Drawing Lines (Part IIIa): Technology, History and Science
Last night the Archivist reminded me that some people like using the phrase, 'this age of technology'. I got his point at once. It's a silly phrase. I don't think there has ever been an age which wasn't an age of some technology or other.
Technologies define ages, not the other way round. While there is some dispute at this end of history, we are quite happy to name the Old Stone Age (Palaeolithic), New Stone Age (Neolithic), Bronze Age and Iron Age after the dominant material technology of a particular place at a particular time. This of course means that these ages occur at different times in different places, but the intent is clear.
Later on, of course, we see the Age of Sail, the Age of Steam, the Age of the Ironclad — all naval ideas. The Space Age overlaps the Atomic Age (which never truly came to pass except as a hope and a fear). The Age of Silicon brings us full circle; it is probably the Modern Stone Age, haha. Our history is broken up conveniently by either technologies or wars.
Then again, we have odd divisions like the Dark Ages (a strange sociohistorical construct), the Middle Ages (which people invented to fill up the space between the 'darkening' fall of Rome and the Renaissance), the Renaissance (another odd sociohistorical construct that is hard to pin down) and the Age of Revolutions (I suppose from 1776-1914 or so, what some people call the 'long 19th century'). Hobsbawm places the last between 1789 (the French Revolution) and 1914 (the First World War) though.
The thing is that history, with its ceaseless reinterpretation of empirical (and not-so-empirical) observations, its re-hypothesizing and re-structuring, does seem to resemble science a lot. It even claims some sort of predictive capability, as in Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
The line between history and science here is probably that of experimentation or technology; testing historical hypotheses by experiment is really, really difficult. It is said that some people like Stalin tried. Most people say that his was a failed experiment, whatever it was supposed to be. In Edgerton's The Shock of the Old, he innovatively divides history by difference in killing technologies. It is a sobering and gruesome perspective.
Technologies define ages, not the other way round. While there is some dispute at this end of history, we are quite happy to name the Old Stone Age (Palaeolithic), New Stone Age (Neolithic), Bronze Age and Iron Age after the dominant material technology of a particular place at a particular time. This of course means that these ages occur at different times in different places, but the intent is clear.
Later on, of course, we see the Age of Sail, the Age of Steam, the Age of the Ironclad — all naval ideas. The Space Age overlaps the Atomic Age (which never truly came to pass except as a hope and a fear). The Age of Silicon brings us full circle; it is probably the Modern Stone Age, haha. Our history is broken up conveniently by either technologies or wars.
Then again, we have odd divisions like the Dark Ages (a strange sociohistorical construct), the Middle Ages (which people invented to fill up the space between the 'darkening' fall of Rome and the Renaissance), the Renaissance (another odd sociohistorical construct that is hard to pin down) and the Age of Revolutions (I suppose from 1776-1914 or so, what some people call the 'long 19th century'). Hobsbawm places the last between 1789 (the French Revolution) and 1914 (the First World War) though.
The thing is that history, with its ceaseless reinterpretation of empirical (and not-so-empirical) observations, its re-hypothesizing and re-structuring, does seem to resemble science a lot. It even claims some sort of predictive capability, as in Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
The line between history and science here is probably that of experimentation or technology; testing historical hypotheses by experiment is really, really difficult. It is said that some people like Stalin tried. Most people say that his was a failed experiment, whatever it was supposed to be. In Edgerton's The Shock of the Old, he innovatively divides history by difference in killing technologies. It is a sobering and gruesome perspective.
Labels: Disciplines, History, Science, Technology
etched with acid at 9:42:00 am
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home