Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Cultural Studies – Miscellaneous, grade: 0, 7, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, History and Theory), course: Relations between technology and culture, language: English, abstract: Stating today that the Western Civilization is the most technological advanced civilization on earth and in history, will probably not draw many objections, but how and when did this happen? What made Western Europe outstrip the other great civilizations that long held technological superiority over it?
In this short essay I try to follow a thought of Professor Lynn Townsend White , seeing the intellectual condition of a society (namely religious values) as the main important factor for its technological development. Although many critics argue against White, downplaying religious value orientation as a possible cause, focusing on technological success of other civilizations in the Middle Ages, portraying the ‘technological mind’ of western Europe as the consequence and not the cause of it’s rapid technological growth or portraying the Western leading technological position as a kind of coincidence, I find them not convincing. To the contrary: the spread of ideas and their grave effects can have their basis in the minds of very few or even single persons, who convince a society to change or adapt their values Further, the wide spread and common borrowing of technological inventions in the medieval Eurasian cultures makes a search for an answer of the astonishing European success even more a question of society and intellectual attitude than the hardware inventions, since Byzantium, the Islamic world, India and China had in the 10th century the same or better technologies and inventions than as Western Europe. And of course on can argue that technological attitudes and pro-technological ideological changes in society where the product of technological progress and not it’s cause, but first this would be hard to prove (since for example Monasticism and ‘Ora et Labora’ came before the great technological progress of Western Europe) and second this leaves the question open what then caused the groundbreaking technological progress in Western Europe (and not in other cultures) in the first place?
In this short essay I try to follow a thought of Professor Lynn Townsend White , seeing the intellectual condition of a society (namely religious values) as the main important factor for its technological development. Although many critics argue against White, downplaying religious value orientation as a possible cause, focusing on technological success of other civilizations in the Middle Ages, portraying the ‘technological mind’ of western Europe as the consequence and not the cause of it’s rapid technological growth or portraying the Western leading technological position as a kind of coincidence, I find them not convincing. To the contrary: the spread of ideas and their grave effects can have their basis in the minds of very few or even single persons, who convince a society to change or adapt their values Further, the wide spread and common borrowing of technological inventions in the medieval Eurasian cultures makes a search for an answer of the astonishing European success even more a question of society and intellectual attitude than the hardware inventions, since Byzantium, the Islamic world, India and China had in the 10th century the same or better technologies and inventions than as Western Europe. And of course on can argue that technological attitudes and pro-technological ideological changes in society where the product of technological progress and not it’s cause, but first this would be hard to prove (since for example Monasticism and ‘Ora et Labora’ came before the great technological progress of Western Europe) and second this leaves the question open what then caused the groundbreaking technological progress in Western Europe (and not in other cultures) in the first place?
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