Csrlson 1 DIVERSITY and PROGRESS
teenth century, the standard story is that intrigue in the imperial court had
Diversity and Progress
How Might W e Picture Technology across
Global Cultures?
W. BERNARD CARLSON
0 N THE M O R N I N G OF 28 March 1848, the people of London awoke to an
astonishing sight. Moored at the East India Docks was a large Chi-
nese sailing ship, or junk-the Keying. With a displacement of nearly 700
tons and length of 160 feet, the Keying had come from Hong Kong to
London by crossing the Indian Ocean, rounding the Cape of Good Hope,
and sailing up the Atlantic. While Londoners were taken with its size, they
were even more impressed with its seaworthiness: as the Illustrated London
News (1848) observed, "She proved herself an excellent sea-boat; and her
powers of weathering a storm equal, if not surpass, those of vessels of
British build." Over the next few months thousands of British flocked to
the docks to see this Chinese ship, not just because it was from the exot-
ic Far East, but also because the Keying served as testimony to the power
of Chinese shipping and shipbuilding. Just as the British were coming to
believe that they ruled the seas, here was a reminder that China could be
a potent maritime rival.
I begin with this image of the Keying in London to shake up how we
typically think about the course of history and the movement of technol-
ogy among cultures. Given our commonplace assumptions about Western
history and technological development, a Chinese ship should not be sail-
ing up the Thaines in 1848: British industrialization and naval power were
on the rise, and China was supposed to be on the wane. Even though the
Chinese had launched a fleet of great ships to explore the world in the fif-
Compurative Technology Transfer and Society, volume 5, number 2 (August 2007):128-55
O 2007 by Colorado Institute for Technology Transfer and Implementation
brodght an end to China's efforts at exploration and trade (Menzies, 2002).
Yet here was the Keying at the East India Docks, suggesting that we need
to examine our assumptions about the role of technology in history; tech-
nology did not always move from the West to the East, from industrial to
nonindustrial economies.
But it is not just our assumptions about the past that need to be re-
vised. As Japan, China, and India grow in industrial power and reshape
global markets in the twenty-first century, historians and policy makers
need to rethink their assumptions about technological diffusion. Already,
vast amounts of goods and services move East to West, leading one to
wonder if before long, ideas and innovation in technology will originate in
China and India and then diffuse to Europe and America. Just as the Brit-
ish had to make sense of the Keying sailing up the Thames, so Americans
and Europeans now must make sense of the container ships docking at
Long Beach and Rotterdam, disgorging thousands of tons of products from
China every day (Donovan & Bonney, 2006).
To revise our thinking about the movement of technology across his-
tory and cultures, we should consider our ideas about diversity and prog-
ress as they relate to technology. On the one hand, thanks to the work of
anthropologists and historians of technology, we can appreciate the re-
markable and diverse ways in which people across a variety of cultures use
technology to shape their lives (Edgerton, 2007). From the iyramids of
ancient Egypt to the boats of Pacific Islanders to the cell-phone networks
established throughout the world today, it is clear that humans have long
used technology in response to their needs, wishes, and dreams. Both his-
torical and contemporary examples amply demonstrate that technology is
not something uniquely created by the industrialized West; one need only
recall that paper, the magnetic compass, and gunpowder all moved East to
West along the Silk Road during the late Middle Ages. Hence, we need to
recognize diversity in the creation and diffusion of technology.
Yet, on the other hand, many strongly believe that technology is essen-
tial to improving living conditions around the world. We know that certain
kinds of technology can provide food, eliminate disease, and raise the stan-
dard of living for millions of people. Many also hope that, by using tech-
nology to increase the wealth of a society, people may be inclined toward
democracy and freedom and away from violence and prejudice. So given
our commitment to using technology for human betterment, how do we go
about promoting technological change without falling into the trap of auto-
matically applying Western assumptions?
The answer, I believe, is to refine our thinking about diversity and
Comparative Technology Transfer end Society. August 2007. vol. 5, no. 2
progress. To understand the diversity found in technology, I will suggest in
this essay that we consider how different societies use technology to pur-
sue material abundance, social order, and cultural meaning. Next, I will
look at how societies differ from each other in terms of the vision or ide-
ology they develop about how to use technology to pursue these three
goals. Having established the notion of technological ideology, I will then
turn to the issue of progress to argue that the common notion of progress
springs from the technological ideology of the industrial West: namely,
that the good society is based on material abundance, and second, that dif-
ferent societies may have entirely different notions of change across hu-
man history To think about what we mean by progress in industrialized
cultures, I will show how we might diagram human history,. looking in
particular at the resources mobilized by different cultures across time.
Throughout, I will emphasize that the Western notion of technological
progress is only one of several ways to think about human history, and that
the trajectory.of human experience can be viewed in a variety of ways.
Indeed, it is only by comparing technological activity across cultures and
by thinking critically about the nature of progress that we can succeed in
understanding how people use technology to shape their experience.
THE PRIME DIRECTIVE
I began to think about the need for a broader perspective regarding
technology across cultures while writing and editing Technology in World
History (Carlson, 2005). Aimed a t the public library market, this multivol-
ume project covered 18 different cultures, Western and non-Western, from
the Stone Age to globalization. In working with a team of experts on this
project, I was especially concerned that we not misrepresent the technolo-
gy in non-Western cultures that we covered; non-Western and Western
technologies had to be treated equally Consequently, I proposed to my fel-
low authors a basic principle to guide how we went about narrating the de-
velopment of different cultures. Just as Captain Kirk in the television series
Star Trek would remind his crew that their prime directive was not to inter-
fere wit11 the development of primitive societies on the planets they visited,
so I suggested to my fellow authors that we were striving not to privilege
the technology of one culture over another (Prime Directive, 2007). In-
deed, the prime directive for Technology i n World History was that all human
cultures have technology, but every culture uses technology differently
All human societies-from the Stone Age to the present, from Ameri-
cans to Pacific Islanders-use technology to provide themselves with food,
Carlson I DIVERSITY end PROGRESS
clothing, and shelter. But while all human societies have technology, every
society employs technology differently to structure social relationships
and give life spiritual or religious meaning. Some cultures use technology
to concentrate wealth in the hands of a ruling class, while others choose
to distribute wealth across society People construct great monuments
such as temples, cathedrals, and skyscrapers as expressions of their ideas
about sacred, political, or economic power. They develop different ways
of communicating ideas, spreading information, and organizing knowl-
edge. Following this directive, our goal with Technology i n World History
was not to suggest that some tecl~nologies-or some societies-were bet-
ter than others, but rather to reveal the amazing array of technologies that
humans have generated in response to the practical problems of living and
thriving.
ABUNDANCE, ORDER, A N D MEANING
To capture the diverse ways that people have used technology to shape
their lives and cultures, my fellow authors and I proceeded to describe how
people in different cultures use technology in response to three basic goals:
material abundance, social order, and cultural meaning. These three cate-
gories were broad enough that they allowed us to compare what was hap-
pening in different cultures without privileging one culture over another.1
First and foremost, humans have relied on technology across the span
of history to generate the food, wealth, and material abundance necessary
to sustain the population and permit the development of a distinctive cul-
ture. Hence, in examining the technology of a particular society, we asked
the following questions:
How did the group produce food?
Where did they live (houses, settlements, and cities)?
What did they wear (clothing and jewelry)?
What materials (ceramics, wood, metal) did they use to fashion
objects?
What sources of power (human muscle, animals, wind, water,
steam, electricity, nuclear) did they utilize?
'1 am drawing the idea that technology has material, social, and cultural functions from the work
of Michael Schiffer (1992, pp. 9-12). My thanks to Bryan Pfaffenberger for helping me develop
this perspective.
Cornparet~veTechnology Transfer and Soc~ety,August 2007. vol 5 . no. 2
How did they move themselves and goods (transport)?
Ilow did they defend themselves or attack other groups (weapons)?
Yet, as the saying goes, "Man does not live by bread alone." While food,
shelter, and clothing are necessary for human existence, they are not suffi-
cient to guarantee that people will be happy or safe. Consequently my fel-
low authors and I went on to consider how people rely on technology to
achieve the noneconomic goals of ordering society and giving life meaning.
We are all aware that technology is more than just the tools humans
use to provide food. In many cultures, people like to have technological
devices-be it a new model of car or the latest cell phone-not just
because they are practical, but also because devices convey messages about
the person who owns or uses them. These messages can be about the indi-
vidual's gender, power, social status, values, beliefs, or emotions; indeed,
one could argue that we only know about some of these intangible quali-
ties when they are manifested in the objects surrounding an individual.
- then, the questions might include:
As with individuals, so it is with societies. To use a simple example
about social order, we know in many cultures who the rulers are by their
symbols, clothes, and palaces as well as by the technology they use to dem-
onstrate power-be it through weapons, networks of roads, or maps.
Whether one considers grand monuments such as the Egyptian pyramids
or the U.S. space program, one quickly realizes that humans possess tech-
nological devices for noneconomic reasons. Such devices can manifest
social status, provide aesthetic pleasure, structure social interactions, and
provide meaning to human existence.
To consider these noneconomic functions of technology, it is necessary
to ask a second set of questions about how different cultures employ tech-
nology to create social and political order:
How do people use technological artifacts to distinguish between
groups (by gender and class) and confer social status?
What devices or machines are used to guide or control the behavior
of individuals or groups?
How does society use technology to deploy political power and
designate leaders and followers?
How do leaders collect information and communicate in order to
coordinate the activities of their societies?
Ilow is. technological knowledge distributed in society? Is it broadly
distributed in terms of skill, or is it concentrated in the hands of a
few experts?
Carlson I DIVERSITY and PROGRESS
Across history, people have used technology to create and maintain
social and political order in a myriad of ways. In the Aztec civilization, for
example, only the ruling and warrior classes were permitted to wear elab-
orate outfits fashioned out of feathers. In ancient China, the emperor dis-
played his power by standardizing all aspects of language, law, and reli-
gion. He went so far as to place tracks in the imperial roads so as to force
the peasants to use carts with a standard wheelbase. And I would specu-
late that in the twenty-first century, our interest in information technolo-
gy is driven as much by a desire for social control (by collecting informa-
tion about citizens and potential enemies) as it has been to improve eco-
nomic productivity.
Along with social and political order, though, we must also examine
how different societies use technology to create meaning-the beliefs and
values they have about themselves and their relationship to nature and the
universe. Here we need to consider how technology interacts with the
myths, religion, art, and philosophy of a culture. With regard to meaning,
How do groups use technology to illustrate and reify their world-
view? How does it help groups create a sense of identity?
How do technological devices reflect a group's views about the
place of humans in the universe? How do devices reflect notions
of time and space?
What do certain devices reveal about how a group addressed and
tried to resolve central puzzles or traumas?
Let me offer a few examples of the relationship between technology
and cultural meaning. First, in writing about the Egyptians in Technology
i n World History, I made the point that the pyramids served no economic
purpose; in fact, their construction took significant numbers of workers
away from food production. Instead, the pharaohs and people of Egypt
undertook the construction of the pyramids in order to make manifest
their beliefs about the afterlife: if the pharaoh was willing to devote sub-
stantial resources to his palace for the afterlife, then there must be some
basis to these beliefs (Carlson, 2005, 2:48-49).
Second, in writing about Pacific peoples, Fred Damon (2005) in Tech-
nology i n World History suggested that boats are much more than a form of
transportation. Pacific Islanders use boats as a metaphor for talking about
their community and for organizing gardens on land. They also use the
process of sailing and navigating for thinking about their role in the uni-
verse; in fact, their ability to think in the same terms about the practical
Cornperetive Technology Transfer end Society, August 2007. vol. 5, no. 2
task of navigating and their place in the universe probably goes a long way
toward explaining why Pacific Islanders are able to sail across thousands
of miles of open sea relying only on memory and star sighting.
The important thing about these three categories-abundance, order,
and meaning-is that they should help us to discern the different ways
that various societies have developed and used technology While we in
the West have emphasized abundance, other cultures have used technolo-
gy to achieve a different mix of abundance, order, and meaning. Because
of this, the technologies of non-Western cultures may look very different
and even surprising to Westerners. But being "different," I wish to empha-
size, does not mean "inferior."
DIAGRAMMING TECHNOLOGICAL
IDEOLOGY
Obviously, we can compare how different societies use technology to
fulfill each of these three basic functions, and in Technology i n World His-
tory, my fellow authors and I employed abundance, order, and meaning to
guide the stories we told. But we can also employ these categories to think
about how each culture uses technology to pursue what it considers the
good society We can ask about technological ideology By "ideology," here
I mean the vision or framework that guides how people deploy technolo-
gy to create power, distribute wealth, and create meaning.
A few cultures treat abundance, order, and meaning as being more or
less equally important. If we look again at the boats and navigation devel-
oped by Pacific Islanders, we can see that this technology is about all three
functions. The boats serve to provide abundance, in the sense that they are
used for fishing and to travel to other islands for trade. We have also seen
that they are used metaphorically to help organize groups to perform work
either at sea or on land. And the techniques of celestial navigation used by
the islanders are closely tied to their cosmology.
However, in other cultures, there may be a great deal of debate and con-
flict over which functions should be highlighted; social and political order,
for instance, may be more important to some people, while material abun-
dance or cultural meaning may be the focus for other groups. As scholars
in both the history of technology and science-technology studies have am-
ply shown, there is conflict among groups about technology because dif-
ferent technologies may lead to different social and political outcomes.2
2 ~ n could
e cite numerous studies from the history and sociology of technology that reveal how
134
Cerison I DIVERSITY end PROGRESS
Some technological developments, for instance, may alter the existing bal-
ance of power. Around 1500 BCE, the Hittites perfected the art of making
iron weapons that were superior to the bronze weapons used by other
groups; capitalizing on their technological advantage, the Hittites con-
quered much of the ancient Mediterranean world, only to be defeated as the
Greeks and other groups mastered the secrets of working iron (Geselowilz,
2005). Yet other technological developments are pursued in order to main-
tain the status quo; in a landmark study, David Noble (1984) argued that
U.S. managers and engineers in the 1950s introduced automated machine
tools in aircraft production in order to curb the power of unionized work-
ers. Hence, in talking about technology and ideology, we need to be aware
that there is often conflict among groups about how to use technology
Moreover, these conflicts may take place at a variety of levels: locally, be-
tween groups in an organization (managers and workers); regionally (say,
between townspeople and farmers); nationally (the aiistocra~yverqus the
peasants); or globally (as between the Hittites and their rivals).
While there is frequently conflict and ferment within a given culture
about specific technological choices, I would suggest that over time, cul-
tures may settle on a general ideology that tends to privilege one function-
abundance, order, or meaning-over the others. As one group comes to
dominate a particular society, so it articulates an ideology that justifies its
authority and explains how the group plans to use technology to create and,
maintain its vision of the good society Assuming that a culture has one pre-
vailing technological ideology is, to be sure, a vast simplification of how
messy and complex.societies are. However, I would argue that it is a neces-
sary simplification if we want to take a first pass at comparing how differ-
ent cultures have their own distinctive technologies. We need to make this
assumption if we want to move from the intracultural approach taken by
most historians of technology, to considering, at least in. this essay, a cross-
cultural per~pective.~
One example of how a culture may develop a distinct technological
ideology can be seen in the absolute monarchies of early modern Europe
(Carlson, 2005,5:32-34). In these states, the king and the aristocracy took
the view that the-most important thing was to maintain political order, that
society should be structured as a hierarchy of classes. The ruling elite ex-
pected that all aspects of the economy and culture would be used to main-
debate and conflict between groups shapes technology The following are some of the more influ-
ential studies: Bijker et al. (1987); HBrd (1993); Hecht (1998); MacKenzie (1990); Smith (1977);
and Winner (1980).
3 ~ oexamples
r of cross-cultural studies in the history of technology, see Hughes (1982) and Dun-
lavy (1994).
Compsretlve Technology Trensfer end Society, August 2007. vol. 5, no. 2
tain this particular political order. As Louis XIV proclaimed, "Letat, c'est
moi." To secure the economic resources needed to sustain their political
and military power, several states pursued mercantilist policies aimed at
capturing wealth from colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas and
bringing it back to Europe. In France, roads and canals were built to per-
mit the king to exert military power throughout the realm, and much
innovation was devoted to creating high-quality textiles and porcelain for
the aristocracy at royal factories located at the Louvre palace. Both the
king and nobility of old-regime France used consumption and display as a
means for underpinning their power. Here the dominant idea is that if a
culture is able to get the right political and social order, then it has
achieved the good society4
To suggest that the ancien rkgime of France privileged social and polit-
ical order over abundance and meaning is not to deny that there was de-
bate within that society Among the nobles, there were some who pushed
for the development of military technology and territorial expansion,
while others concentrated on conspicuous consumption on a grand scale,
drawing on new technologies to create elaborate houses and splendid gar-
dens. Similarly, French engineers promoted inventions in order to advance
their own careers and help establish their profession. And both peasants in
the countryside and the rising middle class in the cities grumbled about
taxes and the greed of their social betters. Yet with all this ferment, the
point is that most people agreed that technology should be directed to-
ward the social and political order.
In order to think about the technological ideologies of different cul-
tures, it can be helpful to draw a diagram using abundance, order, and
meaning as the three corners of a triangle (Figure 1).Since order was the
sine qua non in an absolute monarchy let us place that at the top of the tri-
angle, with abundance and meaning as the lower corners. Now, to show
that the king and aristocracy assumed that material abundance (such as
food production and crafts) as well as culture (such as religion and art)
were to support the political order, let us add arrows going from abun-
dance and meaning toward political order. This gives us a simple picture
of how European monarchies thought about technology, and as we will see
in a moment, this diagram can be compared with others.
As is well known, the French Revolution brought about the end of
absolute monarchy and introduced new ideas about how to structure the
political order-that ordinary citizens should play a more prominent part.
4 ~ h o m aMisa
s (2004, pp. 1-32) maltes a similar point about technology and political order in his
discussion of how Leonardo da Vinci.interacted with Renaissance courts and city-states.
Cerlson I DIVERSITY end PROGRESS
Social Order
(State)
Material Cultural
Abundance Meaning
(Economy) (Religion,
Knowledge,
Art)
Figure 1 The technological ideology of absolute monarchy, 1,600-1800. The
central idea is that the economy and culture support the political order of the king
and aristocracy.
However, at the same time, the Revolution was not about changing the
underlying technological ideology; in the end, France emerged from the
Revolution with a worldview that still saw political order as being the most
important feature of a good society Indeed, the notion that political order
comes first was the hallmark of totalitarian regimes like Stalinist Russia,
where preservation of communist rule was the prime goal, and Maoist
China, which was driven by an intense commitment to an egalitarian
social order. Both of these regimes sought to increase agricultural and
industrial production-material abundance, but with the goal of sustain-
ing their particular political order.
In contrast to this ideology that highlighted order, an alternative vision
took shape in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies. As British merchants developed mechanized factories and extended
their trading empire around the world, they began to articulate a new
worldview. For them, the good society was one that emphasized material
abundance as a means to political and social order. A society should con-
centrate its technological prowess on generating more goods and services,
since increasing material abundance could then be used to make choices
about social and political order and about cultural meaning.5 In diagram-
matic terms, the British entrepreneurs placed abundance at the top of the
pp 33-58) suggests that the Dutch developed their own dtst~nctwetechnolog~cal
' M I S ~(2004,
Ideology In the sevenreenth century, emphasizing how technology could be used to compensate
for their lim~tednatural resources and to develop new products for international trade
Comparative Technology Transfer end Society, August 2007. vol. 5, no. 2
Figure 2 The technological ideology of the Industrial Revolution. The central
belief of industrialization is that increasing abundance will permit a society to
choose the social order and culture that it wants.
triangle and believed that abundance would allow people to shape order
and meaning in new ways (Figure 2). Hence, the arrows in this diagram
flow from abundance to order and meaning.
Notably, in comparing how France and Britain changed in the early
nineteenth century, the French economist Jerome-Adolphe Blanqui (1798-
1854) noted this shift in ideology-that the British worldview placed abun-
dance ahead of political order-and it was because of this ideological
change that he started referring to what was occurring in Britain as the "in-
dustrial revolution." Blanqui was struck not by the technical changes-new
machines, factories, or railroads-but rather by the fact that the British
believed these technologies would create a new sort of society For the Brit-
ish, industry was expected to create a rising standard of living and thus
eliminate the need for restructuring society; if everyone had enough to eat
and worlc to do, then there was no need for political revolutions or social
unrest. Thus, the Industrial Revolution was not just about the coming of
new machines, but also about the creation of a new technological ideology6
Along with British society, many nineteenth-century Americans em-
braced this new technological ideology that order and meaning flow from
G ~ l l l ~ o uhistorians
gh often attribute the term "industrial revolution" to Arnold Toynbee, it was
used much earlier by commentators such as Blanqui. As Maurice Daumas (1979, p. 3:7) noted:
"This expression, already coined by the end of the eighteenth century, was, after being used by sev-
eral historians, sociologists, and economists, readapted in 1881 by the first Arnold Toynbee." On
Blanqui, see his Wikipedia entry (Blanqui, 2007) as well as his magnum opus, History ofPolitical
Economy in Europe (1880).
Carleon I DIVERSITY end PROGRESS
abundance. Tapping the rich natural resources of North America, Ameri-
cans developed new technology to create vast amounts of food, energy, and
wealth, confident that such material abundance would permit them to sus-
tain a vigorous democratic society (Carlson, 2005, 5:64-84). Because
Americans viewed the improvement of technology as the primary means
for creating more democratic social arrangements, they developed a will-
ingness to embrace innovation, often with a naive faith that somehow new
technology will lead to a better society To be sure, as Thomas Dublin
(1979), Ronald Kline (2000), and David Nye (2003) have demonstrated,
there have been dissenting voices: workers, farmers, and social critics have
periodically questioned whether factories, machine tools, and automobiles
were creating an equitable society Equally, groups today debate whether
the material abundance of industrialization is being fairly distributed
among people of all classes, races, and nations. Yet, for the most part, these
groups have been in the minority, and the dominan? narrative thqt abun-
dance leads to democracy prevails in U.S. culture.
For Americans and people living in Western industrial societies, the
ideology that the good society is based on the choices generated by abun-
dance may seem so obvious that it hardly warrants being articulated. Of
course, people should use technology to create material abundance so that
they then can have political and social choices-why else do we have tech-
nology? Yet, once we have articulated this ideology-and we are aware
that there are alternative technological ideologies-then two important
points emerge.
The first concerns limits on social and political choices. In order to ful-
fill the promise of this particular ideology-to provide abundance for lots
of people so that they have choices-a society has to generate more output
(food, shelter, and clothing) over time. Broadly speaking, there are two
strategies for achieving more output: a society can appropriate more inputs
(by conquering a frontier or building an empire), or it can strive to be more
efficient (i.e., using technology to make more output out of fewer inputs).
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries industrial societies
have pursued a combination of these two strategies, but with each, there are
a limited number of ways at any given time that one can arrange people and
resources-factories, corporations, networks-in order to generate increas-
ing abundance. In other words, if abundance is the sine qua non {or an
industrial society, then the options for social and political arrangements are
not entirely open-ended. Put another way, what's good for business and
industry may not be good for expanding a particular political system such
as democracy Here it is not the technology that limits the social choices as
much as it is the technological ideology or the organizational know-how.
Comparetive Technology Transfer end Society, August 2007, vol. 5 . no. 2
A second point goes directly to the movement of technology across
cultures. While industrialized societies in Europe, North America, and the
Pacific Rim have chosen this abundance-centered ideology, must other
societies embrace this ideology if they choose to industrialize? Must we
continue to accept it for ourselves? Is it possible for societies to change
their technological ideology and then choose the technologies that sup-
port that vision of the good society?' At the same time, why do many
Western countries favor technology transfer to the developing world? Is
his transfer simply about the movement of hardware and devices across
borders, or is really about the export of technological ideology?
So far, we have looked at order and abundance at the top of the tri-
angle, but what if meaning takes priority? For instance, some groups have
criticized the materialism of the West and embraced an ideology that puts
religion at the apex of the triangle. In particular, the Egyptian intellectual
Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) took a critical look at the United States in the late
1940s and reacted quite negatively. Based on his interpretation of Islam,
Qutb concluded that materialism was distracting humanity from the tra-
jectory ordained by Allah and revealed by Mohammad; devout Muslims
could only return to the true path by actively fighting the West. The sig-
nificance of Qutb is that his writings appear to have strongly influenced
the actions of Osama bin Laden and a1 Qaeda (Berman, 2003). At the heart
of Qutb's worldview was that the greatest good was a particular set of reli-
gious beliefs, and for him, these beliefs should guide how people pursue
material abundance and social order. Abundance and order, in fact, should
be organized to support a religious state. In diagrammatic form, then,
meaning should be placed at the top of the triangle with arrows pointing
up Irom abundance and social order (Figure 3).
Let me be quick to point out that not all Muslims subscribe to this
view that abundance and order should be subservient to religious beliefs.
Indeed, Muslim intellectuals have wrestled for centuries with how to bal-
ance religious, secular, and material forces in their society, and some Mus-
lim societies have embraced an abundance-centered ideology. Moreover,
radical Islamic fundamentalism is also a powerful response to the imperi-
' ~ h e s e questions about the relationship between technology and social structures were raised
early on by ThomasJefferson. As he observed in his Notes on Virginia written in 1781-82, he
political economists of Europe have established it as a principle that every state should endeavor
to manufacture for itselE and this principle, like many others, we transfer to America, without cal-
culating the difference of result." Jefferson (1984, p. 290) went on to argue that manufacturing is
problematic in that it makes workers economically dependent and hence socially inferior to their
employers. "[Llet our work-shops remain in Europe," he concluded, for "[ilt is better to cany
provisions and materials to workmen there, than bring . . . their manners and principles" to
America (P. 290).
Cerlson I DIVERSITY end PROGRESS
Cultural Meaning
(religious
Material Social
Abundance
Order
Figure 3 Technological ideology privileging religious beliefs of cultural meaning.
The hey idea here is that the good society will only come about when people live by
a set of religious precepts. I f they align their society to these values, people believe
that social order and material abundance shouldfollow.
alistic policies of European powers in the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries in which the Middle East was divided up and controlled in ways
that suited European needs and goals.
Nevertheless, for many in the West, societies that privilege religious
dogma in their technological ideology can seem very troubling. Embedded
in both of the ideologies that have predominated in Europe and the United
States for the last 300 years-with political order or material abundance at
the apex-has been a notion of self-determination. Since the American and
French revolutions, if ordinary people did not like the existing political
order, then we have believed that they have a right to change that order,
preferably by nonviolent means. At the same time, we also believe that in-
dividuals should have economic self-determination: that a society can only
create abundance if everyone has a reasonable amount of freedom to pur-
sue their economic or technological goals and wishes. With our fundamen-
tal faith in technology to produce abundance and in turn permit choices
with regard to order and meaning, placing religious dogma at the top thus
seems incomprehensible. Consequently, I would suggest that some part of
the United States' puzzlement about radical Islamic movements is not
about religion per se as much as it is about conflicting notions of what con-
stitutes the good society and how technology should be used to achieve it.
To sum up, then, we have covered three points so far in talking about
technological diversity. The first is that all cultures have technology, but
every culture uses it differently. The second is that cultures use technolo-
Cornparatlve Technology Transfer and Society, August 2007, vol. 5, no. 2 Cerlson I DIVERSITY end PROGRESS

gy in different ways to produce material abundance, social order, and cul-

tural meaning. And third, cultures differ in that they can have alternative
technological ideologies-different notions about what constitutes the
good society and'how to use technology to pursue their goals.

VISUALIZING P R O G R E S S

At this point, a thoughtful reader might observe:

Sure, it's true and nice that there has been diversity across cultures in
terms of technology, but the bottom line is that some technologies work
better than others. Using technology in certain ways, some societies have
been more efficient in terms of delivering material abundance or health
to large numbers of people. If technology has gotten more efficient over
time, then we should really be talking about progress, not diversity

To support this position, people often trot out an example from scientific
medicine such as antibiotics. Aren't antibiotics one of the best ways to fight
infectious diseases caused by bacteria? Don't antibiotics kill bacteria and
cure sick people living in all cultures? If antibiotics work so well, doesn't
this show that there are technologies that transcend cultural boundaries,
and that some technologies are genuinely better than others? Sure, some
bacteria have developed a resistance to antibiotics, but don't scientists keep
coming up with new and more potent antibiotics? Don't antibiotics prove
that there has been technological progress?
Individual examples such as antibiotics raise knotty philosophical is-
sues for historians of technology To be sure, antibiotics may be more ef-
fective in certain situations than, say, traditional folk remedies. But at the
same time, I would caution us from assuming that there is technological
progress on the basis of the effectiveness of individual examples. For in-
stance, one could argue that the boomerang developed by Australian Abor-
igines is more effective or efficient in the sense that it comes back to the
user, as compared to a spear or arrow or bullet. On the basis of the boom-
erang, would we then privilege all Aborigine technology?
Rather than work from individual examples, I would suggest that we
can better probe technological progress by teasing out two separate issues.
Inherent in the idea of progress is that something gets better over time.
Consequently, we need to think first about our notions of change over time,
and second, we need to look at what that "something" is that changes.
Perhaps progress is a cultural construct based on the choices made for these
two issues.
Figure 4 Four views of change and time.
So how do we picture what has happened in human experience across
the centuries? Figure 4 outlines four ways in which different societies have
viewed change over time. For some cultures-Pacific Islanders for in-
stance-the view was that human affairs have always been the same and
that they should stay the same (Figure 4a); other cultures have viewed
change as a cyclical process-there are prosperous times, then desperate
times-and so human experience follows a cycle of ups and downs, with
no improvement over time (Figure 4b). While it is not necessarily accu-
rate, people in the contemporary Western world often attribute this cycli-
cal view to India, China, or medieval Europe. Still other cultures believe
that there, are rhythms to human history-ups and downs-but that there
is overall improvement across the centuries (Figure 4c). For instance, the
Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-82) viewed history as a process in
which a nomadic people create an urban civilization and attain a peak of
culture, only to be corrupted by their success and ultimately conquered by
another, more vigorous nomadic group (Gieryn, 2005). Finally, there is the
notion embodied in Figure 4d that things have been getting steadily bet-
ter over time. For many people in the Western world this represents prog-
ress-that the human experience has been improving.
Comperetive Technology Transfer end Society, August 2007, vol. 5, no. 2
Figure 5 Technological revolutions.
If Figure 4d, with its line moving upward over time, captures our com-
monsense notion of progress, then one immediate step is to break up the
line along the major transformations that historians think have shaped
human history. While human history has progressed overall, there have
been stops and starts as well as great leaps forward that are labeled revo-
lutions. Following the lead of Alvin and Heidi Toffler (1989,1995), we can
convert the upward-sloping line into "three waves" (their term) or curves:
the Agricultural, Industrial, and Information revolutions (Figure 5).
Yet plotting these three revolutions still doesn't tell us much about what
progress may mean for Westerners. To get at that, we need to ask our sec-
ond question related to progress: What exactly is increasing over time? If
the horizontal axis is time, then what is measured along the vertical axis?
On the one hand, it is tempting to say that what has grown over time
is an intangible: perhaps political freedom, scientific knowledge, or power
over nature. As a political revolutionary, Thomas Jefferson optimistically
believed that, over the course of human history, democracy would gradu-
ally replace authoritarian rule. In his survey of the idea of progress in
Western thought, Robert Nisbet (1980) argued that, for many scholars and
philosophers, progress is the steady increase in human knowledge. Like-
wise, for the generation of historians of technology and science working
during the 1950s and 1960s, the story of progress was the growth of scien-
tlfic knowledge, and this view provided the framework for Charles Sing-
er's (1954-65) multivolume history of technology. Meanwhile, some envi-
Csrlson I DIVERSITY end PROGRESS
ronmental historians have argued that the major trend i n the history of the
West has been a growing ability of humans to control and manipulate
nature, but that this dominance has come at a high cost i n terms of alter-
ing the natural environment and alienating humans from nature and one
another.
On the other hand, recalling our previous discussion that different cul-
tures have different ideas about what constitutes the good society, I would
suggest that the "something" that grows over time is related to what that
culture places at the apex of its technological ideology. For an absolute
monarchy the most important thing was political stability, measured by
using technology to achieve greater degrees of control over territory and
people. Likewise, in a society privileging religious meaning, the most im-
portant thing might be doctrinal purity, in the sense that people live more
closely in conformity with divine prescriptions. The point here is that peo-
ple use technology to achieve different kinds of progress; it depends on
what a culture views as the greatest good.
Given that the technological ideology of the industrial world places
material abundance at the top, most people in the West would probably as-
sume that something material is being measured on the vertical axis in their
diagram of progress, perhaps wealth, natural resources, or technology. As
we have observed, a dominant belief in the West is that societies improve
over time by having more "stuff," since it permits greater social and politi-
cal choices. Certainly, the presumption in the industrialized world is that
humans now have more today than in the past. Since at least the "kitchen
debate" between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, Ameri-
cans have felt that what has grown over time-and made their culture supe-
rior-is the ever-increasing number of choices available to consumers.8
Moreover, this presumption that progress is about the growth of material
things is reflected in academic disciplines such as archaeology Tradition-
ally, archaeologists have sequenced cultures in terms of the metals they
have used-copper, bronze, and iron-largely based on the view that the
strength of each metal permitted cultures to develop new and better tools.
More recently, archaeologists also proposed that one way of differentiating
among different cultures was to look at how much energy they had at their
disposal.9 According to this view, then, one would place Stone Age societies
that could only mobilize human labor at one end of the spectrum, and
industrial societies with their intensive use of fossil fuels on the other.
'on the "kitchen debate," see Carlson (2005, p. 6:6). As an example of how Americans contlnue
to equate progress with material abundance, see the opening chapter in Easterbrook (2003).
9 ~ e Purcell
e (1982).I am grateful to Mike Schiffer for bringing this point to my attention.
 C o m p a r a t i v e T e c h n o l o g y T r a n s f e r e n d S o c i e t y . A u g u s t 2007, vol. 5, n o . 2 C a r l s o n I D I V E R S I T Y e n d PROGRESS

Information Information
Machines Machines Machines Machines
Capital Capital Capital Capital Cap~tal Capital
Minerals Minerals Minerals Minerals Minerals Minerals Minerals Minerals
Land Land Land Land Land Land Land Land Land Land
Animals Animals Animals Animals Animals Animals Animals Animals Animals An~mals Animals Animals
LaborLabor Labor Labor Labor Labor Labor
Labor Labor Labor Labor Labor Labor Labor
Kol'san Pacrf~c Ch~na Europe
Aborigines Egypt lslamlc World Un~tedStates
Early Modern Pacbfic Rbm
Figure 6 Material inputs used over time. Europe lnd~a

Pastoral Mesopotamia China

Keeping in mind that we are thinking here about progress only as it
relates to the ideology that privileges material abundance, let us investi-
gate a little more carefully about what might be increasing under the
curves shown in Figure 5. Taking a cue from this energy-oriented ap-
proach, perhaps we should consider all of the inputs that societies might
use to create abundance, order, and meaning. Figure 6 plots the different
inputs used by humans over time. Although important, energy is not the
only input that cultures use; early societies relied on human labor for
hunting and gathering, then domesticated animals, and gradually began to
use land to produce food. Some societies then discovered how various nat-
ural materials or minerals could be used to make pottery, glass, and metal
- objects. Next, several societies (in both Asia and Europe) created a new
category, capital, in order to make it easier to move between individuals
the value inherent in the first four categories of labor, animals, land, and
minerals. Subsequently, some individuals and groups chose to make tools,
engines, and systems-what we commonly call "machines." Machines
were used either as a substitute for another input that was scarce (human
or animal labor) or because they allowed the more intense use of other
inputs (such as minerals like coal or land in mechanized farming). Build-
ing on the development o l capital and machines, individuals and business
enterprises over the last 150 years have gradually realized that another cat-
egory, information, can be leveraged; think here about how information
related to capital (i.e., stock and commodity prices, currency rates) can be
manipulated, or how more precise information about the performance of
machines or customer preferences can be used to fine-tune the productiv-
ity of factories, railroads, and electrical networks (Beniger, 1986; Chand-
ler, 1977; Yates, 1989).
At a glance, Figure 6 suggests that what may be under the upward
curve of progress (as we commonly think about it in the West) is the fact
that over time, humans have found more kinds of inputs to use, build, and
sustain their societies. At the same time, though, humans have also
Nomads India Europe
China United States
Mesoamerica
Africa
GreecelRome
Medieval Europe
Figure 7 Material inputs across cultures.
increased the amount of each input: over time, there have been ever more
workers, domesticated animals, minerals, and machines put to use by
humanity as a whole. As we observed previously societies pursuing an ide-
ology focused on material abundance often seek more inputs by creating
larger political and economic networks by conquering the frontier, treat-
ing an empire, or setting up trading networks. Equally, societies have used
technology to capture more of an input; think here, for example, of the
efforts made by petroleum engineers in the twentieth century to pump
more oil out of the earth.
Having plotted human history as the accumulation of material inputs,
a next step is to locate various cultures in terms of the inputs they were
able to mobilize (Figure 7). Not surprisingly more "developed societies
appear on the right-hand side of the figure, while more "primitive" soci-
eties are located on the left. Keep in mind that we should expect this, since
we started this exercise by focusing on what modern industrial societies
valued in their ideology-increasing material abundance; cultures with a
different technological ideology are hence not represented favorably in this
figure. Yet grouping cultures under each "stack of inputs reveals several
interesting points. The first is that there is little difference between West-
ern and non-Western cultures in terms of major technological revolutions:
both Western and non-Western societies have been able over the long span
of history to make the jump from one stack of inputs to the next. A sec-
ond point concerns stability: I find it interesting that the largest number of
cultures functioned for centuries by mobilizing only the first four inputs.
Cornparatlve Technology Transfer and Society. August 2007, voi. 5, no. 2 Carlson I DIVERSITY and PROGRESS

As provocative as Figure 7 is, I would suggest a further step. Societies

do not create abundance, order, and meaning simply out of material re-
sources; human societies survive and thrive because they create social
organizations that allow these material resources to be coordinated and the
value in them captured.10 To complement the material resources, then, we
should also plot the social resources-the arrangements, institutions, and
organizations that cultures use to mobilize the inputs listed in each stack
(Figure 8). To be sure, Figure 8 probably does not include all of the social
arrangements devised by humans across all cultures, but it is hopefully a
reasonable start at such a list. Likewise, because my research focuses on
the history of U.S. technology, I have probably made some mistakes in
terms of where some social institutions are located, and anthropologists
would probably locate different social practices on different stacks. The
goal here, however, is to realize how different cultures use a mix of mate-
rial and social resources to create abundance, order, and meaning.
In looking at Figure 8, an intriguing pattern becomes apparent con-
cerning the distribution of social institutions versus material inputs. On
one end of the spectrum, early societies seem to have invented a variety of
social institutions to mobilize as much labor as possible: notions of prop-
erty, marriage, households, slavery, bands, tribes, and temples; on the other,
it would appear that postindustrial societies (if that is the right term for the
last stack) seem to have generated fewer new social arrangements. To me,
it just doesn't seem right that the only new arrangements that have ap-
peared in the twentieth century are research universities, networks (such as
those associated with electric power, telecommunications, and computers),
concentration camps, and online groups. Is it possible that humans, when
they have fewer material resources available, resort to more social innova-
tion? Equally, is it possible that it is harder for us living in postindustrial
society to perceive and label the new social arrangements being created to
leverage information and all of the other inputs in the last stack?
One thing Figure 8 does not capture, though, is the cumulative effect
of social innovations. Once some cultures adopted the practice of, say, the
subdivision of labor found in factories, then that practice could spread to '

other societies. Hence, to convey the cumulative effect of social institu-

tions in a manner that parallels how we are representing the cumulative
effect of material resources, we should list all of the institutions available
that can be used with each stack of material inputs (Figure 9). As this final
figure indicates, the progress associated with the ideology of increasing

'Osee Roberl Friedel (2007) for a discussion of the notion of using technology and social organi-
zations to capture the value in material resources.
 Cerlson I DIVERSITY end PROGRESS
Cornperetive Technology Transfer end Society, August 2007, voi. 5, no. 2

material abundance may be shaped as much by the fact that humans have
generated a rich array of social institutions as by their ability to tap more
material inputs.

CONCLUSIONS

While Figure 9 is revealing, it is far too complicated. We have finally

crammed about as much information as we can into a single diagram, and
hence it is time to step back and think about what this entire exercise of
diagramming reveals about progress as a concept. We have been drawing
these diagrams as heuristics-because they are useful for thinking about
complex matters-and so what do they suggest?
First and foremost, we need to remember that we have been diagram-
ming only one version of progress, one based on a) the assumption that
change over time should be represented as an upward-sloping line, and
b) that the "something" changing over time is material. We made these as-
sumptions because they reflect the dominant technological ideology of the
industrial world: that the good society will be achieved by increasing
material abundance, since more abundance will lead to more choices in
terms of social order and cultural meaning. However, if one chooses a dif-
ferent technological ideology (highlighting either social order or cultural
meaning), then one might change assumptions a or b and wind up with a
very different picture of human history. Progress as we commonly think of
it, then, is a product of our particular technological ideology.
Diagramming progress in this way raises the question of what is the ul-
timate goal of the ideology of maximizing abundance. Where do people
want to go as they continue to mobilize the material and social resources
depicted in Figure 9? For instance, one could argue that the goal is to see
that more and more people live in societies organized around the last stack
of material and social resources. One might see this as a convergent vision,
in that the belief would be that people living in cultures organized around
other stacks would continue to move toward and converge with the post-
industrial world under the last stack (Friedman, 2005). We might natu-
rally assume that as other societies utilized all of the material resources in
imitation of the West, they would then imitate our social institutions and
become more "democratic."
To have more and more people living under the last stack, however,
means that larger numbers of people are expecting to maximize material
abundance and the question quickly becomes this: How close are humans
 Cornperetive Technology Trensfer end Society, August 2007, vol. 5, no. 2
to exhausting the resources of the earth? In response, technological opti-
mists might well respond that humans have produced innovations in the
past that either allowed people to utilize new untapped resources or use
existing resources more efficiently. Going even further, some might even
argue that technology will help us create yet another stack on the right-
hand side of the diagram with new categories of material resources. As a
historian of technology I would agree that it is highly likely that humans
will continue to create new technology, but there is no guarantee that the
'
innovations will necessarily be efficient enough to address the needs of
more and more people. Equally, the historian in me raises cautions about
expecting a new stack to appear; such an event has occurred in the past
once every several hundred years. Moreover, as Figure 7 grimly reminds
us, not every culture makes the transition from the old to the new order.
Technological innovation is great, it is likely to happen, but don't bet the
planet on it.
Yet, if the foregoing discussion of technological diversity and ideology
suggests anything, it should make us aware that there are other long-term
scenarios. We need to recognize that different cultures may have different
material resources, affinities to different social arrangements, and, above
all, different notions of what constitutes the good society. As a result of
these differences, some societies might quite happily choose to live under
a different stack in Figure 9. Like either the Shakers or the Amish in U.S.
cul~ure,they might not privilege material abundance in their ideology and
hence choose to live what seems to us to be a simpler lifestyle (Carlson,
2005, p. 5:86).
The fact that different cultures'have different technological ideologies
has important implications for policy makers concerned with the transfer
of technology to less developed nations. In an ideal world, it seems to me
that we would recognize that cultures differ in terms of what they believe
constitutes the good society, and that the responsible thing for the West to
do would be to help other cultures invent or acquire the technology that
allows them to pursue what is important to their culture. It would be cru-
cial for the West not to choose sides-particularly to align with the mod-
ernists in a given society; indeed, our responsibility would be to let groups
within a culture debate what kind of good society they want. Here we
would be practicing the prime directive of trying not to interfere with how
a culture might evolve.
I am sure there are pragmatists in both the developed and developing
worlds who would reject this view of allowing groups to select the technol-
ogy that suits their vision of the good society. Technical experts might well
argue that we know that increasing material abundance generates social and
Cerlson I DIVERSITY and PROGRESS
cultural choices, and that, confident in our faith, we should permit as much
technology as possible to diffuse throughout the world (but not, of course,
weapons of mass destruction). Yes, the goal is to get as many people as pos-
sible living under the last stack in Figure 9. But what is the basis for this
faith? How do we know that people will use abundance to create a better
society? And, for that matter, what do we mean by a "better" society?
At the same time, some U.S. and European consumers might well say,
"Look, I really like living in a society that maximizes material abundance,
and the only honest way for me to justify this lifestyle is to let everyone
else in the world have a chance to pursue this lifestyle." In other words,
the only way to ensure our material abundance is to let everyone else pur-
sue it as well. Complementing this view is a perspective coming from
China and other developing nations: "Look, West, you have enjoyed cheap
electricity and automobiles for decades, and now it's our turn. It's our
\
choice and we choose abundance."
But if we allow cultures to make choices, then there is an even k o r e
radical, entrepreneurial scenario: How comfortable are we with the possi-
bility that some people might look at all the elements under the last stack
and choose to mix and match the social and material resources in order to
get what they see as the optimal mix? (In fact, Western societies could
even decide not to remain under the last stack.) What if different societies
chose to minimize the use of some material resources or invented new so-
cial arrangements? Since this mixing and matching might not necessarily
coincide with our existing notions of democracy, capitalism, or material-
ism and instead highlight goals such as environmental sustainability, it is
entirely likely that the new combinations might be genuinely uncomfort-
able to our established ways of living and thinking. Yet if the West takes
seriously its fundamental belief in people exercising choice, then it would
be inconsistent to deny people the opportunity to try new combinations.
It would also probably be hopeless to oppose such experiments, since one
of the messages of Figure 9 is that people have been trying various com-
binations of social and material resources across the millennia.
Thus, we have arrived at what for me is the real business of historians
of technology, scholars in the field of science, technology, and society
(STS), and policy makers. It is our task to provide people with the frame-
works and ideas that they need to see how lo combine technology and
social resources in order to create the society in which they wint to live. It
is only by recognizing the diverse ways that cultures use technology, under-
standing the belief systems that guide those choices, and thinking about
what we mean by progress that we may be able to guide technology in the
twenty-first century toward sustaining and enriching human life on earth.
Comparative Technology Transfer end Society, August 2007. voi. 5, no. 2
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