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Blomcast Turning Points in History Wendepunkte in der Geschichte.
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Hello and welcome to the Blomcast, the podcast that looks at turning points in history.
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I have not been recording very regularly recently.
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The reason is that I'm writing a new book and it's a fantastic amount of research.
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And I am frankly drowning in this work, but it's also great work, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you.
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It's a book that looks at the early 21st century.
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You may remember it.
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Well, the larger part of you may remember it.
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If you're a very young listener or viewer, you may not remember it, and it may actually be history for you.
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But I'm looking at the years 2001 to 2014, and they see how they've changed the world, and especially what happened to the great victory of liberalism that was celebrated so much around the world at that time, or at least in certain parts of the world.
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But that's for the future, although I think I'm going to make some more episodes that are grounded in this kind of work.
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It's got a lot of fascinating spin-offs, and there's really amazing stuff that I'd like to share with you in some future episodes, because this research really opens this time anew for me.
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And I I was there, I shared the illusions of the time, and therefore the analysis is all the more interesting.
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But today I just wanted to talk to you about something else, which is popping up all over the place.
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I'm being asked about it, I'm being asked to lecture about it, I'm being asked about it in interviews.
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Um, friends are talking about it, people are talking about it, and it's one facet of something that um keeps coming back.
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Um it is the question of transformation, the question of how societies react to it.
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Um people like to talk about resilience.
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I find it's such an overused word that I don't particularly like to use it.
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But um the facet of that that I really like to talk about is innovation.
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Innovation is the magic word in many business circles.
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It's supposed to be the solution, the silver bullet for just about any problem.
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Innovation is what we need.
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Innovation will is what will make us thrive.
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Innovation is what will solve all the problems from the climate catastrophe to hunger, etc.
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Well, innovation is a good bit more complex and a good more bit more interesting when you start looking into it a little bit, and that's what I'd like to do with you now.
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First of all, um, this touches on a few things that keep interesting me, keep intriguing me, and also a few Blomcast episodes of the past.
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You know, I've done a lot about the end of the liberal project, and also some things about this idea of innovation and this idea of where innovation happened and where it didn't.
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One episode, for instance, by about why particularly Europe became a great colonial power, although it was at the beginning of its ascent one of the more backward areas in the world.
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But of course, this is also the area where the great craze of innovation broke out sometime around the Renaissance.
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And this is a really fascinating subject because if you look at many civilizations, they were terribly innovative.
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They had amazing technologies.
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If you look at the raw materials they had, etc.
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Um, but in most of them, innovation wasn't a value in itself.
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You can see that, for instance, about ancient China, and we will come back to that.
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But you can also see it about ancient Rome.
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There's the old question, and again, this is something we've already been talking about.
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Why did Rome never industrialize?
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Rome had all the base technologies to do build things like steam engines.
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Um, it had manufacturing, cereal production.
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Um, the Romans were very interested in money and in trade and in manufacturing, but they never made the step to industrializing.
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And innovation was just not a virtue in the Roman world.
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Um, if there was a useful invention, that was gladly accepted.
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But it's a little bit like Roman architecture.
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The Romans had concrete already, and it was a lot better than our modern concrete.
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Um, it had different constituent parts.
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Um, but they used the concrete to build to continue the traditional formal repertoire of Roman architecture, and it became bigger and bolder, like in the Pantheon in Rome, which is a huge uh vault, a huge span of concrete, but they didn't seek a different formal language, they didn't innovate with this concrete in the way that people would innovate with this with concrete in the late 19th and 20th centuries when it led to completely new forms.
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And this is something that already gives us one element of an answer or, shall we say, of a suspicion?
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Um, because here is a spirit of trying to do something different, of breaking the mold, of trying something new, of developing a technology because it's possible and not just because it's necessary and you've got a concrete problem to solve.
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How did that come in the world into the world and why in Europe?
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Well, of course, nobody knows.
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But one seems tempted to think that a Jewish and Christian heritage had something to do with it, for the same reason, incidentally, that it had something to do with the idea of hope.
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Um, and why hope is such a religious or such a particularly Christian and Jewish sentiment, and that is simply because you can only hope if you have the idea in your head, if the idea exists in your culture, that the future can be different from the past.
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And many cultures didn't have that, for instance the Romans.
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The world was cyclical, you were born, you grew up through puberty, you had children, you matured, you died, and the next generation would go through the same, just as the seasons were cyclical, etc.
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And the world changed, but it didn't have any direction.
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And it was essentially this everlasting cycle.
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And it was Judaism, the prophets, the idea of the Messiah, it was Christianity and the idea of Jesus Christ and his coming back to earth that gave cultures or created in cultures the idea that there could be a different future, that the future, that history had a goal, that it was going somewhere, and that at this goal perhaps all problems would be solved and the world would be a better place.
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That's a very Jewish Christian idea, Judeo-Christian idea.
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And innovation in itself is also something that looks at a changing world, that looks to drive a changing world, that looks to drive change in the world.
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And perhaps you had to have this idea in your culture in order to create a culture of innovation, such as happened in from the Renaissance onwards in the Baroque time and in the Enlightenment and the great scientific revolutions that happened there.
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We just also did an episode on Great Britain and the beginning of capitalism there, and um my um conversation partner, um Anton House, he he really emphasized also the importance of Britain being a nation of tinkerers, of people who just looked for little solutions for things that were good, but they could be better and they could be different, and one could make it a little bit more efficient and uh reduce friction a little bit, and all this nation of tinkers that was necessary to drive innovation in a bigger culture.
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But let's have a look at a little moment at cultures faced with the need to innovate, societies faced with the need to innovate, because there's a possibility of innovation when you create nice amazing inventions and see where this takes you.
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But there's also the moment when innovation becomes too present to ignore, and a society needs to decide what to do with it.
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I know what I'm talking about.
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I grew up in Germany in a little town called Detmold, which is still incredibly difficult to reach by train, um, for the simple reason that the princess who ruled the place in the early 90s or in the mid-19th century didn't believe in this newfangled modern invention, the train, and therefore didn't have her capital added to the train network.
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And once you miss a great push of innovation, it may be that many generations after that still have to pay for that missed opportunity.
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And on the other hand, however, we're always used to thinking about innovation as a positive thing, as a thing to seek.
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And actually, historical experience is a little bit different because whenever there are winners in history, there are losers, and innovation usually creates both.
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Innovation usually upsets an existing order.
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Um and that has its price.
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And you can see that quite clearly.
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And I thought I'd run through a few examples with you because it's simply interesting to look at how societies have dealt with innovation.
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And if you're interested, we can do individual episodes on these particular examples and look at them in a bit more detail, perhaps also in the form of a conversation, then I'll find somebody interesting I can talk to about that.
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But for the time being, let me just give you a panorama of innovation.
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Because what happens if you miss innovation?
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Well, that I think can be illustrated very easily with the last, with one last important victory, that was the victory against the British Army by the Zulu in the Zulu Wars, I think it was in 1897, and those um 10,000 Zulus beat about 200 Brits.
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And the amazing thing was that the British soldiers were equipped with modern weapons, and the Zulu were equipped with spears and shields.
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And this was probably the last time when an army from a different century crushed an army from a more modern time.
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Um, but you can imagine that the vic that victory did not last long and was only a footnote in the history of colonization.
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And innovation usually creates a decisive advantage.
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And that means that those who are confronted with it, confronted with technological innovation, can only decide on whether to adopt this or whether to pay the price, or rather whether to pay the price they have to pay when they adopt it, or to pay the price and also reap the benefits that they have to pay if they don't.
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Now, one of the real central innovations uh in human history, but especially in the history of Europe, and usually we'll shall see why we why this is an important distinction, was the invention of, as we say, a movable type of book printing.
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Um and we're talking here about the very late 15th century.
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Um, Mr.
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Gutenberg, but Mr.
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Gutenberg was not alone.
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There were in fact parallel inventions in Britain, in France, in Italy.
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Um, inventions, technologic technologies seem to have a way of popping up in different places when the time is ripe.
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And the great invention, of course, here was that you can cut one entire page of a picture or of a text, but then that is stable and as it were frozen.
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And if you don't want it anymore, you simply have to throw it away.
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But if you set the letters individually, if you have them made individually and assemble them for every every page anew, then it is vastly more efficient, vastly cheaper, vastly quicker.
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And you can print books and you can print books about all sorts of subjects because the letters will willingly be rearranged in every order that you wish.
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Now, this huge revolution changed Europe beyond recognition, and then changed the rest of the world beyond recognition.
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And you can see where this story is going.
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It's the story of education, it's the story of science, it's the story of standardized knowledge, it's the story of a rapid exchange of knowledge, of newspapers, of a common sphere that emerges.
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Um hugely important social, political, cultural change.
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And then you have a middle class that consolidates, you have revolutions that come also from pamphlets, and pamphlets are very much actually the center of this story because at the beginning of book printing in the 16th century, books were far too expensive for most people.
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They cost as much as a craftsman earned in a whole year, but pamphlets they were much more accessible.
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They could be short, very few people could read still, but they could be very brief, they could be highly illustrated, they could be pornographic, which was fun and often done, um, and they could damage your enemies, they could spread propaganda.
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Um that was terribly important and very incendiary in the revolutionary wars in Europe, and that immediately shows you that, well, new technology isn't always a good thing, and the innovation it brings can actually upset things terribly.
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And the propaganda, the hatred of the religious wars, was to a very large extent, to a very important extent, disseminated by pamphlets and by the new technology of printing.
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And yes, of course, there were winners and there were losers, and there was an old religious class and a traditional order that faded away and that became less important.
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And there was a new class of secular knowledge that became much more influential, and this changed things amazingly.
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But you can also see, um, well, we'll come no, let's come, let's come to that now because it becomes a very important question very quickly with book printing, and that is book printing in the Ottoman Empire.
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Europe was already printing books for 400 years when the Ottomans were still refusing to have a printing press in um in Istanbul or anywhere in their in their realm that could print Arabic.
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They only allowed printing presses that printed in foreign languages and not an Arabic script, because they had there was great um suspicion towards this new technology, and this suspicion was quite well founded because the Ottoman bureaucratic apparatus and the religious authorities worked quite efficiently, and the scribes that wrote who wrote the documents were very, very important officials in this order, and they were very proud of their craft, they were very highly trained in calligraphy, in grammar, etc.
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And it's true that in Arabic, which is a joined up style of writing, it's very difficult to find enough letters that they have all the joins in all the right places, and it looks very quickly, very clumsy.
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And to have the language of the Quran disfigured in this way was something that many scribes and religious authorities could not even imagine.
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And so they prescribed printing of Arabic in the Ottoman Empire until the n the early nineteenth century.
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And that of course meant that there was a huge backlog, I mean a huge lag of knowledge.
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There was a huge lag of technology, of education, of dissemination of knowledge in the empire, and it lost the possibility to compete with its European competitors, and only a few centuries before it had been a dominant power.
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It had threatened Vienna where I'm sitting now.
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I'm sitting not that far away where Kara Mustafa from the point where Kara Mustafa had his tent and his encampment besieging the inner city of Vienna in 1683.
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Well, only about two centuries later this situation had changed completely, and the reluctance to accept innovation on the part of the Ottoman Empire played a very important part in that.
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Also in the late 18th, early 19th century, you've got another wave of resistance against new technology and against innovation, and those are the Luddites in Britain.
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Ned Ludd was a skilled weaver who led a rebellion against the new mechanized weaving implements because he said this will destroy our work, this will destroy our craft, this will destroy the livelihoods of our families.
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And if these things take hold, then we will be basically reduced to rightless workers.
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We will become work slaves for a big factory, and now we are skilled craftspeople who can offer our services where we choose and where we please.
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And he and his followers destroyed these mechanical looms and tried to turn the clock back, and you can imagine what happened.
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The rebellion was quashed quite brutally, and the mechanical looms came in anyway.
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But you also have to say that Blood was right, it was a catastrophe for the skilled weavers, and they did they and their children did become work slaves of Manchester capitalism, and the innovation which made the fab the the bosses of the factories very rich certainly didn't help the skilled craftsman that had been there before, and that was also a world that was ending, and from Mr.
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Ludd's perspective, yes, he was right to rebel against this great technological invention.
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Here's another moment in history that I certainly will make another more uh programs about because I think it is absolutely crucial that we know more about it in the West, that we that we think more about this in the West.
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And I've not so long ago also done something about the relationship between China and Europe.
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Um and this is um the Qing dynasty in China and what happened in the 19th century to China in the opium wars.
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And again, and this is really interesting.
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Um let me just draw this situation for you because it has certain historical echoes that can't be ignored.
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Here's China, the central empire of the earth as it sees itself.
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A vast and rich empire with an ancient cultural heritage that has.
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No serious rival in the world.
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And that is true throughout the Ming dynasty, and of course, there are incursions in the west of the empire by the Mongols, and there are other conflicts, and every now and then there are rebellions.
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But basically, China is a great power, and in its own mind, the central power of the earth.
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And then there are these pesky Europeans, and they establish colonies in Asian countries, among them in India, and the dominant of these forces is Britain, and Britain does quite a lot of trade with China because people really like to drink tea and have discovered silk and Chinese porcelain and other beautiful things.
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Unfortunately, however, British people want to buy a lot from China, but China doesn't seem to be to need a lot or precisely anything from Britain.
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And so there's a big trade imbalance, a huge torrent of silver moves into China, whereas tea and porcelain and silk come out.
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And Britain thinks this is really bad business, and then they have a some Brits have a brilliant idea.
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They can cultivate opium in northern China, northern India, which is their colony.
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And this opium can be sold by private traders to China.
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And then the trade balance will be much more even.
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And unfortunately, the Chinese do not want their country to be swamped by opium, and so they destroy the opium deliveries, and the Europeans come back with gunboats and with their armies, and to force the Chinese to allow the opium into the country.
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And the Chinese scoff and want to send the barbarians away only to find that their 19th century technology or that the Chinese 17th century technology is in no way equal to the 19th century technology of the Europeans.
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And they're beaten in the first Opium War, and in the Second Opium War, the legendary summer palace is completely laid to waste by the English army.
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And this begins for China a century of humiliation, which really ends only after Mao, the death of Mao Zedong, and the great Chinese renaissance that we are living through now, because for Chinese eyes, it is not China coming out of nowhere, but China being restored to its old glory and to its old dominant place in the world.
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A very different way of looking at history.
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The China that confronted Europe in the 1860s was a China that had grown complacent, that had grown fond of its own myth of greatness, and that was shocked to wake up to just how backward they had become and how dominant the foreign devils were that had landed on their shores.
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And China reacted by learning, by sending people out into the West to learn about not only its technology, but also its philosophy, its culture, what made these societies tick, what made these societies so successful.
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Chinese history then had a few more bumps in the road, some very catastrophic bumps in the road.
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But this learning, this determination to embrace innovation, even if it completely changed the society, has been the strength of a resurgent China.
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So again, innovation and how you deal with it is a very important question.
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We could also talk about Meiji Japan and the Meiji Restoration, which is a similar story to that of China, but one that is somewhat more straightforward because the renovated the complete cultural change under the Meiji Emperor did happen, and that was the end of the shogun Japan, of the old Japan with its aristocracy, and it was the beginning of a very determinately modern Japan.
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But let's just come back one more time to the idea of innovation because these were historical examples, and I think all these examples show that unfortunately when you're confronted with new technologies, with new and powerful technologies, societies don't have the luxury to decide whether they want to adopt them or not, or whether they want to slow them down or only adopt them partially, or it simply doesn't work like that.
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Once competition is going, these technologies are here to stay.
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It's a little like the atomic bomb.
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You can discuss on whether we've had 80 years of peace because there were nuclear weapons in the world or whether the world would be better without them.
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But one thing's for sure, the world we were not going to see a world without nuclear weapons because, especially now that the world has become a much more chaotic place and a much more dangerous place on a global level, on a state-to-state violence level, a lot of more states will want nuclear weapons.
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And it's simply a technology that is too tempting to possess, that uh states would forego it.
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So if we begin to look at innovation today, at where this journey is taking us, one thing that we have to see is that history suggests very strongly that we don't get to choose whether we like innovation or not, whether we want it or not.
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But once new technologies are in the world, they are going to be used, and societies only have the question of how to use those technologies, how to react to those technologies, how to re how to create the laws, the attitudes, the social rituals to integrate those technologies into their social functioning.
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And I think that is a very has always been a big challenge, but it is getting a vastly bigger challenge.
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Why is it a growing challenge?
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Well, I think one thing that we need to talk about when we talk about innovation is the acceleration of transformation, the acceleration of technological change.
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And that has reached a point that is completely unprecedented in human history.
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Imagine you were a farmer in the year 1230, and a fairy came and put you to sleep, and you woke up on the same farm, but in 1930, 700 years later, in the same barn, the hay still seems fresh around you, and you just you rub your eyes, get up, and you go outside.
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And well, this farmer would still pretty much find his way around on that farm.
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The animals will be very similar, the farming processes attending the fields will be very similar.
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There might now be artificial fertilizers, there might now be a few more modern things and a few more things made of metal.
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But basically, the work and what you do with your hands has stayed pretty much similar over 700 years or so.
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Well, I'm now 56, and what I knew about communication technologies when I left school, when I left high school in 1989, is now in a museum.
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We don't use fax machines anymore, we don't have fixed telephones anymore, nobody sends letters, nobody's even heard of telegrams and cables and exciting things like that.
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My knowledge within a few decades has become completely museal because technology has changed so much, so rapidly, that from generation to generation, knowledge becomes completely obsolete.
00:30:51.200 --> 00:31:02.640
And of course, especially with industrial mass production and then with digital copying, the scalability of these technological advances becomes crazy.
00:31:03.119 --> 00:31:17.359
Because something that had to establish itself first and had to be produced over time now can be produced instantly everywhere in the world and can have effects instantly everywhere in the world.
00:31:17.519 --> 00:31:22.319
Think of social media, think of smartphones, which are all very new.
00:31:22.480 --> 00:31:25.119
I mean, the iPhone was invented in 2007.
00:31:25.279 --> 00:31:29.680
I've just written about that, so I have that fresh in my mind.
00:31:29.920 --> 00:31:40.480
And you know, all the behavior associated with smartphones, with social media, with internet access over smartphones, etc., all that developed afterwards.
00:31:40.799 --> 00:32:24.400
So technological change, the pace of innovation has become so fast and so punishing that our societies have more and more problems dealing with this innovation, because it may be profitable, there may be technologies with immense potential, but they also meet people who are already overstretched, over informed, over-distracted, anxious, and the last thing they need is the need to have more technologies to integrate into their life, to learn new behaviors, to learn new ways of being in the world and being in contact with others.
00:32:26.640 --> 00:32:30.160
What does that mean for innovation today?
00:32:30.319 --> 00:32:33.759
First of all, we desperately need it.
00:32:34.240 --> 00:32:52.000
We need technological information innovation to tackle the climate catastrophe, to tackle our energy needs, to tackle better kinds of communication, better kinds of agriculture, better kinds of medicine, of education, etc.
00:32:52.240 --> 00:32:53.440
We need innovation.
00:32:53.519 --> 00:32:56.960
We need the best science and the best technology there is.
00:32:58.319 --> 00:33:24.079
But as individuals with certain psychological boundaries and borders, we also need to talk about how to remain sure of ourselves in environments that are in constant flux and in environments that are technologically changing in front of our very eyes and under our very hands.
00:33:24.799 --> 00:33:30.319
And that is a bigger challenge that we will have to discuss.
00:33:30.559 --> 00:33:42.400
How can we transform our societies and our technologies without being ourselves transformed without recognition without beyond recognition?
00:33:43.359 --> 00:34:01.599
How can we retain what is important and precious, such for instance, such as for instance basic principles, human rights, in an environment of rapid transformation and transformation that is monetized, of course?
00:34:02.000 --> 00:34:11.840
There's big money at stake, and therefore this transformation is not neutral and not random, but it is directed, and it's directed towards somebody else's profit.
00:34:13.119 --> 00:34:32.559
These are enormous questions, and we I think historical comparisons, if so far as something like that is possible, make very clear that refusing ourselves to these technologies, trying to shut off from these technologies is not possible.
00:34:33.599 --> 00:34:36.079
From innovation itself is not possible.
00:34:36.400 --> 00:34:43.360
But to ride it and perhaps even to tame it is a fantastic challenge for societies.
00:34:43.519 --> 00:34:49.679
And that is the societies our that is the challenge our societies are called to now.
00:34:50.079 --> 00:34:52.800
And well, I can only say watch this place.
00:34:53.039 --> 00:35:06.880
We will keep talking about it, we will keep trying to tease out what are the good strategies to deal with these enormous transformations because this is a turning point in history, if there ever was one.
00:35:07.199 --> 00:35:11.039
And well, that's why what I'm here to talk about with you.
00:35:12.239 --> 00:35:20.159
I hope you enjoyed this little rant of mine, um, this time um dedicated to innovation.
00:35:20.400 --> 00:35:36.800
If you did enjoy it, leave me a like, subscribe to the channel, or even send some amazing praise or some sage remark or scholarly objection, or just say that you found this completely terrible.
00:35:36.960 --> 00:35:50.639
But even if you found it terrible, tell all your friends and relations because we need more subscribers and more listeners, and I would like to take this forward and think together with you about the world we're living in, we have been living in and will be living in.
00:35:50.800 --> 00:35:56.000
For now, Philip Blom says, thanks very much for listening, and until next time.
00:00:01.439 --> 00:00:10.800
Blomcast Turning Points in History Wendepunkte in der Geschichte.
00:00:11.199 --> 00:00:17.519
Hello and welcome to the Blomcast, the podcast that looks at turning points in history.
00:00:18.640 --> 00:00:23.039
I have not been recording very regularly recently.
00:00:23.440 --> 00:00:29.519
The reason is that I'm writing a new book and it's a fantastic amount of research.
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And I am frankly drowning in this work, but it's also great work, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you.
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It's a book that looks at the early 21st century.
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You may remember it.
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Well, the larger part of you may remember it.
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If you're a very young listener or viewer, you may not remember it, and it may actually be history for you.
00:00:52.719 --> 00:01:12.560
But I'm looking at the years 2001 to 2014, and they see how they've changed the world, and especially what happened to the great victory of liberalism that was celebrated so much around the world at that time, or at least in certain parts of the world.
00:01:13.040 --> 00:01:19.840
But that's for the future, although I think I'm going to make some more episodes that are grounded in this kind of work.
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It's got a lot of fascinating spin-offs, and there's really amazing stuff that I'd like to share with you in some future episodes, because this research really opens this time anew for me.
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And I I was there, I shared the illusions of the time, and therefore the analysis is all the more interesting.
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But today I just wanted to talk to you about something else, which is popping up all over the place.
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I'm being asked about it, I'm being asked to lecture about it, I'm being asked about it in interviews.
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Um, friends are talking about it, people are talking about it, and it's one facet of something that um keeps coming back.
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Um it is the question of transformation, the question of how societies react to it.
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Um people like to talk about resilience.
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I find it's such an overused word that I don't particularly like to use it.
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But um the facet of that that I really like to talk about is innovation.
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Innovation is the magic word in many business circles.
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It's supposed to be the solution, the silver bullet for just about any problem.
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Innovation is what we need.
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Innovation will is what will make us thrive.
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Innovation is what will solve all the problems from the climate catastrophe to hunger, etc.
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Well, innovation is a good bit more complex and a good more bit more interesting when you start looking into it a little bit, and that's what I'd like to do with you now.
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First of all, um, this touches on a few things that keep interesting me, keep intriguing me, and also a few Blomcast episodes of the past.
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You know, I've done a lot about the end of the liberal project, and also some things about this idea of innovation and this idea of where innovation happened and where it didn't.
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One episode, for instance, by about why particularly Europe became a great colonial power, although it was at the beginning of its ascent one of the more backward areas in the world.
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But of course, this is also the area where the great craze of innovation broke out sometime around the Renaissance.
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And this is a really fascinating subject because if you look at many civilizations, they were terribly innovative.
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They had amazing technologies.
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If you look at the raw materials they had, etc.
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Um, but in most of them, innovation wasn't a value in itself.
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You can see that, for instance, about ancient China, and we will come back to that.
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But you can also see it about ancient Rome.
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There's the old question, and again, this is something we've already been talking about.
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Why did Rome never industrialize?
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Rome had all the base technologies to do build things like steam engines.
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Um, it had manufacturing, cereal production.
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Um, the Romans were very interested in money and in trade and in manufacturing, but they never made the step to industrializing.
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And innovation was just not a virtue in the Roman world.
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Um, if there was a useful invention, that was gladly accepted.
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But it's a little bit like Roman architecture.
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The Romans had concrete already, and it was a lot better than our modern concrete.
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Um, it had different constituent parts.
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Um, but they used the concrete to build to continue the traditional formal repertoire of Roman architecture, and it became bigger and bolder, like in the Pantheon in Rome, which is a huge uh vault, a huge span of concrete, but they didn't seek a different formal language, they didn't innovate with this concrete in the way that people would innovate with this with concrete in the late 19th and 20th centuries when it led to completely new forms.
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And this is something that already gives us one element of an answer or, shall we say, of a suspicion?
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Um, because here is a spirit of trying to do something different, of breaking the mold, of trying something new, of developing a technology because it's possible and not just because it's necessary and you've got a concrete problem to solve.
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How did that come in the world into the world and why in Europe?
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Well, of course, nobody knows.
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But one seems tempted to think that a Jewish and Christian heritage had something to do with it, for the same reason, incidentally, that it had something to do with the idea of hope.
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Um, and why hope is such a religious or such a particularly Christian and Jewish sentiment, and that is simply because you can only hope if you have the idea in your head, if the idea exists in your culture, that the future can be different from the past.
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And many cultures didn't have that, for instance the Romans.
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The world was cyclical, you were born, you grew up through puberty, you had children, you matured, you died, and the next generation would go through the same, just as the seasons were cyclical, etc.
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And the world changed, but it didn't have any direction.
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And it was essentially this everlasting cycle.
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And it was Judaism, the prophets, the idea of the Messiah, it was Christianity and the idea of Jesus Christ and his coming back to earth that gave cultures or created in cultures the idea that there could be a different future, that the future, that history had a goal, that it was going somewhere, and that at this goal perhaps all problems would be solved and the world would be a better place.
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That's a very Jewish Christian idea, Judeo-Christian idea.
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And innovation in itself is also something that looks at a changing world, that looks to drive a changing world, that looks to drive change in the world.
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And perhaps you had to have this idea in your culture in order to create a culture of innovation, such as happened in from the Renaissance onwards in the Baroque time and in the Enlightenment and the great scientific revolutions that happened there.
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We just also did an episode on Great Britain and the beginning of capitalism there, and um my um conversation partner, um Anton House, he he really emphasized also the importance of Britain being a nation of tinkerers, of people who just looked for little solutions for things that were good, but they could be better and they could be different, and one could make it a little bit more efficient and uh reduce friction a little bit, and all this nation of tinkers that was necessary to drive innovation in a bigger culture.
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But let's have a look at a little moment at cultures faced with the need to innovate, societies faced with the need to innovate, because there's a possibility of innovation when you create nice amazing inventions and see where this takes you.
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But there's also the moment when innovation becomes too present to ignore, and a society needs to decide what to do with it.
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I know what I'm talking about.
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I grew up in Germany in a little town called Detmold, which is still incredibly difficult to reach by train, um, for the simple reason that the princess who ruled the place in the early 90s or in the mid-19th century didn't believe in this newfangled modern invention, the train, and therefore didn't have her capital added to the train network.
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And once you miss a great push of innovation, it may be that many generations after that still have to pay for that missed opportunity.
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And on the other hand, however, we're always used to thinking about innovation as a positive thing, as a thing to seek.
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And actually, historical experience is a little bit different because whenever there are winners in history, there are losers, and innovation usually creates both.
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Innovation usually upsets an existing order.
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Um and that has its price.
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And you can see that quite clearly.
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And I thought I'd run through a few examples with you because it's simply interesting to look at how societies have dealt with innovation.
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And if you're interested, we can do individual episodes on these particular examples and look at them in a bit more detail, perhaps also in the form of a conversation, then I'll find somebody interesting I can talk to about that.
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But for the time being, let me just give you a panorama of innovation.
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Because what happens if you miss innovation?
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Well, that I think can be illustrated very easily with the last, with one last important victory, that was the victory against the British Army by the Zulu in the Zulu Wars, I think it was in 1897, and those um 10,000 Zulus beat about 200 Brits.
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And the amazing thing was that the British soldiers were equipped with modern weapons, and the Zulu were equipped with spears and shields.
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And this was probably the last time when an army from a different century crushed an army from a more modern time.
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Um, but you can imagine that the vic that victory did not last long and was only a footnote in the history of colonization.
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And innovation usually creates a decisive advantage.
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And that means that those who are confronted with it, confronted with technological innovation, can only decide on whether to adopt this or whether to pay the price, or rather whether to pay the price they have to pay when they adopt it, or to pay the price and also reap the benefits that they have to pay if they don't.
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Now, one of the real central innovations uh in human history, but especially in the history of Europe, and usually we'll shall see why we why this is an important distinction, was the invention of, as we say, a movable type of book printing.
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Um and we're talking here about the very late 15th century.
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Um, Mr.
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Gutenberg, but Mr.
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Gutenberg was not alone.
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There were in fact parallel inventions in Britain, in France, in Italy.
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Um, inventions, technologic technologies seem to have a way of popping up in different places when the time is ripe.
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And the great invention, of course, here was that you can cut one entire page of a picture or of a text, but then that is stable and as it were frozen.
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And if you don't want it anymore, you simply have to throw it away.
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But if you set the letters individually, if you have them made individually and assemble them for every every page anew, then it is vastly more efficient, vastly cheaper, vastly quicker.
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And you can print books and you can print books about all sorts of subjects because the letters will willingly be rearranged in every order that you wish.
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Now, this huge revolution changed Europe beyond recognition, and then changed the rest of the world beyond recognition.
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And you can see where this story is going.
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It's the story of education, it's the story of science, it's the story of standardized knowledge, it's the story of a rapid exchange of knowledge, of newspapers, of a common sphere that emerges.
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Um hugely important social, political, cultural change.
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And then you have a middle class that consolidates, you have revolutions that come also from pamphlets, and pamphlets are very much actually the center of this story because at the beginning of book printing in the 16th century, books were far too expensive for most people.
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They cost as much as a craftsman earned in a whole year, but pamphlets they were much more accessible.
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They could be short, very few people could read still, but they could be very brief, they could be highly illustrated, they could be pornographic, which was fun and often done, um, and they could damage your enemies, they could spread propaganda.
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Um that was terribly important and very incendiary in the revolutionary wars in Europe, and that immediately shows you that, well, new technology isn't always a good thing, and the innovation it brings can actually upset things terribly.
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And the propaganda, the hatred of the religious wars, was to a very large extent, to a very important extent, disseminated by pamphlets and by the new technology of printing.
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And yes, of course, there were winners and there were losers, and there was an old religious class and a traditional order that faded away and that became less important.
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And there was a new class of secular knowledge that became much more influential, and this changed things amazingly.
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But you can also see, um, well, we'll come no, let's come, let's come to that now because it becomes a very important question very quickly with book printing, and that is book printing in the Ottoman Empire.
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Europe was already printing books for 400 years when the Ottomans were still refusing to have a printing press in um in Istanbul or anywhere in their in their realm that could print Arabic.
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They only allowed printing presses that printed in foreign languages and not an Arabic script, because they had there was great um suspicion towards this new technology, and this suspicion was quite well founded because the Ottoman bureaucratic apparatus and the religious authorities worked quite efficiently, and the scribes that wrote who wrote the documents were very, very important officials in this order, and they were very proud of their craft, they were very highly trained in calligraphy, in grammar, etc.
00:17:28.799 --> 00:17:43.920
And it's true that in Arabic, which is a joined up style of writing, it's very difficult to find enough letters that they have all the joins in all the right places, and it looks very quickly, very clumsy.
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And to have the language of the Quran disfigured in this way was something that many scribes and religious authorities could not even imagine.
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And so they prescribed printing of Arabic in the Ottoman Empire until the n the early nineteenth century.
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And that of course meant that there was a huge backlog, I mean a huge lag of knowledge.
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There was a huge lag of technology, of education, of dissemination of knowledge in the empire, and it lost the possibility to compete with its European competitors, and only a few centuries before it had been a dominant power.
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It had threatened Vienna where I'm sitting now.
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I'm sitting not that far away where Kara Mustafa from the point where Kara Mustafa had his tent and his encampment besieging the inner city of Vienna in 1683.
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Well, only about two centuries later this situation had changed completely, and the reluctance to accept innovation on the part of the Ottoman Empire played a very important part in that.
00:19:00.319 --> 00:19:12.160
Also in the late 18th, early 19th century, you've got another wave of resistance against new technology and against innovation, and those are the Luddites in Britain.
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Ned Ludd was a skilled weaver who led a rebellion against the new mechanized weaving implements because he said this will destroy our work, this will destroy our craft, this will destroy the livelihoods of our families.
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And if these things take hold, then we will be basically reduced to rightless workers.
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We will become work slaves for a big factory, and now we are skilled craftspeople who can offer our services where we choose and where we please.
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And he and his followers destroyed these mechanical looms and tried to turn the clock back, and you can imagine what happened.
00:20:07.759 --> 00:20:16.079
The rebellion was quashed quite brutally, and the mechanical looms came in anyway.
00:20:16.799 --> 00:20:46.960
But you also have to say that Blood was right, it was a catastrophe for the skilled weavers, and they did they and their children did become work slaves of Manchester capitalism, and the innovation which made the fab the the bosses of the factories very rich certainly didn't help the skilled craftsman that had been there before, and that was also a world that was ending, and from Mr.
00:20:47.119 --> 00:20:53.920
Ludd's perspective, yes, he was right to rebel against this great technological invention.
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Here's another moment in history that I certainly will make another more uh programs about because I think it is absolutely crucial that we know more about it in the West, that we that we think more about this in the West.
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And I've not so long ago also done something about the relationship between China and Europe.
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Um and this is um the Qing dynasty in China and what happened in the 19th century to China in the opium wars.
00:21:31.680 --> 00:21:35.200
And again, and this is really interesting.
00:21:35.759 --> 00:21:44.000
Um let me just draw this situation for you because it has certain historical echoes that can't be ignored.
00:21:45.039 --> 00:21:53.839
Here's China, the central empire of the earth as it sees itself.
00:21:54.640 --> 00:21:59.759
A vast and rich empire with an ancient cultural heritage that has.
00:22:00.240 --> 00:22:02.799
No serious rival in the world.
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And that is true throughout the Ming dynasty, and of course, there are incursions in the west of the empire by the Mongols, and there are other conflicts, and every now and then there are rebellions.
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But basically, China is a great power, and in its own mind, the central power of the earth.
00:22:26.319 --> 00:22:50.720
And then there are these pesky Europeans, and they establish colonies in Asian countries, among them in India, and the dominant of these forces is Britain, and Britain does quite a lot of trade with China because people really like to drink tea and have discovered silk and Chinese porcelain and other beautiful things.
00:22:50.960 --> 00:23:01.039
Unfortunately, however, British people want to buy a lot from China, but China doesn't seem to be to need a lot or precisely anything from Britain.
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And so there's a big trade imbalance, a huge torrent of silver moves into China, whereas tea and porcelain and silk come out.
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And Britain thinks this is really bad business, and then they have a some Brits have a brilliant idea.
00:23:18.640 --> 00:23:26.240
They can cultivate opium in northern China, northern India, which is their colony.
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And this opium can be sold by private traders to China.
00:23:32.160 --> 00:23:36.400
And then the trade balance will be much more even.
00:23:36.720 --> 00:23:54.880
And unfortunately, the Chinese do not want their country to be swamped by opium, and so they destroy the opium deliveries, and the Europeans come back with gunboats and with their armies, and to force the Chinese to allow the opium into the country.
00:23:55.119 --> 00:24:12.799
And the Chinese scoff and want to send the barbarians away only to find that their 19th century technology or that the Chinese 17th century technology is in no way equal to the 19th century technology of the Europeans.
00:24:13.519 --> 00:24:24.720
And they're beaten in the first Opium War, and in the Second Opium War, the legendary summer palace is completely laid to waste by the English army.
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And this begins for China a century of humiliation, which really ends only after Mao, the death of Mao Zedong, and the great Chinese renaissance that we are living through now, because for Chinese eyes, it is not China coming out of nowhere, but China being restored to its old glory and to its old dominant place in the world.
00:24:50.559 --> 00:24:53.279
A very different way of looking at history.
00:24:53.519 --> 00:25:18.400
The China that confronted Europe in the 1860s was a China that had grown complacent, that had grown fond of its own myth of greatness, and that was shocked to wake up to just how backward they had become and how dominant the foreign devils were that had landed on their shores.
00:25:18.799 --> 00:25:34.880
And China reacted by learning, by sending people out into the West to learn about not only its technology, but also its philosophy, its culture, what made these societies tick, what made these societies so successful.
00:25:35.119 --> 00:25:41.599
Chinese history then had a few more bumps in the road, some very catastrophic bumps in the road.
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But this learning, this determination to embrace innovation, even if it completely changed the society, has been the strength of a resurgent China.
00:25:57.119 --> 00:26:02.079
So again, innovation and how you deal with it is a very important question.
00:26:02.319 --> 00:26:32.559
We could also talk about Meiji Japan and the Meiji Restoration, which is a similar story to that of China, but one that is somewhat more straightforward because the renovated the complete cultural change under the Meiji Emperor did happen, and that was the end of the shogun Japan, of the old Japan with its aristocracy, and it was the beginning of a very determinately modern Japan.
00:26:33.920 --> 00:27:06.960
But let's just come back one more time to the idea of innovation because these were historical examples, and I think all these examples show that unfortunately when you're confronted with new technologies, with new and powerful technologies, societies don't have the luxury to decide whether they want to adopt them or not, or whether they want to slow them down or only adopt them partially, or it simply doesn't work like that.
00:27:07.119 --> 00:27:12.799
Once competition is going, these technologies are here to stay.
00:27:12.880 --> 00:27:15.039
It's a little like the atomic bomb.
00:27:15.119 --> 00:27:25.200
You can discuss on whether we've had 80 years of peace because there were nuclear weapons in the world or whether the world would be better without them.
00:27:25.440 --> 00:27:43.759
But one thing's for sure, the world we were not going to see a world without nuclear weapons because, especially now that the world has become a much more chaotic place and a much more dangerous place on a global level, on a state-to-state violence level, a lot of more states will want nuclear weapons.
00:27:43.839 --> 00:27:52.480
And it's simply a technology that is too tempting to possess, that uh states would forego it.
00:27:52.799 --> 00:28:12.480
So if we begin to look at innovation today, at where this journey is taking us, one thing that we have to see is that history suggests very strongly that we don't get to choose whether we like innovation or not, whether we want it or not.
00:28:12.799 --> 00:28:43.119
But once new technologies are in the world, they are going to be used, and societies only have the question of how to use those technologies, how to react to those technologies, how to re how to create the laws, the attitudes, the social rituals to integrate those technologies into their social functioning.
00:28:43.200 --> 00:28:51.440
And I think that is a very has always been a big challenge, but it is getting a vastly bigger challenge.
00:28:51.920 --> 00:28:54.640
Why is it a growing challenge?
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Well, I think one thing that we need to talk about when we talk about innovation is the acceleration of transformation, the acceleration of technological change.
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And that has reached a point that is completely unprecedented in human history.
00:29:15.920 --> 00:29:41.039
Imagine you were a farmer in the year 1230, and a fairy came and put you to sleep, and you woke up on the same farm, but in 1930, 700 years later, in the same barn, the hay still seems fresh around you, and you just you rub your eyes, get up, and you go outside.
00:29:41.119 --> 00:29:46.079
And well, this farmer would still pretty much find his way around on that farm.
00:29:46.480 --> 00:29:54.000
The animals will be very similar, the farming processes attending the fields will be very similar.
00:29:54.160 --> 00:30:02.480
There might now be artificial fertilizers, there might now be a few more modern things and a few more things made of metal.
00:30:02.559 --> 00:30:11.759
But basically, the work and what you do with your hands has stayed pretty much similar over 700 years or so.
00:30:12.079 --> 00:30:23.519
Well, I'm now 56, and what I knew about communication technologies when I left school, when I left high school in 1989, is now in a museum.
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We don't use fax machines anymore, we don't have fixed telephones anymore, nobody sends letters, nobody's even heard of telegrams and cables and exciting things like that.
00:30:36.240 --> 00:30:51.039
My knowledge within a few decades has become completely museal because technology has changed so much, so rapidly, that from generation to generation, knowledge becomes completely obsolete.
00:30:51.200 --> 00:31:02.640
And of course, especially with industrial mass production and then with digital copying, the scalability of these technological advances becomes crazy.
00:31:03.119 --> 00:31:17.359
Because something that had to establish itself first and had to be produced over time now can be produced instantly everywhere in the world and can have effects instantly everywhere in the world.
00:31:17.519 --> 00:31:22.319
Think of social media, think of smartphones, which are all very new.
00:31:22.480 --> 00:31:25.119
I mean, the iPhone was invented in 2007.
00:31:25.279 --> 00:31:29.680
I've just written about that, so I have that fresh in my mind.
00:31:29.920 --> 00:31:40.480
And you know, all the behavior associated with smartphones, with social media, with internet access over smartphones, etc., all that developed afterwards.
00:31:40.799 --> 00:32:24.400
So technological change, the pace of innovation has become so fast and so punishing that our societies have more and more problems dealing with this innovation, because it may be profitable, there may be technologies with immense potential, but they also meet people who are already overstretched, over informed, over-distracted, anxious, and the last thing they need is the need to have more technologies to integrate into their life, to learn new behaviors, to learn new ways of being in the world and being in contact with others.
00:32:26.640 --> 00:32:30.160
What does that mean for innovation today?
00:32:30.319 --> 00:32:33.759
First of all, we desperately need it.
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We need technological information innovation to tackle the climate catastrophe, to tackle our energy needs, to tackle better kinds of communication, better kinds of agriculture, better kinds of medicine, of education, etc.
00:32:52.240 --> 00:32:53.440
We need innovation.
00:32:53.519 --> 00:32:56.960
We need the best science and the best technology there is.
00:32:58.319 --> 00:33:24.079
But as individuals with certain psychological boundaries and borders, we also need to talk about how to remain sure of ourselves in environments that are in constant flux and in environments that are technologically changing in front of our very eyes and under our very hands.
00:33:24.799 --> 00:33:30.319
And that is a bigger challenge that we will have to discuss.
00:33:30.559 --> 00:33:42.400
How can we transform our societies and our technologies without being ourselves transformed without recognition without beyond recognition?
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How can we retain what is important and precious, such for instance, such as for instance basic principles, human rights, in an environment of rapid transformation and transformation that is monetized, of course?
00:34:02.000 --> 00:34:11.840
There's big money at stake, and therefore this transformation is not neutral and not random, but it is directed, and it's directed towards somebody else's profit.
00:34:13.119 --> 00:34:32.559
These are enormous questions, and we I think historical comparisons, if so far as something like that is possible, make very clear that refusing ourselves to these technologies, trying to shut off from these technologies is not possible.
00:34:33.599 --> 00:34:36.079
From innovation itself is not possible.
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But to ride it and perhaps even to tame it is a fantastic challenge for societies.
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And that is the societies our that is the challenge our societies are called to now.
00:34:50.079 --> 00:34:52.800
And well, I can only say watch this place.
00:34:53.039 --> 00:35:06.880
We will keep talking about it, we will keep trying to tease out what are the good strategies to deal with these enormous transformations because this is a turning point in history, if there ever was one.
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And well, that's why what I'm here to talk about with you.
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I hope you enjoyed this little rant of mine, um, this time um dedicated to innovation.
00:35:20.400 --> 00:35:36.800
If you did enjoy it, leave me a like, subscribe to the channel, or even send some amazing praise or some sage remark or scholarly objection, or just say that you found this completely terrible.
00:35:36.960 --> 00:35:50.639
But even if you found it terrible, tell all your friends and relations because we need more subscribers and more listeners, and I would like to take this forward and think together with you about the world we're living in, we have been living in and will be living in.
00:35:50.800 --> 00:35:56.000
For now, Philip Blom says, thanks very much for listening, and until next time.
