Psychology, sociology, and anthropology has taught us a lot about the basic foundations of human behavior. For instance, people like views to the outside. It makes us work better, stay more alert, and feel more comfortable. But some things behaviorists have found has made its way into architectural design that are really for primitive aspects of being a mere organism. For instance, when turning, humans find that 45 to 90 degree turns are more "private" turns, as the shift in direction causes a drastic sense of place. Turns that are 15 degrees or less are more "public" turns, as not much about direction, and therefore sense of place has changed.
This has become very important in architectural design these days, as there is a huge emphasis on the public and private realms, as well as the separation and melding of the two. Humans feel more enclosed when the height of surrounding buildings to the space between buildings are at a 1:3 ratio. Humans don't really like big, empty, open spaces (like Boston City Hall Plaza). So a sense of enclosure, privacy, and swaddling have become a part of the environs we habit. These are all great, and very important, but there is something lost that the Ancients seemed to have gotten right. What could it be?
I believe what has been lost is ritual. Ritual elevates the simple self to something larger than itself. Ritual raises the individual out of being just an individual into something greater that he or she is a part of, as rituals are usually done with several people. Procession in environments used to be important. Now its a matter of wayfinding, how cattle intuitively understand a space and can map their way through it. This is called "imaging," where one's mental mapping kicks in to help navigate a space. With ritual there was a sense of communion, where one was part of something larger, e.g. society, and followed paths that were established by a higher idea of how we should move, and not by how we are going to move because of basic brain activity.
It's amazing how little credit scientists will give to ancient peoples. The Greeks invented cogs and steam engines, and even had basic robots. The Romans had concrete that, to this day, is far superior to our own. The Egyptians were excellent psychologists and chemists. But the Egyptians didn't have psychology like we think of it. They had something like therapy, where one explained their mental problems, and a psychologist would explain what they had to do to alleviate their mental demons (usually symbolic prescriptions). Usually exercising thought, focusing on certain aspects of suffering, facing fears, and relaxing. Sounds a lot like what psychiatrists do today, right? In fact, it sounds so much like modern psychology, it is modern psychology. Wow!
What is different is our psychologists do today is focus on brain actions, mental functions. They don't really focus on things to actually put the individual on a higher plane of thinking and living. Today it has become a matter of medicating the pain away. They had some herbs in ancient Egypt, some narcotic, some hallucinogenic, some didn't do anything, and others might kill you. Most of it was meditative, like yoga or Zen meditation. They didn't have Prozac to nullify life without ever actually addressing the problem.
To give a bad fallacy, it would be like encountering a mystery in how black holes work mathematically, and instead of actually facing and working out the math, we just give the equation Prozac to nullify the perplexing math.
I read quite a bit on the secular and occult life ancient peoples. Nothing was ever as basic and primitive as we address our world today in our rational society. We look at humans as something mechanical. They looked at humans as a vessel for the embodiment of a higher idea of living. They addressed human factors as something that could be divine and in accord with nature and the cosmos at large. We address human factors as cattle, something that has basic functions that can be understood as little more than predictable mechanisms.
We are machines that have predictable reactions to certain tunings, like drugs.
Want to know why society is degrading? There is no, or very few people who imagine themselves as part of something larger than themselves. The ancient self image seeped out into society, nature, and the cosmos (anyone whose didn't was an idiot, meaning "inward" or "private"). Our self image usually ends at around 1.5 to 3 feet, depending on environmental circumstances and which psychologist you are talking to about "personal space."
TL;DR: today humans are cattle with basic behavior that we can design the world around. In antiquity humans had a higher sense of self and didn't need to medicate their problems away.
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