Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-15888551-20130819093722/@comment-1255618-20190329193351

@Draevan13 Nah, your passion is admirable! :)  The Elder Scrolls universe and on-line community really is amazing.

Anyway, I totally agree with you that's the out-of-universe justification. I don't agree with you though that the people of Nirn are willing to change, because as the video I linked to above pointed out they are increasingly spurning magic, which there is a lot of evidence for. Also, as I wrote at length recently, there have been tons of apocalypses and near-apocalypes that have each demonstrably caused technological regression, not unlike the Black Death, collapse of the Roman Empire, etc., did in our world, which is another reason the people of Nirn are increasingly wary of magic. Tsun even comments about the modern Nords' foolish aversion to magic in-game. Honestly, the apocalypses have been the biggest set-backs to progress, in my opinion.

The reason the ancient civilizations became so advanced was because they created technology with a strong magical basis. If they hadn't, technological progress on Tamriel would have happened at a slower pace more akin to our world's (we never had "Atlantis" civilizations). Because much of that magic has either been lost to time or is increasingly spurned in the modern era (and, let's face it, much souls- and Daedra- based magic is highly unethical and dangerous and rightly avoided), technology has been sliding backwards. That being said, if the people of Tamriel were to continue to spurn magic, eventually technology would start advancing again, albeit slowly, and over the course of countless generations their technology would start to approach our world's advanced non-magical technology.

In summary, magic has the ability to accelerate technological development, but without advanced non-magical technology it is an extremely volatile basis for technological development, as the Dwemer, Ayleids, etc., showed.