292. "Apparatus"

It's hard, in today's multicultural society, to speak of Europe's superior "achievements" in science, technology, economy, politics, and warfare without sounding braggy.  But Palmer, Colson, and Kramer, authors of the textbook A History of the Modern World, make it easier.  For them Europe, between 1500 and 1900, "supplied the apparatus" for achievement in those areas. 

Apparatus.  No great thing sitting out there to be compared with your thing, you other continents and races and cultures. Nothing to hurt your peoples' feelings.  Nothing to intimidate them, or embarrass them, or get their hackles up.  Just some machinery.  How it's used is more important than who gets credit for it.  Anybody can use it.  

Like the scientific method.  Like formal logic.  Like the constitutional transfer of power.  Like schools that teach skepticism.  And like schemes organizing armies and weapons for more efficient killing.

The great thing about "apparatus" is that it names the means and not the end.  Ends, what we want, are mainly what bring us praise and blame, usually moral.  Means, what we choose to get what we want, follow from the end.  Who blames the apparatus in Frankenstein's laboratory?

Thank you, thank you, Palmer, Colson, and Kramer.  You've saved us Eurocentrists from so much blame.