The Sparks That Lit the West

Fragile Flame: The Uniqueness and Vulnerability of Scientific and Technological Civilisation
by Hal G.P. Colebatch
Acashic, 2013, 620 pages, $39.95

Hal Colebatch has brought his lifelong love of history to bear on a big question: Why have science and technology reached take-off only once? That take-off, happily, occurred in our own era and culture. Western Christianity was the creator, midwife and guardian of our unique scientific and technological civilisation, he says.

The feats of the Egyptians, Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, the Arabs, the Aztecs and Incas all petered out. From a sunken Greek ship near the island of Antikythera in 1900, sponge divers brought up a contraption with thirty or more cogwheels, apparently a planetary computer pre-dating Babbage by two millennia. If the Greeks had had a more rational society, asks Colebatch, would they have put a man on the moon by AD 300? Not so silly, given that the US Civil War’s General Longstreet married a woman who became a wartime aircraft riveter in the 1940s. Winston Churchill began as a mounted lancer and ended in charge of a nuclear strike force.

Hero of Alexandria in the first century described or made a steam turbine, which found no better use than as a magical device in a temple. The Romans, for all their engineering skill, failed even to improve their smelly wick lighting. One disincentive was jail, slavery, death and dismembering for debt—borrowing to innovate was quite a Roman risk.

For take-off, church and state must be stable, supportive and subject to mutual criticism and inquiry. The state must permit economic and financial freedoms and reasonable taxes, along with legal rights and incentives for labour-saving. There must be a prior knowledge base in areas such as metallurgy, along with optimism and a rational spirit. Innovators need respect, and systems must be present for quality-controlled transmission of knowledge.

“The odds against these things coming together in the same civilisation, and then surviving for a significant time, must be staggeringly great,” Colebatch says. Spain, for example, enjoyed wealth, universities, coal, iron and advanced shipping, but its structure stayed medieval. The modern Islamic world still lacks essential ingredients.

With his emphasis on morality as well as technology, Colebatch doesn’t mince words about pseudo-rationalists, such as the French revolutionaries. He quotes Saint-Just:

In Meudon they are tanning human skin, of which perfectly good wash leather is made, for breeches and other uses. Skin coming from men has a consistency and quality superior to chamois. That from feminine subjects is suppler but it has less strength.

In suppressing the Vendee, the worshippers of reason and enlightenment put special emphasis on the need to kill children. Likewise, Stalin’s penal code re-imposed the death penalty on children, which was abolished in Anglo-Saxon England well before the Norman Conquest.

Colebatch lauds the monasteries, with their spiritual underpinning, as crucibles of technology. For the first time, scientific and technological speculation and practical work came together on a permanent basis. The monks improved water-wheels to save labour, without backlash from any vested interests. Even in Saxon England there was about one wheel per fifty families, compared with a dozen or so in the whole Roman empire. As one monk wrote:

How many horses’ backs have been broken, how many men’s arms wearied, by the labour from which a river, with no labour, graciously frees us.

It was the same story with advances ranging from astronomy to dams, cattle breeding and (but for Henry VIII) mass production of cast iron.

Colebatch, an expert commentator on UK affairs, laments the fact that for more than a century Britain’s industrial science has stultified. From Bismarck’s time, Germany nurtured its industrial workforce with pensions, education and resorts, while Britain sank into sullen class warfare. In 1872 only twelve students were reading for the natural science tripos at Cambridge. Yet by then Germany had eleven technical and twenty other universities.

Union resistance stifled building of Liberty and Victory ships (a British idea) in British yards, which fell silent after the Second World War while Italian, Spanish and Finnish yards came to thrive: “Militant union leaders in Germany and Japan had been executed during the war, probably contributing to their postwar competitiveness.”

Colebatch lambasts British anti-science intellectuals. George Bernard Shaw, for example, campaigned against vaccination, hated Lister and Pasteur, defended Stalin and the gulags, and wanted to appease Hitler.

Colebatch is pessimistic that true spirit of inquiry can survive the twenty-first-century assaults on rigour in education, the spread of mystic environmentalism (which prefers lower living standards), and mumbo-jumbo replacing spiritual values. Instances include Western women converting to Islam, perhaps unaware that converting away from Islam is a capital offence under sharia law. Scholastic theologians of the Dark Ages, says Colebatch, placed greater faith in reason than most philosophers are willing to do today.

Throughout the West, ageing and falling populations are depending on younger people to support them. This is possible through science-based productivity gains.

But Colebatch sees the momentum of Western science grinding down from loss of spiritual vibrancy. Western mathematics had progressed for 2500 years but “could not survive the amateurish educationalists of the last century”. A space research fanatic, he deplores the half-century decline of the US space effort, with Obama remarking dismissively, “We have already been to the moon.”

Colebatch concludes:

The continuance of the spiritual, scientific, humanistic and technological heritage of Western/Christian civilisation … may give Mankind the opportunity for a deeper and truer spiritual life, a more wonderful world, and the stars.

 Sadly, this volume, so dense with knowledge and insight, lacks an index, though the e-version is presumably searchable.

Tony Thomas profiled Hal Colebatch in the October issue.