Why the West Rules — For Now by Ian Harris (Profile)
I like narrative history, told in broad brush strokes — and you can’t get broader brush strokes than in a book that covers all human history from the dawn of time to the immediate future. Why the West Rules — for Now has an ambitiously large canvas, which makes for a large book. Luckily Ian Morris has a very readable style.
By “the West” Morris means the civilisation that started in the Mesopotamian and North African riverine regions, and it includes what today we’d call the Middle East, as well as (ultimately) the United States; the West’s “core” has shifted many times since the first humans arrived there from Africa. The East means basically what we call China, a huge area that was not always as unified as it is today.
Morris uses a set of standards by which to measure the relative progress of East and West, a “social development index” based on such things as a society’s levels of energy capture, information technology and ability to wage war. (Incidentally, an index of energy capture alone shows much the same broad pattern as any combination of other factors).
There are certain “hard ceilings” through which civilisations find it hard to break; hence we get a sense of just how revolutionary the period of industrial development was that began in Britain in the 1870s. The West not only shattered the “43-point hard ceiling” but jumped up another 100 points in barely a century.
Here, in fact, is the key moment at which the West’s lead became decisive. Not, perhaps, a Âsurprise.
Capitalist history
But what drives such developments, whether revolutionary or gradual? What is the “motor of history”? Morris is blunt (and insistent) in his belief that progress is basically generated by human greed, sloth and fear. It’s often others’ achievements or threats that get us going; it’s often sheer laziness that drives us to innovate, so we can get things done more easily. Once greed kicks in, of course, the possibilities are endless.
You could say Morris’s is a “capitalist” history — if greed is not actively good, it is at least a powerful drive. But interacting with human motives are contingencies such as geography; as Morris claims, however, geography is not static. That may sound suspiciously like Fingerprints of the Gods, but what Morris means is that the “meaning of geography” changes. For instance, through much of European history it was a disadvantage to be stuck, as Britain was, at the northwestern edge of Europe, facing the vast Atlantic; but, once colonialism opened the potential of transatlantic trade, it became a clear advantage. The seafaring prowess developed simply to survive later enabled a massive accumulation of economic and political power.
Morris argues his case very well, and is good (as you’d expect from a Yale professor) at reminding the reader of key points, indicators and conclusions. You may disagree with his basic thesis, but the book undeniably raises important questions. How many historical accidents does it take to create an inevitability? China invented gunpowder and printing centuries before the West, but it was only when those products appeared in the West that they generated revolutions in, respectively, military technology and knowledge production. (China was in fact in the lead from the 550s until the late 1700s.)
So what happens now? Can the West keep its lead? It’s commonplace today, looking East, to see China as likely to overtake the West in the nearish future. But, ultimately, Morris comes to conclusions that render much of his previous refereeing of the East/West race irrelevant. Whether China takes the lead is less important than whether humanity in general can survive its own vast energy-capture skills, which may make the planet itself uninhabitable.
Universal simultaneity
Or, rather, it’s a matter of which point we hit first: “Singularity” or “Nightfall”. The latter, taken from an Isaac Asimov story, symbolises the collapse of civilisation (Eastern or Western) when climate change really produces catastrophe. Singularity is the almost mythic moment at which technology’s exponential progression becomes a universal simultaneity, at which point all bets are off. I find this hard to envisage, whatever the massive techno-progress we’ve made and are making; perhaps that’s a failure of the imagination.
Or maybe Morris was just unable fully to explain, to me at least, exactly how Singularity could come about.
Speaking of imagination, one has to wonder, while reading Why the West Rules — for Now, about the role of human thought in human progress — all the ideas, beliefs, ideologies, including scientific advances, that we humans produce. Did Protestantism generate a vital “work ethic”, as Max Weber argued? Does the breakdown of tradition generate new ideas, or does economic progress end what historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the “tyranny of tradition”?
Morris is of the view that “each age gets the thought it needs”. Large attitudinal tendencies do affect historical development: China’s ideological commitment to tradition and stability, generated by its conservative elite centuries ago, may have held it back for as many centuries. Was that the thought China needed in that age? Was Lenin’s revision of Marx really what underdeveloped Russia needed in 1917? Or in 1970, for that matter? How do we define “needed”, or say precisely what such needs were? A need for progress can coexist with a need for stability, say; humanity’s needs are often contradictory.
Certainly, one can hope that in one way at least Morris is right. As we face the possibilities of Singularity versus Nightfall, let us hope our age gets the thought it needs.