Progress and decline
A certain kind of old-fashioned idealism, the claim that ideas drive material historical developments, dies hard. In moments of material decline, it is common for the worried to thrash around for explanations and blame culture or prevalent ideas for degenerating. Now we have a fine model of that in the FT, where John Burn-Murdoch asks how progress talk in the Anglospheres v. Hispanic world correlated with relative economic growth since 1600 — claiming to find an explosion of optimism in pre-industrial Britain and so reaching for the conclusion that such talk played some role in causing massive technological transformation. Burn-Murdoch is drawing on new research from Almelhem et al, available in full here. Here is the image that sums it up:
The claim is a heavily ideological one. It takes discourse and the cultural environment to be determinative even though the evidence presented supports no such proposition; why is it not likelier that a set of social changes in early modernity, not least the growth of urban trade, settler colonial expansion and merchant capitalism generated massive discursive change and then industrial transformation? The important thing is how this historical argument sustains a claim about the present and the future. Techno-optimists and (to my surprise) Burn-Murdoch worry that the West is not talking brightly enough about the future: