Is machinery the measure of civilization?

Whether technical power shows that a people is advanced, or is a narrower thing than civilization.

Direction Both
Span 1832–1950
Questions 3
Works 19
Languages English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Gujarati, German

  1. Q32Is widespread use of machinery evidence that a society is more civilized?

    Yes3

    • 1832Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures

      Says a country must have reached a high degree of civilization before it approaches the limit of economy in applying force to transport.

    • 1837Macaulay, Lord Bacon

      Judges Bacon's philosophy by its fruits: it has lengthened life, spanned rivers, annihilated distance and driven cars without horses; its law is progress.

    • 1877Morgan, Ancient Society

      Divides human history into savagery, barbarism and civilization, marking the stages largely by a sequence of inventions and discoveries.

    No3

    • 1909Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule

      Argues modern civilization, whose chief symbol is machinery, is an irreligious condition; true civilization is moral conduct, and India's ancestors chose not to pursue machinery.

    • 1917Tagore, Nationalism

      Argues the West has turned society into a machine of commerce and politics whose aim is success, not goodness, eliminating moral responsibility.

    • 1931Spengler, Man and Technics

      Treats machine technology as the expression of Western man's will to power, a stage in a culture's life that ends in decline.

  2. Q33Can a society adopt another society's machinery without adopting its ways of life?

    Yes4

    • 1861Feng Guifen, Protests from the Jiaobin Studio

      China should adopt Western mathematics, mechanics and arms while keeping Chinese ethical teaching as the foundation; the principle later summarized as Chinese learning for substance, Western learning for application.

    • 1898Zhang Zhidong, Exhortation to Learning

      China should keep the Confucian basis of society and take Western learning only to strengthen its material basis.

    • 1915Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution

      Germany borrowed English machine technology without the English institutions that grew up with it, which let a dynastic state use it; Veblen holds that the machine discipline will erode those older institutions over time.

    • 1931Spengler, Man and Technics

      Western technics has become detachable from the Faustian culture that made it, so non-Western peoples can take it up and turn it against the West.

    No3

    • 1875Fukuzawa Yukichi, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization

      Japan cannot take Western technical novelties while keeping its old spirit; it must adopt the spirit of civilization, the independence of the individual and the nation, that produced them.

    • 1902Yan Fu, Letter to the Editor of the Waijiao bao

      Chinese and Western learning each have their own substance and application; combining Chinese substance with Western application makes both lose their meaning.

    • 1909Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule

      Machinery is the chief sign of modern civilization and has impoverished India; India cannot take it up and remain itself.

    Conditional1

    • 1917Tagore, Nationalism

      Japan can take Western science only if it assimilates it to its own character; if it copies Western nationalism it becomes a borrowed machine left with only borrowed weapons.

  3. Q34Does superiority in industrial or military technology justify one people governing another?

    Yes3

    • 1885Ferry, Speech to the Chamber of Deputies on colonial policy

      Ferry asserts that contemporary European nations generously discharge a superior race’s civilizing duty, contrasting this with earlier Spanish enslavement. The excerpt does not state the technological premise or the explicit right-because-duty formula.

    • 1898Kidd, The Control of the Tropics

      The tropics must be administered by the higher civilizations as a trust, because their resources are needed by the world and their peoples cannot develop them alone.

    • 1901Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Science

      Progress comes through struggle between races, and a scientifically efficient nation is justified in displacing less efficient peoples.

    No4

    • 1898Belloc, The Modern Traveller

      Satirical verse whose narrator rests European mastery in Africa on the Maxim gun alone: 'Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.'

    • 1898Wells, The War of the Worlds

      Technically superior Martians treat humans as Europeans treated the Tasmanians, and the narrator asks whether people who exterminated the Tasmanians can complain.

    • 1902Hobson, Imperialism: A Study

      Hobson rejects the claim that the struggle of races lets the 'socially efficient' justly govern or displace others, and traces imperialism to the interests of finance.

    • 1950Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

      Colonizers' claims of roads, railways and material progress do not justify colonial rule; the Congo-Ocean railway cost lives, and no one knows what these countries would have built without Europe.