Archaeologists Find Athenian Naval Base

[abaris]

And with respect to the technical innovations which created the modern world it wasn't until the high renaissance when this mindset first manifested and not until the Enlightenment did it get really going. And it took massive changes away from Roman modes of thinking and institutions to get there.

Rome never was static. They were open to innovations. In a what if case, you can't say what they would have achieved. They also weren't shy about adapting to new lines of thought if they thought them to be advantegeous.

But yes, christianity only contributed to the decline. By virtually being the enemy of scientific or technological discovery, which go hand in hand. The main contributing factor were the peoples moving in from the North and the Northeast, who didn't know the same level of administrative organisation as the Romans had.

[Anomalocaris]

China wasn't static either. She was as open to technological innovations and new ways of thought as Rome ever was, and was so during the the very same time Rome was declining. Plus china spawned many innovations, such as gun powder artillery, printed paper money, national postal system, and a real system of civil service, that are arguably more inseparable from our concept of modernity than the best that Rome ever devised. Plus China had no Jesus, and yet China did not spawn a scientific revolution or modernity in the next 1600 years.

It take more than acceptance of practical innovation, and it take the right kind of intellectual and economic  environment to ssustain the nurturing of the right kind of innovative thought, before there can be high change of achieving modernity.

I think there was much more chance, and far less inevitability, in the progress towards modernity than most people think. Which makes modernity all the more precious, and more worthy of vigorous and active defense, than even people most repulsed by the mideval barbarism integral to Christianity and Islam might grant.

[abaris]

What if is never a sound foundation of what could have happened in history.

But I think, the developments of the migration of peoples didn't have a beneficial influence on what happened during the ensuing millenium. Along with a faith that feared any kind of innovation.

[Minimalist]

Technology builds on itself, one step at a time.  An isolated genius who makes a discovery can sit there and look at it.



But no one figured out a way to use Hero's steam engine and in the first century there were more than enough slaves to supply the muscle.

[Thumpalumpacus]

China also had a major pullback from exploration, which was a driver for European technological innovation.

[Anomalocaris]

China also had a major pullback from exploration, which was a driver for European technological innovation.

Rome wasn't known for the kind of exploration that drove European technological innovation 1200 years after the fall of Rome.

[Anomalocaris]

China also had a major pullback from exploration, which was a driver for European technological innovation.

1. Rome wasn't known for the kind of exploration that drove European technological innovation 1200 years after the fall of Rome.

2. It wasn't just the exploration that drove European technological innovation, it was a combination of a ruthless devotion to the economic exploitation of what it had explored, as well as the demographics that provided the people who would go and exploit at vast risk to their own lives, and a economic system which made the capital required for this exploration available, that drove the technological innovation.  China didn't have the latter two in the fifteen century, when she pulled back from exploration.  So if China didn't pull back, and beat Europe to America, then I suspect China would not have found enough people willing to colonize, or hitched its financial system to colonization, to be able replicate the sort of conditions that allowed European exploration to become European scientific revolution.

Again, I submit Western scientific revolution is a highly contingent event that was dependent on many independent factors dovetailing by sheer chance.  The chance of it happening anywhere else, at any other time, was low.   The probability of it eventually happening in Europe from the perspective of 1200 AD, 1300AD, right up to 1491AD, was low.

[abaris]

Well, let's be honest here. There have been two regions that at least preserved the acnient knowledge. One was Byzanz and the other were the Middle Eastern realms, formerly belonging to the Eastern Empire. The first push to - at least - scientific recovery came from the Crusades when the West came in touch with Byzanz as well as the muslims.

[Thumpalumpacus]

China also had a major pullback from exploration, which was a driver for European technological innovation.

1. Rome wasn't known for the kind of exploration that drove European technological innovation 1200 years after the fall of Rome.

Which is why I specified "European" and not "Roman".

2. It wasn't just the exploration that drove European technological innovation, it was a combination of a ruthless devotion to the economic exploitation of what it had explored, as well as the demographics that provided the people who would go and exploit at vast risk to their own lives, and a economic system which made the capital required for this exploration available, that drove the technological innovation.  China didn't have the latter two in the fifteen century, when she pulled back from exploration.  So if China didn't pull back, and beat Europe to America, then I suspect China would not have found enough people willing to colonize, or hitched its financial system to colonization, to be able replicate the sort of conditions that allowed European exploration to become European scientific revolution.

Yeah, I wasn't saying that exploration was the only driver of technology, nor was I delving into the reasons behind European exploration.

Again, I submit Western scientific revolution is a highly contingent event that was dependent on many independent factors dovetailing by sheer chance.  The chance of it happening anywhere else, at any other time, was low.   The probability of it eventually happening in Europe from the perspective of 1200 AD, 1300AD, right up to 1491AD, was low.

Of course it was contingent. All history is.

[Anomalocaris]

All history may be contingent, but one could perhaps postulate or discern heightened probability for certain events from certain points in time before the event.    This digression revolved around whether Rome in particular or classical western civilization in general had acheived substantially heightened probability of attaining scientific modernity which were subsequently squandered under the baleful influence of Christianity.

My contention is the heightened probability was not really there and Christianity had cast its baleful escatological influence in vain.

The heightened probability didn't come until 1000 years after the end of classical antiquity.   If the migration from Central Asia didn't successively stress the world of late antiquity, and Roman Empire held together, the most likely outcome would be eventually a long period stagnation and a total squandering of any internal forces that could break the stagnation.  

Autocratic empires are easier to rule, both for the ruler and for the established aristocracy, when the social order itself is not stressed by technological or economic changes.  So autocratic empires will naturally tend to gradually alter its internal structure to encourage stagnation for the benefit of its own ruling classes.   Sustained incentive for technological and social changes have to come from somewhere else, such as rival empires competing with it to gain military or economic supremacy.