It’s often asked, why did the Scientific Revolution occur only in Europe and not China? By which I shall here mean what I explain in my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire as the normalization of effective scientific methods across (at least literate) society. As I document there, the Roman Empire at its peak was on the verge of this (in a way China never was), falling short only in two steps that weren’t fully realized until the course of the 17th century: a clear and consistent demarcation among scientific researchers between reliable and unreliable methods; and the more-or-less universal acceptance of this fact among the literate, intellectual, and political elite. The Romans had all the methods usually credited to the Scientific Revolution (whereas China did not). They just used them alongside more speculative philosophical methods as well, producing more of a mixed bag, slowing the pace and scale of progress.
To be clear, a terminological demarcation between science and philosophy did not occur during the Scientific Revolution (that wouldn’t been realized until the 20th century, a point I document and discuss in Is Philosophy Stupid?). But the demarcation between methods, recognizing what we “now” call philosophy as subordinate and less authoritative, was what the 17th century established in Europe (and even that did not happen overnight: see my article Galileo’s Goofs). Likewise, though there was a lot of respect and enthusiasm for science among the Roman elite, they had not yet made this a normative aspect of their culture, in the way Newton’s Principia finally achieved. For example, while there were many calls to create something like the Imperial Society of Rome for Improving Natural Knowledge, such an idea hadn’t hit high enough on any emperor’s radar before the effective collapse of Roman civilization began in the 3rd century.
So I think we can more or less explain why the Scientific Revolution didn’t happen in ancient Rome. Various attempts at explaining this were explored in H. Floris Cohen’s magisterial The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (University of Chicago, 1991). And I summarize much of that, and where I think the evidence actually leads to on the question and why, in Scientist. It was Cohen’s survey, in fact, that largely inspired my entire Columbia University dissertation, which resulted in two books, The Scientist and Science Education in the Early Roman Empire. The short of it is, at its peak in the first and second centuries of our era, the Roman Empire had achieved the same level of intellectual, industrial, and economic accomplishment as would later characterize 16th century Europe (see Ancient Industrial Machinery & Modern Christian Mythology and Imperial Roman Economics as an Example of an Overthrown Consensus). And all the same trends toward the ideas of the Scientific Revolution can be found in second century scientific writings of the Roman era (as I also document in Scientist).
There isn’t really any empirical argument to be made that Rome wouldn’t have continued on the same course to the same conclusion, had it not catastrophically declined in the very next century—which was dominated by a fifty-year-long civil war ending in the total collapse of its fiduciary economy, the equivalent of the Great Depression, to which the response was doubling up on fascism and mysticism, and the corresponding abandonment of the intellectual values necessary to drive any scientific progress further, a pattern Christianity simply ran with and accelerated once it took the reigns. It was all down hill from there. This essentially put the West in a holding pattern for a thousand years. Half of which was an era of ruin; and the other a long, slow slog back up the ladder to where things had once been—culminating in what’s now called the Renaissance for a reason: it marked the rebirth of the pagan ideas and values that had once driven steady scientific and industrial and philosophical progress. And really, only one thing differed: Europe was on its wax, not its wane at just that time; it thus continually improved economically and industrially (and thus, also intellectually) after that point.
But what explains China’s failure to beat us to it? After all, we really hosed this. With the rise of Christendom, we effectively fumbled the whole ball for a thousand years. Plenty of time for China to have caught up. Also in contention of course was the Islamic world, which for a brief moment (between about 800 and 1100 A.D.) flirted with its own Renaissance, also (like the later Renaissance in Christendom) built on the shoulders of Greco-Roman science, which could have evolved into a bona fide Scientific Revolution—and indeed, it could have done so centuries before the West caught up. There really were no other civilizations that ever came anywhere near this development. We know what happened to Islam. Fundamentalism took over and essentially fucked the entire Islamic world for a thousand years, in a manner very similar to what Christendom did to the West, only Christianity’s fucking of society started centuries earlier, and thus was due to clock-out before Islam’s own similar mistake did. Thus, Islam essentially gave up the lead, and let the West pass it in the race to the finish line.
China briefly flirted with similar behavior, but much earlier—vicious purges of books and intellectuals in the 3rd century B.C. for example, and lesser suppressions of intellectualism continued to recur under almost every dynasty thereafter (most notoriously under the early-modern Qing dynasty, right when Europe’s Scientific Revolution was under way, a classic case of really bad timing). But the worst of this was that earlier purge, and China reached its peak in following centuries, such as during the Han dynasty, in fact almost exactly tracking in timeline the Roman Empire on the other side of the planet. And China continued achieving technological advances ever-after; industrially, it remained comparable to Rome at its height, for most of its existence. But it simply stagnated there. Thus it was unprepared when the Western Industrial empires arrived, too far behind to ever really catch up to them on its own. But why did China never get anywhere in this race, despite having literally thousands of years to figure it out?
The best succinct answer to this question is laid out by Alan Cromer in Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science. His overall point: real science requires developing and deploying methods contrary to all natural human intuition (a point I too have made, e.g. in Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning and Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience); it therefore cannot be expected even to commonly arise, much less then dominate society. Though that isn’t really an explanation, so much as simply a description, of the problem. But Cromer outlines some causal factors, including China’s persistent bent toward isolationism and conservatism after the Han era, resulting in an active disinterest in intellectual progress beyond certain acceptable parameters. But one can still ask why that was the case. And so on. To answer questions like that, one has to go deeper. For the most solid scholarly background, the place to start would be the latest summary of what happened differently in Greece and China by the most renowned and prolific expert on the comparative history of science in China and Greece, G.E.R. Lloyd, whose book Expanding Horizons in the History of Science: The Comparative Approach takes the big picture view and cites via notes and bibliography all the leading or most current works in the subject.
Lloyd has devoted his entire career to the subject and has written numerous excellent books on various aspects of the question I am asking today, so that latest summary won’t even get you the whole story; you may need to explore the particulars. See Amazon’s Reverse Chronological List of his books; but for important examples, see The Ambitions of Curiosity, which also uses Mesopotamia as an analog—an advanced civilization that for many thousands of years never even got near a Scientific Revolution, as one could also observe of Egypt—or Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections, which focuses on the negatives and positives of their differing cultural milieus. I have been studying this same subject since my undergraduate days at Berkeley, working under David Keightley, as one of his protegés at the time, taking his courses on ancient China and the cross-cultural study of death customs (which compared ancient China, Greece, Israel, and Sumer). He helped me on numerous personal projects stemming from all the questions I had of an expert in ancient China: Did ancient China have atheists? Science? A belief in hell? Knowledge of the Roman Empire? What was the principal conflict between Taoism and Confucianism? And beyond. My Berkeley honors thesis, for example, was a comparative study of ancient Chinese, Greek, and Roman conceptions of the hero and the soul, and the possible interactive connections between those two concepts, which Keightley had a significant hand in supervising. That’s reproduced now in my book Hitler Homer Bible Christ.
Throughout its history, what passed for science in China was really either just craft knowledge (like medicine and engineering and astronomy throughout the world before the Greco-Roman systematizations, formalizations, and improvements) or philosophy (lacking any formalized empirical method, indeed lacking even much in the way of formalized logic or mathematics, e.g. China never developed any system of syllogistic deduction: see Logic and Language in Early Chinese Philosophy and Logic in China; or axiomatic mathematical systems, they did not even light upon the notion of formal proofs, and only worked up practical tools on a trial-and-error basis: see Chinese Mathematics and Joseph Dauben’s comparison of developments in Chinese and Greek geometry). As Chad Hansen once put it for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Technically, classical China had semantic theory but no logic.” They were really only interested in working out how to analyze what people say, and that mostly for ethical and political debate; they were not much interested in systematically exploring why various systems of analysis work or don’t work, nor got around to using such knowledge much for resolving debates about how the natural world works and why. And to make matters worse, even what they had in the way of this kind of philosophy suffered under cyclical bouts of anti-intellectualism all across Chinese history.
In a sense, you could say China was always so obsessed with the practical that it all too often never saw enough value in the theoretical. Though theory abounded, it was mostly speculative rather than empirical; the Chinese never made the proper connection between theory and practice, and thus never discovered (or never convinced a wide enough segment of the elite to accept) that, when deployed correctly, theoretical achievement is a powerful engine of practical advances. China also never fostered a general culture in which debate (rather than obedience) regarding the facts of reality was seen as acceptable or valuable—at least after the Han Dynasty, or for any period of time of sufficient length to jump-start an intellectual revolution such as consumed ancient Greece and Rome. One can even see this in the rare examples of extant discussions of the Roman Empire during even the Han dynasty, the most amenable to intellectual progress of any to follow. Notably, the Chinese always knew more about the Romans than vice versa, and we have extant descriptions of official reports from emissaries that China sent to gather intel on their distant rival (see Rome and China by Walter Scheidel). Yet conspicuously absent from these is any discussion of logic, mathematics, science, or even philosophy. They were mainly concerned with the oddities of Roman state management and administration, and to some smaller extent technology, economics, and industry. But again, always looking to the superficial and the practical.
Importantly, the Chinese were always, in result, very empirical. Yet they never made the crucial connection between the empirical and the theoretical, and as a consequence, their advancement was always stalled, limited to only what you can observe and do directly. As Dauben puts it:
Instead of pursuing abstract and logical concerns, Chinese mathematics, like Chinese science, developed a rich tradition of empirical observation. However, theirs was not a theoretical orientation that sought to leave the world of physical experience and practical applications behind in order to construct and test purely theoretical models or explanatory frameworks.
And it turns out, this is extremely limiting. If you are only theoretical and unempirical, you get flights of fancy, mythology, no real progress in understanding reality (think, Homeric Greece, Ancient Isreal). If you are empirical but untheoretical, you can accomplish a lot of practical craft knowledge, but you can’t really get at anything deeper. Science requires the productive unification of both, building on a method of formulating hypotheses (models; causal and structural theories), then developing reliable ways to test them for explanatory accuracy. This never happened in China. They had verificationist empiricism (hence, craft knowledge); but not falsificationist empiricism (hence, science). China thus never even came close to a Scientific Revolution the way ancient Rome did—and if ancient Rome hadn’t, neither would Western Europe have. For without those Greco-Roman foundations having been there to recover, there would have been no Renaissance, and thus no subsequent firming up of the ideas it carried.
This is evident in results, as well as methods. As for methods, we can discern the difference by the complete absence from Chinese history of the most reliable Greco-Roman scientific methodologies. As for results, the Chinese never figured out that the Earth was a sphere or that it orbited the sun, nor ever developed anything we would recognize as mathematical laws of planetary motion (like Ptolemy’s law of Equal Angles in Equal Times that Kepler later built into Equal Areas in Equal Times, or his theory of eccentricities that approximated elliptical motion). There were a few instances of the purely speculative suggestion that the Earth might be a sphere, but never on any empirical basis—because empirically demonstrating that requires theoretical foundation. For example, we see Han Dynasty arguments from analogy that the Earth “has” to be the same shape as the heavens, and the heavens “looks” round. But this is not what we call scientific thinking. And such ideas never became popular anyway. In biology, likewise. For example, the Chinese never figured out what the renal system does or how it works, as Galen did, nor ever localized brain function, as Herophilus did. They never even figured out that the brain produces all human thought, continuing instead to attribute that to the heart and other organs, until modern Western science arrived to correct them—a development still opposed by many Chinese traditionalists.
In the end, if we want to answer the question, “Why did the Chinese not achieve a Scientific Revolution?” we may have to accept the fact that the answer is, “Because, pretty much, no one did.” Mesopotamia. Mesoamerica. Egypt. India. Persia. Not a one of them even came as close as ancient Rome did—and Rome only did, because it eagerly embraced and built on the achievements of the Greeks. So it really comes down to, “Why did the Greeks come up with all this?” Formalization of logic and mathematics (deductive syllogisms, axiomatic proofs, theoretical rather than merely practical understanding, answering the question of every physical and mathematical peculiarity, not just “how,” but “why,” and how can we really know that); likewise a systematized, hypothetico-empirical science that actually becomes more accurate over time, as its method allows it to abandon bad ideas and start elevating sound ones, rather than just continuing to accumulate and revere speculation and fancy (as consumes much of traditional Chinese medicine and astronomy and physics): these are all Greek achievements, which the subsequent political, economic, and industrial success of the Roman Empire then allowed to accumulate further, and probably would have made it to what we mean by the Scientific Revolution by the 4th or 5th century, had its fortunes grown rather than fallen (everything instead going to shit in the 3rd century and not recovering, intellectually, for well over a thousand years). China was thus no different than any other advanced civilization—it was actually a typical human society—on this specific intellectual metric. Typical human societies simply never develop what we mean by science; they only achieve craft knowledge. We have administrative documents from Mesopotamia that date back almost to 3000 B.C., which means it went well over four thousand years without ever hitting on the innovations the Greeks did. Should we be surprised then that neither did China in merely three thousand years time?
Perhaps the surprising thing is that China’s intellectual sophistication between the Qin Dynasty (circa 3rd century B.C.) through the Qing (ending circa 19th century A.D.) was extraordinarily impressive, arguably more so than any other great civilization outside the West can claim. Its technological and engineering achievements, unmatched; as likewise its philosophy and mathematics and semantics (the closest approximation it had to logic). So one wonders how it could achieve all that and still get no farther than Sumer or Egypt in respect to “formal” science, logic, and mathematics. The answer is probably the same. We are simply falsely equating all that with science. When we speak of formal science, logic, and mathematics, we are actually referring to something extremely bizarre in the human ethnographic record, a counter-intuitive paradigm shift in how we accumulate the equivalent of “philosophical” and “craft” knowledge. Understood as such, it is not surprising that China didn’t develop it. Because “it” here means something fundamentally different from what China did do, which was merely excel above all at what all civilizations do, which is merely accumulate philosophical and craft knowledge that nevertheless remains scattered within a sea of errors, fantasies, and bad ideas all given the same weight. That only happens when you have no conception of how to tell the difference between those two things. And so really, the “secret sauce” is simply the remarkable, indeed clearly extraordinarily rare, discovery of how to tell the difference.
The Roman Empire got that far, but only because it had the virtue of enthusiastically adopting whatever good ideas it gleaned from conquered cultures—from the spoked wheel of the Celts to the blown glass of the Syrians, to the entire intellectual apparatus of the Greeks. China had no Greeks to learn from and build on. So we get back down to that one question, which is not, “Why not China?” but rather, “Why Greece?” To be fair, contrary to those who claim historians cannot answer counterfactuals, every positive historical causal theory entails a corresponding counterfactual. You cannot claim to know what caused the Scientific Revolution (or World War II, or the American Revolution, or anything whatever) without claiming to know what wouldn’t have caused it. Because the only way to claim to know what caused an outcome, is to know what causes, if we removed them, would not have had that outcome. That is in fact what it means to say those “are the causes.” If, after all, removing them made no difference to the outcome, clearly they did not cause that outcome. So we certainly can answer questions like, “Why did the Chinese not achieve the Scientific Revolution?” All we have to do is answer the question, “What did cause the Scientific Revolution?” Because if we really have the answer to that question, then by definition we will know the answer to the other: because if those causes are the causes, they necessarily must be observed as absent in China. For if they aren’t, then clearly we have failed to identify the actual causes.
I use this same reasoning in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire to answer the corresponding questions of why the Romans did not experience what we today mean by the Scientific Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution (which are not the same thing; on both, see my articles linked above). The short answer is, they almost did. The only thing we can confidently trace as having stopped them, was their collapse right before the payoff. But China never even became a contender. Which must be because of the lack in China of whatever it was that led the Greeks to so uniquely light upon the fundamental tools of formal, systemitized logic, mathematics, and science that actually make the difference between merely accumulating practical craft knowledge, and actually being able to tell the difference between credible and fanciful descriptions or explanations of anything in the world. I have written on that long ago—starting at the Secular Web a project I never continued (and likely won’t any time soon; it would be great if some others with credentials continued it), but the first entry I did complete probably comes as close to an answer as we are likely to get: and that you can read as The Origins of Greek Philosophy.
As someone who loves the history of Chinese empirical exploration and the incredible genius of Taoists in their chemistry and medicine, this is a really useful article!
Do you have any theories as to what factors led to this cultural differentiation? Obviously, as Steinberg notes, such things can have an infinite regress because cultural behaviors have roots, and we are nowhere near some comprehensive approach. But might it have to do with the geography, or geopolitics?
Yes. In the closing paragraph I link to my survey of ideas I think might have merit as to why the Greeks took the crucially weird step; by comparison then (as I note in this article), the absence of those features (or at least their convergence) will then explain the absence of that effect elsewhere (like China). As any causal theory requires, of course, if it is to have any merit.
As a Chinese browsing Chinese forums. I usually notice a couple of points which some of the author addressed in this article and some which are missing maybe due to lack of some cultural insight:
Ancient Chinese focused on practicality. One great example an user on Zhihu (Chinese version of Quora) gave was the classic story of two children arguing when the Sun was closest to earth (I may have some particular details wrong, but the gist is correct), one boy argued it is in the mornings and evenings because it looked bigger, another boy argued that it had to be noon because it was warmer so the sun must be closer then. At this point Confucius is supposed to have come over and the boys take their argument to Confucius, and he basically tells them off for wasting their time on useless things (in a philosophical way of course).
So here the difference: if given the same question, a Greek philosopher will take the question seriously, then work out theories and experiments to test his theories. But for the Confucian teaching, this was a waste of time, because you did not bring any real value from this. So if you look at Chinese classics, most of the lessons are for one to be a useful person – taking care of the family, keeping the peace, working etc, and to venture out of such activities as a main priority it would be considered a waste of time and being a degenerate. If you look at the Greek intellects, some of them straight up said (I’m paraphrasing), to learn from me you need be willing to learn and be prepared that you may not gain any practicality from these knowledge. This would not be respected in ancient China, definitely not respected enough to be adopted by emperors.
Post Tang, Han vs non-Han tensions were at an all time high, there were loads of works coming out as Han v Barbarians, which basically were highly xenophobic and highly Han chauvinist. Interestingly a lot of such works came out during Song dynasty. Despite Song dynasty itself was actually not that closed off and imported many new ideas and innovations, and side-studies was actually part of the official curriculum which actually fostered a semi-technological and theoretical advance, its works unfortunately did heavily influence the Ming dynasty which caused serious regression.
Let’s talk about Ming dynasty and why its reign was so terrible and regressive. Ming Dynasty emperor was ‘grass roots’, he was a peasant that succeeded in the rebellion, and because of this, he feared his own rule would be threatened the same way so he imposed a lot of laws which were not innovation friendly:
-He imposed the largest and longest maritime ban in history
-He forbade public learning of astronomy
-He imposed measures which severely limited population movement
-He cancelled side-studies for the imperial examines (which included maths) and limited exams to selected works.
-He consolidated power for the emperor like no dynasty before and he did so with heavy handed punishment and psychological abuse, starting the precedence of pulling down officials’ pants and beating their bottoms with wooden planks. This is completely unheard of in prior dynasties (unless by a bad tyrant but he made it pretty much the normal punishment).
The repercussions: By late Ming dynasty highly respected Mathematician couldn’t even understand Song dynasty mathematical theories. Han society at large was highly austere and conservative, during Qing dynasty, emperor Kangxi tried to push mathematics, it did not gain traction, and if you read journals of Europeans missionaries, basically Kangxi told him to back off and not do science in public because the Hans and Mongols had their own beliefs, and while the emperor himself respected his knowledge and was willing to learn, he could not guarantee his safety, if the missionary continued to practice science and preach his teachings in public.
Yes by Qing dyansty, Chinese public at large was highly conservative, did not like new things, and looked down on foreigners. Without having their asses handed to them during war, it would be very hard to change the attitudes of most of Chinese scholarly class (which held significant influence over society at large, and were by that point most reactionary and deeply entrenched in conservatism due to generations of conservative doctrine). Oh and I need to add, it’s not easy to get a good emperor like Kangxi, who was willing to learn and willing to push (at no great political cost of course), but right after Kangxi, his son, YongZheng, yeah, he kicked all the missionaries out, because they decided to support another prince, which really pissed YongZheng off. Things did not ease with Qianlong, because he viewed missionaries with suspicions since, for trying to interfere in Chinese court politics.
-Last one by Chinese researcher, he believes China couldn’t have had natural sciences because Chinese philosophy used Yin/Yang and five elements to explain everything. For example if you look like court records during the opium wars, one of the officials who was reverse-engineering European gun-powder, yeah, used Yin/Yang five elements to solve it. It was surreal. With Yin/Yang five elements being able to explain pretty much everything, you will never reach modern scientific methods, without accepting outside ideas and influences. But Ming dynasty conservativism made natural absorption practically impossible, so the only way you had it was forced adoption.
-Finally I need to talk about class struggle and why for some classes, new ideology is not good, because it is cutting into their interests. This will also get into why Qing dynasty and KMT reforms failed but CPC was able to succeed.
Thank you for the insights. I concur. I don’t see it correcting anything I said. You are simply adding more perspective to it.
Why Greece? Because Greece was a backwater culture that appropriated knowledge and ideas from Egypt, Phoenicia, Lydia, Phrygia in independent cities with extensive mercantile ties and cultural diversity (especially in Ionia, the real seat of “Greek” culture, no?) The act of appropriation involved a streamlining, selection, organization of disparate traditions. This intellectual framework, loose as it was, was the germ.
The organization of mathematics itself seems to have relied on Euclid. His own original work? At any rate, the market, so to speak, for such a summary and rationalization was provided by the massive intercultural explosion that occurred under Alexander and his successors. It’s not called the Hellenistic age because it was simply Athens writ large.
Literally nothing about formal science, mathematics, and logic came from Egypt, Phoenicia, Lydia, Phrygia or anywhere else. That’s the point. They all failed to develop these things.
Like China, they had craft knowledge (unscientific medicine; non-axiomatic maths and logics), and stopped there, stagnating for thousands of years. The Greeks by contrast struck upon the remarkable innovation of formalizing science, logic, and mathematics into hypothetico-deductive systems that are far more productive and successful. Modern science is the result. No other culture in the world ever did that, not even after thousands of years.
Meanwhile, the Greeks gave proper credit to every culture they learned craft knowledge from, which they said was principally Babylon and Egypt (and the facts bear them out). So they can’t even be accused of appropriation.
As for the history of mathematics among the Greeks before Euclid see my appendix in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire. On the outstanding advances that occurred after Euclid (from Apollonius to Archimedes to Menelaus and beyond), see “mathematics” in the index. And yes, outside the Greeks, no one in the world ever achieved anything meaningfully resembling what he did. This is the remarkable innovation to explain; and how the same innovation was extended to numeroud other domains (in mathematics and the sciences and logics). No one else did this, who didn’t get the idea of doing it from encountering what the Greeks did with it.
Yeah, as Richard is pointing out, the word “appropriation” is doing a lot of work here. Even if we want to say that the Greeks were just very clever thieves and saw the value of what other people had more than they did, and in so doing synthesized a new worldview… the question is why it was they who did that, and why no one else (who also were in an integrated Mediterranean trade network) did. I don’t think the Greeks were uniquely well-poised as middlemen, and other middlemen groups like the Parthians didn’t do the same thing. So were they uniquely attentive to other cultures and uniquely curious about selectively assimilating?
Where does competetive advantage and individuality, the individual, isonomia, and isocracy lie in this? In Late Archaic and Classic Geece you had an intellectual arms race as the Greeks were noticeably competetive as individuals and at the city-state level. In the Hellenistic period you had the competition between the Epigoni kingdoms and between Pergamum and Alexandria and Athens as library/intellectual centres.
The kingdoms could still be viewed as federations of city states with a hegemon. The same could be said of the Principate (First among EQUALS) where you couldn’t say that of the Dominate and later Christendom.
The hydraulic civilisations only fleetingly had this. Once you had your Narmer, Sargon or Qin Shi Huang you had centralised states with intermediate periods of collapse followed by more or less the same centralised geographic state re-emerging; not really close enough for competition between them.
Things have gotten W.E.I.R.D for us in the West, but I see increasingly a single narrative being imposed and the loss of that individuality, isocracy, and isnomia being a very real threat. The civilisations we are competing and clashing with can’t be said to have any of that.
That tests poorly as a causal factor. Individualism doesn’t of itself have any causal connection to the developments, as collective motivations can lead to the same concerns and behaviors (e.g. factional and party politics, as also wracked ancient Greece in all eras, and was well-known in China, e.g. between the Confucians and Taoists, and eventually Buddhists).
And science flourished more under centralized empires, owing to elevated wealth and education and aristocratic patronage: Alexander, the Successors, Rome, then after a hiatus, the Great World Empires of the United Kingdom and France, then soon Germany (notably the Spanish Empire was in decline precisely at this time, and correspondingly, science was all but dead there).
Isocracy and isonomia have never actually existed (even Classical Athens was a class-segregated slave-holding society with limited suffrage).
But, that said, I think there is something to the point that authoritarian cultures can’t develop science (they can adopt it and even advance it; but they will never of themselves think of it). As I discuss in the linked article on the point (last paragraph of the article above), the fact of more widely distributed power (not quite isocracy or isonomia but “trendlining” in that direction rather than against) entailed the need (not always but, crucially, often enough) to use persuasion rather than force to effect policy or the adoption of ideology, which entailed a persuasion “arms race” (of weapons and defense) that can only (?) inevitably result in the development of logico-empirical methods.
By contrast, while persuasion would still be important in an authoritarian culture (the advisers and petitioners need to “persuade” their rulers to heed their complaints or requests), it was always unidirectional: one simply had to figure out what would or wouldn’t work on a specific individual or regime, which was more an exercise in horse-trading and folk psychology; it never drives anyone to develop logic or science, because it’s not obvious any such things would do any good. There’s no “competitive arms race” in persuasion techniques that leads to a rapid evolution of a refined analysis of the whole race itself and how to win it.
Admittedly, this is just hypothesis. I don’t think we’ve gotten to the point of confirming it yet. But so far, I do not know of a better one.
And also, there are some other ways “individualism” in mindset “might” undergird the development of scientific thinking other than what you are thinking. This is explored in the works of G.E.E. Lloyd. For example, it appears to manifest in an interest in particularity over holism, so we get more words for anatomical parts and more detailed descriptions of wounds in Homer, vs. more abstract and non-particularized discussion of the same things in the comparable Tso Chuan, where analyzing social relationships mattered more than pinpointing physical details of anything.
Lloyd attempts to note the advantages can go the other way (the lack of holism in the West has in some cases impeded science, while in others its presence has advantaged China), but overall, he argues, science benefits from a slight imbalance of particularism over holism, because holism leads to “easy answers” (“the Yin-and-Yang explains everything”), rather than precise ones.
I am a little suspicious of explanations like this, however, as they seem pretty slippery and wishy-washy; and don’t quite fit very well. For example, ancient Chinese alchemy, mathematics, and engineering are awash with very detailed particularism, and indeed can be dizzyingly elaborate. And their extraordinary accumulation of craft knowledge entails a very strong attentiveness to particulars (their pharmacopia exceeded that of Rome’s, for example). So I do not think this can explain their failure to hit upon, specifically, formal logico-empirical methodologies.
This is such a fascinating subject!
So in summary, the key difference between China and Greece was that the former focused on the empirical whereas the latter focused on both the empirical and the theoretical by systematically connecting the two. And this is something that only the Greeks and the Romans did in the ancient world, or at least they were the first ones to do it.
Moreover, I wanted clarification on something. Did you not say in the past that the Romans were prejudiced against Greek ideas? Or was that more in terms of ideas outside of philosophy and science?
The Romans were only hostile to Hellenism in the Early Republic (pre-200 BC). By 100 BC they were fully Hellenized and bilingual. By 100 AD they named some of the greatest Hellenic scientists among their citizens and were funding Hellenic museums and universities.
But it would still be more accurate to say “only the Greeks.” The Romans did not independently arrive at this; they picked up all the basis from the Greeks and built on it, just as China did after Western contact. So yes, the Romans fully embraced these new ideas and advanced them. But they probably would not have but for contact with the Greeks. They were just luckier than China to be adjacenet to the Greeks at the time. China would have to await modern British naval fleets to land on their shores (partly due to their own self-chosen isolationism).
Thank you for the info.
I didn’t understand why what the Greeks did was counterintuitive. Apologies if you explained it, I will re-read that paragraph with more focus.
Can you please tell me if the Greeks were indeed the founders of Democracy? Or did it predate them? Don’t mean to digress. A “yes” or “no” and if you have a link would suffice.
Proper democracy (“rule by the people” in the form of a majority of citizens casting votes) was first invented by the Greeks, yes (attempts to claim otherwise lack scholarly credence, or confuse oligarchies for democracies). They still excluded slaves and women, but everyone did until literally quite recently in human history. Democracy was, however, independently invented one or two places later: famously the American Iroquois Nation (sometime around the 15th century) and maybe (at least in legend; the historical evidence is poor) one or two Indian cities after the introduction of Buddhism.
One might describe small pre-civilization tribal anarchies as democracies (they sort of loosely operate on consensus, without even rulers or laws), but lawless anarchic tribes are not usually what anyone means by “democracy.” And such systems have never operated a civilization (the only context where formal systems of government make sense to discuss). When talking about formal government over a large population (and not just a few dozen kin-related people), “democracy” only really should refer to, for example, what the Iroquois and Greeks produced (I’m less certain about India; I don’t trust the legendary source material). It is worth noting the Iroquois were the first in history to give women the vote. They beat White people to that innovation by several hundred years.
Considering how rare discovering “logico-empiricism” seems to be. It seems the discovery could be considered a “great filter” in the Fermi paradox / Drake equation sense. Clearly, reaching space would required an extreme level of craftsmanship, which seems unlikely without the narrowing and focusing power of that kind of refinement. I imagine it could be possible to reach that point, but only in an evolutionary timescale. Despite the advantages over terrestrial nature that sentience and sapience provides, it seems neither of those qualities grant the ability to “rise above evolution” that logico-empiricism does.
Obviously, we’re still beholden to evolution biologically, but the ability to analyze our own practices and methodologies, seems to grant us an evolutionary guide a level above natural evolution, a meta-heuristic. Despite the turmoil currently in the world (primarily in the US), I sincerely hope we last long enough to embrace the socio-political changes our scientific lessons are directing us.
As this development was arrived at within 10,000 years of civilization, given the rule that “absent evidence to the contrary, every singular event is more likely typical than exceptional,” and that the Drake is usually already being assigned timelines orders of magnitude larger than that (i.e. we usually give a planet billions not mere thousands of years to light upon the key advances), I doubt this observation could have any observable effect on anyone’s calcs today. It’s a safe bet the average rate is less than 100,000 years (which would make us extraordinarily fast on average, ten times faster than the mean; and I think we’re unlikely to be that amazing).
Another frequently discussed counterfactual (albeit absent from this article) is the scientific revolution happening in India. Obviously, this is due to India’s rich intelectual and proto(?)-scientific traditions. What is your opinion on this?
Not sure what you mean. There was no SR in India. If you mean India’s adoption of Western science, that’s diffusion, not original invention. The most India can be credited for before that are a few independently achieved ideas in math and logic, but they are minor, and never advanced any of their empirical sciences beyond the craft level. This is basically what we see in China. They have lots of impressive empirical math and logic; but still no systematic or axiomatic formalism of either, resulting in no real advances in understanding the natural world or the human mind or body beyond the kind of craft knowledge every premodern culture achieved.
So looking into the evidence I can find, it seems that at best India had a lot of individual mathematical theorists making great breakthroughs and an incredible craft culture (one that let them make ships for the Raj, have a very high level of skill in botany, etc.) But that’s not a scientific revolution. There’s no evidence I can see that they had any of the characteristics Richard describes: hypothetico-deductive systems, any formal analysis of methodology, an embrace of curiosity as a value per se, etc. Only after modern Western contact did they inherit those ideas.
I wonder if political conflict and a lack of a university structure may be a part of it. I suspect that to really get scientific revolutions going you need either a substantial public square for public intellectuals to be trading ideas and/or a university system that creates enough intellectual room for people to go beyond being craftsmen to being scholars, knowing that their efforts to think in meta terms about methodology and empiricism will actually positively impact their fields in the present and future.
Just curious have you read the classical Indian logical texts (nyaya sutras, Dinnaga’s writings)? Asking because they seem like formal logic to me as much as say, Aristotle, et.al. Good article nonetheless.
We actually don’t have any of that. For example, Dinnaga’s writings are lost. We only have translations of translations which have undergone considerable corruption by later interpreters.
He was already writing long after contact with Greek logic (Alexander invaded India eight hundred years before, and the Indo-Greek kingdoms predate Dinnaga by over five centuries; meanwhile, in the interim, even Buddhist contact with the Roman Empire and Greek kingdoms is attested). But add in more and more interpolations and rewrites by even later medieval and modern interpreters, and there is no telling what he originally wrote, or what is in there that can be ascribed as not simply diffusion and evolution from Greece.
One metric is to look for effects, i.e. his logic changing anything else in Indian intellectualism or science or mathematics substantially, and there isn’t any from anywhere near his own time; we see ample evidence, by contrast, of Greco-Roman ideas diffusing to India well by that time.
Earlier Indian logic, like Nyaya, does not differ substantially from Chinese logic (e.g Hsün Tsu, the Moists, etc.). It’s all very impressive. But they never got to axiomatic logics. And did virtually nothing with it empirically. It’s mostly just the analysis of language, applied mostly to theology and mysticism.