> Technology has been around for hundreds of thousands of years
Vernacular methods of doing things have been around - without science or rapid innovation. Key point in time was invention of printing press combined with lutheran zeal to read and the western alphabet that allowed unprecedented platform for knowledge transfer. After that it's been pure acceleration.
Before literacy was a major thing (which it has not been historically) knowledge transfer and preservation was based on human to human contact. You could not literally just crank the machine to print out out going edges in a knowledge graph.
I'm not meaning just a few literate people. I mean an entire society capable of reading and eager to create and learn new information.
> Technology is just tools that humans make to solve a problem.
According to a dictionary it's "the branch of knowledge dealing with engineering or applied sciences" / "the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry" and I would argue it's this sort of technology that enables novel, rapid adaptation.
Applied sciences need science before application. Now - knowledge seeking that sure looks likes science even though it was not called that has been around few millenia - Thales of Miletus, Ibn al-Haytham etc etc.
What is novel in our time is application of science to every goddamn problem on an industrial scale. And the understanding that things can improve. This requires a literate society (imo but arguable maybe), eager to adapt, and pragmatic recognition of what works and what does not.
There are areas that are lacking in literacy and capital. While people in those areas sure enough are able as anybody else to individually use technology developed and manufactured elsewhere, the societies in which they live simply lack the means to apply industrial level technological innovations.
With industrial level technology adaptation it's a whole different ballgame.
Many places in US would be uninhabitable without technology and are thus testaments to the idea that MODERN technology allows survival in unprecedented places. For example Colorado. The place was so arid and unhospitable no one could or would want to live there. But then there came railroads, industrial engineering to implement water reservoirs etc etc and visit Denver today and it's very hard for an outsider to realize they are visiting a modern goddamn miracle.
I'm fairly sure if people can live in Colorado they can live anywhere given sufficient capital is applied (capital being the enabler of applied science and technology).
A lot of ancient societies rapidly adapted to problems. In my previously mentioned tsunami example, ancient societies would build their towns above a certain point to be safe from them. Some cultures used to (and some poorer people still do) build houses on stilts near flood areas to stay safe from rising water.
But in modern, literate society, people think "nah it'll be fine bro" and build houses right up on and flat against the coastline. Then entire towns get washed away.
The biggest mistake modern people make is assuming ancient societies were stupid. They didn't have people sitting in offices thinking up solutions to problems. But the reality is those societies learned just as quickly as anyone else did, and a lot of them probably had a much stronger fear of nature and didn't sit around thinking "nah bro we'll totally survive. we have technology". They knew a tiny mistake meant death. Death to modern first worlders seems like a very out of reach thing. We operate on the assumption we'll live long lives and die in a retirement home.
And Colorado isn't by any means inhospitable. There were plenty of tribes in Colorado before literate enlightened megagenius westerners came along to save the day. It has some of the oldest known towns on the North American continent.[1] Westerners may have at first struggled to survive there with their modern technology, but natives lived just fine in Colorado for thousands of years.
Tibet is a far more inhospitable place. So is Saudi Arabia. But those also have thousands of years of history all without a printing press. Arabian culture even managed to spread across the world out from the inhospitable desert and even dominate part of Europe before the printing press existed. Spain and Indonesia became Islamic before enlightened Europeans went out to save the world and make it "habitable".
I agree humans as individuals regadless where they came from or when they lived have always been equally precious in potential, and all traditions are valuable, but it’s simply false narrative to claim modern technology & capital would not make a difference.
My point was it’s false narrative to compare any historical society to a modern industrial one.
Printing press, latin alphabet and market economy were suberb for knowledge transfer. There was no historically comparable system to commodotize and scale literacy.
It’s false narrative to claim european developments were not unique and transformative. That’s just how the history goes. Literacy, capital, binding contract law and science created a heady mix that created a system that now is global standard how societies try to operate.
Large parts of the system came from other parts of the world. The point is not where this happened or by whom, but the point is it happened.
Modern technological societies are able to adapt in unprecedented scale. Regardless of culture or ethnicity.
It would be pretty weird to think this would be a narrative of european supremacy - cultural, racial or otherwise. Europe was an inconsequential periphery and it’s once again an iconsequential periphery.
Japan had literacy rates equal to the west during the age of exploration. [1] And when you go back to historical records, Egypt and Mesopotamia had insane good record keeping and were stabler, longer lasting societies than anything else earth has yet seen. They're also in some notably harsh environments compared to the easy living of Europe.
Latin characters really had nothing to do with it. Western society was built off the lessons learned from those two societies. What separates post-printing press western civilization has been the incredibly rapid expansion (which Mongols also achieved with nothing but horses and bows and arrows). But whether this post-printing press civilization will last as long as Ancient Egypt did (3000 years) is yet to be seen. We've got about 2600 years to go.
I would argue that Egypt apart from temperature was lot less harsh than Europe. Nile offers water all through the year. And the flooding brought fertilizer each year. Also lot less risk of any type of weather causing famine.
In reality that is lot less harsh than Europe before industrial agriculture. Just looking at list of famines shows that Europe was a harsh place to live for stable society.
It's also very hard to compare pharaonic Egypt to a modern society since most people were agricultural labourers. You did have not that many people (lets say 3M which was a lot by ancient standards), and of the elite who actually could use capital and talent were really, really scarce. Literacy rates were maybe 1%-15%?
Think what a modern country would look like with 3M people of which 150K can read. It would not be pretty and Egypt was probably worse. Of course if you can control thousands of people you always have some capabilities which is the reason why we adore their art to this day. But I think one should think "North Korea" what pharaonic egypt likely was like rather than "pinnacle of imaginable civilization". This is not to put down the achievements of the egyptian civilization, but like pointed out, they had lots of time.
Most people anywhere (except the pastoralists ofc) were agricultural labourers before modern farming kicked in.
Exactly.
What makes the capabilities of the current civilization different is a combination of things, some of which are unique this time around.
The major differentiators are 1. Global scale monoculture in knowledge (take engineers from US midwest, Ethiopia, China, Brazil, France, Japan, Finland, Chennai - we all basically can mesh instantly to a product team since tehcnological education is so homogenous). This monoculture was enabled by the printing press and later digital technologies. 2. Insane amount of energy per capita available 3. Amount of capital available including finance
2. and 3. simply were not available before. We can argue all day about merits of education systems of old but you simply did not have this global talent mass on hand. This talent mass is prerequisite so that you can scale capital and technology rapidly on a global scale.
Energy&Capital then feed the machine to give it energy. This machine simply did not exist before. The energy per person in any society was tiny fraction what we can utilize. Similarly for capital.
Japan is excellent example.
a) It demonstrates how long it takes for a society, if it's educated and all around excellent but pre-modern to reach parity with modern societies. I would argue based on facts it's about two generations or 50 years (for Japan) from Perry expedition 1850's to Japan wiping a western industrial nation state fleet to the bottom of the Tsushima straits (1905).
b) It demonstrates this society, when in it's pre-modern configuration lacked things, that it felt necesary to acquire to be able to go head-to-head with societies that had these implemented.
It's this difference between pre-modern,pre-capitalist pre-industrial and modern I'm talking about, why it's false narrative to state "people througout history have been smart and able" as a contradiction why modern societies would be more capable. Because they are. It's not a statement about why some people with different upbringing or genes would be different. That's irrelevant (except up to a point where their upbringing relates to prevalent institutions i.e Acemoglu, "Why nations fail" etc).
I agree we know nothing of how long the current system can last, or will it evolve or devolve. But it's very hard for me to imagine the system going away unless we go full mad max. Because it's not about cultural identity anymore. Who is your king or god. While we live in tumultuous times, Fukuyama was still more or less correct IMO, even though clearly it's not a "end of history" as much as "beginning of new history".
It's about capital, energy, education and markets.