This is full of falsehoods and outright lies. We do understand the past, we do understand how we got here, we do comprehend the reasons behind almost all events that happen as they can almost universally be explained by science. If we don’t know, we keep doing science until we get the answer - which we, invariably, do.

This may have passed as wisdom a century ago but in the modern age of mandatory education and freedom of information, it just sounds uninformed and naive.