Re:Why no Roman industrial revolution?
by brnaftr361 on Friday August 26, 2022 @08:31PM
(#32614363)
I'd like to think it's about cultural priorities. While in the perspective of the Western frame it would seem "irrational" to eschew modern advancements - it's just that, a perspective of the Western Frame and not objective. Even elements within the WF such as Marx and cohort identified generally negative elements like alienation. As an aside, there are people like the Sentinelese - a people contemporaneous with us still living in the stone age evidence that we don't need modernity, industry, and so on in order to continue as a species.
Toynbee on the Genesis of Civilization via Wikipedia [0]:
He argues that for civilizations to be born, the challenge must be a golden mean; that excessive challenge will crush the civilization, and too little challenge will cause it to stagnate.
One of the big history book authors has an oft-repeated joke, one permutation of it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bsnud/is_this_a_joke...
Why do all that work when you could just sit your ass on a beach or in a nice Mediterranean-esque corner of the world?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History#Genesis_and...
Then why was there no Industrial Revolution when many other civilizations for thousands of years observed these same phenomena? I don't know the answer but it is curious. I do believe when you look back you can see connections - it might be trite at times but James Burke's series 'Connections' tries to tease out the road to a current day technology going back through the past and all the seemingly unrelated things that needed to happen to finally arrive at the solution. Solutions always seem obvious in the present but usually they aren't quite so obvious in the past.