Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  The variety of short-term explanations of the Western industrial revolution, stretching from Pomeranz’s fluke that averted global disaster to Frank’s temporary shift within an expanding world economy, is every bit as wide as the gulf between, say, Jared Diamond and Karl Marx on the long-term side. Yet for all the controversy within both schools, it is the battle lines between them that produce the most starkly opposed theories of how the world works. Some long-termers claim that the revisionists are merely peddling shoddy, politically correct pseudo-scholarship; some short-termers respond that long-termers are pro-Western apologists or even racists.

  The fact that so many experts can reach such wildly different conclusions suggests that something is wrong in the way we have approached the problem. In this book I will argue that long-termers and short-termers alike have misunderstood the shape of history and have therefore reached only partial and contradictory results. What we need, I believe, is a different perspective.

  THE SHAPE OF HISTORY

  What I mean by this is that both long-termers and short-termers agree that the West has dominated the globe for the last two hundred years, but disagree over what the world was like before this. Everything revolves around their differing assessments of premodern history. The only way we can resolve the dispute is by looking at these earlier periods to establish the overall “shape” of history. Only then, with the baseline established, can we argue productively about why things turned out as they did.

  Yet this is the one thing that almost no one seems to want to do. Most experts who write on why the West rules have backgrounds in economics, sociology, politics, or modern history; basically, they are specialists in current or recent events. They tend to focus on the last few generations, looking back at most five hundred years and treating earlier history briefly, if at all—even though the main issue at dispute is whether the factors that gave the West dominance were already present in earlier times or appeared abruptly in the modern age.

  A handful of thinkers approach the question very differently, focusing on distant prehistory then skipping ahead to the modern age, saying little about the thousands of years in between. The geographer and historian Alfred Crosby makes explicit what many of these scholars take for granted—that the prehistoric invention of agriculture was critically important, but “between that era and [the] time of development of the societies that sent Columbus and other voyagers across the oceans, roughly 4,000 years passed, during which little of importance happened, relative to what had gone before.”

  This, I think, is mistaken. We will not find answers if we restrict our search to prehistory or modern times (nor, I hasten to add, would we find them if we limited ourselves to just the four or five millennia in between). The question requires us to look at the whole sweep of human history as a single story, establishing its overall shape, before discussing why it has that shape. This is what I try to do in this book, bringing a rather different set of skills to bear.

  I was educated as an archaeologist and ancient historian, specializing in the classical Mediterranean of the first millennium BCE. When I started college at Birmingham University in England in 1978, most classical scholars I met seemed perfectly comfortable with the old long-term theory that the culture of the ancient Greeks, created two and a half thousand years ago, forged a distinctive Western way of life. Some of them (mostly older ones) would even say outright that this Greek tradition made the West better than the rest.

  So far as I remember, none of this struck me as being a problem until I started graduate research at Cambridge University in the early 1980s, working on the origins of Greek city-states. This took me among anthropological archaeologists working on similar processes in other parts of the world. They openly laughed at the quaint notion that Greek culture was unique and had started a distinctive democratic and rational Western tradition. As people often do, for several years I managed to carry two contradictory notions in my head: on the one hand, Greek society evolved along the same lines as other ancient societies; on the other, it initiated a distinctive Western trajectory.

  The balancing act got more difficult when I took my first faculty position, at the University of Chicago, in 1987. There I taught in Chicago’s renowned History of Western Civilization program, ranging from ancient Athens to (eventually) the fall of communism. To stay even one day ahead of my students I had to read medieval and modern European history much more seriously than before, and I could not help noticing that for long stretches of time the freedom, reason, and inventiveness that Greece supposedly bequeathed to the West were more honored in the breach than the observance. Trying to make sense of this, I found myself looking at broader and broader slices of the human past. I was surprised how strong the parallels were between the supposedly unique Western experience and the history of other parts of the world, above all the great civilizations of China, India, and Iran.

  Professors enjoy nothing more than complaining about their administrative burdens, but when I moved to Stanford University in 1995 I quickly learned that serving on committees could be an excellent way to find out what was going on outside my own little field. Since then I have directed the university’s Social Science History Institute and Archaeology Center, served as chair of the Classics department and senior associate dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, and run a large archaeological excavation—which all meant plenty of paperwork and headaches, but which also let me meet specialists in every field, from genetics to literary criticism, that might be relevant to working out why the West rules.

  I learned one big thing: to answer this question we need a broad approach, combining the historian’s focus on context, the archaeologist’s awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist’s comparative methods. We could get this combination by assembling a multidisciplinary team of specialists, pooling deep expertise across a range of fields, and that is in fact just what I did when I started directing an archaeological excavation on Sicily. I knew nowhere near enough about botany to analyze the carbonized seeds we found, about zoology to identify the animal bones, about chemistry to make sense of the residues in storage vessels, about geology to reconstruct the landscape’s formation processes, or about a host of other indispensable specialties, so I found specialists who did. An excavation director is a kind of academic impresario, bringing together talented artists who put on the show.

  That is a good way to produce an excavation report, where the goal is to pile up data for others to use, but books-by-committee tend to be less good at developing unified answers to big questions. As a result, in the book you are reading now I take an inter- rather than multi disciplinary approach. Instead of riding shotgun over a herd of specialists, I strike off on my own to draw together and interpret the findings of experts in numerous fields.

  This courts all kinds of dangers (superficiality, disciplinary bias, and just general error). I will never have the same subtle grasp of Chinese culture as someone who has spent a lifetime reading medieval manuscripts, or be as up-to-date on human evolution as a geneticist (I am told that the journal Science updates its website on average every thirteen seconds; while typing this sentence I have probably fallen behind again). But on the other hand, those who stay within the boundaries of their own disciplines will never see the big picture. The interdisciplinary, single-author model probably is the worst way to write a book like this—except for all the other ways. To me it certainly seems the least bad way to proceed, but you will have to judge from the results whether I am right.

  So what are the results? I argue in this book that asking why the West rules is really a question about what I will call social development. By this I basically mean societies’ abilities to get things done—to shape their physical, economic, social, and intellectual environments to their own ends. Back in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Western observers mostly took it for granted that social development was an unquestioned good. Development is progress (or evolution, or History), they implicitly and often
explicitly said, and progress—whether toward God, affluence, or a people’s paradise—is the point of life. These days that seems less obvious. Many people feel that the environmental degradation, wars, inequality, and disillusionment that social development brings in its train far outweigh any benefits it generates.

  Yet whatever moral charge we put on social development, its reality is undeniable. Almost all societies today are more developed (in the sense I defined that word in the previous paragraph) than they were a hundred years ago, and some societies today are more developed than others. In 1842 the hard truth was that Britain was more developed than China—so developed, in fact, that its reach had become global. There had been empires aplenty in the past, but their reach had always been regional. By 1842, however, British manufacturers could flood China with their products, British industrialists could build iron ships that outgunned any in the world, and British politicians could send an expedition halfway around the globe.

  Asking why the West rules really means asking two questions. We need to know both why the West is more developed—that is, more able to get things done—than any other region of the world, and why Western development rose so high in the last two hundred years that for the first time in history a few countries could dominate the entire planet.

  The only way to answer these questions, I believe, is by measuring social development to produce a graph that—literally—shows the shape of history. Once we do that, we will see that neither long-term lock-in nor short-term accident theories explain the shape of history very well at all. The answer to the first question—why Western social development is higher than that of any other part of the world—does not lie in any recent accident: the West has been the most developed region of the world for fourteen of the last fifteen millennia. But on the other hand, neither was the West’s lead locked in in the distant past. For more than a thousand years, from about 550 through 1775 CE, Eastern regions scored higher. Western rule was neither predetermined thousands of years ago nor a result of recent accidents.

  Nor can either long-term or short-term theories by themselves answer the second question, of why Western social development has risen so high compared to all earlier societies. As we will see, it was only around 1800 CE that Western scores began surging upward at astonishing rates; but this upturn was itself only the latest example of a very long-term pattern of steadily accelerating social development. The long term and the short term work together.

  This is why we cannot explain Western rule just by looking at prehistory or just by looking at the last few hundred years. To answer the question we have to make sense of the whole sweep of the past. Yet while charting the rise and fall of social development reveals the shape of history and shows us what needs to be explained, it doesn’t actually do the explaining. For that we need to burrow into the details.

  SLOTH, FEAR, AND GREED

  “HISTORY, n. An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.” It is sometimes hard to disagree with Ambrose Bierce’s comic definition: history can seem to be just one damned thing after another, a chaotic jumble of geniuses and dolts, tyrants and romantics, poets and thieves, accomplishing the extraordinary or scraping the barrel of depravity.

  Such people stud the pages that follow, which is as it should be. After all, it is flesh-and-blood individuals, not vast impersonal forces, who do all the living, dying, creating, and fighting in this world. Yet behind all the sound and fury, I will argue, the past nevertheless has strong patterns, and with the right tools historians can see what they are and even explain them.

  I will use three of these tools.

  The first is biology,* which tells us what humans truly are: clever chimps. We are part of the animal kingdom, which is itself part of the larger empire of life, stretching from the great apes all the way down to amoebas. This very obvious truth has three important consequences.

  First, like all life-forms, we survive because we extract energy from our environment and turn that energy into more of ourselves.

  Second, like all the more intelligent animals, we are curious creatures. We are constantly tinkering, wondering whether things are edible, whether we can have fun with them, whether we can improve them. We are just much better at tinkering than other animals, because we have big, fast brains with lots of folds to think things through, endlessly supple vocal cords to talk things through, and opposable thumbs to work things through.

  That said, humans—like other animals—are obviously not all the same. Some extract more energy from the environment than others; some reproduce more than others; some are more curious, creative, clever, or practical than others. But the third consequence of our animalness is that large groups of humans, as opposed to individual humans, are all much the same. If you pluck two random people from a crowd, they may be as different as can be imagined, but if you round up two complete crowds they will tend to mirror each other rather closely. And if you compare groups millions strong, as I do in this book, they are likely to have very similar proportions of energetic, fertile, curious, creative, clever, talkative, and practical people.

  These three rather commonsensical observations explain much of the course of history. For millennia social development has generally been increasing, thanks to our tinkering, and has generally done so at an accelerating rate. Good ideas beget more good ideas, and having once had good ideas we tend not to forget them. But as we will see, biology does not explain the whole history of social development. Sometimes social development has stagnated for long periods without rising at all; sometimes it has even gone into reverse. Just knowing that we are clever chimps is not enough.

  This is where the second tool, sociology, comes in.* Sociology tells us simultaneously what causes social change and what social change causes. It is one thing for clever chimps to sit around tinkering, but it is another altogether for their ideas to catch on and change society. That, it seems, requires some sort of catalyst. The great science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein once suggested that “Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.” We will see later in this book that this Heinlein Theorem is only partly true, because lazy women are just as important as lazy men, sloth is not the only mother of invention, and “progress” is often a rather upbeat word for what happens. But if we flesh it out a little, I think Heinlein’s insight becomes about as good a one-sentence summary of the causes of social change as we are likely to find. In fact, as the book goes on I will start passing off a less pithy version of it as my own Morris Theorem: “Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. And they rarely know what they’re doing.” History teaches us that when the pressure is on, change takes off.

  Greedy, lazy, frightened people seek their own preferred balance among being comfortable, working as little as possible, and being safe. But that is not the end of the story, because people’s success in reproducing themselves and capturing energy inevitably puts pressure on the resources (intellectual and social as well as material) available to them. Rising social development generates the very forces that undermine further social development. I call this the paradox of development. Success creates new problems; solving them creates still newer problems. Life, as they say, is a vale of tears.

  The paradox of development is constantly at work, confronting people with hard choices. Often people fail to rise to its challenges, and social development stagnates or even declines. At other times, though, sloth, fear, and greed combine to push some people to take risks, innovating to change the rules of the game. If at least a few of them succeed and if most people then adopt the successful innovations, a society might push through the resource bottleneck and social development will keep rising.

  People confront, and solve, such problems every day, which is why social development has generally kept moving upward since the end of the last ice age. But as we will see, at certain points
the paradox of development creates tough ceilings that will yield only to truly transformative changes. Social development sticks at these ceilings, setting off a desperate race. In case after case we will see that when societies fail to solve the problems that confront them, a terrible package of ills—famine, epidemic, uncontrolled migration, and state failure—begins to afflict them, turning stagnation into decline; and when famine, epidemic, migration, and state failure are joined by further forces of disruption, like climatic change (collectively, I call these the five horsemen of the apocalypse), decline can turn into disastrous, centuries-long collapses and dark ages.

  Between them, biology and sociology explain most of the shape of history—why social development has generally risen, why it rises faster at some times and slower at others, and why it sometimes falls. But these biological and sociological laws are constants, applying everywhere, in all times and all places. They by definition tell us about humanity as a whole, not about why people in one place have fared so differently from those in another. To explain that, I will argue throughout this book, we need a third tool: geography.*