The Cultural Model of Development: Alternative to Faustian Technology

Abstract

The paper identifies two types of science, the Promethean and the Faustian, each inspired by a particular myth and sustained by a particular eschatology, which determine both the concept of development and the choice of technology for achieving it. Both Prometheus of the Greek myth (who stole fire from heaven at the cost of terrible personal suffering) and Faust of the mediaeval German legend (who sold his soul to the devil) were in quest of knowledge, but because of their differing views of man's nature and life's goal, for entirely different purposes. To Prometheus knowledge was an instrument of liberation and self-perfection leading to the divine. To Faust knowledge was an instrument of power, untrammelled and absolute, over everyone and everything leading to (as the legend itself has it) self-destruction and eternal perdition. Thanks to a quirk of history (or the unfolding of the inexorable process of history, if you please), the Promethean eschatology lost out to the Faustian eschatology, first in the West and later all over the world. Overwhelming local cultures and traditions, it universalized the Western concept of development and Western technology. The dire cumulative consequence of this process is all too evident – not least in the Western society itself; even the fear of total destruction is no longer too fanciful. The paper therefore pleads for a different concept and different models of development suited to particular cultures.