Originally published 29 April 1991
Mary Kingsley, intrepid Victorian traveler, was one of the most adventurous of 19th century European explorers of Africa. Untypical of Victorian women, she went where men feared to go. She was also untypical in her sensitive appreciation of African culture and thought. But even she never doubted the racial preeminence of Europeans.
She wrote: “All I can say is, that when I come back from a spell in Africa, the thing that makes me proud of being one of the English is not the manners and customs up here, certainly not the houses or the climate; but it is the thing embodied in a great railway engine…[The railway] is the manifestation of the superiority of my race.”
In other words, high tech equals high culture. It’s an equation traced by Rutgers University historian Michael Adas in a recent book Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell University Press). Adas documents the many and subtle ways scientific and technological achievements fed a Western sense of racial and cultural superiority — and buttressed Western imperialism.
When, in the 16th century, Europeans set out to conquer and colonize the non-European world, they believed it was proper that they do so. Their sense of superiority was anchored in the conviction that because they were Christian, they best understood transcendent truths.
But it was superior science and technology that made their conquests possible: mathematical methods of navigation, sailing ships with superior maneuverability and armament, steel armor, gunpowder.
Superior technology
By the the 18th and 19th centuries — the great age of European imperialism — science and technology had replaced religion as the primary measure of human worth. Technology provided Europeans with unprecedented control over nature, and seemingly confirmed the superiority of Western thought and culture.
Confident that science gave them unique access to universal truths, Europeans set about the subjugation and transformation of “backward” peoples with missionary zeal. The railroad and the gunship became more powerful symbols of manifest destiny than the cross had ever been.
According to Adas, the terrible slaughter in the trenches of World War I finally caused Europeans to doubt that machines conferred moral superiority. Americans were spared this salutary lesson by arriving late on the battlefields of Europe, and in the aftermath of Great War took up from Europe the mantle of global dominance.
Adas writes: “In the decades after World War I, applied science and technology pervaded American life to a degree that greatly exceeded that experienced by any other society…Henry Ford was widely regarded as the prophet of a new age of ‘heroic optimism,’ in which science and invention were hailed as the key to American prosperity and the best solution for social ills.”
American optimism survived World War II, although the ideology of civilizing backward peoples gave way to what was perceived as the generous bestowal of technological improvements, even a sharing of wealth. But implicit within the new ideology, says Adas, was a subtle form of cultural imperialism — the assumed superiority of American cultural values, confirmed by our scientific and technological prowess.
It is tempting to extend Adas’s analysis to more recent events, in particular, to the conflict in the Persian Gulf.
A decisive victory
Whether Americans acted wisely in the Gulf will be long debated by political pundits and moral philosophers. What goes unchallenged is the dazzling performance of American technology. It is hard to find any parallel in history to so swift and decisive a victory, based not upon actual combat, but upon an overwhelming superiority of machines.
One is reminded, perhaps, of the exploits of Cortes and Pizarro, who with few men and vastly superior ships and weapons subdued entire civilizations of Native Americans. Their quick and (mostly) bloodless victories were taken as signs of God’s favor upon their campaigns.
Now Americans are tempted towards a similar smugness. We are inclined to take an exaggerated pride in all things American, as if smart bombs, lasers, and microchips confer moral righteousness upon those who use them against less sophisticated weaponry. As Michael Adas has demonstrated, this faulty equation of technological preeminence with cultural superiority has a long and dishonorable history.
In recounting that history, Adas quotes the famous 19th century missionary-explorer David Livingston, summarizing the advantages for Europeans in Africa of vastly superior firearms: “Without any bullying, firearms command respect, and lead [African] men to be reasonable who might otherwise feel disposed to be troublesome.”
Livingston believed that Western technology justified the European colonization of Africa, even against the “troublesome” wishes of Africans. For him, as for Mary Kingsley, technological sophistication was a satisfactory measure of human worth.
And that’s a delusion Americans must resist in the aftermath of their razzle-dazzle technological triumph in the Gulf.
