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0 pointshosh2y ago0 comments

My beef with this isn't about whether it concludes anything about innovation, but that it presents itself as a comprehensive and universal map of various technologies, ideas, and innovation when it is anything but. It is mainly concentrated in advances in the Western world. I wouldn't have a problem with this if it were titled as, "Calculating Western Empires: A Genealogy of Technology ... " because that is what it is.

Examples from the 1500s and 1600s are definitely European-centric -- meaning that there are little, if any examples drawn from ideas outside of Europe.

I look at the category for Education, and it has "Saving Souls with School". Where are the non-Christian examples of innovation in Education?

The category for emotions (of which there are rich traditions and thought on this in many cultures). Or "Era of Humors", "Cartesian Dualism", "Embodying Class". Those are all Western-centric ideas.

One curious example -- specifically talking about the import of teas and porcelain from the East. The implicit frame here is that it doesn't matter for this set of comparisons until those items became available in the West. What about the history of when tea (and spices!) were cultivated, and porcelain were made? (The porcelain that were exported out of China were mass produced and considered the bottom grade unsuitable for the domestic martket).

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SI_Rob2y ago· 2 in thread

I don't see a problem with this mainly because I would argue that innovation, in the early modern european era onward sense of "technologies that tend to direct the cumulative power of the many into the control of a few" captured by the infographic, isn't necessarily a net positive for humanity, and thus leaving non-western influences out of it keeps those cultures in the benefit of the doubt.

The next century or two may well see us wipe ourselves out as a species, as the great elliptic of this leverage-amplifying 'innovation' arc comes crashing back on itself..

It may well be that not innovating, in this western-dominated sense, was the right strategy for our species survival all along, and thus clamoring to be included in this narrative is to demand that non-western cultures be given a position of honor alongside the west in the story of humanity's self-destruction.

hoshOP2y ago

I can respect that position. When I reflect on permaculture design, or Christopher Alexander's ideas, for example, the Western modernity did not have to turn out the way it did.

I can't say that non-Western empire cultures were that much better from that lens.

The one I had been studying for the past year or so was the Chinese. During the 1500s and 1600s, technologies for warfare was just as rampant. The Ming and the Jinchurens were fielding firearms as enthusiastically as anywhere else. The 1800s when many places were industrializing, the Qing dynasty was wracked with uprisings, revolts, and a civil war with a scale comparable to WWI in terms of numbers of dead and cities razed. This unrest was the result of centuries of increasing marginalization of young people being shut out from economic opportunities, and widespread access to the ability to inflict violence.

But I can't even say that even if the Qing did not have that internal instability, would they have done better? The telegraph was invented in the mid 1800s, and it started globalizing markets because of information transmission. It is considerably difficult to map Chinese ideographs to the equivalent of Morse code, even if the literati were not using the ability to read and write maintain status.

SI_Rob2y ago

permaculture a good place to investigate a basis of the essential conflict at work here, which is that perma-anything and "innovation" are orthogonal forces over the same domain. Would any culture be capable of improving on the resource rivalry -> technical conflict -> cultural domination/consolidation model?

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