Abstract
That economic development cannot be halted, or, to cite the World Bank once again, that its “desirability … is universally recognized”3 would seem to be a basic truth as the twentieth century draws to its end. Respectable debate centers on what kind of development—whether it is environmentally sustainable or socially equitable. The specific term development is a post-World War II phenomenon, but what it refers to—progress, modernization, technology, growth—has been going on in the West since the seventeenth century. The core phenomenon is in one sense, as Walt Rostow put it, “simple and obvious: What distinguishes the world since the industrial revolution from the world before is the systematic, regular, and progressive application of science and technology to the production of goods and services.”4 Technology, in the sense of toolmaking and action upon nature to satisfy human needs, has always existed; indeed, recent studies indicate that other primates have similar proclivities. The critical juncture in human history came with the Enlightenment, when several societies in Western Europe began to organize themselves in a feedback loop of continuous technical innovation and transformation, a new social dynamic that joined the production of economic surpluses to the method of modern science and the expansion of markets.
Instead of the speculative philosophy taught in the Schools, a practical philosophy can be found by which, knowing the power and effects of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies which surround us, as distinctly as we know the various trades of our craftsmen, we might put them in the same way to all the uses for which they are appropriate, and thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature.1
—René Descartes, Discourse on Method
We treat the fatal consequences of technology as though they were a technical defect that could be remedied by technology alone. We are looking for an objective way out of the crisis of objectivity.2
—Václav Havel
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Notes
- 1.
The literature on the subject of the origins of economic development in the modern era is of course enormous; for an introduction, see H. W. Arndt, Economic Development: The History of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Walt W. Rostow, How It All Began: Origins of the Modern Economy (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975); J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (New York: Dover Publications, 1932).
- 2.
Rostow notes that through the eighteenth century, modernization was largely a “top-down” affair: technical research and the creation of manufactures and markets were assiduously and painstakingly promoted by national governments that were gradually establishing a sense of nationhood. “With respect to the future,” he optimistically proclaimed, “the economic tasks undertaken by governments in early modern Europe approximate those of the least industrialized parts of the post-1945 developing world” (Rostow, How It All Began, 20, 103).
- 3.
Arndt points out that the poverty, basic needs, and alternative technology goals that entered international development discourse in the late 1960s and 1970s were viewed skeptically by most developing-country elites and governments as diversions from the central project of increased national power through economic modernization. These concerns seemed to reflect growing Western doubts about the virtues of ceaseless economic growth and continued social inequality rather than any demand from the developing-country governments. (Arndt, Economic Development, 108–11.)
- 4.
It is clearly a mistake, however, to think of all traditional societies as necessarily better adapted to their environments, less violent, or otherwise “happier” than our own. ucla anthropologist Robert B. Edgerton, for example, criticizes the belief “that small-scale societies are better adapted to their ecological circumstances than our own…. Some may be, but others decidedly are not. In a number of small societies, people are chronically hungry and care little about one another’s welfare” (Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony [New York: Free Press, 1992], 12).
- 5.
“These long chains of reasonings, quite simple and easy, which geometers are accustomed to using to teach their most difficult demonstrations,” he writes in the Discourse on Method, “had given me cause to imagine that everything which can be encompassed by man’s knowledge is linked in the same way” (Discourse on Method and the Meditations [see endnote 1], 41).
- 6.
A city whose creation and physical design embodies a very Cartesian project of domination of space, both as an urban center and as a planned new national capital to open up and control the Brazilian interior.
- 7.
The image is a caricature, but unfortunately true, and revealing of a mind-set that views large parts of the earth’s surface with little more discrimination than that with which Descartes viewed his ball of wax, which, the great philosopher concluded, was nothing “except something extended, flexible and malleable.” The Bank claims it is promoting now the approach it should have had in the 1980s—so-called “agro-ecological zoning,” which in theory starts with topography, soil quality, existing land uses, etc., in land use planning for the Amazon. But in practice less has changed than meets the eye (see Chapter 6).
- 8.
Commentators have noted that the use of the word inquisition here is of critical importance; Bacon’s method envisages an active program of experimentation and manipulation of nature as the key to knowledge and power: “The secrets of nature reveal themselves more readily under the vexations of art than when they go their own way” (Novum Organum [see endnote 31], aphorism 98). See Jatinder K. Bajaj, “Francis Bacon, the First Philosopher of Modern Science,” in Ashis Nandy, ed., Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990),47. Shiv Vivanathan calls this “the vivisectional mandate, where the other becomes the object of experiment which is in essence violence and in which pain is inflicted in the name of science” (Vivanathan, “On the Annals of the Laboratory State,” in Nandy, op. cit., 259).
- 9.
Weinberger notes that Bacon’s Latin version uses the word vinvitur, literally “conquer,” rather than “command.” (New Atlantis and The Great Instauration [see endnote 30], p. 21, note 40.)
- 10.
Several more recent studies (than Rostow’s) by economic historians emphasize the role of new, economically more efficient social, legal, and property arrangements which, coupled with technological innovation, created self-reinforcing incentives for individual economic effort and therefore the “key to growth.” (Douglas C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History [Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973], l; see also Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, Jr., How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World [New York: Basic Books, 1986].) These arrangements include, in Britain in the latter half of the seventeenth century, “the creation of the first patent law to encourage innovation, the elimination of many of the remnants of feudal servitude … the joint stock company … the coffee house, which was a precursor of organized insurance; the creation of securities and commodities markets; the development of the goldsmith into a deposit banker issuing bank notes, discounting bills and providing interest on deposits” (North and Thomas, 155); and, of course, the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. Clearly, this is what happened; but why did it happen, and what was (and is) the essence of the whole process? These are essentially philosophical questions, whose answers depend on what one is looking for. See Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (see endnote 51).
- 11.
His Traces on the Rhodian Shore (see endnote 52) is still the definitive study of conceptions of nature in Western history through the end of the eighteenth century.
- 12.
“Of the Incalescence of Quicksilver into Gold,” which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
- 13.
This is the view of Swiss ecological economist Hans Binswanger (whose namesake and relation, ironically, is a leading agricultural economist in the World Bank), who, in a fascinating interpretation of the second part of Goethe’s Faust, describes the foundation of the modern economy as an alchemical process. (Hans Christoph Binswanger, “Die Moderne Wirtschaft als alchemistischer Prozess: Eine oekonomische Deutung von Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ ” [The modern economy as alchemistic process: an economic interpretation of Goethe’s “Faust.”] Neuen Rundschau, Nr. 2, 1982, reprinted in Leviathan, Zeitschrift fuer Sozialwis-senschaft, 1986, Heft 1.)
- 14.
A fascinating aspect of Newton’s tenure at the Mint was the energy with which he hunted down counterfeiters, setting up networks of informers and spies all over England, visiting, incognito, taverns and quarters infested by thieves to ferret out information. In a single nineteen-month period (June 1698 to Christmas 1699) Newton appeared in 123 separate days at the Mint to interrogate some 200 informers and suspects, many of whom were subsequently executed. (Manuel, Portrait of Isaac Newton [see endnote 58], 230.)
- 15.
Who set out the Saint-Simonian system in a series of lectures between 1828 and 1830, published as The Doctrine of Saint-Simon: An Exposition (see endnote 72).
- 16.
According to Manuel, the “unitary bank” would be supplied with credit equal to what the Saint-Simonians called the total annual product of industry, something like today’s gnp. Numerous local credit institutions and specialized industrial banks would determine the debit side. “In this bankers’ dream world,” Manuel concludes, “the [financial] demands of centralized supervision and of local special institutions were delicately balanced—in a way, the contemporary practice, though not the theory, of all highly organized economies” (Manuel, The Prophets of Paris [see endnote 73], 177).
- 17.
Other aspects of Enfantin’s career would make an interesting subject for an historical novel. He tried to convert the Saint-Simonian movement into something resembling what today would be called a New Age cult; he promoted a kind of Utopian, pantheistic religion (based on Saint-Simon’s vision of the new epoch that would arrive when his ideas were put into practice); he advocated free love and the abolition of marriage; he established himself as the “Father” of the cult of “apostle” followers, and contemplated the publication of a Saint-Simonian bible of texts from the master, as well as the construction of a Saint-Simonian temple to be built of iron. (Markham, introduction to Saint-Simon, Selected Writings [see endnote 65], xxxvii-xxxix.)
- 18.
The Saint-Simonian flavor of their technocratic faith was particularly unbounded in the first generation. Nassar proclaimed that after the construction of the Aswan dam, Egypt “would be a paradise”; for Nehru, India’s gigantic dams were its “modern temples”; and Nkrumah, the first leader of independent Ghana in 1958, declared that the giant Volta River dam (financed by the World Bank) would herald a new era in which “Ghanians would cease being hewers of wood and drawers of water for the west” (Vivanathan, “On the Annals of the Laboratory State,” in Nandy, ed., Science, Hegemony and Violence [see endnote 41], 279).
- 19.
Development is, as one Dutch sociologist put it, “after all nothing but the Enlightenment applied or modernization operationalized” (Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Emancipations, Modern and Postmodern,” Development and Change, vol. 23, no. 3 [July 1992], 5, 23).
- 20.
After 1851 the Crystal Palace was taken down and reassembled in another part of London, and the exhibition continued on a semi-permanent basis for years.
- 21.
“How will democracy even in [a] … limited sense be at all possible?” “How,” he asked, “can one possibly save any remnants of ‘individualist’ freedom in any sense?” (Weber, Economy and Society [see endnote 98], vol. 2, 1403).
- 22.
The whole epic tale of the economic profligacy and environmental waste propagated by these two agencies is set out in Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert (set endnote 119).
- 23.
In the words of Lt. Gen. Henry J. Hatch, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, the proposed, enormously costly “unstraightening” of the Kissimmee River in Florida to save Lake Okeechobee and the entire water table of South Florida from the ecological threats caused by earlier Corps projects that straightened and canalized the same river is “a terrific case study” of the Corp’s new approach. (Lt. Gen. Henry J. Hatch, in “Green Engineering and National Security” [see endnote 133], 43.)
- 24.
According to Tennessean William Chandler, author of The Myth of tva (see endnote 135), on which I rely heavily in this discussion.
- 25.
Gunther notes that per capita income was up 75 percent from 1933 to 1946, as opposed to 56 percent in the rest of the country; wages up 57 percent, as opposed to 47 percent; and value of manufactured products up 68 percent in contrast to 54 percent elsewhere. (Gunther, Inside U.S.A. [see endnote 134], 738.)
- 26.
These include the Damodar Valley Corporation in India, the Sao Francisco Valley Commission in Brazil, and the Cauca Valley Corporation in Columbia.
- 27.
That is, economic costs incurred through choosing investments less productive than feasible alternatives.
- 28.
Chandler observes that this criticism should be tempered by a recognition that there is probably little tva could have done in any case “to offset the nationwide trends toward larger farms and mechanized agriculture” (Chandler, The Myth of the tva, 98).
- 29.
There is no contradiction here: the fact that massive technological interventions on the earth may be unreasonable or unsound from a broader scientific or economic perspective (e.g., the agricultural colonization of tropical rainforests, the construction of gigantic dams) does not mean they cannot be carried out, and indeed science and economics provide the technological and administrative means to carry out such projects effectively.
- 30.
See, for example, “Development as Enclosure,” and “The Encompassing Web,” in Whose Common Future? special issue of Ecologist, vol. 22, no. 4 (July/August 1992), 131–57; for a popular account, see Jeremy Rifkin, Biosphere Politics: A Cultural Odyssey from the Middle Ages to the New Age, part 1, “Enclosing the Global Commons” (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 11–94.
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Rich, B. (2013). From Descartes to Chico Mendes: A Brief History of Modernity as Development. In: Mortgaging the Earth. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-515-1_8
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