According to Wikipedia the expression “standing on the shoulders of giants” originated with William of Conches:

The ancients had only the books which they themselves wrote, but we have all their books and moreover all those which have been written from the beginning until our time.… Hence we are like a dwarf perched on the shoulders of a giant. The former sees further than the giant, not because of his own stature, but because of the stature of his bearer. Similarly, we [moderns] see more than the ancients, because our writings, modest as they are, are added to their great works.

I was going to say that the dwarfs despise the giants for being so short and lowly, but I think that adds little to the original text.

So, yeah, what William of Conches said: we all intellectually, and in some ways morally, perch upon the shoulders of giants.

But it is important to recognize that our perch gives us much more than an expansive view of the objects around us. Our height also gives us a lofty subjectivity — a subjectivity who not only sees and knows, but also judges and feels from a height.

We lose something crucial when we naively assume that this altitude is our natural birthright. When height is all we have ever known, it is easy to take for granted the layers upon layers of understanding that have raised us further and further above barbarity.

We cannot imagine how life might be at lower elevations. We are incapable of imagining ourselves as possible selves born in barbarous times and conditions. We confuse the peaceful, sensitive, reasonable second-natures instilled in the nursery with primordial nature herself.

Even without civilization, we think, we would have had the virtues, attitudes and understandings essential to who we are.

We keep the gifts of civilization, but lose all gratitude. We steal the gifts of our ancestors.

But we go from ingratitude to depravity when we start blaming the giants for the heights we have not yet reached, when we see the giants beneath us not as a tower lifting us up but iron chains holding us down. We think that if we untether ourselves from the bloody dirt around the giants’ feet, we will float up to the utopian heaven where we belong.

So we punch down, kick down, drop heavy rocks, pour molten lead and buckets of acid on the past. Once the giants are dead to us, their accomplishments forgotten, their teachings unlearned, the chains will corrode, dissolve and vanish into oblivion. Finally, we are free.