Thinking we humans are so much smarter than a century ago is unfounded vanity
It is easy to look back at the past and see former practices and beliefs as helplessly antiquated and inconceivable today.
It is also comforting to explain away that is because current generation is so much smarter than those that came before us.
Unfortunately, in biological terms, given typical evolutionary timescales, our human “wetware” is just the same as it was decades or centuries ago.
Just as easily as we could have been born in another country and thus hold another cultural identity, religion and spoken language, if we were born in pre-modern times, we would most likely hold a variation of the major ways of thinking of the time.
Thinking otherwise is fooling ourselves.
We, individually, happen at the horizon of possible outcomes of our time and environment. Exceptionally, that boundary may or may not be pushed further in historical events, but we are bound by what's possible right now.
The question, for the benefit of society, is how to grow that possibilities boundary, bit by bit, given that our individual human tendencies, flaws and physical capabilities aren't any different than one, two or three generations ago.
What changes from one generation to the next? A few things: knowledge, institutions, and technology.
Thanks to written records, learned knowledge can be passed down to the next generation even hundreds or thousands of years later. See, sacred text from the world's major religions, which foster a sense of identity, place and belonging across millennia. See, Euclid's Elements, published 300 BC, just as correct about many of the fundamentals of Geometry as it is today, albeit using language and constructs unfamiliar to modern practicioners.
Thanks to institutions, such as schools and higher education, writing, Algebra and other mental tools discovered and perfected long ago, can be quickly passed to the next generation as a starting point.
No one needs to figure out how to represent integer quantities, as Arabic numbers are readily available. This seems to us like a given, but it took a good bit of time for humanity as a species to come up with this system and to make it available worldwide. If we would think that, starting from scratch and with the same available information at the time, we would be any faster, that's fooling ourselves.
Finally, technology. While we may would like attribute to some kind of higher sense of morality or virtue the modern man, there's a more practical take: petroleum and coal as abundant fuel, steel-made machinery, concrete, and fertilisers increased the supply of energy, food and raw materials so much that many old practices were abandoned not because they were immoral, but because they were uneconomical and yielded inferior, less efficient results.
As humanity supposedly progresses and advances over the decades, it's a good and humbling practice to recognise that, in many ways, we aren't any different that the ones that came before. We are subject to the same flawed way of thinking, same tendencies and, let's be honest, the same traps of self-serving justifications which sidestep morals and ethics.
I think, for the most part and as a species, we need to rethink what it means to be an affluent and so advanced. What are truly the goals? Are these goals sustainable and beneficial in the long-term? Are we moving toward achieving them and what would be check points to keep us accountable?