Words&Dirt

“There are phases in cultural evolution that are by their nature big leaps; a technology, or a constellation of them, proves so explosive that its lucky hosts suddenly seem light-years ahead of other cultures.  Those laggard cultures, indeed, look so pathetic that it is tempting to ask whether there isn’t some qualitative difference at work, some special something that rendered the ‘leading’ culture, and it alone, capable of crossing the technological threshold.

Surely such flattering interpretations accompanied encounters ten millennia ago between agricultural societies and hunter-gatherer societies, or, five millennia ago, between literate, state-level societies and illiterate chiefdoms.  In those cases we have hard evidence that the interpretation in wrong, the thesis of exceptionalism a self-indulgent illusion: we now know that both farming (and chiefdoms) and writing (and state-level societies) appeared independently, multiple times.

In the case of the industrial revolution, evidence of this sort is unattainable.  A revolution at this technological level occurs in an age when a global brain is taking shape, and news can travel around the planet in months.  So any subsequent episodes of industrialization––such as Japan’s less than a century after Europe’s––are necessarily derivative.  Thus the thesis of European exceptionalism can never be conclusively disproved.  Still, it is hard to take that thesis seriously if you are aware of the tens of millennia of cultural evolution that led to the industrial revolution; aware of the diffuse power evinced by that evolution at every turn; aware that what creates great technological change isn’t so much great cultures as the greatness of culture itself.”

––Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright, pg. 172