Jeff Fink wrote:
Is it culture that allowed western Europe/America to develop such
incredible technology while all previous insipient techno societies such
as China and Egypt failed to mature technically?
I think this is a misleading question.
The sum total of human knowledge has increased -- erratically -- as an
exponential. The more we know, the easier it is to discover more, and
the more we can pool our knowledge, the faster it happens. The behavior
of exponential growth leads directly to the illusion that there were
enormous differences in the rate of technological progress between
Europe and the rest of the world. If we look at the full timeline of
human history, on the other hand, and consider when other cultures might
have arrived at a post-industrial society if Europe had not, it appears
that the difference in "arrival time", as a fraction of the length of
human history, would actually have been quite small.
The early part of an exponential looks "flat" -- if you just look at the
curve locally, it's hard to tell anything's changing. In the time of
Jesus Christ, society surely _looked_ like a zero-sum game to the
inhabitants, because the pace of change was so slow. Ecclesiastes could
write "there is nothing new under the sun", and people could take it as
literally true with no need to hem and haw about how he meant it
figuratively, or claim he was just talking about human behavior, or
whatnot -- it appeared, 2500 years ago, that things were really
completely static.
But they were not. The sum of human knowledge was increasing, and at
some point the slope of the exponential got steep enough that it was
obvious that things were changing. That happened first in western
Europe -- but the difference in /years/ is actually very small between
where Europe was on the curve versus, say, China, or even the Americas.
Figure human beings have been "absolutely human" for 100,000 years. The
rate of technological change has only been fast enough for individuals
to easily see it happening during the last 600 years or so. Europe may
have been "ahead" of China by, say, a century, and ahead of the New
World by a handful of centuries -- but on the scale of human history,
that's the blink of an eye. Someone had to get to the industrial
revolution first; it happened to be Europe. If Europe had stumbled, it
would surely have happened anyway, and probably no more than a few
hundred years later. The difference in time to reach the threshold of
advanced technology, given a time scale of 100,000 years, would most
likely have been less than 1% if we had had to "wait" for some other
continent to get there.
I tend to think that
freedom and the rise of a middle class are essential. There must be
time and resources available to large groups of people in order to amass
great amounts of knowledge through experimentation. I don’t think any
previous civilizations had those ingredients.
Perhaps. That's somewhat speculative.
What is not speculation is that no previous civilization had the same
prior fund of amassed knowledge which was available in Europe at the
dawn of the industrial revolution.
What is also not speculation is that if something had prevented Europe
from taking the "next step", within another couple of centuries the
amassed knowledge in Asia would have exceeded that which was available
in Europe at the start of the revolution. We can then guess that that,
in turn, might very well have sparked an industrial revolution,
regardless of the sclerotic nature of Oriental politics at the time.
Freedom in Europe sped things up. Slavery in the new world sped things
up, as well, by making southern plantations practical, and hence fueling
England's foreign trade, which in turn funded industrialization at home.
The connections here are complex and not generally known but appear to
have been significant. But the human knowledge base was increasing
regardless of all that; it seems quite plausible that a scientific and
industrial revolution was inevitable.
The political situation affected the timing, but was almost surely not
the root cause.
Jeff
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* R.C.Macaulay [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*Sent:* Thursday, December 13, 2007 8:38 PM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* [Vo]:OT: Culture and the evolving human
Been reading this thread with interest at the views expressed. Anyone
care to expound on the impact of another component .... CULTURE.
What role does culture play in the grand scheme of things?
Richard
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