Innovation and Human History

Abstract

May/June 2008 Historically Speaking 21 marcating Western culture from the rest of the world. Since the dawn of Greek culture in the 8di century B.C., since Hesiod and Homer lifted antiquity 's myths, gods, and heroes into the bright light of understanding and humanization, since Aeschylus , Sophocles, and Euripides gave birdi to tragedy, the spirit of this civilization has been unique and ever creative. There was far more to 16th- and 17thcentury Europe than the rise of Newtonian science; just consider Luther and the principle of individual interpretation of revealed truth, Geneva under Calvin's humanistic voluntarism, Loyola and die Jesuit Order, Parecelsus and the advocacy of higher cultural prestige for the practical know-how of artisans and craftsmen, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Grotius, and Montaigne. It is not possible to understand the "new" in the West in relation to science and industry alone. The creativity, the striving of the West extends well beyond these fields. It also extends farther than any nationality, beyond the Italian Renaissance, the German Reformation, the French Enlightenment, or the British Industrial Revolution. Historians now tend to recognize that diese cultural changes were European-wide; the Enlightenment, for example, was no more French than it was English and Scottish. Frederick die Great, the enlightened ruler who brought Prussia through three brutal wars and established its status as a great power, belonged to a generation that initiated an uninterrupted string of German golden ages in literature, music, philosophy, and science right into the 20th century. Kant's caU to humans to dare to use their own reason was soon followed by a Romantic movement against the Age of Reason itself, which deeply shaped the way Westerners at large came to think about personal fulfillment and artistic originality. And this was just the beginning of a remarkable efflorescence in the next two centuries: surrealism, impressionism, quantum physics, phenomenology, logical-positivism,structuralism,realism, utilitarianism, cubism, pragmatism, symbolism, Keynesianism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and more. What requires attention is not our current fascination with new products. It is why a definite geographical area of the world came to display a kind of agitated tension—what Hegel called the "infinite drive," the "irresistible trust" of the Occident—diat constituted its unparalleled history, and would culminate in the deconstructive nihilism that pervades much of the academic mind today. Ricardo Duchesne is associateprofessor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick, SaintJohn. He is the author of "Asia First?"Journal of the Historical Society 6 (2006): 69-91. 1 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton University Press, 1993). 2 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the Wist, vol. 1: Form andActuality , trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (Alfred Knopf, 1973), 183-216. Innovation and Human History David Christian Theodore Rabb describes powerfully the capacity of modern ("Western"?) humans to wonder at the new. There is indeed good reason to think that a sense of newness and of change is a distinctive feature of the modern experience of reality, if only because in most eras of human history, fundamental innovations were so rare that few people experienced them within their own lifetimes. This is one of many reasons why it is tempting to see innovation as a distinctive feature of Western civilization, or perhaps of modernity in general . Yet I believe we must resist this temptation. The pace of innovation is indeed faster than ever before in human history, and that is precisely why it is so visible. Yet thefact of innovation has been present throughout human history. Indeed, it is innovation that distinguishes the history of our species from the histories of all other species. In my view, innovation is not unique either to the West or to the modern world. On the contrary, it is a defining feature of Homo sapiens and should therefore be treated as a central theme in human history. The idea of "growth" has been central to economic theory at least since the time of Adam Smith. Yet the closely related idea of innovation—the generation of the new ideas and techniques that make sustained growth possible—has been surprisingly undertheorized. There are several reasons for this. First, innovation arises from human creativity, so...