Civilization as a Living Process

If a human being is a relational, regulatory, developmental organism, then a civilization — which is simply a great many such organisms, linked — is best understood not as a machine to be engineered but as a living process to be cultivated.

Living processes have requirements. They can be nourished or starved, regulated or overwhelmed, developed or arrested. They do not respond well to force applied against their nature. And they mature, when they mature, the way living things do: developmentally, in sequence, through relationship, by passing what has been learned from those who hold it to those who will carry it next.

Seen this way, many of our gravest problems look less like failures of intelligence or resources and more like failures of development — interrupted maturation, broken transmission, the pathways along which wisdom once moved between generations worn thin or severed. A civilization can accumulate enormous knowledge and still fail to mature, if the channels through which a person becomes wise are allowed to collapse.