Civilization: The West and the Rest

by Niall Ferguson

  For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists and the public at large have tended to think about the rise and fall of civilizations in such cyclical and gradual terms. In Book VI of Polybius’ Histories, which relate the rise of Rome, the process of political anacyclosis goes as follows:

  1. Monarchy

  2. Kingship

  3. Tyranny

  4. Aristocracy

  5. Oligarchy

  6. Democracy

  7. Ochlocracy (mob rule)

  This idea was revived in the Renaissance, when Polybius was rediscovered, and passed, meme-like, from the writing of Machiavelli to that of Montesquieu.1 But a cyclical view also arose quite separately in the writings of the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun and in Ming Neo-Confucianism.2 In his book Scienza nuova (1725), the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico describes all civilizations as passing through a ricorso with three phases: the divine, the heroic and the human or rational, which reverts back to the divine through what Vico called ‘the barbarism of reflection’. ‘The best instituted governments, like the best constituted animal bodies,’ wrote the British political philosopher Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, in 1738, ‘carry in them the seeds of their destruction: and, though they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend visibly to their dissolution. Every hour they live is an hour the less that they have to live.’3 In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith conceived of economic growth – ‘opulence’ as he put it – ultimately giving way to the ‘stationary state’.

  Idealists and materialists agreed on this one thing. For Hegel and Marx alike, it was the dialectic that gave history its unmistakable beat. History was seasonal for Oswald Spengler, the German historian, who wrote in The Decline of the West (1918–22) that the nineteenth century had been ‘the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and scepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money’. The British historian Arnold Toynbee’s twelve-volume Study of History (1936–54) posited a cycle of challenge, response by ‘creative minorities’, then decline – civilizational suicide – when leaders stop responding with sufficient creativity to the challenges they face. Another grand theory was that of the Russian émigré sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, who argued that all major civilizations passed through three phases: ‘ideational’ (in which reality is spiritual), ‘sensate’ (in which reality is material) and ‘idealistic’ (a synthesis of the two).4 The American historian Carroll Quigley taught his students at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service (among them the future President Bill Clinton) that civilizations had, like man, seven ages: mixture, gestation, expansion, conflict, universal empire, decay and invasion. It was, Quigley explained in a classic statement of the life-cycle theory:

  a process of evolution … each civilization is born … and … enters a period of vigorous expansion, increasing its size and power … until gradually a crisis of organization appears. When this crisis has passed and the civilization been reorganized … its vigor and morale have weakened. It becomes stabilized and eventually stagnant. After a Golden Age of peace and prosperity, internal crises again arise. At this time there appears, for the first time, a moral and physical weakness, which raises … questions about the civilization’s ability to defend itself against external enemies … The civilization grows steadily weaker until it is submerged by outside enemies, and eventually disappears.5

  Each of these models is different, but all share the assumption that history has rhythm.

  Although hardly anyone reads Spengler, Toynbee or Sorokin today – Quigley is still enjoyed by conspiracy theorists* – similar strains of thought are legible in the work of more modern authors. Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) is another work of cyclical history, in which great powers rise and fall according to the growth rates of their industrial bases and the costs of their imperial commitments relative to their economies. Just as in Cole’s Course of Empire, imperial expansion carries the seeds of future decline. As Kennedy writes: ‘If a state overextends itself strategically … it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all.’6 This phenomenon of ‘imperial overstretch’, he argues, is common to all great powers. When Kennedy’s book was published, many people in the United States shared his fear that their own country might be succumbing to this disease.

  More recently, it is the anthropologist Jared Diamond who has captured the public imagination with a grand theory of rise and fall. His book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), is cyclical history for the Green Age: tales of societies, from seventeenth-century Easter Island to twenty-first-century China, that risked, or now risk, destroying themselves by abusing their natural environments. Diamond quotes John Lloyd Stevens, the American explorer and amateur archaeologist who discovered the eerily dead Mayan cities of Mexico: ‘Here were the remains of a cultivated, polished, and peculiar people, who had passed through all the stages incident to the rise and fall of nations, reached their golden age, and perished.’7 According to Diamond, the Maya fell into a classic Malthusian trap as their population grew larger than their fragile and inefficient agricultural system could support. More people meant more cultivation, but more cultivation meant deforestation, erosion, drought and soil exhaustion. The result was civil war over dwindling resources and, finally, collapse.

  Diamond’s inference is of course that today’s world could go the way of the Maya.8 The critical point is that environmental suicide is a slow and protracted process. Unfortunately, political leaders in almost any society – primitive or sophisticated – have little incentive to address problems that are unlikely to manifest themselves for a hundred years or more. As the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 made clear, rhetorical pleas to ‘save the planet’ for future generations are insufficient to overcome the conflicts over economic distribution between rich and poor countries that exist in the here and now. We love our grandchildren. But our great-great-grandchildren are harder to relate to.

  Yet it is possible that this whole conceptual framework is, in fact, flawed. Perhaps Cole’s artistic representation of a civilizational supercycle of birth, growth and eventual death is a misrepresentation of the historical process. What if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic – sometimes almost stationary, but also capable of violent acceleration? What if historical time is less like the slow and predictable changing of the seasons and more like the elastic time of our dreams? Above all, what if collapse is not centuries in the making but strikes a civilization suddenly, like a thief in the night?

  Civilizations, as I have endeavoured to show in this book, are highly complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, so that their construction more closely resembles a Namibian termite mound than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder – on ‘the edge of chaos’, in the phrase of the computer scientist Christopher Langton. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time, apparently in equilibrium, in reality constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when they ‘go critical’. A slight perturbation can set off a ‘phase transition’ from a benign equilibrium to a crisis – a single grain of sand causes an apparently stable sandcastle to fall in on itself.

  To understand complexity, it is helpful to examine how natural scientists use the concept.9 Think of the spontaneous self-organization of half a million termites, which allows them to construct a complex mound, or the fractal geometry of the snowflakes formed by water molecules, with their myriad variants of sixfold symmetry. Human intelligence itself is a complex system, a product of the interaction of billions of neurons in the central nervous system – what the neuroscientist Charles Sherrington called the ‘enchanted loom’. Our immune system is also a complex system in which antibodies mobilize themselves to wage a defensive war against alien antigens. All complex systems in the natural world share certain charac
teristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes – what scientists call ‘the amplifier effect’.10 Causal relationships are often non-linear, which means that traditional methods of generalizing from observations (such as trend analysis and sampling) are of little use. Indeed, some theorists would go so far as to say that certain complex systems are wholly non-deterministic, meaning that it is next to impossible to make predictions about their future behaviour based on past data. There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of ‘self-organized criticality’; it is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the breakdown is unknown, because the distribution of forest fires by magnitude does not follow the familiar bell curve, with most fires clustered around a mean value, the way most adult male heights are clustered around five foot nine. Rather, if you plot the size of fires against the frequency of their occurrence, you get a straight line. Will the next fire be tiny or huge, a bonfire or a conflagration? The most that can be said is that a forest fire twice as large as last year’s is roughly four (or six or eight, depending on the forest) times less likely to happen this year. This kind of pattern – known as a ‘power-law distribution’ – is remarkably common in the natural world. It can be seen not just in forest fires but also in earthquakes and epidemics. Only the steepness of the line varies.11

  The political and economic structures made by humans share many of the features of complex systems. Indeed, heterodox economists such as W. Brian Arthur have been arguing along these lines for decades, going far beyond Adam Smith’s notion of an ‘Invisible Hand’, seeming to guide multiple profit-maximizing individuals, or Friedrich von Hayek’s later critique of economic planning and demand management.12 To Arthur, a complex economy is characterized by the interaction of dispersed agents, a lack of any central control, multiple levels of organization, continual adaptation, incessant creation of new market niches and no general equilibrium. In contradiction to the core prediction of classical economics that competition causes diminishing returns, in a complex economy increasing returns are quite possible. Viewed in this light, Silicon Valley is economic complexity in action; so is the internet itself. And the financial crisis that began in 2007 can also be explained in similar terms. As Nassim Taleb has argued, the global economy by the spring of 2007 had come to resemble an over-optimized electricity grid. The relatively small surge represented by defaults on subprime mortgages in the United States sufficed to tip the entire world economy into the financial equivalent of a blackout, which for a time threatened to cause a complete collapse of international trade.13 Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute are currently exploring how such insights can be applied to other aspects of collective human activity, including ‘metahistory’.14

  This is less esoteric than it seems, since wars are even less normally distributed than financial crises. The physicist and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson* grouped ‘deadly quarrels’, ranging from homicides to world wars, according to their magnitudes, using the base-10 logarithm of the total number of deaths. Thus a terrorist act that kills 100 people has a magnitude of 2, while a war with a million victims is a magnitude-6 conflict. (Note that a war of magnitude 6 ± 0.5 could cause anywhere from 316,228 to 3,162,278 deaths.) Considering only the period from 1815 to 1945, Richardson found more than 300 conflicts of magnitude 2.5 or higher (in other words, responsible for upwards of 300 deaths). Of these, two magnitude-7 wars (the world wars) killed at least 36 million (60 per cent of the total), excluding victims of war-related famine or disease, and millions of magnitude-0 homicides (with one, two or three victims) claimed 9.7 million lives (16 per cent). These data appear at first sight to be completely random. But they, too, obey a power law.15

  If the incidence of war is as unpredictable as the incidence of forest fires, the implications for any theory of the rise and fall of civilizations are immense, given the obvious causal role played by wars in both the ascent and descent of complex social organizations. A civilization is by definition a highly complex system. Whatever nominal central authority exists, in practice it is an adaptive network of dynamic economic, social and political relations. It is not surprising, then, that civilizations of all shapes and sizes exhibit many of the characteristics of complex systems in the natural world – including the tendency to move quite suddenly from stability to instability.

  As we saw in the last chapter, Western civilization in its first incarnation – the Roman Empire – did not decline and fall sedately. It collapsed within a generation, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders in the early fifth century. Comparably swift collapses have been a leitmotif of this book. In 1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from their lofty Andean cities. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses, gunpowder and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. The Ming dynasty’s rule in China also fell apart with extraordinary speed in the mid-seventeenth century. Again, the transition from equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade. In much the same way, the Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity. French intervention on the side of the colonial rebels against British rule in North America in the 1770s seemed like a good idea at the time, but it served to push French finances into a critical state. The summoning of the Estates General in May 1789 unleashed a political chain reaction and a collapse of royal legitimacy so swift that within four years the King had been decapitated by guillotine, a device invented only in 1791. At the time of the Young Turk movement, which came to power in 1908, the Ottoman Empire still seemed capable of being reformed. By 1922, when the last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire departed Istanbul aboard a British warship, it was gone. Japan’s empire reached its maximum territorial extent in 1942, after Pearl Harbor. By 1945 it too was no more.

  The sun set on the British Empire with comparable suddenness. In February 1945 Prime Minister Winston Churchill bestrode the world stage as one of the ‘Big Three’, deciding the fates of nations with US President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Yalta. No sooner had the war ended than he was swept from office. Within a dozen years, the United Kingdom had conceded independence to Burma, Egypt, Ghana, India, Israel, Jordan, Malaya, Pakistan, Ceylon and Sudan. The Suez Crisis in 1956 proved that the United Kingdom could not act in defiance of the United States in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of empire. Although it took until the 1960s for Harold Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ to blow through sub-Saharan Africa and the remnants of colonial rule east of Suez, the United Kingdom’s age of hegemony was effectively over less than a dozen years after its victories over Germany and Japan.

  The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. According to one recent account, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that ‘averted Armageddon’.16 But this was not apparent at the time. In March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the CIA (wrongly) estimated the Soviet economy to be approximately 60 per cent the size of the US economy. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was genuinely larger than the US stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets’ favour for most of the previous twenty years. Yet less than five years after Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in Central and Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed in 1991 by the Soviet Union itself. If ever an empire fell off a cliff – rather than gently declining – it was the one founded by Lenin.

  If civilizations are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, rather than cycling sedately from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon, what are the implications for Western civilization today? First, we need to remind ourselves of how the West came to domina
te the rest of the world after around 1500.

  Recent research has demolished the fashionable view that China was economically neck and neck with the West until as recently as 1800. Per-capita gross domestic product essentially stagnated in the Ming era and was significantly lower than in pre-industrial Britain. The main reason for this was that China was still overwhelmingly an agricultural economy, with 90 per cent of GDP accounted for by low-productivity cultivation, a much higher share than in early-modern Britain. Moreover, for a century after 1520, the Chinese national savings rate was negative. There was no capital accumulation in late Ming China; rather the opposite.17 The story of what Kenneth Pomeranz has called ‘the Great Divergence’ between East and West therefore began much earlier than Pomeranz asserted. Even the late Angus Maddison may have been over-optimistic when he argued that in 1700 the average inhabitant of China was slightly better off than the average inhabitant of the future United States. Maddison was closer to the mark when he estimated that in 1600 British per-capita GDP was already 60 per cent higher than Chinese.18

  What happened after that was that China’s output and population grew in lockstep, causing individual income to stagnate, while the English-speaking world, closely followed by North-western Europe, surged ahead. By 1820 US per-capita GDP was twice that of China; by 1870 it was nearly five times greater; by 1913 the ratio was nearly ten to one. Despite the painful interruption of the Great Depression, the United States suffered nothing so devastating as China’s wretched twentieth-century ordeal of revolution, civil war, Japanese invasion, more revolution, man-made famine and yet more (‘cultural’) revolution. In 1968 the average American was thirty-three times richer than the average Chinese, using figures calculated on the basis of purchasing-power parity (allowing for the different costs of living in the two countries). Calculated in current dollar terms the differential at its peak was more like seventy to one.