As soon as a civilization reaches a given level of control and manipulation of its environment it finds itself at a crossroads, which will lead it to choose whether to continue on the path of progress and innovation, thus progressing towards ever greater technical capacity or continue on path of the hierarchy, to keep the institution of slavery active thus making one's civilization static and limiting one's ability to produce " profit and wealth ".
To the civilization that has to make this choice, the two roads have both advantages and disadvantages, and if on the one hand the profits linked to the institution of slavery can be reduced compared to the profits linked to industrial production, it is also true that production industry requires expensive and difficult-to-implement machinery, and the promise of greater profit comes largely from a company's willingness to risk it all.
Technological innovation from this point of view it can be frightening, because it represents an unknown, and human beings are naturally afraid of what they do not know, however, technique and technology are fundamental elements of a civilization, without them a true civilization is impossible and unthinkable, and I will not dwell on the traditional example of the invention of the plow that allows a people to pass from nomadism to a sedentary life, thus starting to build their own villages and cities.
The effects of technology and technology on our civilization would become particularly evident in the nineteenth century, following the industrial revolution , bringing with them a growing interest in the study of the history of science and technologies, in this sense the writings of Samuel Smiles are a more than eloquent example, subsequently this interest would gradually fade, until it almost completely disappeared at the beginning of the following century.
This golden parenthesis in the nineteenth century allowed us to better understand the dynamics of scientific thought, and above all, it allowed us to understand why, some civilizations of the ancient world, chose the path of hierarchy and slavery, with all their advantages and advantages. , thus holding back its capacity for technological development.
In the ancient world, more precisely in the Greek and Greco-Roman world, the technique was associated with the activity of the lower classes, more precisely the slaves, and was seen as a " minor art ”, And this would have made the“ Greek science "Particularly infertile. In fact there were no "scientists" in the ancient world, also because this social institution would not have appeared before the seventeenth century, but this does not mean that the ancient world was totally alien to science and scientific thought, indeed, the Greeks were convinced that all natural phenomena were determined by laws and principles ( and not by the whims of some deity, spirit or demon ). This belief would have allowed the Greek civilization to develop mathematics in a remarkable way and would have invented the idea that, in order to be considered true, a given hypothesis must necessarily be certified by a test. Thanks to experimentation, especially by the intellectuals of Alexandria of Egypt in Ptolemaic age , the Greek intellectuals would have made an important contribution to cartography, theoretical and practical mechanics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine and anatomy. And it is likely that these results were the result of the intersection of Greek and Egyptian cultures.
Despite a promising first scientific phase, and if well the level of technical and technological knowledge of the ancient world would have allowed the Greco-Roman civilization to make an epochal leap forward on the technological level, building the steam engine, emblem of the industrial revolution, the Greek civilization, having reached the crossroads, would not have shown a greater interest in science than that shown by other civilizations such as the Islamic civilizations , Indian and Chinese, preferring instead the guarantees of the traditional slave system.
It is no coincidence that the greatest legacy of Greco-Roman civilization is linked to the administrative and legal system and not to the scientific world, and in this sense it is important to remember that none of the "wonders of the ancient world ”Was the work of the Romans.
The technological discrepancy between the ancient and the modern world is enormous and can be easily explained if we accept the truth that the Romans were not first-rate engineers, but that they simply limited themselves to imitating and " copying "The technological innovations of the peoples with whom they came into contact and that instead the medieval age was a particularly prolific era on a technical level, and it was not just a period in which" abandoned ”And the Roman aqueducts and roads were neglected.
Flying over large cities, cathedrals, fortresses and castles that had nothing to envy, on a technical and engineering level, to Roman villas and aqueducts. During the Middle Ages, a series of technical innovations were produced that are still the basis of our civilization today.
A comparison between the technical knowledge of the Middle Ages and the ancient world, the superiority of medieval knowledge appears immensely superior. The great engines of medieval technology do not reside in Europe, but in the Chinese, Indian and Arabian world, which were the privileged mediators able to bring scientific knowledge from Asia to Europe and the Mediterranean.
The Arab world had inherited the bases of its mathematical, philosophical and astronomical knowledge from the Greek world, and to these it would have added a new knowledge from Asia and thanks to it they would have made a further important contribution to medicine, especially optics and olfactory, they would have developed the study of chemistry and produced a series of related technical innovations.
The technical development of medieval Europe, even if it were a reaction and an imitation of the technical development of the first Islamic civilization, nevertheless denotes an important level of cultural openness that would have laid the foundations for a truly European development in the following centuries.
A more recent example of a similar dynamic can be found in the contemporary Far East, in particular in China, Korea and Japan . These peoples are often labeled, on the technological level, as copiers, imitators of European or American technology, but their imitation ( unlike the Roman one ) is not static, and has produced its own technological identity.
An indispensable element for the technological development of a civilization is undoubtedly its ability and willingness to learn. Introducing technologies of foreign peoples is in some ways even more important than the development of its own technologies, an example in this sense comes to us from China which has a long history of inventions and internal discoveries behind it, but which, hardly, in the past centuries , has allowed the entry of foreign techniques and technologies in their country, facing an inevitable drying up of their technology.
In medieval Europe, on the other hand, the dynamics are totally reversed, internal discoveries and inventions are relatively few, but there is a great willingness to learn and introduce new techniques, so medieval artisans could have continuously developed and updated their techniques until they would not have been able to develop new and original techniques and technologies.
Sources:
D.S.L. Cardwell, Technology, science, history, Il Mulino, Bologna 1976