Culture II

A Culture of Progress
• Of all the ideas that were debated in the market for ideas in the
Republic of Letters, perhaps none was more critical to later economic
outcomes than the idea of progress.
• The growth of useful knowledge (both propositional and prescriptive)
was considered to be central to this concept of progress.
• The search for useful knowledge would be conducted as a
collaborative project within a competitive system.
• The belief that historical progress means that history consists of a
progression from obscurity to lightness, not the reverse.
Relationship to Industrialization
• Slack (2015), who traces the term “improvement” through seventeenth
century English culture observes that improvement came before the
industrial revolution.
• The belief in progress, especially the version that saw the
accumulation of useful knowledge as central to material improvement,
was a hallmark of Enlightenment Europe.
Definitions of the Term
• Progress as freedom
• Progress as power
• Lasch (1991): the demand side of progress, a positive assessment of the
proliferation of wants, rising expectations, newly acquired tastes and
standards of personal comfort.
• Baconian program: increase and disseminate natural philosophy and other
forms of knowledge to benefit “the useful arts.”
• The idea of progress is logically equivalent to an implied disrespect of
previous generations.
Battle of the Books
• “ancients” and “moderns”
• Were modern scholars and authors nothing but midgets standing on the
shoulders of giants, or were they giants themselves?
• Science and technology (cumulative) vs. rhetoric and poetry
• The combination of geographical discoveries, technological advances,
a better understanding of nature, and rapidly rising access to
information persuaded more and more intellectuals in the period after
1500 that their own age was wiser and better informed than the era of
antiquity.
• By the middle of the sixteenth century this sense was expressed most
explicitly among French writers.
Jean Bodin (1530–1596), “where we look more closely, there is no doubt that
our discoveries surpass those of the ancients.”
Blaise de Vigenère (1523–1596), “it is reasonable to make a place for antiquity,
but from this it does all follow that we must read or praise only the works of the
ancients”.
• (By the seventeenth century) European intellectuals placed growing
emphasis on the social value of technological advances.
• The notion that progress was prevalent also among the British writers
of the seventeenth century.
• By the middle of the eighteenth century few doubts about past and
present progress could survive.
How the Past is Viewed
• The idea of progress is linked to the cultural issue of how people regard the
capabilities and wisdom of their own generation relative to the wisdom of
previous ones.
• The same may be said about technology.
• Jews in Britain after 1656
• Progress, the moderns emphasized, was driven by improved tools of
research.
• Cumulativeness was itself a variable that society controlled and constructed.
-The technological capability to store knowledge at low cost and high searchability.
Technology and Institutions
• The Enlightenment program was based on the implicit assumption that
technological and institutional changes were mutually reinforcing, that
is, there was a deep complementarity and synergy between
technological and institutional change (Mokyr, 2006a).
• “Cardwell’s Law”—the empirical regularity that no society remains at
the cutting edge of technological creativity for very long (Mokyr,
1994).
Reaction and Resistance
• Between 1500 and 1700, many of the heterodox scientists and
innovators were threatened by political or religious authority.
• Religion vs. physics, astronomy, medicine and chemistry.
• Galileo Galilei—forced papacy to take a more aggressive stand against
heterodoxies. Turned Italy into a scientific backwater (Alexander, 2014, p.
179)
• Jan Baptist van Helmont, repeatedly threatened and penalized for his
adherence to heterodox views of nature and medicine and for being a
(skeptical) follower of Paracelsus.
National Differences
• French optimism: man’s ability to create wealth by inventing
technologies capable of raising production.
• British pragmatism: British belief in progress in the century before the
Industrial Revolution was more pragmatic, more down-to-earth--
continuous flow of relatively minor incremental steps toward an
improved society.
• Various European versions of the Enlightenment strongly influenced
and imitated, blended with, and modified and complemented one
another.
What accounts for the success of the idea of
progress?
• On the demand side, the expansion of the economies in Western
Europe after 1500 gave rise to an increasingly strong contingent of
homines novi
• The Enlightenment, especially the British Enlightenment, retained an
element of millenarianism, a belief in “a new heaven to replace the
old.
China and Europe

Needham (1969b, pp. 82–83) : “why did the Chinese society in the
eighth century A.D. favor science as compared with Western society,
and that of the eighteenth century A.D. inhibit it?”
Lin (1995)
• Two types of past technological progress:
• Learning-by-doing; by-product of production. experience-based technological change
Vs.
• Deliberate application of science-based research and development. knowledge-based
technological change
• China fell behind when Europe began to apply systematic research in
propositional knowledge to production.
• David Hume: Political fragmentation was the main reason behind European
flourishing of useful knowledge.
Was China behind?
• Shiue and Keller (2007) have pointed out that in terms of allocative
efficiency, as late as 1750, China did not lag significantly behind
Europe.
• Qing China had “sprouts of capitalism”.
• China was also a relatively well-educated and literate nation.
• China was a land of books.
An Important Cultural Difference
• Greif and Tabellini (2014) have argued that in China the social unit
that organized cooperation was the extended family or clan, while in
Europe it was a voluntary group of unrelated (by blood) people, which
they term “corporations.”
• The concept of generalized morality can be used to understand how
the European Republic of Letters worked. Its members had to deal
largely with strangers in a network of weak ties, yet the rules of a
general morality—not faking results, not copying without attributing,
responding to letters, and so on—applied and were observed.
History of Ideas in China
• In the era known as the “age of warring states” between 475 and 221 BC,
China produced many of its most successful cultural entrepreneurs.
• Confucianism itself emerged as the winner in the market for ideas during
the Qin (221–207 BC) and the subsequent Western Han dynasties (202 BC–
9 AD) and the later or Eastern Han dynasty (25– 220 AD).
• Daoism remained highly influential in Chinese history, and to some extent
was a rival of Confucianism.
• Fierce religious competition was absent in China.
• In China, after its reunification by the Mongol Yuan dynasty and the
subsequent rise of the Ming in 1368, competition in the market for
ideas gradually weakened.
• The cultural climate rigidified in Ming and Qing China, and became
increasingly unaccommodating to intellectual innovation.
• The system of the anonymous imperial examinations (keju) tested
candidates mostly on their knowledge of the classical canon.
Roots of Conservatism
• The cultural foundations of China’s polity were rooted in a secular ideology
that was inherently neither hostile nor conducive to the growth of useful
knowledge.
• Northern Song had a competitive market for ideas. Between ca. 1000 and
ca. 1200, indeed, China went through a period of economic and intellectual
flourishing, of optimism and a notion in progress and reason.
• Thirteen- and fourteenth-century China was subject to a variety of
exogenous shocks, such as Mongol invasions and plague.
• Chinese merchants did not foster an intellectual culture that encouraged
radical heterodoxy.
Answer to Needham Puzzle
• China had sciences but no Science (Sivin [1984], 2005, p. 4)
• China lacked a unifying single coordinating mechanism such as a competitive
market in which new ideas were tested.
• “scientific pursuits on China thus did not aim at stepwise approximation to an
objective reality but a recovery of what archaic sages already knew” (Lloyd
and Sivin, 2002, p. 193).
• The rise of open science in Europe almost guaranteed that existing knowledge
would not disappear or be forgotten.