Joel Mokyr: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, I think my sense would be that both Roman and Greek civilizations were, in many ways, creative, but the creativity did never really extend very much into the technological realm. Insofar that they did science, they were mostly uninterested in applying that science to day-to-day problems. That insight, the kind of knowledge that we have about nature, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and so on and so forth, that should be applied toward material improvement, that’s not an immediate and obvious insight, nor is it an immediate and obvious insight that progress, as we understand it today, is feasible and/or desirable. These are all insights that arose in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. I have referred to these things, as you surely know, as what I call the industrial enlightenment. There is this change of mind in European’s thinking after maybe 1450 or 1500, maybe because of the printing press, maybe because of other reasons, but in which Europeans essentially start to convince themselves that they are smarter than anybody that came before them, that a lot of these great Hellenistic and Greek scientists were wrong about many things, and that they could do better. Once you have that belief—and Francis Bacon and a whole bunch of other people were all in that tradition—in Rome, what you see is a whole bunch of clever people, but they’re not that interested in technology. Let me give you one specific example, Tyler, that I have always found particularly intriguing, although I don’t have a good answer why it happened. If you think about human needs, one of the constants of human needs, above all, is that, at some age, we need glasses. I don’t know when you start wearing glasses, but I started wearing glasses when I was in my early 40s in order to read and things like that. That’s not a cultural feature. That’s something that’s hard-wired in us. The Romans, certainly the upper class, were literate people, and they had glass, but they never invent spectacles. They don’t have optics, and they’re not interested in optics. There’s this passage in Seneca in which he looks at a glass that has water in it. He says, “Hey, it is interesting. The stuff that’s behind the glass actually is magnified.” But they never take the step of coming up with eyeglasses. You wonder why, because, clearly, if necessity is the mother of invention, this was a necessity. They never do it. The only thing that you see happening in Rome, and even that was very constrained, is they do come up with water mills, but the water mills remain, by and large, tools for grinding wheat, wine, and corn. They don’t actually take it to the kind of extremes that Europeans did in the Middle Ages, turning it into sawmill and fulling mills, which is why factories were known as mills. They never do that. n. They don’t actually take it to the kind of extremes that Europeans did in the Middle Ages, turning it into sawmill and fulling mills, which is why factories were known as mills. They never do that. I think the reason is because the people who made things, the artisans, the workmen, and the people who knew things and studied things, which is the scientists and the mathematicians and the teachers, never talked to each other. What’s more, the scientists essentially looked upon hard work and manual labor with a great deal of contempt. Both Plato and Aristotle make these points, but the Romans took it over. It was a slave society. Slave societies often look at manual labor with a great deal of condescension. In the end, I think that’s what stopped them. The other thing is, I think that if you don’t have a concept of progress and you don’t think that by studying things and investigating things and doing what we would call research in order to make the world a better place, at least from a material point of view, if you don’t have that concept, there’s not going to be an Industrial Revolution. The Chinese don’t have that concept either. Coming back to China, I looked quite a long time for this. Basically, all the Chinese experts, that I have read, essentially said that the concept of progress is basically absent. Now, that’s a concept that’s emerging in Europe in the 15th to 16th century. By 17th century, it’s quite commonplace. Once you have that, you can sort of see all those smart guys trying to solve practical and pragmatic problems. Scientists, many scientists, almost all scientists, I would think, there’s some exceptions, almost all of them said, “Look, I want to do science not only because I’m curious and not only because I want to illustrate the glory and the wisdom of the Creator; I want to do science because I want to make life better. Now, whose life is a different question. That is what really emerges in Europe. No other civilization does that, Tyler. The Romans are very good at infrastructure. You can go see the aqueduct in Segovia or the waterworks in Istanbul, the Roman system of roads. Isn’t there some notion of progress behind those developments with Caesar encountering what we now call Britain, right?…

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