Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 173

In even the most advanced of traditional civilizations, the relatively low level of technological development permitted only a small minority to escape agricultural work. Modern technology has transformed the way of life enjoyed by a very large proportion of the human population. As the economic historian David Landes (2003: 5) observes:

Modern technology produces not only more, faster; it turns out objects that could not have been produced under any circumstances by the craft methods of yesterday. The best Indian hand-spinner could not turn out yarn so fine and regular as that of the [spinning] mule; all the forges in eighteenth-century Christendom could not have produced steel sheets so large, smooth and homogeneous as those of a modern strip mill. Most important, modern technology has created things that could scarcely have been conceived in the pre-industrial era: the camera, the motor car, the airplane, the whole array of electronic devices from the radio to the high-speed computer, the nuclear power plant, and so on almost ad infinitum.

Even so, the continuing existence of gross global inequalities means that this technological development is not shared equally across the world’s societies.

The modes of life and social institutions characteristic of the modern world are radically different from those of even the recent past, and over a period of less than three centuries – a sliver of time in human history – people have shifted away from ways of life that endured for many thousands of years. For example, a large majority of the employed population now work in services, factories, offices and shops rather than agriculture, while the largest cities are denser and larger than any urban settlements found in traditional civilizations.

The role of cities in the new global order is discussed in chapter 13, ‘Cities and Urban Life’.

In traditional civilizations, political authorities (monarchs and emperors) had little direct influence on the customs and habits of most of their subjects, who lived in fairly self-contained local villages. With industrialization, transportation and communication became much more rapid, making for a more integrated ‘national’ community. The industrial societies were the first nation-states to come into existence. Nation-states are political communities, divided from each other by clearly delimited borders rather than the vague frontier areas that separated traditional states. States have extensive powers over many aspects of citizens’ lives, framing laws that apply to all those within their borders. Virtually all societies in the world today are nation-states of this kind.

Nation-states are discussed more extensively in chapter 20, ‘Politics, Government and Social Movements’, and chapter 21, ‘Nations, War and Terrorism’.

Industrial technology has by no means been limited to peaceful economic development. From the earliest phases, production has been put to military use, radically altering how societies wage war, creating weaponry and military organizations far more advanced than in earlier cultures. Together, economic strength, political cohesion and military superiority account for the spread of ‘Western’ ways of life across the world over the last 250 years. Once again we have to acknowledge that globalization is not simply about trade but is a process that has often been characterized by wars, violence, conquest and inequality (see chapter 21, ‘Nations, War and Terrorism’).