To anyone who considers why the world is arranged the way it is, one vexing question is this: Why was the world dominated for so long by the people of Western Europe?

After all, China, India, the Mideast, and Africa have had civilizations far longer. Indeed, since Africa is where the human species evolved and where the first signs of tool use appear, African humans have had the most protracted opportunity to develop a global dominance.

Suggested explanations (even recent ones) have included racial superiority, the perhaps more reasonable observation that the long tenancy in Africa gave human parasites protracted opportunity to evolve, diversify, multiply, and sap human vitality, and the possibility that as humans moved into areas of harsher climate, they had to become more aggressive and innovative.

To these, I would like to add my own suggestion. It's based on some of the material I offer my students in the Technology and Society course I teach at Thomas College (for the syllabus, click here). It has a good deal to do with science. And it's not particularly PC.

Where to start? Well, the West has been roundly criticized as a pack of greedy, arrogant, condescending, patronizing, colonialist, racist, sexist sons of bitches. The Greeks, the Romans, the Italians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the Germans, the English, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Belgians, the Dutch, from the settlement of Rome through the Vikings and Crusaders and Conquistadores to the exploiters of India and Africa and more. Some were worse than others, but they all came, they saw, and if they liked what they saw, they took it home with them. Treasure, women, slaves, artwork, mummies, and even words (the English language is the richest one around because it contains so many "borrowed" words). Worse yet, they have shown a distinct tendency to feel that other peoples are inferior because they don't speak their language, worship their god, or share their knowledge base.

That sense of superiority is hardly unique. But perhaps it is unique that Western Europeans have expressed that feeling in numerous attempts to upgrade their "little brown brothers" to something approaching "full humanity."

Feeling annoyed already? Good. It's going to get worse. I said this wasn't particularly PC.

Let's look at the situation a little differently. Let's get rid of the put-down words and refrain for a bit from calling the people of Western Europe such awful greedy, arrogant, condescending, patronizing, colonialist, racist, sexist SOBs. Let's say instead that they obviously believed in sharing.

Not that they were very interested in being fair about it. None of this "I cut the cake, you choose the slice you want" crap. They cut, they chose. But they did seem to feel that reciprocity of some sort was appropriate, and they expressed it in those upgrade attempts: missions, schools, scholarships to Oxford and the Sorbonne.

That is, they knew a good thing when they saw it, and if it didn't cost too much--knowledge is one of those things that is not diminished by being given away--they shared it with everyone they dealt with. The schools set up by churches and colonial powers did not dish up the ideas of just one nation, but those that nation had collected from all over the world, from other colonies and countries.

It's on these ideas that I wish to focus, for I think they were much more significant than the more physical treasures. Nations that collected and used diverse ideas enjoyed great vitality, and from that vitality they gained world domination for a long time. And those that did it best--think of England and its inclusive attitude toward language, versus, say, France and its famous insistence on linguistic purity--dominated longest.

Did the vitality come first or second? Second, I think. What came first was surely a pragmatic attitude, a sense that if something worked, it was good. If it worked better, it was better, and never mind the source. With this, there also had to be a certain hastiness, an impatience, an unwillingness to worry about the long-term and perhaps subversive effects of adopting certain ideas.

We can see the opposite attitude in Asia. Well before Columbus, in 1405, the Chinese emperor Grand Eunuch Cheng Ho sent out an exploration fleet of 63 junks. In seven voyages, ending in 1433, they got as far as Africa and came home as "treasure ships," with samples and reports of vast wealth to be gained by reaching out to the new lands. However, in 1424 the Imperial court banned further long-distance voyages, either government-sponsored or private; later even the construction of sea-going craft was banned. Among the reasons were invaders in the north, a smug sense that China was so great that it had nothing to learn from the rest of the world, and apparently a fear that the flood of new ideas that must accompany foreign contact would be destabilizing. The fleet of treasure ships was sunk. For a brief account on the Internet, click here. For a nice image of an old junk such as might have been part of the exploration fleet, click here.

In Japan, guns were first introduced by Portuguese traders on the island of Tanegashima, off Kyushu, in 1543. They quickly proved popular, and Japanese blacksmiths even improved on the design, but once it was realized that guns made it possible for commoners to kill noble samurai from a nice, safe, dishonorable distance, guns were stringently controlled. They didn't return until the nineteenth century, when Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry forced the door to Japan open to the West.

In both cases, we see fondness for stability dominating the drive to innovate. China and Japan could cling successfully to the status quo because they were powerful in the first case and isolated in the second. They might have been less successful if they had been surrounded by aggressive, innovative neighbors. And they might have been less committed to the status quo if their history were shorter.

Europe's history was shorter. Every European nation was surrounded by eager competitors. And though European history has been marked by the quest for stability, the goal has been elusive. Nations and empires have risen and fallen at what must surely strike the Chinese as a bewildering pace. Change has been the norm, not stability, and in change, in political upheaval, has lain every young bravo's dream of fame and fortune.

Other parts of the world have been just as prone to upheaval, but they did not profit from the experience in the same way or to the same extent. What I think made Western Europeans more successful was their eagerness to pick up ideas, their pragmatism, if you will. Where that came from I cannot begin to guess. Perhaps it's a cultural thing, derived from the demands of survival in a bleak Ice Age environment. Perhaps it's in the genes. Perhaps we even have to consider that in addition to whatever else they were, Western Europeans had an extra degree of aggressiveness--not only were they SOBs, but they were mean SOBs. After all, Eskimos and some Native American groups (e.g., the Cherokee) are also pragmatic and very good at picking up ideas, but they don't go hunting for them. And though the Eskimos have preserved much of their culture, the Native Americans were confronted by a better armed foe who wanted their land.

More interesting than the Western European eagerness to acquire ideas as well as land and treasure, is the form that eagerness eventually took. We see the first signs when the Chinese innovation of movable type came to Europe (the Gutenberg Bible was printed by 1455). In the sixteenth century, European printing presses cranked out some 200,000,000 books and changed the definition of a library from one room with a dozen hand-copied tomes (Cambridge University had 300) to a building with many thousands.

The Chinese had not used their invention with such profligacy at all. But Western Europe was a realm of sharers. It seemed quite natural to crank those presses. As a result, literacy became a valued skill. Schools proliferated. And as it became possible for people to compare sources instead of trusting one authority figure's voice, or the one book available, critical thinking developed. This in turn led to the Protestant Reformation (Martin Luther challenged the Catholic Church in 1517) and to science.

Think about that for a moment: As long as you're being fed one version of "the truth," whether it concerns religion ("The one god, the true god, is..."), ideology ("The welfare mother is a drain upon the vitality of America!"), or the nature of physical reality ("The sun goes around the Earth"), most people are not greatly motivated to question or to check. But when you have two or more sources, and those sources do not agree, it becomes quite natural to say, "Let's see." This is why authoritarians in many areas don't much care for free access to information. Even Martin Luther, when he realized in his later years that all those thinking-for-themselves rebels against Catholicism weren't coming up with his conclusions, grew less enthusiastic about letting people read scripture for themselves.

In Western Europe, despite repeated attempts to stem the flood of new knowledge and ideas (think of the Catholic Church's Index of prohibited books), sharing won out. And in science we see the ethic of sharing in its fullest bloom. An essential part of the scientific method is communication--telling other scientists about one's guesses, theories, and experimental results, not to brag but to facilitate criticism ("If I'm wrong, tell me!") and the work of others, both one's contemporaries and one's successors. Scientists strongly dislike efforts by governments to classify their work (they are anti-secrets). They hate attempts by various groups to censor their work (information is for sharing). They're not nearly as inclined to NIH (Not Invented Here) Syndrome as, say, bureaucrats. They refuse to accept that there are things humans are not meant to know--there are only things we don't know yet.

One might be tempted to link all this to Europe's long experience with Christianity, which has been strong on spreading the word and resisting suppression ever since its beginnings. But Islam shares that strength, and it did not lead its adherents in the same direction at all. Indeed, though the Moslem nations are justly renowned for their accomplishments in mathematics ("algebra" is derived from the Arabic al-jabr, meaning the joining of broken parts), astronomy, and other areas, they have done little since the Renaissance; some have blamed their intellectual stagnation on the Islamic prohibition of representational images, without which science cannot work.

Science requires not just an eagerness to spread the word and resist suppression, but also an openness to the new. It defies the status quo. It is a distinctively Western European development.

Am I then saying that scientists are modern Vikings? In a way, yes. Like Vikings, they venture forth to other realms than home--some new, some previously raided--in search of booty. They fetch that booty home, and then they tell everyone all about it. And when they figure out what to do with it, they tell again, and in the process they change the world. The result is Western civilization, much envied, much aspired to, much imitated.

Yet science's attitude does not go unchallenged. There are plenty of people who would tell the Chinese sailors to stay home, tell Vikings there are fields to plow and sheep to shear and "How much did that new longship cost, anyway?" Today they question the costs of space programs, Superconducting Super Colliders, experimental fusion reactors, and so on. They fear that if we learn too much about the human genome we will open a door to new kinds of discrimination, if we learn how to manipulate genes, we will create monsters, if we approve new food additives or drugs, we will cause an epidemic of cancer or brain disorders or .... You get the idea. These are the people who cling to the status quo, who fear change, who are unwilling to take chances, who insist on a guarantee that the world will not bite.

A civilization can be run that way. The histories of China and Japan both confirm that. But we must remember that China and Japan could hold their static line only temporarily. While they rested smug behind their borders of distance and power and isolation, Western Europe and its American spinoff were learning, gaining power, and preparing to deliver little notes that said "Share--or else!"

Is calling scientists Vikings, or perhaps the inheritors of the Viking spirit, a criticism? Some might say so, for after all we do think of Vikings as greedy, arrogant, violent, vicious, mean, racist, sexist, colonialist exploiters of nature. Them's fightin' words, you know!

But I tried to duck that terminology in favor of calling them sharers. Crude, violent, and unfair, but still sharers. Modern scientists have dropped the crudeness, violence, and unfairness, but they're still sharers, and that's the key.

Is this sort of sharing a long-term survival strategy for the human species? I'd like to think so, but I have to remember that human activities (not just Western) have done immense amounts of damage to the world and promise still more in the near future (e.g., global warming and sea level rise). If scientists can find solutions that permit human civilization to remain, then yes, sharing is indeed good for the long term. But if solutions do not exist or cannot be made acceptable to human governments, we might well wind up saying, "Gee, maybe all that sharing wasn't such a great idea. Maybe we should have stuck with the status quo and never left the 1400s."

Of course, that doesn't work unless the neighbors think the same way. If they are Vikings and you're not, you will soon be conquered or out-competed or relegated to the world's sidelines. Unless you change your mind, as Japan did after Perry's visit.

I don't think refusing to share ideas with the rest of the world can work for long unless everyone chooses the same path. Since there will surely always be Vikings, or sharers, and they will inevitably gain wealth and power as a result of their attitude, competition must drive everyone else in the same direction. It may be a risky direction, it may threaten the survival of the species, but the alternative threatens the survival of nations and cultures. To many, that is the worse threat.

What's your take on this? You're readers of Tomorrowsf, an on-line magazine published on the Internet, a medium that embodies the sharing ideal even more than the classic printing press (Project Gutenberg--making classic books available in electronic form, for free--was not so named by accident). You're hooked on sharing. If the Internet vanished, I suspect, you would suffer some fairly severe withdrawal symptoms. You would react in much the same way if the Internet's content were restricted in the name of secrecy or censorship (both of which are real possibilities; visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation). Banning the printing press may seem less conceivable, but it would surely have a similar impact. Banning science... well, there are people who would do it if they could, for science scares them or conflicts with their religious beliefs. If they ever manage to have their way (not that that seems very likely), it would be an unmitigated disaster for civilization. The 1400s were not really a very pleasant time to be alive.

If I resist my own bias as a scientist, I have to say that the tale is not yet told. Most people find the survival of the species or civilization a bit too abstract an issue to worry about. We won't know whether it is best to pursue change or stasis until it is too late.

In the meantime, everyone on the planet seems to want the same standard of living enjoyed in Western Europe, Japan, North America, and the rest of the developed world. That is, the world seems to have decided that the Vikings and other Western Europeans were right: "Share -- or else!"

RECOMMENDED READING:

Rudi Volti, Society and Technological Change (New York: St. Martin's, 1995, 3rd ed.) (ISBN 0-312-09642-9).

Dr. Thomas A. Easton is Professor of Life Sciences at Thomas College in Waterville, Maine. He has been the Analog book columnist for almost 20 years. His latest novel is Silicon Karma (Clarkston, GA: White Wolf, 1997). His latest nonfiction books are Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Science, Technology, and Society (Guilford, CT: Dushkin Publishing Group, 1995, 2nd ed., 1997) and Periodic Stars: An Overview of Recent Science Fiction (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Books, 1997).