My read would be that pre-Enlightenment examples are fundamentally different in that the Enlightenment wasn't a momentary advancement, as previous regional jostlings were, but a growth hack.
It permanently increased the growth rate of knowledge in Europe, which then outscaled everyone else.
I'd be curious about opinions more knowledgeable than mine opining on the above conditions vis certain periods in Chinese and Middle Eastern history. They would seem to equally qualify. And if they were equally possessed there, then the conditions must be incorrect or incomplete.
How would this fail to apply to the area we now call China? It consistent of a bunch of different states which regularly went to war with each other, conquered each other and broke apart again, not unlike the various European states. It had a thousand year tradition of the Confucian exam system. It had block printing a thousand years before Europe.
To better rule, they assimilated themselves into Chinese culture by embracing a very traditional, conservative form of Confucianism. Unfortunately for them, this coincided with exposure to western countries expeditions, and rather than embrace your marketplace of ideas, they rejected anything that was not traditional thinking.
Feudalism, rebellions, drug trade, the opium wars and more all together helped to give china the "sick man of the east" moniker.
It had a rigid top-down bureaucracy where any innovation was probably stifled. The telescope was invented in 1608 and revolutionized Europe. The Jesuits brought it to Imperial China and it basically did nothing because the government didn't want anything to do with it, and so ordered the technology to ignore.
The Chinese still thought the Earth was flat until the Jesuits arrived:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#Ming_Dynasty_in_Chi...
It wasn't an issue of nourishing intellectuals, which China had been doing for centuries, and it wasn't an issue of regular war against peer armies, which again, had been happening in China for centuries.
So now the question is: why did Europe care about telescopes, and China didn't?
My intuition is that telescopes didn't solve any problems for Chinese emperors/subjects, and so they didn't care about their invention. Similarly, if it were important for China to know that the Earth was round, they would've figured it out.
> The Chinese still thought the Earth was flat until the Jesuits arrived:
I think this might add some nuance to what "thinking the Earth was flat" meant: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ug0yf/coper...
Can you point to the research you've read that indicates that this never happened outside of Europe, because of religious/moral reason?
Anatomical dissection happened in a variety of places, including a criminal in 200-300 BCE China.
https://anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002...
Egypt had been cutting corpses and doing sophisticated surgery 2000 years before that
Copying another comment I made in this thread (much hand-waving and unsubtly/non-nuance):
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Literacy, individualism, lack of tribalism/clans, a 'mechanistic'/logical/Aristotelian view of reality (which led to the development of science), a 'general' of separation spiritual and civil powers (Matthew 22:15–22, Mark 12:13–17, Luke 20:20–26).
Max Weber (1864-1920) was one of the first people to ask this question:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber
For more recent thoughts, see The WEIRDest People in the World by Heinrich:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor...
And Toby Huff (The Rise of Early Modern Science, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toby_Huff
Intellectual Curiosity makes some interesting observations from the historical record: the telescope was invented in 1608 (where it ended up revolutionizing things), and the Europeans brought the technology to Imperial China and Mughal India. They brought it as 'supplicants' to the court to try to grant greater access to each nation; the Jesuits in China used it to show that their 'superior' knowledge of the universe and reality to help with converting folks to Christianity/Catholicism (e.g., by better predicting eclipses).
Neither country was interesting and continued, through a top-down decree, to simply do things the way they always did them.
The telescope arrived in the the Ottoman Empire by osmosis, and they didn't do much with it either.
Fast forward 100+ years and the scientific/technological advances made through curious minds allowed by a different worldview allowed the Europeans to develop more efficient (product output per energy input) economies and then walk all over the rest of the planet. The Indians and Chinese were arguable equally (if not more) advanced in the 1600s, but by the 1700s and later they were 'primitive' in comparison to the Europeans.
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* https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=30742959
> I think this might add some nuance to what "thinking the Earth was flat" meant
To add nuance to nuance: IIRC, the only way to really "prove" or provide evidence of the Earth's motion around the sun was through parallax of stars. Things came close with Bradley and stellar aberration in ~1728:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bradley
Giuseppi Calandrelli finally directly measures parallax in α-Lyrae in 1806. The Earth's motion (rotation) around its axis was demonstrated by Guglielmini:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Battista_Guglielmini
And it's not like folks didn't think of the possibility, as even Aristotle wrote in De Caelo (II.14):
> Again, everything that moves with the circular movement, except the first sphere, is observed to be passed, and to move with more than one motion. The earth, then, also, whether it move about the centre or as stationary at it, must necessarily move with two motions. But if this were so, there would have to be passings and turnings of the fixed stars. Yet no such thing is observed. The same stars always rise and set in the same parts of the earth.
> lack of tribalism/clans
The government structure of European states was hereditary. A clan would lay claim to a region and support/fight other clans in their claims.
> a 'mechanistic'/logical/Aristotelian view of reality
I don't know that this is true? For example, where does the soul exist in a mechanistic view of reality?
> a 'general' of separation spiritual and civil powers
This is a better description of China than Europe. Churches were authority figures, held land, and vied with monarchs and nobles for political power. You'll need to be much more specific as to what you mean.
> Fast forward 100+ years and the scientific/technological advances made through curious minds allowed by a different worldview allowed the Europeans to develop more efficient (product output per energy input) economies and then walk all over the rest of the planet.
What do you mean "walk all over the rest of the planet"? Europeans were limited to small coastal trading posts until the late 19th century. When you look at a 18th century map and see "all of central America belongs to Spain", that doesn't mean that Spain could project power over all of it. It was an aspirational "we own this" combined with "other powers best not try to take this from us". It didn't mean that they had meaningful control or ownership of the region.
> The Indians and Chinese were arguable equally (if not more) advanced in the 1600s, but by the 1700s and later they were 'primitive' in comparison to the Europeans.
Can you define what you mean by "advanced" and "primitive"? How would one measure that?
Yes. This an HN comment, not an anthropological/sociological/historical analytical paper.
Weber, Tuff, Heinrich have written books on this, Needham has written volumes. The rest of us are just hand waving here.
It astounds me when I encounter people decrying Western values. Have they not travelled the world? Do they not understand how much worse it can be? No one argues that Enlightenment values are perfect; just that they’re the best we’ve found so far.
> It astounds me when I encounter people decrying Western values.
A country that deprives women of agency, for example, is different, sure, but one can also make the judgement call that’s it’s a worse culture.
By your logic we couldn’t say slavery was bad if society was better off when it existed.
This is false. Slavery is objectively bad.
The idea of human rights is constantly in flux. It is subjectively understood and applied. For example, is internet access now a human right? It is not clear what interpretation of human rights should prevail. Not to mention that ‘liberal ideas of human rights’ is a very Eurocentric framing which denies important contributions from other civilizations.
Even interpretation of historical events relative to the present can be subjected to a flux in understanding. If slavery was codified to protect the rights of slave owners and slaves, while also providing for both parties, then this arrangement could be considered better than the economic servitude many laborers find themselves in today.
In fact, most slavery in history was not like the brutality of so called American chattel slavery.
I mean, the belief system of Germany in WW2 went off the rails and a good portion of the population agreed, but I think we can all admit it didn't evolve into a "better" system.
I think it’s time we start being a little less apologetic about our good values and a little more critical about their bad values.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
>Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
And punishment for adultery and homosexual activity has been something staple across many religions and cultures, which have formed the basis of great civilizations. Adultery and homosexual activity have been social evils in many moral codes and ways of life. It’s not about oppressing women or gays, it’s about justice and fairness.
Viewing things through such a narrow and dichotomous view makes you unable to cope with different ways of life except that you condemn it without understanding.
IMHO, it'd be an uphill battle to argue it should rank lower.
> Parent seems to hold individual liberty among the highest priority values.
In such a society, I could imagine that adultery (potentially confusing which child belongs to which lineage of genes) and homosexuality (reducing the pool of available genes) might be dissuaded on punishment of death.
When I lived in the Middle East, I had a good Saudi couple as friends. The husband had an app so that when the wife wanted to leave the country on a trip, the border people could trigger a notification so he could approve her leaving. This was better than previously when she couldn't leave unaccompanied. Are you really trying to say that's not worse or better, just different?
I went to an Omani friend's wedding in his small village in Oman. The celebration was fascinating and fun. The men and women celebrated in two different groups. There was no alcohol. (But there was lots of dancing outside at night in the heat and spinning around with swords, which almost gave me a sort of drunken euphoria anyway!) The local mosque's call to prayer sounded and everyone in the party (except me and one other Western dude) left to the mosque and came back 15-20 minutes later. I actually admired the communal nature of it, as everyone seemed really close to each other, and could see the benefit of the requirement. On the flip side, if you didn't believe or something but were a local, you absolutely could not show it or skip.
Side note: the wife of the friend was not the secret girlfriend he loved for the years that I knew him, while constantly trying to improve his station in life to get her parents' approval. They said no when he finally did as much as he could and asked; so he ended up marrying the nice girl who his family arranged for him. They are quite happy today, though.
I taught computer science for a little while in China. They have a lot of different cultural expectations and values as well. I had some students come up after class to ask what it was like having two parties in our political system. And then living in Singapore was yet another story!
All this to say, I find your comment extremely simplistic and naive. I can't imagine living for a while in places with wildly different cultures and believing that deep cultural values don't manifest in meaningful ways.
At some level I agree that things are "just different", and that it takes a personal perspective to decry a cultural value or say something is better or worse. I think the Omani example is a good one; there's lots to like about that, and my Omani friend actually really does, even despite not marrying the woman he loved for so long. Whether something is "better" or "worse" depends on your values.
But all that said, I think you can acknowledge that and still stake a claim that, "no, what I believe is better!", and I think that is frowned upon these days and is a shame. While Oman is a lovely place in a lot of ways, I have a 1 year old daughter now, and I would not want her to grow up there. Then you have Saudi Arabia, with even less going for it... China has a much different culture, which we'll see how it works for them going forward. In the context of this article, can different cultures and cultural values really not contribute to the wealth of nations?
I think your example of "polygamy" is a good one. Is that better or worse or just different? I think it's puerile to reflexively say "it's just different". Maybe it is! But then, maybe it also contributes to cultural things; male competition, unwed males, family values, all kinds of things. Honestly, I don't know its effects, but I would be surprised if there were none. And then you could compare those effects against your values (things like "equality of men and women") and probably grade it as "worse", "just different", or "better" on the whole.
Then at a meta level, your "values" are again a cultural artifact. If someone doesn't value "equality of men and women", is that better or worse, or just different? It leads to different judgments of outcomes. How do you judge a policy like giving women the right to vote, if your values are divergent? And if large swaths of the population have one value or another, and one country ends up with women having the right to vote and others not; is that better or worse or just different? Could that have a meaningful impact on other aspects of the culture or nation, on how its politics proceed?
Anyways, be careful of using an example as a cultural judgement of society. It’s important to practice cultural humility. judgements may reveal more about the one doing the judging than the one being judged.
And even today, where the children do expect to grow to adulthood, they continue to have a dozen children per wife. So obtaining a wife (or more) is a goal that presses the adolescents to achieve things in life. What motivates a Western child to achieve things in life?
The only one I can think of is the decline that started under the Qing.