Civilization: The West and the Rest

by Niall Ferguson

  Estimates of the Muslim population of West European countries vary widely. According to one estimate the total population has risen from around 10 million in 1990 to 17 million in 2010.93 As a share of national populations, Muslim communities range in size from as much as 9.8 per cent in France to as little as 0.2 per cent in Portugal.94 Such figures seem to belie the warnings of some scholars of a future ‘Eurabia’ – a continent Islamicized by the end of the twenty-first century. However, if the Muslim population of the UK were to continue growing at an annual rate of 6.7 per cent (as it did between 2004 and 2008), its share of the total UK population would rise from just under 4 per cent in 2008 to 8 per cent in 2020, to 15 per cent in 2030 and to 28 per cent in 2040, finally passing 50 per cent in 2050.95

  Mass immigration is not necessarily the solvent of a civilization, if the migrants embrace, and are encouraged to embrace, the values of the civilization to which they are moving. But in cases where immigrant communities are not successfully assimilated and then become prey to radical ideologues, the consequences can be profoundly destabilizing.96 The crucial thing is not sheer numbers so much as the extent to which some Muslim communities have been penetrated by Islamist organizations like the Arab Muslim Brotherhood, the Pakistani Jama’at-i Islami, the Saudi-financed Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. In Britain, to take perhaps the most troubling example, there is an active Muslim Brotherhood offshoot called the Muslim Association of Britain, two Jama’at-i Islami spin-offs, the Islamic Society of Britain and its youth wing, Young Muslims UK, as well as an organization called Hizb ut-Tahrir (‘Party of Liberation’). Hizb ut-Tahrir openly proclaims its intention to make ‘Britain … an Islamic state by the year 2020!’97 Also known to be active in recruiting terrorists are al-Qaeda and the equally dangerous Harakat ul-Mujahideen. Such infiltration is by no means unique to the UK.*

  The case of Shehzad Tanweer illustrates how insidious the process of radicalization is. Tanweer was one of the suicide bombers who wreaked havoc in London on 7 July 2005, detonating a bomb aboard a Circle Line Underground train between Aldgate and Liverpool Street that killed himself and six other passengers. Born in Yorkshire in 1983, Tanweer was not poor; his father, an immigrant from Pakistan, had built up a successful takeaway food business, selling fish and chips and driving a Mercedes. He was not uneducated, in so far as a degree in sports science from Leeds Metropolitan University counts as education. His case suggests that no amount of economic, educational and recreational opportunity can prevent the son of a Muslim immigrant from being converted into a fanatic and a terrorist if the wrong people get to him. In this regard, a crucial role is being played at universities and elsewhere by Islamic ‘centres’, some of which are little more than recruiting agencies for jihad. Often, such centres act as gateways to training camps in countries like Pakistan, where the new recruits from bilad al-kufr (the lands of unbelief) are sent for more practical forms of indoctrination. Between 1999 and 2009 a total of 119 individuals were found guilty of Islamism-related terrorist offences in the UK, more than two-thirds of them British nationals. Just under a third had attended an institute of higher education, and about the same proportion had attended a terrorist training camp.98 It has been as much through luck as through effective counter-terrorism that other attacks by British-based jihadis have been thwarted, notably the plot in August 2006 by a group of young British Muslims to detonate home-made bombs aboard multiple transatlantic planes, and the attempt by a Nigerian-born graduate of University College London to detonate plastic explosive concealed in his underwear as his flight from Amsterdam was nearing Detroit airport on Christmas Day 2009.

  THE END OF DAYS?

  In his Decline and Fall, Gibbon covered more than 1,400 years of history, from 180 to 1590. This was history over the very long run, in which the causes of decline ranged from the personality disorders of individual emperors to the power of the Praetorian Guard and the rise of monotheism. After the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180, civil war became a recurring problem, as aspiring emperors competed for the spoils of supreme power. By the fourth century, barbarian invasions or migrations were well under way and only intensified as the Huns moved west. Meanwhile, the challenge posed by Sassanid Persia to the Eastern Roman Empire was steadily growing. The first time Western civilization crashed, as Gibbon tells the story, it was a very slow burn.

  But what if political strife, barbarian migration and imperial rivalry were all just integral features of late antiquity – signs of normality, rather than harbingers of distant doom? Through this lens, Rome’s fall was in fact quite sudden and dramatic. The final breakdown in the Western Roman Empire began in 406, when Germanic invaders poured across the Rhine into Gaul and then Italy. Rome itself was sacked by the Goths in 410. Co-opted by an enfeebled emperor, the Goths then fought the Vandals for control of Spain, but this merely shifted the problem south. Between 429 and 439, Genseric led the Vandals to victory after victory in North Africa, culminating in the fall of Carthage. Rome lost its southern Mediterranean breadbasket and, along with it, a huge source of tax revenue. Roman soldiers were barely able to defeat Attila’s Huns as they swept west from the Balkans. By 452, the Western Roman Empire had lost all of Britain, most of Spain, the richest provinces of North Africa, and south-western and south-eastern Gaul. Not much was left besides Italy. Basiliscus, brother-in-law of Emperor Leo I, tried and failed to recapture Carthage in 468. Byzantium lived on, but the Western Roman Empire was dead. By 476, Rome was the fiefdom of Odoacer, King of the Scirii.99

  What is most striking about this more modern reading of history is the speed of the Roman Empire’s collapse. In just five decades, the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century – inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle – shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of Western Europe. What one historian has called ‘the end of civilization’ came within the span of a single generation.100

  Could our own version of Western civilization collapse with equal suddenness? It is, admittedly, an old fear that began haunting British intellectuals from Chesterton to Shaw more than a century ago.101 Today, however, the fear may be better grounded. A large majority of scientists subscribe to the view that, especially as China and other big Asian as well as South American countries narrow the economic gap between the West and the Rest, humanity is running the risk of catastrophic climate change. Without question there has been an unprecedented increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. And there is some evidence that this has caused an increase in average temperatures. What is less clear is how a continuation of these trends will impact on the earth’s weather. However, it does not seem entirely fanciful to imagine further melting of the polar icecaps leading to changes in the direction of ocean currents or flooding of low-lying coastal regions; or the further desertification of areas hitherto capable of sustaining agriculture. Quite apart from climate change, some environmentalists also fear that, as Asia’s more populous nations follow the Western route out of poverty, the strain on global supplies of energy, food and fresh water will become unbearable. Sceptics about the risks of climate change should spend some time in China, where the biggest and fastest industrial revolution in history is causing measurable – indeed, unmissable – environmental damage.

  Most people who discuss these issues – myself among them – are not scientifically qualified to weigh the evidence. What attracts us to the idea of an environmental disaster is not so much the data as the familiarity of the prediction. Since the earliest recorded myths and legends, mankind has been fascinated by the idea of a spectacular end of the world, from the ‘twilight of the gods’ in the Nibelung saga to the key text of Christian eschatology, the Book of Revelation, written by the Evangelist John of Patmos. In this version of the apocalypse, the Messiah or Lamb of God will return to earth and defeat the Antichrist in the Battle of Armageddon, after which Satan will be conf
ined to a bottomless pit for a thousand years. The culmination will come when Satan re-emerges from the abyss and summons together the people of Gog and Magog. This will be the cue for ‘voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and … a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth’ (Revelation 16:18). Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists both subscribe to a literal interpretation of this prophecy, but they are by no means alone. A remarkably large number of Evangelical Christians in the United States say they share the belief that we are nearing the End of Days. For many, the only question is who will be left behind when the ‘Rapture’ comes. Some say the phase of tribulation has already started. On 14 December 2008, it is said, the First Trumpet sounded, as the financial crisis neared its nadir. Once the Second, Third and Fourth Trumpets have sounded, the United States will collapse as a world power. When the Fifth Trumpet sounds, the Third World War will break out, killing billions of people. Then, on the last day of this great tribulation, Jesus Christ will return to redeem the true believers, as foreseen in the Book of Revelation. On a trip to the barren hill at Megiddo in Israel, commonly held to be the site of the coming Battle of Armageddon, I was not wholly surprised to encounter a party of Americans drawn there by precisely this kind of millenarian belief. Like those unreconstructed Marxists who continue to yearn for the collapse of capitalism, interpreting each new financial crisis as the beginning of the end, they feel a certain frisson at the thought that the End might come on their watch.

  This idea that we are doomed – that decline and fall are inevitable, that things can only get worse – is deeply connected with our own sense of mortality. Because as individuals we are bound to degenerate, so, we instinctively feel, must the civilizations in which we live. All flesh is grass. In the same way, all vainglorious monuments end up as ruins. The wind blows through the melancholy relics of our former achievements.

  But what we struggle to decide is how exactly this process of decline and fall unfolds in the realm of complex social and political structures. Do civilizations collapse with a bang, on the battlefield of Armageddon, or with a long, lingering whimper? The only way to answer that concluding question is to return to the first principles of historical explanation itself.

  1. Petty warring kingdoms: England and France clash yet again in the Hundred Years’ War

  2. The Four Conditions of Society: Poverty by Jean Bourdichon, c. 1500

  3. The Triumph of Death by Peter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1562

  4. The Yongle Emperor

  5. Su Song’s water clock in the Forbidden City, Beijing

  6. A game of Chinese golf (chuiwan)

  7. The qilin: the Sultan of Malindi’s tribute to the Middle Kingdom

  8. The culture of conformity: the Chinese civil service examination in the reign of the Jen Tsung Emperor

  9. The victor of the spice race: Vasco da Gama’s tomb, monastery of St Jerome, Lisbon

  10. Earl Macartney vainly seeks to arouse the Xianlong Emperor’s interest in Western civilization: a cartoon by James Gillray

  11. Jan Sobieski’s men raise the Ottoman siege of Vienna

  12. Prisoner of the harem: Sultan Osman III

  13. The Ottoman envoy Ahmed Resmî Effendi’s arrival in Berlin, 1763

  14. The original manuscript of Frederick the Great’s Anti-Machiavel, with annotations by Voltaire

  15. Pages from the German edition of Benjamin Robins’s New Principles of Gunnery

  16. The city the Spaniards failed to find: Machu Picchu, Peru

  17. Boneyard Beach, South Carolina

  18. You do the work … Millicent How’s indenture document

  19. … you get the land: Abraham Smith’s land grant

  20. The American dream: a piece of Charleston

  21. Conquistador: Jerónimo de Aliaga

  22. The Washington who wasn’t: Simón Bolívar as seen in present-day Caracas

  23. The scars of slavery in the United States

  24. The baguette as a legacy of empire: Saint-Louis, Senegal

  25. The black sheep who beat the white sheep: Blaise Diagne, the first black member of the French National Assembly

  26. Louis Faidherbe, Governor of Senegal, ponders his mission civilisatrice

  27. Tirailleurs Sénégalais proudly show off their samples

  28. Médecins Sans Frontières, imperial style: French doctors brave the tropics

  29. Three photographs of ‘Bastard’ women from the German racial theorist Eugen Fischer’s study of the Rehoboth Basters

  30. ‘I didn’t know what the war was really like’: a Senegalese tirailleur on the Western Front

  31. Lüderitz, Namibia

  32. The sartorial world we have lost: a young woman on horseback, Urga [Ulan Bator], Mongolia, 1913, taken by Stéphane Passet for Albert Kahn’s ‘archives of the planet’

  33. Two princes in Savile Row: Hirohito and Edward

  34. The Meiji makeover, 1: Observance of His Imperial Majesty of the Military Manoeuvres of Combined Army and Navy Forces, Yōshū Chikanobu, 1890

  35. The Meiji makeover, 2: Ladies Sewing, Adachi Ginkō, 1887

  36. James Dean unleashes the jeans genie in Giant

  37. Levi’s® London flagship store, 174–176 Regent Street

  38. ‘They are afraid of freedom. / They are afraid of democracy… So why the hell are we afraid of them?’ The Plastic People of the Universe rock Soviet communism

  39. Headscarves on dummies in Istanbul

  40. In search of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism: Max Weber in America

  41. American cornucopia: The St Louis World’s Fair, 1904

  42. The Word comes to Wenzhou: China Inland Mission Students with their teacher, c. 1900

  43. The cartography of salvation: an American missionary’s map of South-east China

  44. A scene of death and destruction from the Taiping Rebellion

  45. Mass-producing scripture: the Nanjing Amity Bible Printing Company

  46. Industrial Revelation: China today

  47. The end of Western predominance: President Barack Obama bows to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, November 2009

  Conclusion: The Rivals

  Well, Sir Anthony, since you desire it, we will not anticipate the past! – So mind, young people – our retrospection be all to the future.

  Sheridan

  He felt that in the electric flame department of the infernal regions there should be a special gridiron, reserved exclusively for the man who invented these performances [amateur theatricals], so opposed to the true spirit of civilization.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  There is no better illustration of the life cycle of a civilization than The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings by Thomas Cole that hang in the gallery of the New York Historical Society. A founder of the Hudson River School and one of the pioneers of nineteenth-century American landscape painting, Cole beautifully captured a theory to which most people remain in thrall to this day: the theory of cycles of civilization.

  Each of the five imagined scenes depicts the mouth of a great river beneath a rocky outcrop. In the first, The Savage State, a lush wilderness is populated by a handful of hunter-gatherers eking out a primitive existence at the break of a stormy dawn. The second picture, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, is of an agrarian idyll: the inhabitants have cleared the trees, planted fields and built an elegant Greek temple. The third and largest of the paintings is The Consummation of Empire. Now the landscape is covered by a magnificent marble entrepôt, while the contented farmer-philosophers of the previous tableau have been replaced by a throng of opulently clad merchants, proconsuls and citizen-consumers. It is midday in the life cycle. Then comes Destruction. The city is ablaze, its citizens fleeing an invading horde that rapes and pillages beneath a brooding evening sky. Finally, the moon rises over Desolation. There is not a living soul to be seen, only a few decaying columns and colonnades overgrown by briars and ivy.

  Conceived in the mid-1830s, Cole’s
pentaptych has a clear message: all civilizations, no matter how magnificent, are condemned to decline and fall. The implicit suggestion was that the young American republic of Cole’s age would do better to stick to its bucolic first principles and resist the temptations of commerce, conquest and colonization.