Michael Adas

In Machines as the Measure of Men, Michael Adas examines the role of science and technology in shaping Europeans’ sense of their own cultural supremacy. He argues, “By the mid-eighteenth century, scientific and technological gauges were playing a major and at times dominant role in European thinking about such civilizations as those of India and China and had begun to shape European policies on issues as critical as the fate of the African slave trade. In the industrial era, science and technological measures of human worth and potential dominated European thinking on issues ranging from racism to colonial education. They also provided key components of the civilizing-mission ideology that both justified Europe’s global hegemony and vitally influenced the ways in which European power was exercised” (pgs. 3-4).
Looking at early periods of contact with non-Europeans, Adas writes, “In contrast to the practice of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, inventiveness and scientific knowledge were rarely stressed as standards by which to judge the level of development attained by African or Asian societies or to evaluate the capacities of non-Western peoples” (pg. 22). Furthermore, “Whether they were merchants or missionaries, European travelers in this era viewed their Christian faith, rather than their mastery of the natural world, as the key source of their distinctiveness from and superiority to non-Western peoples. But assessments of the sophistication of African and Asian science and technology as aspects of larger configurations of material culture did affect European attitudes toward different peoples and cultures” (pg. 22).
Adas argues that race did not play a large role in determining markers of civilization until late in the nineteenth century. He writes, “European categorizations of some peoples as savages or barbarians and others as civilized had much less to do with narcissistic disdain for extreme differences in physical appearance than with ethnocentric perceptions of levels of sophistication in social organization and cultural development generally. The roles of science and technology in shaping these perceptions were secondary” (pg. 68). Even after the period of initial contact, “Though the Europeans’ esteem for China and, to a lesser extent, India declined in the eighteenth century, it was rare for an author to suggest that their stagnation and inferiority to Europe in the sciences were caused by racial constraints. The alleged backwardness of the Africans, by contrast, had long been vaguely lined to innate or biological differences” (pg. 122). As time passed, however, “The refusal to acknowledge China’s great contributions to technological innovation and scientific discovery facilitated the efforts of the more extreme advocates of white supremacy to denigrate the one civilization that had clearly rivaled and, in many categories of material achievement, surpassed Europe in the preindustrial era” (pg. 193). Furthermore, “The realization that by reducing nineteenth-century European perceptions of and reactions to colonized peoples to manifestations of racism were may be missing the main point – focusing on subordinate themes and missing more dominant ones – suggests that we may need to modify some of our basic assumptions about European intellectual history in this era” (pg. 341).
By the Industrial Revolution, “European observers came to view science and especially technology as the most objective and unassailable measures of their own civilization’s past achievement and present worth. In science and technology their superiority was readily demonstrable, and their advantages over other peoples grew at an ever increasing pace” (pg. 134). In this way, “The assumptions that it was desirable for humans to master nature and that the scientifically minded and inventive Europeans were best at doing so led many authors to the conviction that it was the destiny and duty of Europeans to expand into and develop regions occupied by less advanced peoples” (pg. 217). Furthermore, “As time came to be oriented to the regular beat of machines and viewed as a commodity to be economized or squandered, European attitudes toward work altered in ways that further emphasized the contrasts between the industrializing West and the rest of the world” (pg. 250).
Prior to World War I, Europeans turned to the East looking for a simpler way of life. Though “India and to a lesser extent China were the focus of efforts by European intellectuals to arouse concern over the dangers facing the powerful but, they believed, overly materialistic West. Though the first serious and systematic studies of African societies were undertaken in the fin-de-siècle period, African beliefs and institutions were rarely seen as serious alternatives to those of the West” (pg. 353). The war itself changed that. Adas concludes, “The mechanized slaughter on the Western Front corrupted or undermined the credibility of most of the ideals and assumptions on which the Europeans had based their sense of superiority to all other peoples and from which they had fashioned that ideological testament to their unprecedented hubris, the civilizing mission. Years of suicidal devastation forced European intellectuals to question the very foundations upon which their thought and value systems had been built: the conviction that they were the most rational of all beings, in control of themselves, of other peoples, and of all creation” (pg. 372).… (more)