12-28-07

A Note on Technology and Historical Eras

For convenience sake, the history is broken down into the various eras defined by Western history, but a history of Western Civilization is not—no matter what the Victorians thought—a history of the world.  The section breaks here only exist to provide an easy means for westerners to see the timescape.  The so-called Dark Ages were only Dark in Europe, where the collapse of the Roman Empire left a huge power vacuum and internecine warfare destroyed much accumulated knowledge.  In the Middle East, particularly in Asia Minor where the Seljuk Turks held sway and the Byzantine Empire remained for several hundred years, much of the knowledge and literature of the Classical Period were retained and flowered into a Golden Age.  China, too, was also experience one of its rare periods of expansion and exploration.

This is an important note for two reasons:  first, one should not assume that just because a period has a certain name, that that's the way it was, everywhere.  As stated before, I'm using Western conventions because I'm an American writing in English, and I assume the readership to have similar cultural references for comprehension.  Second, and most importantly, it's important to understand that not all technologies are developed by all cultures and civilizations simultaneously.  In the Americas, no civilization ever made lasting use of the fixed-axle wheel.  This should not be taken as an indication that the American Cultures were any less intelligent or developed than their Old World counterparts.  Most American civilizations occurred on or very near to mountainous regions that made early versions of wheeled transport counterproductive.  By the same token, those same civilizations developed advanced farming methods that weren't put into much use by Old World cultures (and here, I'm including the US as an Old World culture, being—as we are—and extension and refinement of the British Empire) until the last century.

Different influences drive technology, and drive cultures to make use of technology in different ways.  It never occurred to the Chinese to use gunpowder as a propellent for missiles, just as it never occurred to some cultures to augment the release power of bows by inserting a opposing curve at the end of the staff.  Iron-hardening processes, and ultimately steel, resulted from interruptions in the Mediterranean tin trade.  Certain Pacific Northwest cultures used copper as a decorative and utility metal, but never developed copper weapons or tools.

I hope to get someone better qualified to write a more complete essay on the influence of one society on another and the variances of divergent and convergent technology, but my main point is this:  having a gun doesn't make you more advanced than the guy with a stone axe, it just makes you more dangerous, and, even then, only if the gun is loaded.  History is a long and winding road, but it doesn't necessarily lead anywhere, and there are lots of stops and byways, anyway.  Not everyone you meet will have enjoyed—or even read—Dickens, but that doesn't make that person ignorant or impaired; he merely has a different set of references.  It's best to try to learn from variant references, and neither discount them as "savage" nor romanticize them as somehow better than our own.  Human history is a smorgasbord of triumph and failure, and I want this particular buffet to be slanted toward allowing people to sample as many dishes as they can without pretending to empirical judgement on one or the other.