Thought experiment:
Imagine that in 1880, Europe and the Americas had been brought into contact with another continent on which civilization had already advanced to the point at which we are now in 2009.
Let's call this new continent Futureland, and place it in the middle of the Pacific where the Polynesian Islands are. They speak a non-Indo-European language. They're highly secular, but have in their background an essentially animistic religion ala Shinto. The Futurelanders are friendly and open, eager to sell Americans and Europeans high tech products and to build factories in Europe and America. They also happily sell the "old world" modern farming equipment, superior strains of crops, and advise them on more efficient farming practices -- resulting in a rapid increase of agricultural output which requires far fewer farmers than contemporary 1880s practices. They're also quite willing to allow Europeans and Americans to travel to Futureland to attend university, and indeed settle there.
What happens to "old world" language, culture, political institutions, religion and economy? Would such a situation be at all desireable for Americans and Europeans, and if so in what sense?
Would such an encounter be significantly different if it were between Futureland and an "old world" circa 1800 or circa 1650? Or 1950?
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8 comments:
My initial thought is that it's probably always profoundly disruptive (in a bad way) for a culture to come into contact with another which is quantum leaps ahead in terms of technology. I would imagine that even the Europe and America of 1950, if they had suddenly come into constant cultural and economic contact with a continent at 2009 levels of technology, would have quickly succumbed to a lot of the economic, political and cultural disfunctions that we associate with the third world. And the farther back you go (thus the greater the technological disconnect) the greater the disruption.
That said, I don't really know that there's a way of avoiding that. Certainly, I can't imagine anyone supporting some sort of "prime directive" in which more advanced cultures don't allow themselves to come into contact with less advanced ones. Not only would this not work (there would be huge incentives to break the rule) but it hardly seems moral to refuse to chare information about things ranging from vaccines to agricultural techniques that would prevent famine. And yet, it appears to be massively destructive to a culture to find that someone else has done everything first.
The level of advancement that we have achieved is not a natural result of where we were, technologically speaking, in 1800. A key factor in technological progression was the political/economic climate in America -- free enterprise, private property rights, protection of intellectual property, and a disciplined religious tradition that promoted hard work and honesty, and looked down on corruption.
In pretty much all of the third world situations that actually occur today, one or more of these elements are missing.
Since those elements were manifestly present in early America, I am actually optimistic that we could have maintained a fairly ordered society while adopting more advanced technology.
Europe would not do as well -- There is a certain personality type that made the American character, which is of course the exact type of personality that is willing to pick up and leave old Europe for the new world. So whatever it is that propelled America to greatness, those characteristics would have been dramatically lacking in Europe at that time.
1) Whatever language is spoken in Futureland would quickly become lingua franca for the world.
2) All other countries would experience a brain drain as their best and brightest go to Futureland to get educated, and stay there for the good jobs.
3) Some fundamentalists in older and poorer countries would see Futureland as a threat to their beliefs (notably their unwritten but widely held belief that they should be the premier society on Earth). A hyper-fundamendalist sect would hit Futureland with terrorist attacks. Futureland would respond by starting wars against not one but two countries, and because of poor planning and wishful thinking these wars will lead to decades-long quagmires in which Futureland succeeds in killing lots of people but not in creating anything like enlightened or free societies in the subject countries. No one in Futureland will know what to do then.
Joel
The Blackadder Says:
This puts me in mind of a similar thought experiment Mencius Moldbug posed a while back:
[W]hat would become of 1908 America, if said continent magically popped up in the mid-Atlantic in 2008, and had to modernize and compete in the global economy[?] I am very confident that Old America would be the world's leading industrial power within the decade, and I suspect it would attract a lot of immigration from New America....
[W]ithout computers, cell phones or even motor vehicles, 19th-century America could rebuild destroyed cities instantly - at least, instantly by today's standards. Imagine what this vanished society, which if we could see it with our own eyes would strike us as no less foreign than any country in the world today, could accomplish if it got its hands on 21st-century gadgets - without any of the intervening social and political progress.
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A key factor in technological progression was the political/economic climate in America -- free enterprise, private property rights, protection of intellectual property, and a disciplined religious tradition that promoted hard work and honesty, and looked down on corruption.
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So whatever it is that propelled America to greatness, those characteristics would have been dramatically lacking in Europe at that time.
Ah, cultural imperialism... :)
You may want to teach your kids Chinese, by the way - it'll come in handy in about 20 years time :)
My view of the reasons for American preeminence is a little different. I'm quite sure that aside from cultural characteristics such as strong individualism (which lead to both strong private property rights and the system of highly competitive free enterprise present in America, which I will admit has allowed new technological advancements to be adopted at a more rapid rate than they would have been in a society where those in a weaker position are protected rather than bought out or bankrupted) factors such as having a large land mass relatively untouched by war were probably rather helpful as Europeans spent their resources and much of their young workforce blowing up each other's infrastructure during the two world wars, while the Americans sold them armaments, and then the equipment required to rebuild, along with providing financial backing in the form of loans and investment capital. And hey presto, America has the money and influence to be a superpower! :). (PS: I'm not an American, although I'm sure I have my own unquestioned assumptions about what make my country better than everyone else's :)).
To answer the thought experiment, though, I wonder whether a free enterprise, private property rights supporting, competitive modern economic system would "happily" provide technology, or whether it would do so "profitably" (I notice the thought experiment used "sell", rather than "give" or "provide"), in exchange for as much benefit as it could wring out of the old world for itself. A technologically ignorant (and mostly illiterate) civilization would be ripe for the taking, and I think it'd get taken. And that, I think, is the biggest issue, bigger than loss of culture or language or religion. The business world today is built on the idea that making maximal profit for your shareholders is the ethically right and the only acceptable thing to do - I've actually been in classes where it was taught that social responsibility was simply not a part of the responsibility of a business person. And so, Europe and America would be quickly colonized, debt-trapped in exchange for these fancy new technologies, and we'd have a situation much like we have in Africa now. Poor people with no education and no life-options are easy pickings for corrupt demagogues, so such governments would be likely to arise, and the business leaders in the new world would gladly do deals with them for their resources.
The problem I see in the world today is that power and ethics don't go together nearly often enough. In that situation, I'd pity the weaker party in any transaction. I think it's possible some of the people from the old world would do OK, though. Machiavelli wrote a thing or two a while back, and when it comes to managing in the top ranks of power in the world, I don't think there have been many advances. We're a bit more advanced in the marketing department, though, I'll give us that :).
We don't need a prime directive. What we need is to have the idea spread that short term self-interest is not to the communal good (as it's often thought to be at the moment), but instead if you want to do what's good for society as a whole, you need to look at transacting with others only when it is to mutual benefit. Building fairness into our economics, with the understanding that the people you take advantage of now will still be around tomorrow, or will have descendents, and they will be pissed off that you're rich and they're poor. Since improvised explosive devices are cheap, the way to protect your own security is to take only what you need, and help out others who have less than you. We are a long way from having the goal of maximal communal benefit as the explicit basis for our economics, even though that's supposedly what lends the current "creative destruction through self-interest and competition" model for business behaviour its legitimacy. So if we were to be placed in the presence of a civilization that was less technologically advanced than us, that civilization would be screwed, hard and fast. Nothing personal, though - it's just business. :)
"And so, Europe and America would be quickly colonized, debt-trapped in exchange for these fancy new technologies, and we'd have a situation much like we have in Africa now. Poor people with no education and no life-options are easy pickings for corrupt demagogues, so such governments would be likely to arise, and the business leaders in the new world would gladly do deals with them for their resources."
I wouldn't describe early Americans as "poor people with no education and no life-options". On the contrary, literacy was higher than the comparatively rich and powerful England.
I'm curious what you think the difference is between Hong Kong and Nigeria. Why does one have high economic growth and the other not? I think the cultural and political elements are not just a factor in "new technological advancements" as you say, but are very important to the ability of a nation to take advantage of the technology that is already available, to do things like establish a good physical infrastructure and keep corruption under control.
Your explanation of American preeminence seems kind of weak. There are lots of peaceful countries that could have taken advantage of the opportunity to sell armaments to Europe, etc, which you think resulted in American preeminence. Why was it America? In any case I don't think that was a large part of the American manufacuring economy, although I haven't checked. I would expect that most of the goods produced in America in the 19th and 20th centuries were aimed at internal demand. There was a lot of infrastucture installed onto a very large and relatively empty continent in that time period. There's the same opportunity, physically speaking, in Africa today. Why aren't they growing by leaps and bounds? I think political and cultural values are the primary answer.
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