Permutations of Post-Agricultural Civilizations

Industrial, Technological, and Scientific Formations

Having recently written about scientific civilization through the lens of comments by Jacob Bronowski and Susanne Langer, I have been doing more research on the idea of scientific civilization for further posts in the series. This has brought additional material to my attention, but it has also raised questions. Why focus on scientific civilization? Does scientific civilization have a special place in the future of civilization, or ought it to have a special place in the future of civilization?

In particular, what relationship does scientific civilization have to other forms of post-agricultural civilization, or what we might also call modern civilization? One can find “industrial civilization,” “technological civilization,” and “scientific civilization” used synonymously, which raises the question as to whether these ideas are subtly distinct or not. Is there a reason to distinguish between industrial civilization, technological civilization, and scientific civilization, or should we regard them as different names for the same thing?

One way to distinguish these three formations of modernity, and yet show them in relation to each other, is by way of what I call the STEM cycle, which is a tightly-coupled loop of scientific research, technological applications, and industrial engineering which characterizes civilization today. A STEM cycle has long been present in civilization, but in the past the STEM cycle was loosely-coupled, often with generations passing between each stage in the cycle. The combined effect of the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution served to transform the loosely-coupled STEM cycle of agricultural civilizations (which make intensive use of specialized agricultural technologies, though often in a highly traditional context that discourages innovation) into the tightly-coupled STEM cycle of modern civilization.

There are, of course, many technologies that came about not because of science, but through mere tinkering. It seems that James Watt’s steam engine was the iterated result of the tinkering of many men over a long period of time, so that the central exhibit of the industrial revolution seems to defy my characterization of technology. If one wanted to take the time to carefully select one’s examples, one could assemble a history of technology that almost entirely excluded the contribution of science. I concede this point, but at the same time, I could write a history of technology that was entirely based upon technologies that emerged as a direct result of the dispassionate pursuit of scientific knowledge.

Selective histories aside, all of the most difficult and demanding technologies — nuclear energy, spacecraft, computing, DNA therapies in medicine, and so on — are the result of extensive scientific research, including pure science (Rutherford was doing pure science, but his pure science ultimately made nuclear technologies possible) performed with little or no interest in practical application. This also appears that it will hold good in the future, as the role of tinkering decreases and the role of scientific rigor in the advancement of technology increases. There are thresholds beyond which tinkering cannot pass.

Similar criticisms can be made of each section of the STEM cycle: scientific instruments that advance scientific research that do not come from industrial engineering, and industrial engineering developments that do not come from technology. All of these criticisms are valid, but they do not invalidate the idea of the STEM cycle generally. Also, the definitions of science, technology, and engineering need to be refined considerably in order to consistently make distinctions among these sections of the STEM cycle, which will inevitably have broad areas of overlap. As with my analysis of the institutional structure of civilization, the STEM cycle is an abstraction for use in the analysis of the economic infrastructure of civilization, and any actual processes will be far more complex that this idealized simplification.

For more on the STEM cycle, I have written several posts that examine this idea in detail, including:

• The Industrial-Technological Thesis
• Industrial-Technological Disruption
• The Open Loop of Industrial-Technological Civilization
• Chronometry and the STEM Cycle
• The Institutionalization of the STEM Cycle
• Secrecy and the STEM Cycle

Given a tightly-coupled STEM cycle as characterizing modern civilization, we can differentiate scientific civilization, technological civilization, and industrialized civilization as each being civilizations that emphasize one section of the STEM cycle over the other sections of the cycle. In each, all sections of the STEM cycle are present, but in scientific civilization, for example, the section of the STEM cycle that predominates is scientific research.

Coming at this problem from another angle, given my analysis of the institutional structure of civilization, I can formally identify these three formations of modern civilization as follows:

• A scientific civilization is a civilization that takes science as its central project
• A technological civilization is a civilization that takes technology as its central project
• An industrial civilization is a civilization that takes industrial engineering as its central project

The above formulations are, in each case, what I call a “proper” civilization, with other permutations of these formations following from science, technology, and engineering playing different roles in the institutional structure of civilization. This gives us a way to formally distinguish these three formations, but as I have pointed out in other posts, there are a great many different ways in which a civilization might take science as its central project, so there is room for a great deal of variation even among any one of these formations.

These formulations are entirely consistent with the above formulations that distinguish scientific, technological, and industrial civilizations in terms of an emphasis on one section of the STEM cycle: in each formation, there is a tightly-coupled STEM cycle, but in each formation one section of the STEM cycle either serves as the central project of the civilization, or is integral with the central project of the civilization.

The above formulations, then, allow me to integrate my definition of the institutional structures of civilization with the idea of the STEM cycle characterizing modern civilizations. This degree of integration of the two concepts strengthens both. However, I am lacking an intuitively perspicuous way to differentiate scientific, technological, and industrial civilizations. One way to address this deficit would be to formulate a great many scenarios (i.e., thought experiments, with possible real-world exemplifications, but not necessarily tied to actually existing civilizations in the historical record, which record is very shallow for modern civilizations) that highlighted distinctively scientific, technological, and industrial central projects, and then proceed inductively from these scenarios to generalizations that cover all tokens of the type.

I am not yet in a position to delineate an exhaustive description of the possibilities for scientific, technological, and industrial civilizations — this would a project for a lifetime, or for a scientific research program with many contributors — but I do have a few telling examples that can shed some limited light on the possibilities.

In Tinkering with the Mind (and the sequels Tinkering with Science and Addendum on “Tinkering with Science”) I discussed the possibility of innovations derived from high technology tinkering without a scientific basis. Such high technology tinkering could only come within an economic infrastructure built up by a tightly-coupled STEM cycle, but in the case of technologies derived by tinkering, the scientific element in the production of the innovative technology in question would be in the background, while technology and engineering would be in the foreground. In the event that a civilization emerged from the proliferation of such technologies of tinkering (another example would be Shawyer’s EmDrive), we could call this a technological civilization or an industrial civilization, but it clearly would not be a scientific civilization.

Another possibility that is not far from our present economic infrastructure would be a civilization focused on industrial engineering design, to the point that the technology and the science were far in the background, while the design became the focus of interest and development. Here, practical application would run ahead of actual scientific and technological innovation — though “run ahead” might be misleading in this context. Let me explain. Computer technology has been advancing so rapidly over the past several decades that those who use computers have been playing a game of catching up to the most efficient uses of the technologies available. The result has been a number of suboptimal operating systems that all of us present for the computer revolution have passed through in stoic and pragmatic determination. It hasn’t always been enjoyable. Suppose the technological innovations came to an end. One scenario that I have discussed in other contexts would be the collapse of modern civilization leaving a few industrialized enclaves. These enclaves would probably not be large enough to produce new innovations in semiconductor design, but they might be able to keep existing computational infrastructure functioning. Under these circumstances, there would be a strong motivation to use available technology as efficiently and effectively as possible. A real premium would attach to better software applications that could derive better performance from the same hardware.

We have an actual example of this in the Voyager spacecraft, far from us in outer space, indeed, having passed out of the solar system, but engineers on Earth have reprogrammed the spacecraft several times since their launch in order to obtain better results from hardware that cannot be changed. A civilization in which such conditions became the norm could be considered a civilization in which industrial engineering was in the foreground, while technology and science were distantly in the background, being maintained but not improved. If this particular example is to be taken as representative, it may be the case the industrial civilizations sensu stricto only come about after science and technology have faltered, that is to say, in the twilight of scientific civilization or technological civilization. But a generalization of this sweeping kind would require much more study of the problem.