A poor narrative

Not written by Dmitry Orlov, but one of his correspondents: The Russian Soul and the Collapse of the West. It opens:

The earliest stirrings of modern industrial society can be traced back to some 6,000 years ago, to the emergence of the first cities, the emergence of agriculture and storage of food surpluses in the Near East. A bit later, analytic and linguistic keys to the forward march of civilization found critical refinement in Aristotle’s syllogistic logic and the founding of the sciences. The current trajectory of the West burst into full self-consciousness during the period of European Enlightenment, with the birth of rationalism and the elaboration of the modern scientific method. These, in turn, eventually gave rise to the industrialization, hyper-specialization, technological innovation and increasing commodification of just about everything that we are witnessing today.

It reads more like a diatribe by an anarcho-primitivist than something you would expect at ClubOrlov. It is questionable that the advances in technology in the 18th and 19th centuries could be credited to the Enlightenement, rather than to the work of tinkerers outside of academia. Such advances were then exploited by those who had the means to do so - those who had a lot of property, and I don't think we can talk about the causes of the rise of industrial capitalism without first considering the rise of the modern nation-state, which is not the ideal political entity for Aristotle (and many of the Greeks) or the more clear-headed of the medievals.