a sociology of knowledge

It is important that we never forget our world is inherited. The foundation for our civilization has long since been established, and though much has been forgotten, we continue to build upon the genius and ingenuity of those that precede us.Peter Berger made famous an idea of the “sociology of knowledge” whereby just about all that we can come to know, our body of knowledge, is given to us by the society in which we live. This body of knowledge that society possesses exists at the level of the community, as no individual can know everything that the whole of a society collectively knows knowledge becomes diffused throughout the entirety of the social group. Each generation cannot be left to reinvent the wheel so for society to have advanced to it’s current level, it had to build upon the body of knowledge passed on to it by previous generations.Progress came as society built upon the inherited knowledge given to us by the community through the mediums of instructing, training, and educating. As time has passed it is safe to say that everything we know will have been given to us by the society we were born into and as we in turn pass it on to the next generation it will largely be what we ourselves have learned, with a bit of change and perhaps even a bit of deterioration.Knowledge is organic and is in a constant state of flux. While we do not pass on necessarily all that we learned from generations previous, what we gather is used as a foundation for the next. Society advances, as the methodology towards creation no longer begins from the bottom—the wheel— but rather from where the last generation left off. The knowledge gathered from the discovery of fire eventually carried our minds to construct the combustible engine, the latter never being possible without the former, through generations we passed down the promethean knowledge that fueled the next stage of innovation.Light, heat, and fire have all since been simplified to a switch, dial, or a match. As our civilization builds upon itself we have become increasingly divorced with the basic knowledge that led to our fruition. Thus, we have come to rely not on the body of knowledge passed down to us from the previous generations but the technology we have created with it.The following is not a dispute of what the wonders of technology have granted, but simply meant to question on our reliance, as well as to revel in the trend of the post apocalypse. Let us imagine a single catastrophic event that would at once eradicated everything man-made from the earth with the exception of our current body of knowledge. Everything our hands created will have disappeared and instead we are left to ride out the unbridled consequence bareback. With this in mind how long would it take to rebuild society to its current state?To take this even further I would like to ask; with what we know about our current society—war, poverty, corruption— why would we want to rebuild our society to something indistinguishable from its current state? Wouldn't we wish to do it differently, perhaps better? And finally, if we don’t wish to replicate society as it is today, why do we tolerate what it has become?img