Terminal Sclerosis

I read the commentaries on my essay by Dean Keith Simonton and Ran Baratz with interest, but have nothing substantive to add. Walter Russell Mead’s argument about the role of competition triggered a variety of thoughts, all of which are preliminary; it is not a topic that I have investigated systematically. For example, what if classical China had not coalesced into a single huge state, but had consisted of four or five smaller, competing states? Would competition have spurred those different Chinas to accelerate their technological development or invent the scientific method? It is a fascinating and not implausible possibility. With regard to Europe, Mead is surely right that rivalry spurred technological and economic responses.

But as Dean Simonton points out, all of the major European nations experienced “transient dry periods” during those same centuries. The locus of scientific and technological accomplishment moved northward, from Italy during the Renaissance to northern Europe and especially Great Britain thereafter. The experience of Europe teaches that it is possible to drop out of technological competition, as Italy did, or never to enter the competition at all, as in the case of Spain and Portugal.

With regard to the role of rivalry among nations in keeping America innovative, I have one observation and one working hypothesis. The observation is that the United States as a nation has already shown that it is willing to drop out of competitions that do not directly affect our security. The obvious example is the manned space program. The United States now depends on Russian launch vehicles to get our astronauts to the international space station, and shows no alarm about the prospect of being left far behind by the Chinese in years to come. The national ethos that prompted the Apollo program seems completely lost.