I don’t want to hijack this thread on African development anymore than it has been, and I think this should have its own thread regardless.
How come other cultures did not take the ‘Japanese’ route of coming to par with Europe? Japan had a sales call from the West in the 1600’s, basically said “that’s nice, but we don’t need any thank you,” since they were on a fairly equal footing. And then shut and locked the door for about two centuries.
Then in the 1850’s America then knocked on the door and said they had to buy some stuff or else. Japan said okay to make nice for the moment, but also had a WTF moment and said to themselves “we have seemed to have fallen behind a bit.” And proceeded to catch up very quickly.
So, why was Japan the exception and not the rule? Why didn’t the Muslim* powers or the Native American cultures never try to adopt technology the way Japan did. And even today, most tribal cultures seem content to remain tribal. Why are they not all off to engineering school and the like?
Thanks,
AP
I know the Turks were keeping up, mostly, with Europe, but Persia and the Mughals in India did not seem to care.
Average IQ is hardly important, since in any group, there are, by definition, people who are above average IQ and who will end up in leadership positions. If you have 10 people of 90 IQ and 5 people of 120 (assuming, of course, that IQ is even meaningful – it was never intended to be anything other than a way of seeing if students were ahead or behind the others in their class, not a guide to native intelligence), and the the second group are running things, then the average IQ is meaningless.
Some people in other cultures tried to follow the example of Japanese modernization. Here is a webpage discussing Ethiopian “Japanizers” from the early 20th century.
I am not going to go the route of saying that IQ doesn’t mean anything at all. I will say that those are current IQ results (estimates?) or something and there could be many flaws in that deduction such as who are allowed to take the test.
I will leave it to you to expand on:
What current IQ test results mean in context of the OP. The U.S. and western Europe see a trend called the Flynn effect that means that IQ scores have risen substantially every decade since they started. Average students today are basically super-geniuses in the 1940’s and most of the 1940’s students would have to be placed in special-ed now.
How do those IQ scores directly correlate to what is being said? It is a test score that is measuring something but it could be things such as extremely abstract thinking that would not directly a culture developing much directly. You need to explain the mechanism for this. A clan of crack farmer/tradesmen/blacksmiths is going to do much better than a clan of poets/abstract mathematicians in my mind.
PC has nothing to do with it. (And you should note botht the responses in your other post on the topic–to say nothing of the caveats expressed in the Wiki article to which you linked–indicating that IQ is a bit of a chimaera, especially in such contexts.
A more serious answer would probably be that Japan, having closed itself off to begin with, was a much more uniform society with far less internal disruption, so an edict from the top could be enforced more swiftly with less resistance than similar edicts in other lands.
The inhabitants of the Americas were far less organized (and scattered across enormous lands) and they were seriously harmed by diseases that destroyed their ability to organize and adopt the technology of the invaders.
China, India, and the Ottoman Empire all had brief chances to stand up to the Europeans, but were torn apart by internal strife (often fomented by the Europeans). It helped the European position that they were the ones visiting the other lands. Europe never had fleets of outsiders clamoring in their harbors either to beg or ddemand special favors (and threatening or bribing local factions to side with them).
There is probably not a nice simple single solution, of course. China’s history differs from India’s that differs from the Middle East.
Its only an exception in a pretty small set of countries that managed to remain uncolonised…
The only major ones I can think of (off the top of my head, I’m sure I’ll be corrected) are China, Ethiopia (actually didn’t do too badly, and inflicted a major defeat on Italy during the 1800s), and as you point out the Ottoman Empire (which was at the end of a centuries old decline, but prior to that had been far ahead of the west technologically).
Of the ones that were colonised, they took a while to recover by in several cases are now on a par with the west (India, Singapore, Malaysia, etc).
I think a big part of the issue is that a technological society needs a high degree of cooperation between the people within it. For that to happen, there has to be a certain level of trust, of commonality, of shared values. This is a huge problem in tribal societies or societies in which there is a weak and/or corrupt government. When people are afraid to trade because their profits will be stolen, or they are unwilling to trade with the ‘other tribe’, or the government is so corrupt that the bribes and kickbacks bring economic activity to a halt, it is very difficult to build the kinds of modern institutions needed for a highly technological society.
In the west, we had the rule of law, capitalism, constitutions, strong police protection, consistent laws and effective courts, and all the other trappings of civil society. The stuff you need to make an interconnected economy work. Japan had a different system, but their codes of honor and rigid cultural structure actually gave them a framework from which to build large institutions as well.
They were never really given a chance, the sophisticated civilised (in srict sense of the word: i.e. building cities) cultures were wiped out by the spanish. There was a explict campaign to extinguish these cultures, they were never given the chance to obtain western technology. The nomadic tribal societies of north america did adopt western technology (horses, guns, etc) but that was never going to enough to protect tribal societies against westernized military.
Don’t pull that. I am well versed in psychometrics and took extensive classes on intelligence testing in graduate school. I understand it well and I know that people often like to gloss over facts.
You are a guest here. I think you will find our little community different here. We support PC and un-PC ideas equally as long as they are grounded in sound things.
Your flaws are:
Current IQ scores equal Japanese IQ scores in the past. This is almost certainly not the case. Group IQ scores change dramatically over time.
How those IQ scores would translate into a successful society. What seems self-evident to you really isn’t. There have to be other factors at work even if that is the case.
The SDMB requires more work on your part than throwing out a random number even if it is a valid cite.
I would put it down to several things (in no particular order):
They already had a decent government (i.e. maintaining a beauracracy.)
They had forewarning via being able to see what happened to China.
A literate population.
A strong (if internal) economy, with equivalents to corporations, monopolies, and laws to deal with such.
A strong middle class of samurai.
Luck.
The revolutionaries who wanted to see the country into the modern world were honest in that, rather than becoming like the French Revolution or most others which become missions of powergrabbing.
I’m presently listening to a college course on tape that addresses this very issue. One reason is that Japan was not divided up into a small class of very rich people and a large class of poor peasants like most of the non-Western world at the time. It was mostly a land of small farmers who were reasonaby well off compared to most of the rest of the non-Western world. 40% of all Japanese males were literate in the mid-nineteenth century, which is close to the situation in Europe and North America at the time. There was a class of intellectuals reading Western books, including science books, at the time, since a deliberate decision had been made in 1750 to import such books and learn from them. Basically, Japan was already halfway to the situation of the Western world when the American ships arrived. Then, in the 1860’s, there was the Meiji Restoration which got rid of the Shogunate, which made it easier for industrialization to go forward.
Actually, the amazing thing is that people are still floating that statement of “support” for psychometrics that was cobbled together to defend the book The Bell Curve when it was published (lacking peer review) and before it could be analyzed. The actual statement by the “52 experts” has its own problems:
It was initially written as a self-serving defense against people who said that all IQ testing was nonsense (which is different than people in the Wiki article or on these boards pointing out that drawing conclusions from widely disparate IQ testing may be inappropriate or unsupportable);
It includes several signatories who are recognized as blatant racists even in the psychometric community, notably J. Philippe Rushton;
It does not actually provide proof of anything other than a desire for a group of people to “defend their turf”;
Being published prior to the reviews of The Bell Curve, it fails to address the many problems that actual workers in the field have discovered in the methodology and conclusions published in that work.
Thanks for the link. I was not aware of the Ethiopian attempt.
They represent the trend, or lack of, that I am exploring. It is the lack of technological curiousity that baffles me.
Sage Rat and Wendell Wagner, you both bring up good points also. Thanks.
griffin1977, to use the Lewis and Clark expedition as an example, all the tribes they encountered were fairly stable, and some had very rich, though preliterate, cultures, and most were familiar with Europeans and their goods. But none of the tribes expressed an interest in the manufacture of those goods, only what they could trade for them (or such interest does not seem to be part of the historical record.)
And again, even in the Third World today, there does seem to be a high demand for technology. Don’t they want Internet porn also? (I am only half-joking.) I like to watch the travel channels, and I see all these documentary film crews carrying around all this high-tech equipment, and no one seems all that interested in it. Is all of that left on the cutting room floor?
I don’t see how IQ is a factor either, especially averages. Science and technology makes it greatest leaps from those above the average. And the average European was not that far ahead of most the world until fairly recently. I doubt the disparity, if any, was that great at the beginning of the colonial period or even the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Literacy does appear to be a large factor though. I think that goes to the heart of why Latin America did not keep up with North America. Their culture has unfortunately promoted a strong bias against non-religious literacy.
It just surprises me that not being curious appears to be the default instead of the opposite trait.
you have to have some kind of frame of reference before you could even begin to wonder about making the tech for yourself.
I can give an example from rl thats not excat but might shed some light.
I teach defensive driving, I also teach adults how to drive. there is a huge difference between teaching somone from America or another first world country where cars are normal everyday life from birth vrs 2nd and 3rd world where cars are (to some at least) a magical device that you can control through some kind of incantations or something.
people who are acclimated to tech (or to whatever for that matter) often dont realise how different others see those things. you wouldnt believe some of the things I hear from my immigrant students that they thought about cars and driving. there are quite a few members here who recal the days before pcs, the net, wireless, cell phones and the like. when they were new tech we took some time to adjust but we also had the history of previous tech already.
The North American tribes were (by and large IANA Anthropologist) nomadic hunter gathers or simple argiculuturalists. They didn’t have large towns or cities, or complex hierachical social systems, the idea they would have been able to create an industrial society from scratch (even if they had the inclination to do so) seems exceedingly unlikely. Many other cultures (including Japan) had the kind of complex society that could be industriallized. The vast majority were taken over by a colonial power, (sometimes, in the case of the Meso-american cultures, wiped out entirely).
By the time that Lewis and Clark wandered up the Missouri that was (almost) true). It is important to note, however, that North America had hosted several very large and quite complex societies. The Iroquois confederacy, the Natchez, Coosa, and several others were as large as most European nations of the period, were founded on an agricultural economy, and had very complex relationships among groups.
What they lacked was immunity to European disease. When De Soto made his trek through the Southeast, his soldiers reported passing up to a dozen towns with each day’s travel. However, the Spaniards brought disease with them and when de Luna returned to the area sixteen years later, he found that the populations had been reduced by as much as 90% between the pestilence and the civil wars that followed.
I’d add (some of which key off of what you mentioned):
The Tokugawa regime had become thoroughly discredited/the existing elites had strong reasons to desire change.
There existed a source of legitimacy outside the control of the existing political system (the Emperor) that the revolutionaries could use; by aligning themselves with that source they could attack the existing order while being ‘traditionalist’ at the same time.
More generally, it has been argued that Japan has traditionally been very pragmatic about adapting to the realities of the situation it finds itself in and making the best of it. Japanese leaders leading up to the Meiji Restoration and since have often spoken of the “trends of the times” and the “force of the inevitable” as things that need to be obeyed.