There is this common belief among a lot of people today (even me until more recently) about this idea of technological and societal development. This notion that we are currently more advanced technologically and culturally today than peoples of the past. Now technological advancement or evolution I can somewhat understand, but the idea of an advanced culture makes no sense to me.
My understanding for all this (or at least when I started to think about this) came from playing games like Civilization or Age of Empires, and I remember I posted a comment asking for some clarification here:
But more recently, I was watching an episode of Stargate where the main characters go to another planet and encounter a tribe they considered as not having "evolved" and I was reminded again of this notion of "advancedness". So my question is can you suggest any good books to read about this idea? The idea of progress and how it applies (or doesn't) to societal development.
This is a good question, hope the following helps a bit:
As you no doubt already noted from the answers to your earlier question, the idea that is very heavily implied in Civilization type games, known in the art as “technological determinism”, i.e. that technological development determines the societal development is widely seen as a problematic, to put it mildly. First of all, how should we measure societal development in the first place? There are of course some ideas, my personal favorite being the society’s treatment of its most vulnerable and despised members, but it does not seem to be a topic where we’d achieve a global understanding any time soon.
Closely related, if not intertwined with, to this idea is the idea of Progress as a linear advance of society via science and technology.
So the books you’d probably want to read are books that examine the case for technological determinism and the idea of linear progress. There are many of them and I don’t even have an exhaustive list nor can I provide one, but here we go regardless.
The two major research fields that have examined the ideas above and, in the opinion of most current science and technology scholars, have found them lacking are Social Construction of Technology (often abbreviated as “SCOT”) and social shaping of technology. The differences between these two are subtle, and although I for one slightly prefer the latter conceptualization, they are to a very large degree interchangeable. The fundamental works here are Bijker et al’s The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (1987) and MacKenzie’s and Wajckman’s The Social Shaping of Technology (2nd Ed., 1999). The latter’s introductory essay is freely available with some Googling and is an excellent introduction to key ideas (also, Wikipedia has a pretty good overview of technological determinism and its critiques). I can also warmly recommend Wajckman’s other works; e.g. Feminism Confronts Technology (1991) contains numerous excellent observations regarding the “inevitabilities” of technology. Then there are the works of Langdon Winner of course, and the slim edited volume by Marx (not the famous one), “Does technology drive history?”, is another great overview.
I would also suggest reading some more polemical works about the nature of “progress”., and trying to keep an open mind when reading them: I for one would’ve rejected many such books outright when fresh out from engineering school, but now find them quite insightful. Two relatively recent ones I can recommend, though advise to take as arguments and not as final truths, are Ryan’s Civilized to Death and Wright’s A Short History of Progress.
Hope this helps, let me know if you want to know more!