addiction, burnout, and deinstitutionalization, this wisdom of our ancestors may soon be very clear to us. For example, how did they deal with boredom?
Pushing for negative or positive connotations feel both odd to me if the point is to evaluate a set of practices to apply to specific issues they could efficiently solve.
Also burnout can’t be a purely modern phenomenon. Scale might be different, but I can’t imagine it appear only a century ago for instance.
The point is, it's not just a set of practices" applied to "specific issues". It's a complex system of beliefs that ultimately result in living differently and being less susceptible to today's problems. "Wisdom" sounds like a fitting name for such system of beliefs.
I think it extremely rarely happens (or it does in dramatic ways that few people survive), and instead we try to look at positive parts and cherry-pick them to merge into our own culture. The yogi example is not (I think) about moving to India and restarting one’s life as a yogi, but to cherry-pick some specific parts (fitness exercices and/or meditation techniques probably) and wedge them where it could fit in our modern life.
The positive connotation is the default mode of healing and 'magick'. It is the negative connotation that gets pushed, which is what leads to 'spirit possession': mental illness.
People with burnout survive these days. That is new.
I'm fascinated by this stuff. I have shelves full of books on it, and occultism of various forms. It's fascinating, because it opens up a window into how people perceived the world, how they communicated with each other, and what they valued.
It's 99% tosh though, and much of it is either dangerous and counterproductive, or often time wasting or an explicit scam. Charms and potions that couldn't possibly be what they were purported to be were rife. The history of the occult and witchcraft is as much a history of fleecing the gullible as it is of any kind of wisdom or philosophy. It's one of the reasons I find it so interesting, and the characters involved so colourful. Someone has a problem and you have, or want a reputation for wisdom? Make up a silly little ritual or charm and send them on their way. Everyone's happy.
(and with no modern medicine avaiable)
We try our best to learn from history, and I think we can reasonably accept that the tradition that got perpetuated up until now might not be optimal, and is only “wisdom” until it’s widely proven wrong. Problem is, it can take centuries to finally accept that it was wrong (and boy do we have deeply wrong views of the world and humans, that took centuries to prove wrong, and we’re not there yet)
That’s why I’m not fond of labelling tradition as “wisdom” when we should keep a critical view of it, and be open to chalenge these at any situation where it matters to not screw it.
People aren't utility function maximisers. Even if lots of us like it dry that won't necessarily be their preferred way of communicating.
I'm not sure if boredom was that much of problem. Days were filled with work, much of it requiring focus, mastery, improvised solutions to unexpected circumstances etc. Also, since the work wasn't "alienated", it didn't feel dull or pointless like much of the work today.
Also, I have a 92 year old grandmother who, during her youth, lived in what was basically a premodern village. She has told many tales of the life back then but she never mentioned being bored. The number of skills she had would be mindboggling for a typical XXI century office dweller, who often can pretty much only (for example) code and swipe his credit card.
Trying random things and repeating what works while discarding what doesn’t is how evolution works, but it’s not the same type of thing as a scientific or proto-scientific understanding (lots of cultures did proto-scientific at different times, and real science is much more recent and mostly worldwide).
Sure, that’s how we got humans from single-celled life, so it’s not nothing — but evolution is also why humans still have an appendix, why dudes have nipples, why the recurrent laryngeal nerve takes a stupid path from the brain to the larynx via the heart not just in us but even in giraffes, and why so many people descended from malarial regions have a gene where two copies gives you sickle cell anaemia.
So while I would agree that it is wrong to call something “superstition” just because one doesn’t understand it [0], if the people doing the rituals also don’t understand it then it becomes fair.
Consider the Covid pandemic: wearing a mask slows transmission, but every so often I saw people with a mask covering only their mouth and not their nose.
Consider people asking for an antibiotic for a viral infection. People who say “I don’t want chemicals in my food”. People who think 123456 is a really good password.
Consider a Diesel engine: you can run it on vegetable oil, including recycling used oil from a commercial deep fat fryer, if you filter it. Imagine two people who didn’t know why it needed to be filtered, one who wasted time filtering fresh oil and one who didn’t filter dirty.
Consider a small pacific island in WW2: one day a lot of strangers clad in unusual clothes show up in a big boat, make a long flat clearing, hold strange shaped objects to their mouths and ears while repeating a mysterious chant in a language none of the locals speak, then loud birds appear and land, laying eggs filled with wonderful treasures beyond measure.
Clearly these people are wizards, so when they all eventually leave, the locals copied them, carving their own mouth-and-ear totems from wood, sewing ritual clothing in the same style as the strangers’, chanting the same words.
A decade later, it works! Another giant loud bird lands, and people who look and sound like the old wizards emerge. The new arrivals seem perplexed, so you explain that you are all following the teachings of John Frum, trying to summon the great god Cargo.
This isn’t a value judgement I’m making here, because if it was I would have to condemn myself also. Nobody is immune to this. And something being a cargo-cult or any other kind of superstition doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, just that you’re only going to get a useful result by luck (e.g. because an aircraft had to make an emergency landing and your palm-tree runway with a bamboo observation tower and people holding hand carved toy radios looked good enough from a distance).
[0] likewise “supernatural” but in my experience the latter term is used by believers and the former by nonbelievers
And that this isn’t limited to just “them” for any value of “them” who do things.
The rest is a bunch of examples of why, even when an effect exists.
These two are provided by different faculties of the mind, and sensory perception of a physical reality is yet a third instance with reference to the one thing. If you have additional faculties of perception, you grasp the thing in additional ways.
Should you be color blind, is paint superstition?
For the case of paint: paint can be understood in both superstitious and non superstitious ways regardless of if you can or can’t see it, and whether it is or is not being understood superstitiously depends on the details of what one does or doesn’t know. I’ve read superstitious accounts of colour by people who can see it — “pink is for girls, blue is for boys”, which of bold or soft colours is better for a child’s education, does yellow encourage intellectual thought…
Here’s something for you: is the use of blue-and-orange in action film posters backed by research that poster designers know about, or are they just cargo-culting one particular successful film’s poster? As with John Frum, this isn’t about the original, it’s about why everyone else is mimicking it: a blind or colourblind person doesn’t need to have a colour qualia to find out either way.
I think your groups are too broadly encompassing. The division between superstition and scientific method is inside any given decision, not between entire beliefs or results, so you can’t just point to a specific belief or result and categorise it as either. (I’m not sure I was clear on that myself in the previous postings).
I don't think you'd call those superstition.
eg. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22730370-400-how-does...
While people don’t generally understand bikes [0], in this case superstition would be more about people building them like in any of the [0] illustrations (or e.g. saying “I need suspension/carbon fibre frame” without knowing what those are for) rather than not being aware of how the laws of motion stop it falling over — except for bikes with trick steering, average people aren’t even going to bother asserting a causal mechanism for motion: https://youtu.be/9cNmUNHSBac