The Contradictory Paths of Civilization

Many people interested in economics are inevitably interested in the industrial revolution that began in the 1750s and the French Revolution that broke out in 1789. Because just as the science of economics that began with Adam Smith emerged as a result of the Renaissance movements that began in the 14th and 15th centuries changing the modes of production and sociological structure, the economists of the following centuries also experienced the effects of these two critical events and produced their products.

I think it would be more interesting to start this compilation, which is too narrow in scope compared to the unpretentious and exciting depth of history that will make one's hair stand on end, with some case studies. To quote Jacques Attali, the author of the book 1492, in 1436, the three cities in Europe with a population exceeding 150,000 were Istanbul, Naples and Rome, families were just beginning to understand the importance of educating their children, Portugal was bringing around 10,000 slaves from Africa to its own lands every year. In addition, Jews were forced to emigrate from the Iberian Peninsula by Catholic kings. This pitch-dark and stinking atmosphere of the Middle Ages was cleared up a little in 1435 with the invention of the printing press, advances in optics, the first blood transfusion, the development of mathematical science in Italy with the use of logarithmic functions and algebra to aid trade, and the creation of masterpieces of architecture that have survived to this day.

This air purification will reach dimensions that will disturb the whole world from time to time with the stormy years that will affect Europe for many more years. Because while Europe is creating the concept of the West, it is trying to make even the Christianity of Eastern origin European and the price of this is paid by Muslims, Jews and African slaves. The path of civilization from the printing press to the steam engine, from the steam engine to the atom and from the atom to today's communication technologies is painful. The western world has come up with an important concept in the name of which many economic theories have been produced, colonialism has been founded and massacres have been committed: Development.

During the same period, the east was a great danger for the west with the expansionist policy of the Ottomans. However, thanks to this danger, Bartolomeo Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Half-Jewish and Genoese weaver and sailor Cristobal Columbus went to the Caribbean and discovered a new continent. Then, Amerigo Vespucci gave his name to this new world. Magalhaes (Magellan) circumnavigated the world. While all this was happening, various thinkers did not stay idle in Europe. Sir Josiah Child made an economic analysis of exploitation and reached the conclusion that exploiting the new world was more advantageous than exploiting India.

Europe welcomed the New Age that began with the conquest of Istanbul with mathematicians, explorers, merchants, artists and diplomats. In other words, with old concepts that it interpreted in a new way and thought it had produced itself. But it did not forget those who created them and either expelled them from the continent or exploited those who were useful to it. Later, it had its own thinkers defend it. Max Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and accepted that everything started in the East, but he also claimed that everything reached the highest level of civilization and rational form in Europe. These were perhaps the crooked sides of Europe, but JJ Rousseau established democracy in theory with the Social Pact. Condorcet wrote A Historical Table of the Progress of Human Intelligence. Fermat also dealt with number theory in the 1600s. While rhetoric was experiencing the most glorious period of its history, Baroque music, which ended with GF Handel and JS Bach, surrendered its popularity to J. Haydn, WA Mozart and LV Beethoven in Vienna. However, the East had no contribution to these. Yet everything had started there. Perhaps the ancient Anatolian atomists could not prove the nuclear structure of the atom with today's science, but they had put products that were equivalent to Western science for their time under the shining sun of the world of civilization 2,000 years ago.

If Plato (as the West calls him, Plato) had not written The Republic, if Homer had not traveled through Anatolian lands and had not left the Iliad and the Odyssey as an inheritance, and if Aristotle had spent his time thinking about nothing, neither would the apple falling on Newton's head have had any meaning, nor would Einstein's great intelligence have found a formula E=m.c2 to entertain and keep thousands of physicists busy for years.

When I think about all this, I ask myself. I wonder where, when and how will the thousands of years of struggle of man with blood, sticks, guns and brains end. And when will he not think about what darkness the future holds? And when will he learn to continue his story without being a slave to the monsters he created, who knows how many more thousands of years it will take.

Arda Tunca (Istanbul, June 1993)