Did Romans have Futurism?

[NDP]

@ralph124c

The idea of progrss, based upon technological change, is a recent one. It certainly did not exist before AD 1300 or so (it coincided with the invention of the mechanical clock). The Romans were a stagnant society-the idea of a radically different future did not appeal to them at all-which is why they never invented a working steam engine.

Actually, the technology (via the Greeks) for a workable steam engine was there. It’s just that nobody apparently saw fit to use the device as anything more than some sort of neat temple toy.

[coremelt]

I am also puzzled, Romans had witnessed many inventions: concrete, plumbing facilities, cranes, wagon technology, mechanized harvesting machines, domes, the arch in building practice, wine and oil presses, and glass blowing.

list from here:

Ancient Roman technology

how was it possible they didn’t see the changes that the above list caused in building and production capability and extrapolate that innovation would continue? even if on a whole romans were fatalists due to religion there should have been some individuals who didn’t fit the standard.

[Skylark]

@straggler

I have a vague memory of one of my high school history teachers telling me that a Chinese ruler once experimented with a bit of futurism, and decided that China had already reached the technological pinnacle, so withdrew all funding from R&D. Can’t back this up, though.

Sounds like when the Ming dynasty burned all their ships after Zheng He (the guy with the real big boats) came back with all those giraffes. Tho it’s debated whether it really happened quite like that (check out the historiography discussion going on above), but that’s the conventional telling.

@Alex_Dubinsky

You’re in 100 AD Rome. You live in an apartment in a city of one million. You go to downstairs to buy some breakfast as you head to work. After work you go to the [super?]market where produce has been trucked in over paved roads. Perhaps this wouldn’t apply to mere workers, but you might also hit the gym and go for a swim in a heated pool.

At the end of a long week sneak into the emperor’s palace and catch a stand up philosopher.

[Mr.Kobayashi]

@Alex_Dubinsky

Yet… the monuments hadn’t existed until they built them. The future was going to be different from the past: there’d be endlessly more stone stuff standing around. No one in Egypt ever got high and thought of that?

Math didn’t exist in Greece until Pythagoras, and a mere 200 years later had advanced to the point of Euclid’s Elements–a work so advanced it would be the standard for the next one or two thousand years. Did none of the philosophers at the time think, “Holy crap. In the future mathematics will become so powerful it will solve all our problems”? (Or that philosophy will explain everything in the world, etc.?)

Greek society and forms of government advanced just as rapidly. When Plato wrote the Republic, did he have some idea or hope that that was what the future was going to be like?
If the answer to all of the previous questions is no, then I’d like to figure out why. What was it that kept the ancients from extrapolating their progress, in taking an entirely circular, nihilist view of history despite reality pointing to the contrary. Did they have a poor awareness of history? Did they believe too fervently in things like Atlantis (ie, past civilizations supposedly more advanced than they)? Were they so impressed by everything that’d been accomplished that they didn’t think it could get much better? (Like, apparently, that one Chinese emperor.)

If they did nobody cared or wrote it down, the present was far more important - as was preparing yourself for the afterlife. Extrapolating that in a few generations time their might be some more pyramids around was useful to…well, no-one. Add to this the effect of the flood on Egyptian culture and you get a very cyclical view of the future; ask an average Egyptian his views about the future and he’ll likely tell you that the Nile will flood again, there will be a different Pharoah and, if his heart was found to be free of vice, he would be dwelling in the field of reeds.

Plato’s Republic does not mention the future as you think of it, except in the immediate, personal sense (and the Greek sense of being tied in with the fates). Speaking of mathematics, you may find this extract interesting;

He had recently been at the shrine of Ammon, and it was plain that he was not particularly impressed by most of the things there, but in regard to the ever-burning lamp he related a story told by the priests which deserves special consideration; it is that the lamp consumes less and less oil each year, and they hold that this is a proof of a disparity in the years, which all the time is making one year shorter in duration than its predecessor; for it is reasonable that in less duration of time the amount consumed should be less.

c 3 The company was surprised at this, and Demetrius went so far as to say that it was ridiculous to try in this way to draw great conclusions from small data, not, as Alcaeus5 puts it, “painting the lion from a single claw,” but with a wick and lamp postulating a mutation in the heavens and the universe, and doing away completely with mathematical science.

p355 “Neither of these things,” said Cleombrotus, "will disturb these men; certainly they will not concede any superior accuracy to the mathematicians, since it is more likely that a set period of time, in movements and cycles so far away, should elude mathematical calculation than that the measurement of the oil should elude the very men who were always giving careful attention to the anomaly and watching it closely because of its strangeness
…

But memory is for us the hearing of deeds to which we are deaf and the seeing of things to which we are blind. Hence, as I said, it is no wonder that, if it has command over things that no longer are, it anticipates many of those which have not yet come to pass, since these are more closely related to it, and with these it has much in common; for its attachments and associations are with the future, and it is quit of all that is past and ended, save only to remember it.

c 40 "Souls therefore, all possessed of this power, which is innate but dim and hardly manifest, nevertheless oftentimes disclose its flower and radiance in p469dreams, and some in the hour of death,134 when the body becomes cleansed of all impurities and attains a temperament adapted to this end, a temperament through which the reasoning and thinking faculty of the souls is relaxed and released from their present state as they range amid the irrational and imaginative realms of the future. It is not true, as Euripides135 says, that

The best of seers is he that guesses well;

no, the best of seers is the intelligent man, following the guidance of that in his soul which possesses sense and which, with the help of reasonable probability, leads him on his way. But that which foretells the future, like a tablet without writing, **is both irrational and indeterminate in itself, but receptive of impressions and presentiments through what may be done to it, and inconsequently grasps at the future when it is farthest withdrawn from the present. **

From Plutarch’s Moralia, on Oracles.

Plutarch • On the Failure of Oracles

In other words, the future defies mathematical prediction and attempting to predict what may happen in the distant future is ‘inconsequential’.

Note also that the Greeks were great believers in fate (most of the great tragedies revolve around the idea that you cannot escape or defy fate/the gods; see Oedipus Rex). An unknown Greek Platoist writes;

569Although events are infinite, extending infinitely into the past and future,38 fate, which encloses them all in a cycle, is nevertheless not infinite but finite, as neither a law nor a formula39 nor anything divine can be infinite.40 Further, you would understand what is meant if you should apprehend the entire revolution and the complete sum of time.

ps‑Plutarch • On Fate

The concept of the future as a linear progression of technology was simply not considered in ancient times. Which sounds insane to us, but then even a cursory glance at other ancient ideas will give you similar impressions.

[CJJ]

@Mr.Kobayashi

The concept of the future as a linear progression of technology was simply not considered in ancient times. Which sounds insane to us, but then even a cursory glance at other ancient ideas will give you similar impressions.

I think this pretty much nails it. It’s important I think to differentiate between mere historical change–which the Romans and anyone who had a written history recognized–and the specific notion of predictable progress. Futurists extrapolate based on the specific assumption of linear progressions in technology. Under this assumption, it’s not too difficult to, say, predict television once radio has been invented.

Why didn’t the Romans (or any other ancient society) appreciate the progression of technology? For starters, there wasn’t really a lot of impetus for innovative technology. A vast slave-labor pool plus the need for jobs to keep the urban poor employed meant there wasn’t a great market for labor-saving devices. If, say, a landholder wanted to double his agricultural production or cut harvest time in half, his first impulse would be to double his labor force, not invest in better technology.

Second, the few widespread inventions that did occur didn’t seem to spark further innovation. Glass-blowing is an excellent example; the main application seemed to be to produce “more of the same” items that were already being made using glass casting. Certainly the new technique produced stylistic or artistic changes, but the greatest effect seems to have been merely to make glass more common. The use of glass for windows is an excellent example of the pattern: The discovery of clear-but-not perfectly-transparent glass leads to its use in windows, but the window glass is made using the older (and more labor-intensive) casting technique. No Roman seems to have put together the nascent technologies of clear glass and glass blowing to make a better product (e.g. crown glass or blown plate), so glass windows remained a luxury item.

[Askance]

@Alex_Dubinsky

You’re in 100 AD Rome. You live in an apartment in a city of one million. You go to downstairs to buy some breakfast as you head to work. After work you go to the [super?]market where produce has been trucked in over paved roads. Perhaps this wouldn’t apply to mere workers, but you might also hit the gym and go for a swim in a heated pool.

I guess some people might be unimpressed by that, but as an admirer of the fine-grained aspects of economics, I find it all to be marvelously advanced organization. And Romans made a point of spreading all this.

That’s society, not economy. In no way did the Roman economy resemble “modernity”.

[Una_Persson]

Mr. Kobayashi, thank you for your informative posts.

[Mr.Kobayashi]

Thanks, Una Persson, the classical world is a bit of a passion of mine, quite an interesting question too.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

Am I wrong, or was Rome more interested in looking backward, towards a fictional “Golden Age”?

Or was that the Greeks?

Or, as I suspect, both?

[Mr.Kobayashi]

@Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor

Am I wrong, or was Rome more interested in looking backward, towards a fictional “Golden Age”?

Or was that the Greeks?

Or, as I suspect, both?

It’s a Greek idea, of the Ages of Man the Golden Age was the most ancient, mythical age of plenty. The Romans naturally nicked the idea.