From Night Thoughts by Wallace Shawn
To get from where we are now to some less terrifying place will be, if not completely impossible, certainly way beyond difficult, and so it almost goes without saying that the human beings who might carry out such an extraordinary creative task need to be as inspired and insightful and intelligent and deep as members of the species can possibly be. And here is where we must say that civilization itself could come in handy, because some of the things that civilization has learned how to do could prove amazingly useful in the struggle to save the world from some of the things that civilization is now doing.
Because civilization has actually figured out how to store up and preserve human wisdom from over the millennia and has devised remarkable methods for refining and sharpening the individual human mind.
Civilization has come up with many precious objects that can cause the human mind to expand.
but many of these objects have been hoarded in the locked treasure rooms of a tiny number of individuals. And many of the treasures have fallen victim to a fate that is common to things that are kept in locked rooms; no one quite remembers where they are, and after a while they're completely forgotten.
We need to break into those rooms, because we need all the help we can possibly get.
(Page 68)
This happened to remind me of the following:
Contrary to conventional wisdom, human brilliance emerges not from our innate brainpower or raw computational capacities, but from the sharing of information in communities and networks over generations. We review how larger, more diverse, and more optimally interconnected networks of minds give rise to faster innovation and how the cognitive products of this cumulative cultural evolutionary process feedback to make us individually “smarter”—in the sense of being better at meeting the challenges and problems posed by our societies and socioecologies. Here, we consider not only how cultural evolution supplies us with “thinking tools” (like counting systems and fractions) but also how it has shaped our ontologies (e.g., do germs and witches exist?) and epistemologies, including our notions of what constitutes a “good reason” or “good evidence” (e.g., are dreams a source of evidence?). Building on this, we consider how cultural evolution has organized and distributed cultural knowledge and cognitive tasks among subpopulations, effectively shifting both thinking and production to the level of the community, population, or network, resulting in collective information processing and group decisions.
(From the paper “What makes us smart” by Joseph Henrich and Michael Muthukrishna)