Tusko writes:
My belief -- which has, with one notable exception, remained untested by serious discussion -- is that the level of technology that a culture has attained at any given time has a direct effect on the possibilities for social organisation and complexity in that group. [...] As I've been intimating, I once mentioned this belief to a very smart history/economics post-grad friend. He disagreed strongly, and said that it was a very simplistic view, because it is very hard to define what technology is exactly. His response was, I think, what about ideas? Is democracy a technology?
It doesn't really matter how you define 'technology' because you didn't say that technology was the
only influence on culture. If you partition human inventions into 'technological' and 'non-technological', then, wherever you draw the line, there is always a (partial) influence from the technological side. Only in the non-interesting - and absurd - case of drawing the line such that nothing is deemed 'technological', would there (obviously) be no influence from it.
I wouldn't say your position is simplistic, it's just not the whole picture (in more than one way, as has been pointed out by others), nor would it have to be, to remain an interesting subject for investigation.
{edited to add a comma, that humble, but most useful member of punctuation marks}
This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 22 February 2005 13:27 AM
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