Since the Industrial Revolution, and especially since the Information
Revolution, the techniques for the preservation of physical goods and
knowledge have become tremendously more reliable than was possible in
premodern societies. The ability to make multiple copies of an object
and potentially inexhaustible copies of an idea―and to maintain detailed
visual, textual, and auditory records of particular times, places, and
activities, with little effort by historical standards, has preserved
many of the accomplishments of prior and current thinkers for the
creative faculties of humans to expand upon.
It is doubtful that we, in our time, are inherently more creative
than our ancestors. But we do have a much more diverse and advanced
subject matter to which to apply our creativity. Where we are free
to do so, we may arrange these building blocks of innovation in much the
same way that our ancestors arranged sticks and stones―except that the
consequences of our actions are much more powerful, life-enhancing,
and durable. Our infrastructure and our methods for maintaining and
transmitting knowledge separate us from our ancestors to the extent that,
to them, we would be as gods.
And yet, none of the wonders that enable progress in our time are ever
guaranteed to continue, though not due to inanimate nature and lower
life forms alone; those have always been in a steady retreat wherever
human reason and productivity were unleashed at anywhere near their
fullest extent. But the folly, ignorance, sloth, and envy of other
men can all too easily slow the growth of progress-nourishing
infrastructure to a crawl, or even reverse it and usher in a new Dark
Ages. Coercive policies, economic misconduct and capital consumption,
massive wars, widespread prohibitions on peaceful and productive
activities, superstitions and irrational taboos, pervasive and
disproportionate fears―as embodied in the environmentalists' progress-killing
"precautionary principle"―and a desire for "security" over liberty, for
"tradition" over growth, and for stasis over innovation, are all forces
that counteract and threaten the maintenance of our civilization. In
most times and places, only a handful of people have been immune to
deleterious anti-progressive beliefs and their consequences, but there
is no reason why we cannot all rise above such anti-life thinking. We
all have the creative faculty in us, and we can all think.
The importance of maintenance to human progress can be carried into the
life of the individual with profound consequences that can produce
massive personal growth and productivity via a change of habits. A mere
creation of reproducible records of one's past achievements―and their
publication on the Internet, where possible―can create a formidable
store of knowledge to which the creator and others can refer and which
they can build upon. The concepts of open-source software and
distributed computing, for instance, are built on this elementary
principle, but it can be applied to so many more areas of life. The
creative faculty is with us every day, and every day it produces
original ideas and methods for improving our lives. But, without
adequate maintenance―including the establishment of a concrete form for
these innovations―these gifts from within our minds will fade away into
insignificance, much like the ruins of antiquity. Developing an improved
infrastructure for the products of one's own mind may be the first step
toward revitalizing the infrastructure of civilization itself.
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