Divided we stand

Toward the end of his landmark book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond poses an interesting question.  From the fifteenth century on, why was it Europe rather than China that launched the Renaissance, produced an explosion of scientific research and technological innovation, explored and colonized the Americas and Australia, and eventually came to dominate the globe?  During the Middle Ages, China had been far more technologically innovative and advanced than Europe.  From 1405 to 1433, Chinese "treasure fleets" of hundreds of ships, much bigger than those later used by Columbus or da Gama, plied the Indian Ocean.  An observer at that time would have predicted that China, not Europe, would achieve colonial dominion over the world and lead it into industrialization and modernity.  So why was it actually Europe which did that instead?

Diamond's answer is interesting, and has important lessons for our own time.

For reasons ultimately connected with geography, China for most of its history (since the third century BC, at least) has been a single huge unified state, while Europe since the fall of Rome has been fragmented into dozens or sometimes hundreds of small independent countries.  This meant that certain kinds of bad decisions by leadership, while equally likely to happen in either civilization, had much more decisive impact in China than in Europe.

For example, China stopped sending its "treasure fleets" due to the outcome of a power struggle between two factions in its government.  The fleets had been a project of the faction which ultimately lost, and were strongly identified with it -- so the winning faction made an end to them and even dismantled China's shipyards to prevent more ocean-going ships from being built in the future.  It's the kind of thing that could happen in any country.  But because all of China was under a single government, this one accident of history took the whole Chinese civilization out of the running in the field of global exploration.

In Europe, even if one country had banned shipbuilding due to some similar political event, other countries would still have continued.  As Diamond points out, Columbus went to several European leaders looking for support for his plan to circumnavigate the globe and was turned away, until the king of Spain agreed to sponsor him.  If Spain had also turned him down, he would have kept trying other monarchs until one finally agreed.  Even if China had produced a similarly ambitious explorer, he would not have been able to carry out his project.

Similarly, at various times during the fifteenth century China abandoned development of a number of promising technologies.  China's political unity meant that once these decisions were made, they were enforced throughout the whole vast region.  In Europe, at the same time, there were many cases of individual governments rejecting or trying to suppress various new technologies -- but in every case, there were other countries that embraced the new ideas and moved forward.  When the new technologies were militarily or economically useful, those countries which rejected them were left behind and marginalized, and ultimately had no choice but to abandon their recalcitrance -- so Europe as a whole continued to progress, while China stagnated.

The lesson for our own time is clear.  Many people find the divided condition of the world frustrating and wish for a global government which could solve problems on a world-wide scale.  But the example of the fifteenth century shows the potential danger of this.  The anti-technology mentality is still very much alive in some circles, motivated either by religious taboos or by a bizarre tremulous "there are things man was not meant to know" mentality, or sometimes simply denial or misunderstanding of science.  It's not so long ago that religionists in the US were opposing AIDS treatments and mass HPV vaccination on the grounds that they would encourage "sexual immorality", and the general anti-vaccine movement continues to do great harm in many parts of the world.  Advocates of teaching creationism in schools instead of evolution, which would cripple the study of biology as a whole, have had some political success in the US.  Printing, lightning rods, airplanes, and many other new technologies aroused opposition on various grounds when they were first introduced.  Today, there are forces which oppose work on nanotechnology, anti-aging research, and certain fields of genetic engineering.

If the entire world were under a single government, anti-science forces would be strongly motivated to seek influence in that government to bring about a global ban on research into areas they find objectionable.  If they succeeded, this would result in some period of unnecessary stagnation, as happened in China, or perhaps would even mean that progress in those fields would be carried out by underground groups such as terrorist organizations (Ray Kurzweil has emphasized this danger in the case of nanotechnology -- if governments try to slow down research, they will be left defenseless against nanotech-based weapons developed by terrorists, since they will have prevented themselves from building up the knowledge base necessary to create such defenses).  Just imagine how much worse the covid-19 pandemic would be, if for several decades the (mostly Christian and Islamist) global anti-vaccine movement had been able to influence a world government to slow down vaccine research everywhere, so that the mRNA technology which we used to create vaccines against the new coronavirus so quickly had not yet been developed.

The world's politically-fragmented condition is our insurance against such disasters.  Even if anti-vaxers had managed to stop or slow research in one or two countries, it would have continued elsewhere.  Stalin's embrace of Lysenkoism crippled Soviet progress in genetics, but the West continued to move forward.  If reactionaries someday persuade a conservative US government to ban work on genetic engineering or on curing aging, then the work will continue in other advanced nations.  And as in fifteenth-century Europe, any country which stops progress on important new technologies within its own borders will tend to fall behind rival nations which embrace those technologies, ultimately becoming marginalized and irrelevant on the world stage -- unless it changes its ways.