THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY(2004)
For thousands of years, past has been the source of interesting, exciting, even terrifying stories that have been used to derive control over crowds of ordinary human-beings. Unfortunately, very few of those realized that the keys to understand their own lives and what was going on earth were in somewhere, years and years from then.
I firmly believe that our main purpose to take this course was to get closer to those keys, even to find them. During the period of three months, we first searched them in near future; however, something such important could not be found very easily. Thus, we went to thousands and thousands of years ago, and went on searching through the ages. In the end of the course, the only key we found was that there was no key. There were only lessons we could learn if we tried to realize causes and effects properly. From now on, I will try to share you the lessons I managed to understand. With this purpose I want to create an outline, from which I will implement my assay.
I really want to write about three important lessons, and with the light of those, I will discuss about the world of today. Such lessons are;
§ Technological development does not mean human development; even sometimes they are inversely related.
§ Chance is almost nothing when we begin to talk about events in the past. Almost all are the mixtures of causes and effects; chance is very week among those.
§ In the analysis period of past events, the most powerful enemy of logic is fallacy of misplaced concreteness. If you disregard the vegetable soup of causes, all the events seem alike; however, results may have no relation.
The first lesson I want to share is the misunderstanding about the technological development. Since we get that sort of development as a change in lifestyle; the change does not mean the progress.
In fact, to reach this result, we do not have to go to thousands of years ago. Even we look at the last century; we see the intensive progress in technology. Unfortunately, such intensive progress has been used for massacres; and has not been used to prevent the nations of third world from starvation, epidemics and wars. The top point of technological progress of 1945 was used to kill 250000 innocent Japanese in
THE GREAT HUMANITY
The great humanity is
the deck-passenger on the ship
third class on the train
on foot on the causeway
the great humanity.
The great humanity
goes to work at eight
marries at twenty
dies at forty
the great humanity.
Bread is enough for all except the great humanity
rice the same
sugar the same
cloth the same
books the same
are enough for all except the great humanity.
The great humanity has
no shade on his soil
no lamp on his road
no glass on his window
but the great humanity has hope
you can't live without hope.
Nazım Hikmet Ran (Blasing&Konuk)
This dilemma has remained valid, since the first appearance of human-beings. The interesting part is that the hope you can see in the last two lines of the poem has also remained despite all the disappointments the humanity has faced through the ages.
We may imagine the hunter-gatherers of nine thousand years ago as ancient creatures whose only purpose was to prevent death, when we regard Thomas Hobbes. However, as we discussed in lectures, relative to their “progressive” successors (farmers), they had abundant of advantages in term of human development: First of all, they had better health than farmers. They had variety of food supplies where they can get all the proteins and vitamins they need. On the other hand, farmers had simple and fixed menus: what they could bring up. Moreover, while hunter-gatherer bands did not have widespread wars; with the need of fertile lands, warfare and death were the important parts of farming life. As the result; it was inevitable that integration, classification, and inequalities rose and developed.
In fact, an important point we could reach in that lesson was the fact that changes in lifestyles did not occur unless a compulsion occurred. Human-beings begin to farm, because food supplies of the hunting and gathering world were about to come to extinction, while the population density of the great hunters became denser.
One amazing example in the book that we could realize these facts well was about an inverse shift. “…around 3000B.C. the hunter-gatherers of southern Sweden adopted farming based on Southwestern Asian crops, but abandoned it around 2700 B.C. and reverted to hunting-gathering for 400 years before resuming farming.”(qtd in Diamond 109) According to these sentences we may assume that between 3000B.C. and 2700 B.C. there was some sort of scarcity that forced hunter-gatherers to adopt farming. However, after that force had removed, they turned back to their roots.
The regress we mentioned in the beginning part of hunter-gatherers did not stop after hunter-gatherers adopted farming. Life got worse and worse, with the increasing complexity and developing technology. The new class, that the new conditions gave rise to, used technology to control the majority. Technology developed weapons and methods to make the poor crowds believe that their holy ruler would take them to prosperity. Unfortunately, all he got were more wars, more epidemics, and shorter lifetimes. The blessings of technology…
So far, I wrote about the technological changes and their effects to human development. Now I want to discuss another important lesson: life is a mixture of causes and effects; in other words, history is a cumulative process. Thus, we can reach a lot of judgments about the world of today by observing the past. In the lectures of our course there was a quote from Winston Churchill. There is another speech about the same topic which belongs to Ataturk: ”A nation that do not know anything about their past can not have a future.”
With this aim, we discussed many different dramatic events. The book of Jared Diamond was full of those events. For instance, the collision at Cajamarca was an impressive example of the first lesson. Especially the questions Diamond used to create his ideas seemed childish; however, they were the base points of very important inferences. Moreover, the strategy Pizzaro used was not successful by chance. The conditions made the result inevitable. Pizarro was from
Another interesting point at the collision was the source where the Spaniards got their power. They invade a continent for the name of the god. They claimed that they were in the new continent to invite the barbarians to the rightness. To kill thousands of heathens barbarously was the usage of top point of technology and civilization. (69)
We may ask the important question of Diamond now: “How did Pizarro come to be there to capture him, instead of Athaualpa’s coming to
While we are talking about history, we should determine the conditions very well. Else we may fall in the trap of misunderstandings. Let us examine an actual case to understand what sort of a fallacy there may occur:
On contrary, Incas were too honest to realize the foxes in the brains of Spaniards. Moreover, they believed in the divinity of their sovereign. The only thing that made them a whole was that belief. And when that belief collapsed, there was nothing to do, although Incas did not give up fighting against invaders through the century.
In fact, I do not want to be so subjective against the colonizators of the
Now I want to talk about today with the help of those three lessons. Of course, my speech is in term of the development of humanity.
In the world of today, are the most developed countries the ones with best technological opportunities? In fact, for such a comparison, we should determine the criteria first. In the course we especially used Sen’s criteria; but it is my opinion that the real criterion should be whether each citizen can keep on living as a human-being or they have to admit some other animal roles such as a donkey or a dog. Apart from all the stuff we saw in the lessons, another point is also very important. If a country creates its civilization on the basis of stealing the freedoms of some other countries, the human development in that country is in the minus level, even if its citizens have the highest standard of living. When we add my criterion to others, most of the top ten lose their places in the table. Because, all the wealth of those countries come from the loss of others.
During the agrarian era, one important thing states discovered was to exploit others economically for their profits. In fact, the father of widespread wars was that discovery. In industrial age, we discussed what was done as to clean the dirt of agrarian era. However, I do not agree; all the highly developed countries, that were the new representatives of civilization, did were to find new ways to go on exploiting. They found new nice names for what they went on doing. Today, name is globalization. Maybe tomorrow, there will be a nicer name which will seem very nice when the concept is misunderstood.
The citizens of highly developed countries have wonderful lives. Houses, cars, education possibilities, healthcare, life insurance… But they do not realize that all the comfort they have stem from the discomfort of some others. Maybe the governments and the secret rulers of those countries do not want them to realize.
The sad but true thing is that some nations especially in
On the other hand, one country reaches the top with the help of my new criterion, if we turn back to human development index table:
In conclusion, I firmly believe that history has much more to offer than we managed to realize. We should keep on searching the keys, although we are aware of the nonexistence. Because, each step brings us to a new inference helping to understand more about present. We need to understand more and more to reach a better life, not only in individual level but also universally.
REFERENCES
1- Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel.
2- Ran, Nazım Hikmet. Tr.by Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk. Poems of Nazım Hikmet.
3- Shields, Mark. Lecture Notes.
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