Where do you go for help when you need advice? When you need help knowing how to handle something, or help in thinking through a thing, where do you go to get that help?

Where do your peers go? Where does the average American go?

I suspect the primary sources of advice and counsel in America today are the icons of pop culture: Oprah, Dr. Phil, Brad and Angelina.

When I was a kid growing up, we had Ann Landers. She was a syndicated newspaper columnist who dispensed counsel on a wide variety of issues including in-law difficulties, straying husbands, bedroom boredom, the headaches of women bumping into the glass ceiling, and nosy neighbors. The column still exists, written by another person, but I think its a relic from a by-gone generation. Today, Oprah is our Ann Landers. And Oprah is about to be gone, too. Her final television show is this week.

It occurs to me that contemporary America gets its advice mostly from people born after World War II. While it’s certainly appropriate for them to participate in the discussion, I just don’t think 50 years of life or millions of dollars in income from selling pop culture sizzle is an adequate foundation upon which to dispense life altering advice. My instincts tell me there’s a need for something more, deeper, truer, more tried and tested.

When I travel to Europe I marvel at the architecture of structures that have stood, in some cases, for millennia. I remember standing in a barn in the Swiss Alps and seeing the year it was built carved in an overhead wooden beam. That barn—still in use and looking good as new—was older than our country. Of recent pop culture note the future King of England was married in a building dating back roughly 1000 years. Yet in my America, particularly the midwest and west, most of our structures are post 1950, and hardly anything predates 1900.

We’re a land where our entire ethos is a mere babe in the context of human civilization. So it makes sense to me that when we need solidly rooted counsel we should look to sources that extend beyond our contemporaries. For wisdom we should look to cultures and civilizations that pre-date our own. A midwestern Baby-Boomer like me can learn much from 1700’s Jamestown, Virginia, but even more from Reformation-Era Europe.

The idea of giving greater credence to older things—teachings, principles, and ways—is consistent with a critical, academic approach to history in which older texts are considered more reliable; that which was recorded in closest chronological proximity to the event is generally considered more reliable because as time passes the story morphs on the tongues of its tellers. Its an academic version of that old gossip game where you whisper something into the ear of the person next to you, and she passes it on until it circles through the entire room and in the end, the message whispered into the first ear is nothing like the message received in the final ear. The first (“oldest”) ear received the accurate message. Likewise, the oldest culture, and the oldest text, is the most reliable in terms of its content.

When it comes to wisdom for living, principles for problem solving, and guidance for a better life. I think it’s important to look to the oldest information we have available. Generally, that is literature that comes from the region referred to as Mesopotamia or the Fertile Crescent. It extends from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf and is often also called “The Cradle of Civilization.” Here the history of man goes back at least 5000 years. When compared to the 200 years of American history, or the time since the end of WWII, that seems a far more significant and reliable place to hunt for wisdom and counsel than an issue of PEOPLE Magazine written and edited by somebody born while Bill Clinton was president.

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Coming Next: Specific lessons you can learn from ancient wisdom.