Bright Simons

We rationalise underdevelopment when we justify low thinking & poor imagination by blaming poverty. If I got a dollar anytime someone said to me that so and so shallow reasoning outcome should be excused because so and so people are disabled by "bread and butter issues," I would have beat Musk to a trillion dollars. I blame Maslow. He made it too easy for his ideas to be bastardised. Now, the "poverty blocks thinking" excuse has a pyramid to hide behind. The animated video attached to this post depicts the so-called "Antikythera Mechanism." It is more than 2000 years old. Discovered in fragments in 1902 by a Greek Politician, several experts worked day & night to reassemble and unlock its inner workings. The machine, sometimes called the world's first analog computer, embodies 500 years of Greek conceptual thinking. But for what? It tracked the moon, aligned calendars, & modelled the cosmos. Why was such exquisite and painstaking engineering deployed to grasp such distant phenomenon? Didn't the Greeks have mouths to feed? Leaking roofs to patch? Textiles to weave? They did, but the stars could not wait. We like to tell ourselves a tidy story about progress. First bread, then stars. First fix the roads, the drains, the clinics, the hunger - and only then, much later, may a poor society permit itself to dream about higher concepts. Survival first then imagination. What the Antikythera machine tells us is that progress doesn't have that patience. The Greeks realised that watching the constellations could help manage harvests better. Reading Orion might save a fortune from drowning. Learning about fluids and screws together can overcome an invading army. Meeting basic needs also opens the door to climbing higher logic. Imagination is not the scarce resource we like to pretend it is. It is everywhere, already at work, disguised as survival. Given the reputation of the Greeks as pioneers, you might be tempted to think that this was merely the product of broad social enlightenment. Well, the period during which the pieces that became Antikythera were being assembled over hundreds of years were far from advanced. Thw average Greek was far from Plato. Most Greeks then were poorer than the average Botswanan or Moldovan today. Most couldn't read. Life expectancy was barely 40. In some Greek towns then, when a pandemic hit, random people were selected, painted, slapped & tossed out of the town in the hope of abating the disease (read about "pharmakos"). Hardly Xanadu. Yet there were pockets, subcultures, of mind-boggling genius. People calculated the size of the Earth using sticks & shadows. And the distance to the moon using rods and discs. Such pockets can be found today in Kokompe and Suame Magazine too, in the little folds of our daily lives. The spirit is in the soups that take 4 hours to make. And the funeral mourning display and its sequenced rhythms. Do these elaborate tapestries not flourish in the midst of poverty because they matter more than food? The real question is why so little of these sparks of elaborate imagination and creativity accumulate into broad changes in our societies. Into industrialisation, modernisation, city planning, and all the higher order systems we seem to crave. Funny enough, Antikythera also begs this same question. That machine did not start an industrial revolution. It became a fossil. The workshop vanished, the patrons died, the knowledge stayed trapped in too few hands - and the sea swallowed the rest. What was missing was not genius. It was a big enough subculture to grow around it. Call it a conversion belt. Think of it as the difference between a miracle and a civilisation. And this is exactly where too many of our economies stall today. We celebrate the occasional hero, the sudden breakthroughs, but fail to form clubs to sustain the spark. Yes we are saddled with "bread & butter issues," but we can always choose to make it about "bread & stars" if we want.