THE GENESIS OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT.BY AUSTIN NWAEZE, DIRECTOR OF GARDEN CITY LIBRARY, PROJECT READ ADVOCACY.
The foundation of social development is knowledge sharing.The Bible said in the last days many shall travel to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.
The truth remains that civilization as we know and enjoy it today was made possible by the singular invention of the printing press which emanated by the effort of Gutenberg.
This unusual benefactor of mankind was used to bring knowledge to the world in a way that has not been possible for thousands of years.
The most educated people of those days where the librarians, who were the custodians and repository of the special knowledge transferred by other educated class or the nobility for short. In biblical times, they were simply referred to as the scribes or scribblers, meaning one who writes. It was a noble profession because these persons preserved knowledge, history, customs and traditions of their society.
These intellectual class were special advisers to the kings and rulers and their wisdom was relied upon because they were the midwives to the birth of new ideas and ideals as a result of their extensive studies.
As society evolved, men from various continent of the world, first Asiatic and then European, found the need to spread the special knowledge locked up and hoarded up by the aristocrats, kings and nobles of the realm, because they discovered that keeping the unschooled, ignorant and oppressed by reason of their deficiency in knowledge, was tantamount to a disaster waiting to happen. It seems the libraries, which were then the exclusive reserve of the few wealthy class, has to be unveiled to those who will show themselves ambitious enough for leadership and social development.
The world in actuality has come a long way in disseminating knowledge and information that was previously considered private property. It is this widespread use of information which has seen its most unprecedented explosion in our own age, that we refer to as civilization. Civilization is the combined knowledge of mankind gathered for more than three thousand years of human social evolution and being shared by a mastermind group who constituted the thinkers or philosophic class.
Aristotle proposed that in a society that would be wisely and justly governed, the philosophers should be kings or the kings philosophers. The reason for this proposition is not far fetched taking into cognizance that humans are the most complex creatures on earth. Leading humans involves a compound knowledge of history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, geography and commerce which at that time, were not so developed as subjects to be formally thought. Over the centuries, just like the greatest book, the bible, men have been organizing and reorganizing into digestible format, the knowledge we have in textbooks today. Subjects such as metaphysics have even been demystified. All thanks to the scholars, the scribes and now in modern parlance, the librarians who dictated, and edited high sounding words that were uttered by men of prodigious knowledge.
Seeing we have graduated from the unknown to the known, should we now discard speculative knowledge, realizing that it is doubt that gave birth to certainty? The philosophers questions and the quest for men to find answers to those questions gave birth to scientific empiricism and scientific experimentation gave birth to technology which is the driver of social change in the new world today.
Man no doubt is still probing, is still questioning, is still searching to extend the frontiers of his knowledge. The magic and miracle of yesterday has become the science and technology of today. Nothing is truly unknowable, only unknown. The men that were used to make up the great books collection project has proved this much to us; that the limit of our thinking is the limit of our social development as human beings in this illimitable and boundless universe.
The rest of the world has long realized this deep truth and are working with it, but when will the apprehension of this truth be burned into our collective consciousness as a people, as AFRICANS?
When this happens, we will discover where civilization all started. We will read, think, argue, speculate, question, probe, search, research, hypothesize and conclude, but thank God with the helpful tools of science and technology. Then shall we advance ourselves as a people and as a continent.
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