Untitled - socium.ge

TECHNOLOGY ENTERS HISTORYAfterword 439The assertion that technology deserves a leading role in the historical recordwas first articulated long before the cluster of events normally called theIndustrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century. The historiographicalrevolution that brought technology into the writing of history began in theseventeenth century, with two declarations of independence from the past. Thefirst declaration was that of René Descartes, who, in Discourse on Method,“takes his stand against tradition the moment he decides to doubt its authorityand to rely upon his own personal resources in the quest for truth” (Harrison,1992: 111). Descartes detaches himself from the past in order to become“methodically self-reliant in matters of action and knowledge” and also inorder to achieve “the mastery and possession of nature” (Harrison, 1992: 108).The second declaration of independence came from the moderns in the socalled“battle of the books” between the moderns and the ancients, whichdemonstrates how supposedly literary quarrels – or, as we might say now,“culture wars” – can raise fundamental conflicts with meaningful implicationsfor more than just intellectual elites. The seventeenth-century “moderns”might concede equality or even superiority to the ancients in philosophy andthe arts, but they felt they clinched their arguments for the superiority ofmodernity in pointing out that only their age possessed the compass, the printingpress, and gunpowder. Furthermore, the moderns claimed, they could beconfident that such technological achievements would continue because themodern age possessed the experimental method: not a body of knowledge,such as the ancients had bequeathed, but a method for acquiring and improvingknowledge that no longer depended on individual genius (Jones, 1936).Descartes and the moderns converged, then, in claiming a break in historythrough the discovery of a method that would enable them to defy the tyrannyof the past and open the way to the development of a new mastery over naturethrough reason. They redefined history as the record of increasing superiorityin areas where the moderns had an advantage. In a move that would berepeated over and over again, Europeans shifted the ground of the debate to“machines as the measure of men” to proclaim to others and to assure themselvesof their own superiority (Adas, 1990). The value system emerges inresponse to a perceived advantage and becomes the basis of further developmentof that advantage.The historian-philosophers of the eighteenth century went even further.Because enlightened Europeans claimed superior methods of advancingknowledge and attaining power over the natural world, they proposed thathistory itself would begin to work differently. The first important statement ofthis claim was the Discours sur les progrès successifs de l’esprit humain (APhilosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind), a