Sudden rapid advances in technology are nothing new. A thousand years ago, man learned how to capture the wind – and as Mark Vernon describes, transformed the world for the better

Imagine a time of moral panic about proliferating technologies. Many feel the machines are undoing people’s minds and narrowing attention. Others worry about the denudation of the environment in a rush to supply the new devices with raw materials. Various authorities step in, trying to devise laws to contain their use. And yet, the novel gadgets make life easier, and a few people confess they like them.

The time I have in mind is almost 1000 years ago. The place is Al-Andalus, or Andalusia, on the Iberian Peninsula. The Islamic invader, Tariq ibn Ziyad, had landed on the promontory now named after him – Jabal Tariq, the Mount of Tariq, or Gibraltar. He seized and then transformed the region and with him came a flow of learning, art, architecture, and transformative technology.

Clocks improved, as did astrolabes. Roman numerals were dropped in favour of the Arabic ones used today: 1, 2, 3, 4… But one development stood out because of the manner in which it invaded people’s lives. Windmills.

They were not entirely new. Devices powered by the wind had existed in prehistory – boats with sails, of course, and also musical instruments that could force air through pipes like an organ. Self-turning prayer wheels were another application and that use is telling.

Back then, wind was deployed in ways that tangibly maintained the connection between its physical and spiritual aspects. The linkage is remembered in ancient languages because the word for “wind” – “pneuma” in Greek, say – is the same as that for “breath” and “spirit”. Hence, when Plato discusses breathing in his dialogue the Timaeus, he naturally incorporates reflections on exercising, the nature of the cosmos, and the care of the soul – sounding like a modern-day guru of good respiration, in fact.

Windmills, though, are different as they visibly undo that integrated vision. These machines are engines of extraction. They take one aspect of the wind-breath-spirit amalgam, namely the mechanical one, and divide it from the others – the living and the spiritual.

Dante spotted the shift. When he reaches the icy floor of Hell, in the first part of his Divine Comedy, he sees Lucifer and the fallen angel’s great wings. Dante likens the scene to a windmill. The machine is appropriately devilish because, like Lucifer, it exploits God’s creation. Its power is useful but lifeless, with the upshot that people feel ambivalent about this presence in their lives. Would that drain attention from the world of spirit and foster interest solely in deriving benefits from such technologies?

The anxiety spread as the machines did. But alongside the worry emerged another response – a thoughtful one. The philosophers of Al-Andalus, in part reflecting on the technophobia, derived helpful wisdom and practical insights.

Take the great Islamic polymath Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroes. A child of Cordoba, he was born into a family of jurists and became a genius of natural philosophy and medicine. He gained a reputation for speaking truth to power and arguing that women should receive the same education as men.

He was particularly celebrated for his commentaries on Aristotle, whom Muslims called their “First Teacher”. The meeting of the ancient Greek’s philosophy and the revelations of the Quran proved hugely productive. In fact, when Averroes’s work reached the Christian parts of Europe, it initiated a fresh tradition of thought, called Scholasticism. Thomas Aquinas, another great mind of the era, frequently refers to Aristotle and Averroes. He calls the Greek simply and respectfully “the philosopher”, and the Muslim “the commentator”. And it was by engaging with the ancient Greek’s philosophy that Averroes suggests, to us, a response to periods of technological concern.

He noticed that Aristotle had described how all things connect in four distinctive, though undivided, ways. First, there is the way in which the stuff of reality – the matter – interacts. Second, there is the way in which the vitality of things flows – the efficient causes, as Aristotle put it. Then, thirdly, there is the way in which all this activity follows patterns and systems, structures and forms, which he called the formal element. And fourthly, there are the deep purposes and divine intentions that the manifest world conveys: the final goal towards which reality tends, namely participation in the life of the source of everything – also called God.

Technology operates in the first two domains, Aristotle might say, the material and the efficient: making things that do stuff. But the question of which tools and machines are made, and why, is not decided by the technology but by humans, which means that the third and fourth domains – the formal and the final – are set by people as they align with higher purposes, or don’t.

To put it another way, the means should not be confused with the ends and doing so is the great risk in periods of technological advance, when technological progress readily dazzles and alarms us. The machine can colonise the imagination but it needn’t. Technology does not take on a life of its own, as if it has its own intentions. People have purposes, not appliances, and when devices appear to have intelligence, that intelligence is really a reflection of the human makers, not the artificial contraptions.

So the lesson of the windmills of Al-Andalus is this: Technology certainly shapes our lives, but it only cuts us off from awareness of the soulful and the spiritual to the extent that we let it. Moreover, people have been wrestling with these worries for a long time and we nowadays don’t need to reinvent the wheel (no pun intended). The wisdom derived yesterday can illuminate our today.

This article is from Idler #104

Mark Vernon presents a new Thought for the Week on every “A Drink with the Idler”. It’s FREE to subscribers.

Subscribe to the Idler here and get 12% off the shop price plus a FREE copy of Idle Thoughts by Tom Hodgkinson, worth £8.95.

Subscribers may comment. Please add your idle thoughts using the box below.

A Drink with the Idler

“A Drink with the Idler” returns on Thursday, 15 January at 6pm, when health psychologist Dr Kari Leibowitz will be revealing her secrets to finding joy in the darker months. Book here.
It’s FREE to subscribers.

Our January/February 2026 issue Idler #107 is available in Waitrose, Smiths and TG Jones.
Click here for your nearest stockist.