Trevor wrote:Some might offer the idea that metal working wasn't advanced enough to hold the required pressures or some other technical reason, but I doubt that was the ultimate cause of the failure to advance. At certain times in history there seems to be movement in the direction of ignorance or darkness, as you say, and loss of permanence. This trend can be seen in money, record keeping, food, clothing, relationships, job tenure, how often people move, structures, or just about everything, where there is a loss of durability and a goal of just getting through the near term. That also speaks to T's observation about not preparing by getting out of the system - the mentality is to do something that works for a while.
Empires also had plenty of cheap labor at the time and their lives were considered worthless, so it didn't seem necessary to take the final steps in creating a steam engine. In Rome, something like 1/3 of the population were enslaved.
Valid points, all. What I also respectfully believe helped Europe enter the Modern/Industrial Age was: a slow absorption of the fragments of Greco-Roman learning that took place during the Middle Ages, as well as translation/absorption of valuable learning coming in from the Eastern world; the creation of a "learning curiosity" that was likely at least significantly caused by the discovery of the aforementioned learning and the inheritance of Greco-Roman culture, and its melding with some Germanic traditions; and this learning curiosity also motivating Europeans in the Middle Ages to work very hard for small gains. Slow but sure mixtures of rationalism, curiosity, and passion seemed to come together to allow the early Western Modern Age to finally happen.
This thus fostered the first viable modern mechanical inventions, including firearms and later industrial achievements — a process which was surely also helped along by the thinning out of the European population via the Black Death. The glimmerings of modern nation-states arose, which could be held together by changes in military, transportation, and communications technology. And, as labor became more sought-after and higher-priced due to the Black Death, this surely empowered the common folk to have more say in how society was shaped — and the modern nation-state and "worker empowerment" likely worked together to create the modern saecula, and modern history, that Strauss and Howe wrote about in their seminal works.
This westernization process is, of course, still going on today, and is no doubt a key factor in much of the unrest we see today in parts of the non-Western world — places that are facing real tensions regarding the integration of their traditional non-Western cultures with fragments of modern Western culture.
Thanks, all, for sharing in this interesting discussion and debate. —Best regards, Marc