From Engelsberg Ideas:
Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has greatly enhanced humanity’s capacity to shape the world through manufacturing and finance. However, these technological developments also have the potential to exacerbate crises and stoke division.
‘If the heavens proclaim the glory of God, machines proclaim the glory of man,’ wrote the Jesuit theologian and later cardinal Jean Daniélou in his 1961 book, Scandaleuse vérité (The Scandal of Truth). Technology, Daniélou understood, was in many ways a definitive feature of modernity, and represented the sharp end of humanity’s ambition to master the world. In the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon had described the scientific method’s application to the natural world in his Novum Organum Scientiarum (1620) as restoring humans’ ‘rights over nature’ as they use all their ‘efforts to make the course of art outstrip nature’. In these words, we find much of the inspiration for the modern technological project.
Technology is a manifestation of empirical reason, and one sphere of life in which the application of empirical reason to our world has especially affected humans is the economy. The publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776 launched the revolution of ideas that helped radically transform Western economic life, starting in Britain and then extending in rapid succession to continental Europe and the Americas. But while concepts like the division of labour and the mutually beneficial effects of free exchange proved critical in delivering millions of people from poverty, equally important was the emergence of devices such as the steam engine, pioneered by the English inventor Thomas Newcomen and enhanced by the Scottish engineer James Watt. What the Greeks called tékhnē — the knowledge of making and doing things — was as important as the new social science of economics.
The acceleration of technological change from the late eighteenth century onwards enabled humans to transform increasing amounts of raw materials into energy, to use that energy to create new tools and products out of combinations of other materials, and then trade these goods faster and more efficiently across the world. Since then, every successive generation has built upon their predecessors’ technological achievements, to the point whereby people in developed economies today can order goods and services from across the world to their front door with a few clicks on their computer.
The pervasiveness of sophisticated technology is thus one of the defining features of modern economic life. But it has also had considerable spill-over effects that go beyond the economy. Some of these are especially evident in two sectors of Western economies: manufacturing and finance.
In many ways, the rise of modern capitalism was defined by manufacturing. The economist and historian of economic thought Joseph Schumpeter did not exaggerate when he wrote in his History of Economic Analysis (1954) that ‘by the end of the fifteenth century most of the phenomena that we are in the habit of associating with that vague word ‘Capitalism’ had put in their appearance, including big business, stock and commodity speculation, and ‘high finance’....
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HT: The Browser
