Who Really Rules The World

Technology Rules
Technology rules the world because it's what makes us human. It's in our very nature to develop technologies that improve our lives.

From wheel to horseshoe to engine; from flint knife to spear to firearms: human history has been defined by technological innovation. It's a powerful tool – the invention of the printing press re-shaped Western European culture, just like the digital revolution is reshaping the world today.

Even our lust for oil, the cause of many of the world's problems, is because it fuels the technologies we have become so dependant on.

Technology has determined our past and it will determine our future. And that's why it rules the world.

Brian Greene explains why technology rules the world. He is a science writer with an all round interest in technology and its effect on our lives.

Determinism
The technological initiative is embedded in our being. Fundamentally, technology is Man. Once evolution had blessed us with big brains, had given us reason and foresight, we discovered that tools could make life easier. Technology became a primal part of our biology and our culture. The fact that we are still travelling the same road, all these thousands of years later, illustrates how important it has been to our success. Without technology we are not human. Not only did it determine our past, it will also determine our future.

For some of you the notion that technology sits at the helm of our society might be a little hard to accept. It smacks of technological determinism, which is rather unfashionable these days. But hold on a minute, there’s determinism and there's determinism. I'm not saying that technology is the rudder of history in all its minutiae; what I am suggesting is that technology influences the broader strokes of human history at a very fundamental level.

Without it we would be unable to feed, clothe or house ourselves as we do today. We certainly couldn’t cram ourselves into the densely populated urbanisations that we now inhabit. Our very way of life depends on technology and without it we should be forced to flee from civilisation and take up hunting and gathering again. Indeed, many would argue that civilisation only began when humans starting using technologies. Technological innovations provide the background on which humans live out their lives.

After all, we define human history in technological terms: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Industrial revolution, the Computer Age. These are more than mere labels for a particular time and place. They encapsulate the very real idea of a culture fuelled by a revolutionary technological innovation. The flint knife, the spear, the wheel, the horseshoe, the spindle, the printing press, the canals, the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the jet engine, the silicon chip – these are all crucial junctions in the complex web of events that have shaped our social and cultural history.

Technology And 9/11
Ever since man fashioned the first piece of flint, technology has been a huge force in our social and cultural development. But the influence of technology, its ability to steer us along particular paths and make history, will always be tempered by a host of other factors. Take 9/11 as an example. It has transformed the political landscape, fracturing decades-old alliances, and spreading fear and suspicion across the globe. The terrorists seem to have done their job. The world is now a less pleasant place than it was before the Twin Towers came down. Is technology to blame? I hear a resounding 'no’ from the anti-determinists amongst you. Well let’s take a closer look.

In one somewhat tenuous sense, technology was to blame for 9/11. Had construction technology not gone so relentlessly upwards, there would have been no World Trade Centre to destroy. Had civil airliners not become so fast, so large, and so lethal, they wouldn't have become so attractive to terrorists. And had we not all been so addicted to oil, the fuel of our technological age, there would have been no dispute in the first place. Put oil, aeroplanes and skyscrapers all together on the same stage, and sooner or later something like this was bound to happen. Everything that came afterwards was merely a consequence of this tragic meeting. The collision of technologies gave us a global clash of cultures.

This reading of history is appealing because it reduces complex phenomena to simple, easily digestible pieces. You might think it an extreme form of technological determinism to which only satirists, conspiracy theorists and a few barking scholars could subscribe; the kind of people, for example, who might trace the cause of Arsenal’s recent poor run of form all the way back to the invention of the wheel!

But hang on a minute. Here’s the rub. Did 9/11 not have something to do with the control of precious oil stocks? Why is oil so precious? Because oil fuels technology. Would the West have cared enough about the Middle East to go to war if it wasn’t home to the world’s most productive oil fields? Would we have bothered policing Saddam if he’d been the ruler of an impoverished African country? I doubt it.

Stirrup Controversy
In my view it would be futile to dispute the fact that history has been dictated by technology, but hard line technological determinism gets a bad press and that might be at least partly justified. Social theorists have always been tempted by technological themes. Take the historian Lynn White Jr, for example. In his 1962 book Mediaeval Technology and Social Change, he asserts that the Middle Ages would have been nothing without the stirrup.

The dear old ‘stirrup controversy’ has been batted around the halls of academe for many a decade. It's a prime example of our human propensity to invent a pleasing narrative where there is none in reality. The stirrup story goes like this.

Long before the Middle Ages, wars were generally fought by large bands of axe-wielding foot soldiers who could be gathered together at short notice. Cavalry were fairly rare and not always that effective because they generally used javelin-type lances that were hurled into the midst of the enemy with little accuracy. The stirrup, however, would transform the cavalry soldier forever more.

Stirrups enabled warriors on horseback to hold a lance underarm and charge full pelt at the enemy. With feet firmly implanted in stirrups, the mounted soldier could brace himself against the blow without being thrown backward off the horse. A terrifying spectacle coveted by every self-respecting king, this was the first example of shock warfare.

Cavalry, however, were more expensive to support than itinerant foot soldiers. Horses needed land. So kings across Europe began to allocate land to gentlemen who could afford to keep and train a band of skilled mounted soldiers. The deal was that in return for their land these feudal lords, or chevaliers as they became known, would issue forth a fearsome band of mounted warriors when the king called them to arms. This is how the humble stirrup gave rise to a patchwork of land ownership that ultimately created the feudal system of social order.

Lovely story though this is, it isn’t quite as straight forward as Lynn White portrays. He made the fatal mistake of concentrating so hard on the development of the stirrup that he ignored other influences. Subsequent research has shown that foot soldiers remained the mainstay of most armies long after the stirrup was invented and that the system of feudalism wasn’t quite as universal as White had thought.

The stirrup controversy is one example of technological determinism taken too far. This story and others like it have led to backlash against technological sway of any kind. But much of White’s work on the stirrup remains unchallenged, and the causal links between the stirrup and shock warfare still stand.

Press For Change
In the past, determinists have sometimes gone too far with stories about how simple technological innovations steered the course of our history. The stirrup story is a good example of this. But resistance to these over-simplifications has led us to swing too far in the other direction and to sweep aside the notion that technology has an influence on our cultures at all. This is clearly madness.

One of the more vociferous technological determinists, Marshall McLuhan, argued in the 1960s that the invention of the printing press entirely re-shaped Western European culture from 1500 to 1900. There is no question that culture was influenced by this technological leap, the only argument is by how much.

Before the printing press, replication of written materials was painstakingly slow. Consequently, knowledge, including technical knowledge, was held by just a few scholars and scribes. The printing press would change all this since it made possible the mass production of written material. As a result, knowledge could be more widely disseminated than ever before. It's no coincidence that the scientific revolution took off after the printing press was invented. The development of science and indeed technology was greatly enhanced by the ease of communication because more people were able contribute their ideas and discuss those of their peers.

McLuhan saw the distribution of printed works as the driving force behind cultural revolutions on many levels – politics, music, art, religion, science. Indeed, our whole mode of thought, he insisted, underwent radical, epoch-defining change because of the advent of moveable type. There was a shift from the secretive and jealous guarding of knowledge by the few to open access for the public.

Shaping The Future
Sociologist Marshall McLuhan, writing in the 1960s, who had commented so astutely on past technologies was equally perceptive on future technologies. Just as the printing press had precipitated a revolution in human thought, so he believed the new medium of telecommunications would unleash another revolution. Long before the Internet, he was talking with great prescience about a global village, linked by a technology that would shift the balance of our sensory repertoire and reshape our civilisation. McLuhan’s ideas are especially intriguing because they hint not only at social or cultural shifts, but at fundamental changes in the way our brains are wired. How does iPod Man, for instance, compare with Bronze Age Man?

Today, we live in a world surrounded by gadgets; innovative tools that both direct and reflect our social and economic needs. As McLuhan once said: 'We shape our tools and they in turn shape us.' He is right, for it's technology that will determine our future. Only technology can satisfy our appetite for energy, feed a growing human population, or carry us to safety on another planet before the Sun finally burns up and destroys planet Earth.

It is an absolute certainty that human beings will only survive as a result of their untold creativity in the field of technology. Technology is the future of the human race. And that's why it rules the world.