I was mostly joking, but it seems that anti-intellectualism and survivalism would almost have to go hand in hand.

It's more like where survivalism started.

Is that where the anit-intellectualism started?

The burning of the library of Alexandria didn't help.

The ancient Greco-Roman world was far enough along technologically that we could have had an industrial revolution more than a thousand years before it actually happened. Sadly, the potential for that went down with the rest of Classical civilization when the Roman Empire broke up. The nail in the coffin was the breakdown of trade on a wide scale; everything reverted to a local scale and coordinated industry was something that just couldn't be supported.

Modern Western civilization never built any device that the Alexandrian Greek artificers could not have also built until after Edison.

Very interesting. Ancient Greek analog astronomy computer. Really brilliant.

http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/antikythera/