People sitting around Carthage in 6th century BCE didn’t have access to the practice of don’t kill any of your infants anymore than we have access to the practice of don’t require anyone in your community to sleep outside.
Humans derive meaning from our interactions.
New Idea thwarts our collective effort to find such meaning, and tends to be unwelcome.
Without the entire scaffolding of mass and one:one communication networks, the scientific method, the ability to travel more than four miles from the place of one’s birth without planning for lion attacks… well, the world was just awful before and New Idea had to compete with Old Idea that already allowed us to make sense.
Humans grow attached to the ideas we hold.
Our ideas morph, in our minds.
We shift so easily from “this allows me to makes sense of things” to “I have a justifiably correct belief about things”.
We don’t stay there either!
We tend to personally identify with these ideas, and end up believing nonsense like “I know how the world works” or even “I Am Right”.
The slipping of authority away from institutions will be fascinating to behold.
Our culture is making it much harder to accept that any institution has any right to be an Authority about Idea — we are losing our ability to rely upon, say, The New York Times or The Church or The President to tell us anything meaningful.
Yet, at the same time, individuals have no less need to adopt ideas as if they know they are true, and, so there’s a vacuum forming in our process to appeal to authority for reassurance that we’re on the right track.