Bedrocks of Civilization

Bedrocks of civilization

BEDROCKS OF CIVILIZATION, narration by Prof. Judson Singer, director of Tharaka Invention Academy.

When we hear people talk about civilizations rising and falling, we often think about great empires, powerful armies, enormous cities, or impressive monuments. We may think that a civilization is successful because it has become wealthy or because it has developed advanced technology. Those things certainly tell us something about a society, but I would like you to consider another possibility. Perhaps one of the best ways to understand the strength of a civilization is to look at how well its people are able to solve problems.

Think about the problems every society must face. People need food and clean water. They need shelter, energy, transportation, health care, education, and ways to communicate with one another. New problems also appear as populations grow, environments change, economies develop, and new technologies enter our lives. A healthy civilization does not simply solve one set of problems and stop. It develops the ability to face new problems as they appear, learn from experience, and create better solutions.

This brings us to the first bedrock of a rising civilization: problem-solving capacity. There is an important difference between possessing technology and having the ability to create and adapt technology. A country might import computers, vehicles, agricultural machinery, medical equipment, or sophisticated communication systems. Those technologies may be extremely useful, but if people cannot repair them, modify them, improve them, or develop alternatives when they fail, the society remains dependent upon somebody else. A stronger kind of development occurs when people themselves become increasingly capable of solving the problems they encounter.

The second bedrock is adaptive institutions. Every society creates institutions to help people work together. Schools educate children, universities develop knowledge, businesses produce goods and services, governments organize public activities, and community organizations help people address local needs. But there is a difficulty. An institution that worked very well fifty years ago may not work equally well today because the world around it has changed.

Good institutions therefore need to be stable, but they also need to be able to learn. They must recognize when an old approach is no longer working and be willing to consider a better one. The danger comes when an institution becomes more concerned with protecting its procedures, traditions, or position than with solving the problem it was created to address. At that point, yesterday’s solution can gradually become today’s obstacle.

The third bedrock is investment in a shared future. Imagine planting a tree that you know you may never sit beneath. Why would you plant it? You plant it because someone else will need its shade. Civilizations do something similar when they build schools, roads, water systems, farms, libraries, laboratories, businesses, and other resources that may continue serving people long after the original builders are gone.

That kind of investment requires people to believe that the future is worth building. It also requires enough trust for people who may disagree about many things to cooperate when they face an important common problem. People do not have to think alike. In fact, disagreement can be healthy because different ideas can lead to better solutions. The real danger begins when people stop believing that cooperation can benefit everyone and begin to see every issue as a struggle in which somebody else must lose.

Now we can also see the warning signs of decline more clearly. A society may create more offices, more regulations, more committees, and more complicated systems, while its actual problems become harder and more expensive to solve. Institutions may become excellent at maintaining themselves but less effective at carrying out their original purposes. Groups within society may become so divided that even problems affecting everyone become difficult to address together. A civilization can therefore possess impressive technology and great wealth while its underlying ability to respond to new challenges is becoming weaker.

This idea becomes especially important when we think about invention. We often imagine inventors as a small group of scientists and engineers working in laboratories. But invention is much broader than that. A farmer who discovers a better way to preserve crops is solving a problem. A mechanic who modifies imported equipment so that it can be repaired with locally available parts is solving a problem. A village that improves its water-collection system is solving a problem, and a teacher who discovers a better way to explain a difficult idea is solving a problem as well.

None of these people may become famous inventors, but together, millions of acts like these can increase the problem-solving capacity of an entire society. This is what I mean by distributed inventive capacity: instead of depending upon a small number of specialists to create solutions for everyone else, we develop the ability to invent and solve problems throughout the population.

For African societies, I believe this distinction deserves particular attention. Africa is enormously diverse, so we should not talk about the entire continent as though every country and community faces the same circumstances. But we can still ask an important question: What might happen if African societies dramatically increased the number of people who were capable of identifying problems and developing locally appropriate solutions?

That question leads directly to education. Of course, education must teach young people what humanity has already learned. We need mathematics, science, history, language, engineering, and all the knowledge accumulated by earlier generations. But sooner or later, every generation encounters problems for which the answer is not already written in a textbook.

At that point, knowing yesterday’s answers is not enough. People must know how to observe carefully, ask good questions, challenge assumptions, investigate evidence, imagine alternatives, experiment with ideas, learn from failure, and improve their solutions. Today they must also learn how to use artificial intelligence intelligently without surrendering their own judgment.

This is one of the ideas behind the Tharaka Invention Academy. TIA begins with a simple proposition: inventive capacity can be cultivated. Inventors do not have to be rare individuals who somehow appear by accident. Curiosity, observation, imagination, experimentation, collaboration, persistence, and good judgment are habits that people can practice and strengthen.

So when we think about the future of a civilization, perhaps we should look beyond how much money it possesses, how many buildings it has constructed, or how much technology it can purchase. We might ask a different question: Is the number of people capable of creating useful solutions increasing or decreasing?

Because in the long run, one of a civilization’s deepest renewable resources may be the problem-solving capacity of its people. A society that continually develops that capacity becomes better prepared for problems it cannot yet predict. And that is why cultivating inventive people is more than an educational objective.

It is an investment in civilizational capacity.

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