Page 262 - Contribution To Phenomenology

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURAL REVENGE 255

cross cultural exchange went the other way as well—if alcohol typically
decimated much Native American culture, feral ponies from Coronado's
heartland explorations were the major factor in changing the Sioux from
a more sedintary, forest dwellers into the famed horseback hunters of the
migrating buffalo.
C Technoscience itself, however, has its roots within Euro-American
histories. These postdate the discovery of the New World, but the first
moves were within Europe and the rise of Renaissance science which also
presupposed the already sophisticated technologically textured Medieval
developments. The accelerations which occured in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries—Modern and Enlightment Periods—^were even more
technologically enclothed with the nineteenth—the Industrial Revolutions.
If the first moves were Continentally originated, there was a very early
and little noticed movement of the same technoscience into the North
American context, now wedded to a new entrepeneural and competetive
spirit. Technologies soon began to be more refined and radical than their
European ancestors—the clippers and then the "America," a pragmatic
racer faster than all of England's racing yachts, won the cup of the same
name and held it (with one temporary loss) for the nearly century and
a half of naval design development.
And, if technoscience as the unique weldment of science and
technology, is today regarded as needing an educational, theoretical, and
productive basis to be autonomous, its production has not yet spread far
beyond the Euro-American confines even today. Most of the European
countries. North America, Anglo-European Australasia, Israel, and South
Africa, to which we may now add only a couple of Northern Asian
countries—Japan and Korea—with all the other, often largest populace
countries, still struggling to attain autonomy, are the only originating
producers of technoscience. The remainder of the englobed world is the
recipient.
The recent Gulf War is our most dramatic, contemporary example:
The USSR, many European countries, and the USA, were the suppliers
of Iraq with the war technologies needed to undertake a peculiarly
vicious form of cultural revenge. If Iraq's was the world's fourth largest
army, its weaponry was non-indigineous. Nor was the attempt to forge the
War into an IslamicAVest conflict successful. Insofar as the conflict was
cultural and confrontational, the dangers were unlikely to have been
successful as revenge. It is not here that I shall focus the inquiry into
technology and cultural revenge.