Is continuous social change and technological improvement "a Western thing"?

[Pipcard]

Related thread: Cultural inertia regarding Japan (I should have called it "Cultural determinism regarding Japan")

[For the purposes of this thread, the "West" is defined as this]

Someone on reddit asked "Why is Japan still reyling [sic] on so much analogue technology?" [by that they meant things such as fax machines, etc.]

This person replied (bolded for emphasis):
(if you look their post history, they are not a white supremacist)

Japan got its reputation for being technologically advanced from the post-WW2 period when its economy surged forward and leapt ahead of the world in technology, and from the many ways that it uses technology in daily life that people of other countries don't bother with (e.g., in toilets).

But Japan is generally very conservative in its approach to change. It leapt ahead in technology only temporarily when its economy was being rebuilt after the War, but after it built up and stabilized, it "rested on its laurels" and its rate of progress is much more modest today. Culturally, it sees no reason to abandon things that work.

Very likely the same thing will happen to both Korea and China eventually, but they're still in the mode of pursuing rapid technological advancement because they started later than Japan. Korea started in the '80s, China more in the '90s.

Technology as an insatiable hunger - as a pursuit in itself whose social disruptions are proof of its value (as in the culture of Silicon Valley) - is more of a Western thing, sometimes remarked on as pathological by critics. The current rapid advancement of China by contrast is just inertia, because it was starting from so far behind, and is being pushed by political forces. Once their economy reaches technological saturation, as Japan's did in the '90s, further disruptions will be seen as dangerous and increasingly discouraged in favor of incremental changes.

I wouldn't be able to unravel the countless articles over the course of decades. But here's one article that says basically the same things:
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34667380

You may be wondering why I posted this in the Before 1900 section. That's because I brought it up with them via PM, and they replied that it was due to geographic factors:

I would put it like this: The West has "chaos in its heart" as the Nietzsche quote goes, and revels at least in the constructive version of disruption. That's not "exceptionalism," because it ultimately boils down to geography (I'll get to that).

The West romanticizes the act of discovery and novel creation, because the very geography of Europe was an engine for spinning up the hunger for the new: The Aegean was like the tidepool in which its civilization was born, full of islands to explore, and every subsequent step in the evolution of Europe and its derivative civilizations has accelerated that initial condition.

East Asia is different. China is incredibly fertile and wide. Its coast is long, but it has a low ratio of islands to mainland shore, so its history had more in common with ancient Egypt (i.e., the Nile) than with Europe's accelerating "chainsaw" of peninsulas. Ancient Egypt lurched forward and achieved things that are incredible even today, then just spent the next 2,000 years gilding the lilies they'd created rather than plowing further ahead.

China is more dynamic than that. They have periods of advance, followed by periods of slow stability, and that's characteristic of East Asia in general because their geography didn't allow anything else. It was a crowded place from ancient times, so cultures are highly attuned to stability just by harsh natural selection. Innovations that served stability were prized, others were either ignored or suppressed as dangerous.

The West is not homogeneous in this, but some aspects of it want to be supernovas - to burn bright and fast, and stab into the future with reckless abandon. Societies like China and Japan wish to advance holistically, as an entire society, so it happens in more considered, momentous, inertial terms - slow, then accelerating, then cruising, then slowing down again. Individualism is more staccato, if that makes any sense.

East Asia is content to observe our madness and pick and choose what aspects make sense for them to develop further, and they do discover things independently - though as stated, most of the time they don't see them as useful to pursue because the idea might be disruptive.

 

[SlyDessertFox]

No?

 

[Pipcard]

No?

Please note that the question is about "continuous" social and technological change. The person I mentioned above claims that societies in East Asia tend to change slowly most of the time, with short periods of rapid advancement (e.g. pulling a Meiji or the recent rise of Korean electronics firms), and that this preference for social stability is related to their geography (thankfully they did not say genetics).

 

[SlyDessertFox]

Please note that the question is about "continuous" social and technological change. The person I mentioned above claims that societies in East Asia tend to change slowly most of the time, with short periods of rapid advancement (e.g. pulling a Meiji or the recent rise of Korean electronics firms), and that this preference for social stability is related to their geography (thankfully they did not say genetics).

My understanding of Chinese history is this was definitely not the case in China.

 

[Deleted member 97083]

There's not really much evidence for his assertion. He's basically using generalizations of the last 60 years to extrapolate back into ancient times without using any data.

Also, his contrast between the Aegean and Ancient Egypt is erroneous because Western civilization inherits almost as much from Ancient Egypt as it does from Greece, and Ancient Egypt stalled for 2,000 years not because they just decided to stop doing things, but because they got conquered and didn't really gain independence again for many centuries.

Only in the last 500 years at maximum did the West innovate continuously. And only in the last 150 years did this occur all across "the West" instead of smaller specific areas. With some of the earlier innovating areas in the West, like Portugal and Spain, also having long periods of stagnation after their innovation.

Slow incremental change was the case almost everywhere until the Industrial Revolution.

 

[moxn]

How does the existence of peninsulas and islands spur on discovery and exploration? Yes, you can sail off and find a new island... but you could also walk off and find a new land. Under this logic, the cultures in Indonesia and the Caribbean should obviously have become the most advanced.

A lot of times geographic determinism is just our attempt to look back and try to find patterns that aren't really there, or try to find easy explanations for trends that can't be easily explained. China has frequently been united throughout history, so obviously there must be some geographic reason behind it. Europe has been mostly disunited, so again there just has to be a geographic reason. And if the West has pulled ahead of everyone else in modern history, then there just has to be geographic reasons.

Obviously geography does still play a role, even an important one. But it isn't the be-all end-all people make it out to be.

 

[Pipcard]

So do the tech industries of South Korea and China really have the same fate that befell Japan's? Are "western countries" such as the United States mostly immune to that fate? And if both cases are true, what is the real cause?

 

[kholieken]

So do the tech industries of South Korea and China really have the same fate that befell Japan's? Are "western countries" such as the United States mostly immune to that fate? And if both cases are true, what is the real cause?

Probably. I think slow down in SK and China is inevitable. There are news about China AI and genetic research, and Japan and China phone tech is very advanced, so China's Silicon Valley is not impossible, but general trend of Lost Decade is similar.

No, obvious example is US Steel and Automotive Industry, and there are some comparison between Lost Decade in Japan and post 08 recession in US.

 

[LostInNewDelhi]

I haven't seen a take this hot since Krakatau.

 

[Richard V]

Is Japan less innovative than the West as a whole? Well certainly, it’s only one country. Is it less innovative than the Silicon Valley? Yes, but so is Europe. Just because the Silicon Valley is in the West doesn’t make all of the West equally innovative. Japan’s reliance on analog tech is largely due to their businesses being run by old men who makes IT decisions. That says more about their social conservatism than cultural attitude toward tech in general.

Societies have a natural tendency to hang on to elements that remind them of their glorified past. I don’t see Japan as having cultural inertia especially worse than others. Isn’t Italy known for it’s charming old towns, the French for rigid cuisine, the English for their penchant for handmade shoes? A lot of Americans prefer classic cars and Harley Davidson is definitely not a technologically advanced machine. What about those hipsters with 1900 haircuts and pocket watches? When the Japanese do it, maybe it seem more anachronistic because it’s more exotic.

Trying to make specific predictions of large amorphous entities as the West and East Asia is pretty suspect.

 

[Optical_Illusion]

Generally, I don't have a personal problem with these sort of ideas, that the West is a "Faustian civilization", or that Western culture is in some sense temperamentally more disposed to activity, risk, ambition, novelty. Though they're awfully unprovable on the whole, and even more unprovable that they matter much as a force in history, I think we lose out on diversity of viewpoint from proposing them out of bounds.

But economic advances happening in East Asia in "periods of advance, followed by periods of slow stability" is probably not a very good piece of evidence to support an argument on East Asian culture attitudes to change.

We have periods of fast economic growth ("tigers", etc.) in East Asia recently, for society as a whole, because large amounts of catch up growth is possible, where it never has been so for Western countries who have stuck closer to the world technological frontier.

Earlier in history (pre-1900), deeper cycles of collapse and growth with dynasties specifically in China, likewise reflect the large gains of growth that can be made following the establishment of major zones of peace and trade, and the huge costs that are incurred when these arrangements are fragile and collapse into civil war with changes between dynasties. As opposed to more steady state fractured structure of European polities.

So none of this really supports the idea that East Asian cultures have more cultural appetite for change (as is often cited by some rather admiring Western folk looking at recent change in China, Japan or South Korea) or less cultural appetite for change, and it can be quite well explained through conventional economic forces.

 

[Pipcard]

So, what do you think about this whole idea that social structures in East Asia are too "conformist" to be leaders (instead of followers) in technological innovation?

 

[Monter]

Quick google search lead me to this article on Wikipedia (you can see more details on the external link at the bottom) that puts the East Asian countries pretty high, with only "Western" competition coming from the USA and Germany, that pretty much shows "Asians can't into innovation lmao" to be pretty rubbish.

So, what do you think about this whole idea that social structures in East Asia are too "conformist" to be leaders (instead of followers) in technological innovation?

How conformist? Was Zhu Yuanzhang, a peasant from Anhui, a born follower if he toppled the Mongols and became Emperor himself? Or Sun Yat-sen? Or hundreds of lower class individuals that rose up in the thousands of years of Chinese history (not even glimpsing at Korean and Japanese for more btw)? That really doesn't see like it. Also discounting the civilization that brought paper, the compass, gunpowder among others as "non-innovative and conformist" is bit... weird.

 

[piratedude]

I think this perception has a lot more to do with the growth & spread of capitalism (in its various forms) and its internal dynamics than any "inertia" of a particular culture.

 

[Richard V]

So, what do you think about this whole idea that social structures in East Asia are too "conformist" to be leaders (instead of followers) in technological innovation?

Two things come to mind. First the idea that East Asian culture is conformist needs qualification. East Asia is not one and the same. The cultural difference from Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Canton, Taipei are actually quite large. In the West the Japanese anolog culture is a meme, but few realize how China and Korea are now way ahead of the West in building cashless societies. Twitter hasn’t innovated in years and looks like a fax machine compared to WeChat. Why extrapolate China and Korea’s futures from Japan when no one would extrapolate California’s culture from Greece or Austria or Mississippi. To be taken seriously one has to examine specific business ecosystems.

Second, how much does conformism impede innovation? The US was highly innovative in the 1950s when it was socially conformal. A lot of innovation were actually initially government backed or even came straight out of government funded labs. My opinion is, cultural conformity may play a role, but it’s secondary. Innovation is driven primarily by talent and money. There has to be access to talented people and a lot of investment from the front end and profits from the result of this innovation. Right now there is no place that combines talent and money like California and it is the clear innovation leader.

The question is can someone else build Silicon Valley and Hollywood somewhere else? America isn’t the only place with money and talent, and the formula can be copied. I would say it’s possible but many have tried and failed so we will have to wait and see. But I wouldn’t dismiss this can’t happen in East Asia just because the Japanese are more conformist than Californians.

 

[Infinity]

Japan continuously innovates in the auto industry. The same can be said about computers. Japan continually improves video games. The university of Tokyo has more publications in Nanotechnology than any other institution. Japan is perhaps most famous nowadays for its advances in robotics. No one is more interested in making robots appear more human-like than Japan. Ion propulsion is another achievement from Japan, and yes, they have a space program!

Although, I agree partially with the argument that Japan doesn't seem to be as broadly interested in technology as the best of the west or even China for that matter. Where's Japan's Google/Baidu, Facebook/Tencent, or Amazon/Alibaba? How about an operating system? Their financial systems seem to lag behind the U.S and China as well. Nor are they doing much in geology. Extracting the Earth's resources might not be as sexy as some tech companies, but it's arguably more important.

 

[Pipcard]

Japan continuously innovates in the auto industry. The same can be said about computers. Japan continually improves video games. The university of Tokyo has more publications in Nanotechnology than any other institution. Japan is perhaps most famous nowadays for its advances in robotics. No one is more interested in making robots appear more human-like than Japan. Ion propulsion is another achievement from Japan, and yes, they have a space program!

Although, I agree partially with the argument that Japan doesn't seem to be as broadly interested in technology as the best of the west or even China for that matter. Where's Japan's Google/Baidu, Facebook/Tencent, or Amazon/Alibaba? How about an operating system? Their financial systems seem to lag behind the U.S and China as well. Nor are they doing much in geology. Extracting the Earth's resources might not be as sexy as some tech companies, but it's arguably more important.

But what about those people who argue that Japanese industry "doesn't really innovate or come up with anything new, they are only good at refining and improving existing things"? Those people like to say that as if it's a given.

And people have said Japanese robotics aren't really "practical," because back in 2011 during the Fukushima disaster, they had to rely on American robots (specifically the company iRobot). This is said to be because of a weakness in software as well as a lack of defense industry-based incentives.

 

[Richard V]

But what about those people who argue that Japanese industry "doesn't really innovate or come up with anything new, they are only good at refining and improving existing things"? Those people like to say that as if it's a given.

And people have said Japanese robotics aren't really "practical," because back in 2011 during the Fukushima disaster, they had to rely on American robots (specifically the company iRobot). This is said to be because of a weakness in software as well as a lack of defense industry-based incentives.

I would say Japanese innovation is second rate compared to the United States. They are the best of the rest, just like Germany, UK, France. Not a bad place to be really.

 

[Alex Zetsu]

Look, most cultures advance. Japan's supreme isolation and stasis is unusual. Even Qing China isn't as stagnant as most people think and were more advanced technologically than the Ming.

 

[Monter]

I would say Japanese innovation is second rate compared to the United States. They are the best of the rest, just like Germany, UK, France. Not a bad place to be really.

That's something that I find odd about those threads, people seem to bash Japan on the basis they aren't a technological hyperpower outranking the USA, but why Japan has the existential need to be the top? Why only them and not other major countries like Britain, Canada and France?