Annihilation from Within

Studies argues that even in the twentieth century, there remained traces of “old philosophical ideas about knowledge and inquiry … ideas rooted in neo-Confucian doctrines.” In Munro’s words, what diverted attention from the pursuit of scientific inquiry were “ideas about a totalistic world and about the style of inquiry derived from it.” It seems that China’s commitment to a “totalistic world” delayed the cultural split.2
So it happened that Western Europe was the first region of the world in which the pursuit of science began to diverge from religious beliefs and societal norms. This emancipation began stealthily, but in the seventeenth century it was increasingly accepted. Before that time, several of the intellectual pioneers—Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei—notoriously suffered death or imprisonment for their rebellion against the cultural unity that allowed religious teachings to circumscribe humanity’s spiritual existence. The guardians of the religious and political order in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries resisted the initial efforts of scientists to break away from the unitary culture.
Although it is now standard practice to deride this suppression of scientific discovery, the European authorities of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance surely deserve some credit for understanding what was at stake. They intuitively foresaw that a cultural schism would have revolutionary and dangerous consequences. Yet their unsuccessful and at times oppressive attempt to avert the schism now has few defenders. Even the Roman Catholic Church has felt obliged to express second thoughts, 350 years after it had sought to keep Galileo from opening one of the many fissures that eventually led to a world of two souls. In 1992, Pope John Paul II endorsed the findings of a lengthy investigation by the Pontifical Academy of Science that concluded Galileo Galilei had been wronged.
An extraordinary confluence of religious and political upheavals in Western Europe forced the early hairline fissures in European culture wide open and liberated science from political control. Prominent among these developments was the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which diminished the influence of religious belief on people’s lives and thinking, and which in part was a delayed consequence of the Protestant Reformation. Additional blows to the unitary culture were delivered by new government policies, especially in Western Europe and the United States, that allowed the free market to promote and reward technological innovation.
Long before mankind’s cultural divergence had reached its full scope and conquered the whole world, political philosophers and historians began to recognize its profoundly revolutionary character. Early in the nineteenth century, its most visible manifestations first emerged in England and became known as the Industrial Revolution—a term that John Stuart Mill had used already in 1848 and that became popularized in 1888 through lectures by the English economist Arnold Toynbee (the uncle of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee). There is wide agreement among historians that, in addition to scientific discoveries, the necessary precursors of the Industrial Revolution included changing attitudes toward religion, new ideas in political philosophy, and innovations in governmental practices and law.3
Although the scientific-industrial upheaval began in Western Europe, science and technology are not something intrinsically “Western.” One might classify the Bill of Rights, classical music, and Protestantism as cultural contributions that are specifically Western. And one might note that from the seventeenth century onward, West European scholars were disproportionately represented among the titans of science. But empirical science is no more “Western” than mathematics is “Arab” because of the geographic provenance of algebra and Arabic numerals.4 The fact is that any nation, regardless of how “non-Western” it is, can now carry out projects employing advanced scientific theories and technology if it has a sufficiently large educated class and the political will to marshal the requisite human and economic resources.
The cultural split is not linked to geographic location. All societies, wherever located, have by now experienced this split to varying degrees, as the scientific-technological mode of human thought has spread to all civilizations. The influential French historian Fernand Braudel—based on his useful distinction between “culture” and “civilization”—explained that “civilizations, vast or otherwise, can always be located on the map. An essential part of their character depends on the constraints or advantages of their geographical situation.”5 But in the cultural realm, such geographic constraints are no longer relevant to the scientific and technological mode of human activity. Since so many technological advances brought all civilizations immense economic benefits and vast improvements in health care, few people are concerned about the widening divergence between mankind’s political culture and its scientific achievements. Zbigniew Brzezinski foresaw the political problems of this divergence thirty-five years ago: “On the one hand this [technological] revolution marks the beginning of a global community; on the other hand, it fragments humanity and detaches it from its traditional moorings.” Somewhat similar ideas were expressed by Jacques Ellul (who gained many admirers in the 1970s and 1980s); but he failed to see the dangerously widening divergence between the two modes of human thought.6
Railroads As Nation-Builders
The nations that first embraced the Industrial Revolution were richly rewarded with fabulous increases in wealth and military might. Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Russia, and Japan were empowered by their technological and economic progress to build steel mills and munitions factories, armored ships and artillery, telegraph lines and railroads. The railroads connected the major cities of these nations as if buckling the country together with their iron tracks. Railroad lines converging in London tied Scotland to England and England to Wales, the better to keep the Kingdom united. In Russia the spokes of the railroad system reached out from Moscow in every direction, even to the Pacific port of Vladivostok. In Germany, as Bismarck unified that country, the railroad lines began to clasp Berlin to Munich, Hamburg, Strasbourg. In the United States thousands of miles of railroads linked New York to New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle. While physically uniting the countries that built them, railroads also helped protect the national territory. Unlike the horse cavalry (whose military role survived the end of World War I), railroad trains cannot seek out unguarded