We have techniques to learn about the universe, and ways of communicating and recording our various philosophies so it is possible for an individual to educate himself on the opinions and ideas of other men and other times, to evaluate them for his own adoption, rejection, or adaptation.

But history is full of examples of superior minds operating in widely varying environments, many quite savage and primitive by our standards, who were able to accomplish great deeds.

The founding fathers were statesmen, soldiers, merchants, farmers, and well educated in the philosophy and science of their day. That their educations and experiences were limited with respect to ours, and handicapped by the ideas of their time, did not necessarily make them helpless and ignorant of their world. But they would probably be as lost in ours as we would be in theirs.

It doesn't matter where you go in history, you find men who were exceptional politicians, warriors, leaders, businessmen, who conducted great enterprises based on philosophies we today would consider hopelessly wrong. They believed in religions, theories of statecraft, science, world views we now univrsally agree to be mistaken. People like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Bonaparte, Lenin, Hitler and many others were able to make things happen. We may not like what they did, and many of them ended in catastrophic failure, but they nevertheless made things happen. And they had no single theory of reality, and certainly not the same world, to transform.

I submit that knowing exactly how the world works isn't as important as having a working theory that can be adapted to it. The world is constantly changing, no single understanding of it will always hold, indeed, no no single understanding of it need necessarily hold. Sometimes even totally contradictory world-views can achieve unimaginable but equally significant results; Stalin and Hitler, for example.

We have a tendency to patronize the past, to see the personlities of history in terms of "what could they have accomplished if they lived today?" The great movers and shakers of history might have been fish out of water today, and vice versa. Our science is demonstrably better, and we are certainly convinced our politics is more humane than theirs was, and that our religious views are more enlightened, our social organization more equitable. But what do we really know? All we can really say is "we don't believe that any more."