Danny Hillis makes a similar analogy in 'The Pattern on the Stone', where he reasons that if someone 200-300 years ago where told what he did for work he'd be burned as a witch.
"The period of the European witch trials, with the most active phase and which saw the largest number of fatalities seems to have occurred between 1560 and 1630.[31][5] The period between 1560 and 1670 saw more than 40,000 deaths.[32]"
from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_mo...
Did you find any actual statistics? I did not, but as far as I know witch trials happened after the reformation and somewhat coincided with the enlightenment.
Without the results/successes of tech developments, we probably wouldn't have as much witch burnings and hunts.
Think about doctors walking around healing people, doing surgeries. That's basically what a witch does. Where else do they get their power?
the Massachusetts witch trials were 1692-93, and pardons only started being given out well into the 1700's
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-th...
There's also the critical theory about how the Enlightenment is only the Enlightenment in retrospect. During that time, it would have been a miserable existence full of broken and exploited people, and people believing in totally different realities and agendas.
It's like someone looking back 500 years in the future would would say "during the covid era science developed significant breakthroughs in universal vaccine technology"
Where as looking from today, it's all about vaccine/mask denialism, protests about 5G microchips, mass information, mass deaths (a lot of people died in the last 2 years from disease), etc.
That's not a theory, that's the obvious interpretation of what everyone knows about the time period, including the people who were living in it. Even the texts of the enlightenment are often about how bad they think their society is.
Healers in the middle ages performed life saving surgeries, even on people with serious injuries to their skulls. (This isn't supposed to be a scientific defense of medieval healing techniques, but these were skilled people with limited tools and knoledge trying their best. Same as today.) Successfull healers weren't considered witches, because they were recognized as a legitimite profession and the catholic church largely regarded "healing magic" as pagan superstition.
Listening to some teenager complain about how they "hate nerds" or <insert pseudoscience> or <insert antiscience idiocy> with a device that is using quantum-level physics, materials engineering, electrical engineering, math, computer science, chemistry, unimaginable nerd-centuries of effort.
Modern humanity exists in a miracle of technology. Witchcraft to people only 300 years ago. And to say nothing of heating, cooling, transportation, agriculture, medicine, etc.
Transistor/Information Technology however may be building such a stack of technology dependence that is easily teetered and makes our whole civilization much more fragile to disruption. We saw it with Covid, about as insignificant a disruption as could be imagined, basically a test run for globalized trade and interdependence. Generally we failed.
But then again I'm reaching the age where "prepping" starts to infect the mind.
http://southernghoststories.com/the-witch-of-fentress-county
>When Joseph Stout went before Judge Abraham Caruthers, Attorney General John B. McCormick refused to prosecute him. The witch-hunters tried to argue with Judge Caruthers and cited the Statutes of Henry VIII and James I which made witchcraft a felony. The judge shot them down and told them that the statute only applied in England and had no standing in the state of Tennessee.
Probably more an issue with my memory than with Hillis' analogy.