Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

Second, not only did similar things happen in both East and West, but they also happened in more or less the same order. I have illustrated this in Table 2.1 with lines linking the parallel developments in each region. Most of the lines have roughly the same slope, with developments coming first in the West, followed about two thousand years later by the East.* This strongly suggests that developments in the East and West shared a cultural logic; the same causes had the same consequences at both ends of Eurasia. The only real difference is that the process started two thousand years earlier in the West.

  Third, though, neither of my first two points is completely true. There are exceptions to the rules. Crude pottery appeared in the East at least seven thousand years earlier than in the West, and lavish tombs one thousand years earlier. Going the other way, Westerners built monumental shrines more than six thousand years before Easterners. Anyone who believes that these differences set East and West off along distinct cultural trajectories that explain why the West rules needs to show why pottery, tombs, and shrines matter so much, while anyone (me, for instance) who believes they did not really matter needs to explain why they diverge from the general pattern.

  Archaeologists mostly agree why pottery appeared so early in the East: because the foods available there made boiling so important. Easterners needed containers they could put on a fire and consequently mastered pottery very early. If this is right, rather than focusing on the pottery itself, we should perhaps be asking whether differences in food preparation locked East and West into different trajectories of development. Maybe, for instance, Western cooking provided more nutrients, making for stronger people. That, though, is not very convincing. Skeletal studies give a rather depressing picture of life in both the Eastern and Western agricultural cores: it was, as the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes more or less put it, poor, nasty, and short (though not necessarily brutish). In East and West alike early farmers were malnourished and stunted, carried heavy parasite loads, had bad teeth, and died young; in both regions, improvements in agriculture gradually improved diet; and in both regions, fancier elite cuisines eventually emerged. The Eastern reliance on boiling was one among many differences in cooking, but overall, the similarities between Eastern and Western nutrition vastly outweigh the differences.

  Or maybe different ways of preparing food led to different patterns of eating and different family structures, with long-term consequences. Again, though, it is far from obvious that this actually happened. In both East and West the earliest farmers seem to have stored, prepared, and perhaps eaten food communally, only to shift across the next few millennia toward doing these things at the family level. Once more, East-West similarities outweigh differences. The early Eastern invention of pottery is certainly an interesting difference, but it does not seem very relevant to explaining why the West rules.

  What of the early prominence of elaborate tombs in the East and the even earlier prominence of elaborate shrines in the West? These developments, I suspect, were actually mirror images of each other. Both, as we have seen, were intimately linked to an emerging obsession with ancestors at a time when agriculture was making inheritance from the dead the most important fact of economic life. For reasons we will probably never understand, Westerners and Easterners came up with different ways to give thanks to and get in contact with the ancestors. Some Westerners apparently thought that passing their relatives’ skulls around, filling buildings with bulls’ heads and pillars, and sacrificing people in them would do the trick; Easterners generally felt better about burying carved jade animals with their relatives, worshipping their tombs, and eventually beheading other people and throwing them in the grave too. Different strokes for different folks; but similar results.

  I think we can draw two conclusions from Table 2.1. First, early developments in the Western and Eastern cores were mostly rather similar. I do not want to gloss over the very real differences in everything from styles of stone tools to the plants and animals people ate, but none of these differences lends much support to the long-term lock-in theory we have been discussing, that something about the way Western culture developed after the Ice Age gave it greater potential than Eastern culture and explains why the West rules. That seems to be untrue.

  If any long-term lock-in theory can survive confronting the evidence in Table 2.1, it is the simplest one of all, that thanks to geography the West got a two-thousand-year head start in development, retained that lead long enough to arrive first at industrialization, and therefore dominates the world. To test this theory we need to extend our East-West comparison into more recent periods to see if that is what really happened.

  That sounds simple enough, but the second lesson of Table 2.1 is that cross-cultural comparison is tricky. Just listing important developments in two columns was only a start, because making sense of the anomalies in Table 2.1 required us to put boiling and baking, skulls and graves into context, to find out what they meant within prehistoric societies. And that plunges us into one of the central problems of anthropology, the comparative study of societies.

  When nineteenth-century European missionaries and administrators started collecting information about the peoples in their colonial empires, their reports of outlandish customs amazed scholars. Anthropologists catalogued these activities, speculating about their diffusion around the globe and what they might tell us about the evolution of more civilized (by which they meant more European-like) behavior. They sent eager graduate students to exotic climes to collect more examples. One of these bright young men was Bronislaw Malinowski, a Pole studying in London who found himself in the Trobriand Islands in 1914 when World War I broke out. Unable to get a boat home, Malinowski did the only reasonable thing; after sulking briefly in his tent, he got himself a girlfriend. Consequently, by 1918 he understood Trobriand culture from the inside out. He grasped what his professors in their book-lined studies had missed: that anthropology was really about explaining how customs fit together. Comparisons must be between complete functioning cultures, not individual practices torn out of context, because the same behavior may have different meanings in different contexts. Tattooing your face, for instance, may make you a rebel in Kansas, but it marks you as a conformist in New Guinea. Equally, the same idea may take different forms in different cultures, like the circulating skulls and buried jades in the prehistoric West and East, both expressing reverence toward ancestors.

  Malinowski would have hated Table 2.1. We cannot, he would have insisted, make a grab bag of customs from two functioning cultures and pass judgment on which was doing better. And we certainly cannot write books with chapter titles like “The West Takes the Lead.” What, he would have asked, do we mean by “lead”? How on earth do we justify disentangling specific practices from the seamless web of life and measuring them against each other? And even if we could disentangle reality, how would we know which bits to measure?

  All good questions, and we need to answer them if we are to explain why the West rules—even though the search for answers has torn anthropology apart over the last fifty years. With some trepidation, I will now plunge into these troubled waters.

  3

  TAKING THE MEASURE OF THE PAST

  ARCHAEOLOGY EVOLVING

  Social evolution was still rather a new idea when cultural anthropologists launched the rebellion against it described at the end of Chapter 2. The word’s modern sense goes back only to 1857, when Herbert Spencer, a homeschooled English polymath, published an essay called “Progress: Its Law and Cause.” Spencer was an odd character, who had already tried his hand at being a railway engineer, a copy editor at the then brand-new magazine The Economist, and a romantic partner of the lady novelist George Eliot (none of which suited him; he never held a steady job or married). This essay, though, was an overnight sensation. In it Spencer explained, “From the remotest past which Science can fathom, up to the novelties of yesterday, that in which progress essentially consists, is the transformation of the homogeneous into the
heterogeneous.” Evolution, Spencer insisted, is the process by which things begin simply and get more complex, and it explains everything about everything:

  The advance from the simple to the complex, through a process of successive differentiations, is seen alike in the earliest changes of the Universe to which we can reason our way back, and in the earliest changes which we can inductively establish; it is seen in the geologic and climatic evolution of the Earth; it is seen in the unfolding of every single organism on its surface, and in the multiplication of kinds of organisms; it is seen in the evolution of Humanity, whether contemplated in the civilized individual, or in the aggregate of races; it is seen in the evolution of Society in respect alike of its political, its religious, and its economical organization; and it is seen in the evolution of all those endless concrete and abstract products of human activity which constitute the environment of our daily life.

  Spencer spent the next forty years bundling geology, biology, psychology, sociology, politics, and ethics into a single evolutionary theory. He succeeded so well that by 1870 he was probably the most influential philosopher writing in English, and when Japanese and Chinese intellectuals decided they needed to understand the West’s achievements, he was the first author they translated. The great minds of the age bowed to his ideas. The first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, did not contain the word “evolution”; nor did the second or third, nor even the fourth or fifth. But in the sixth imprint, in 1872, Darwin felt compelled to borrow the term that Spencer had by now popularized.*

  Spencer believed that societies had evolved through four levels of differentiation, from the simple (wandering bands without leaders) through the compound (stable villages with political leaders) and doubly compound (groups with churches, states, complex divisions of labor, and scholarship) to the trebly compound (great civilizations like Rome and Victorian Britain). The scheme caught on, though no two theorists quite agreed on how to label the stages. Some spoke of evolution from savagery through barbarism to civilization; others preferred evolution from magic through religion to science. By 1906 the forest of terminologies was so annoying that Max Weber, the founding father of sociology, complained about “the vanity of contemporary authors who conduct themselves in the face of a terminology used by someone else as if it were his toothbrush.”

  Whatever the labels evolutionists used, though, they all faced the same problem. They had a gut feeling that they must be right, but little hard evidence to prove it. The newly forming discipline of anthropology therefore set out to supply data. Some societies, the thinking went, are less evolved than others: the colonized peoples of Africa or the Trobriand Islands, with their stone tools and colorful customs, are like living ancestors, reflecting what civilized people in trebly compound societies must have been like in prehistory. All that the anthropologist had to do (apart from putting up with malaria, internal parasites, and ungrateful natives) was take good notes, and he (not too often she in those days) could come home and fill in the gaps in the evolutionary story.

  It was this intellectual program that Malinowski rejected. In a way, though, it is odd that the issue came up at all. If evolutionists wanted to document progress, why not do so directly, using archaeological data, the physical remains left behind by actual prehistoric societies, rather than indirectly, using anthropological observations of contemporary groups and speculating that they were survivals? The answer: archaeologists a century ago just did not know very much. Serious excavation had barely begun, so evolutionists had to combine the skimpy information in archaeological reports with incidental details from ancient literature and random ethnographic accounts—which made it all too easy for Malinowksi and like-minded anthropologists to expose evolutionists’ reconstructions as speculative just-so stories.

  Archaeology is a young science. As little as three centuries ago, our most ancient evidence about history—China’s Five Classics, the Indian Vedas, the Hebrew Bible, and the Greek poet Homer—barely reached back to 1000 BCE. Before these masterpieces, all was darkness. The simple act of digging things up changed everything, but it took a while. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1799 he brought with him a legion of scholars, who copied down or carried off dozens of ancient inscriptions. In the 1820s French linguists unlocked the secrets of these hieroglyphic texts, abruptly adding two thousand years to documented history. Not to be outdone, in the 1840s British explorers tunneled into ruined cities in the lands that are now Iraq or, hanging from ropes, transcribed royal inscriptions in the mountains of Iran; before the decade was over, scholars could read Old Persian, Assyrian, and the wisdom of Babylon.

  When Spencer started writing about progress in the 1850s, archaeology was still more adventure than science, bursting with real-life Indiana Joneses. It was only in the 1870s that archaeologists began applying the geological principle of stratigraphy (the commonsense insight that since the uppermost layers of earth on a site must have got there after the lower layers, we can use the sequence of deposits to reconstruct the order of events) to their digs, and stratigraphic analysis became mainstream only in the 1920s. Archaeologists still depended on linking their sites with events mentioned in ancient literature to date what they excavated, and so until the 1940s finds in most parts of the world floated in a haze of conjecture and guesswork. That ended when nuclear physicists discovered radiocarbon dating, using the decay of unstable carbon isotopes in bone, charcoal, and other organic finds to tell how old objects were. Archaeologists began imposing order on prehistory, and by the 1970s a global framework was taking shape.

  When I was a graduate student in the 1980s one or two senior professors still claimed that when they had been students their teachers had advised them that the only essential tools for fieldwork were a tuxedo and a small revolver. I am still not sure whether I should have believed them, but whatever the truth of the matter, the James Bond era was certainly dying by the 1950s. The real breakthroughs increasingly came from the daily grind of an army of professionals, grubbing facts, pushing further into prehistory, and fanning out across the globe.

  Museum storerooms were overflowing with artifacts and library shelves groaning under the weight of technical monographs, but some archaeologists worried that the fundamental question—what does it all mean?—was going unanswered. The situation in the 1950s was the mirror image of the 1850s: where once grand theory sought data, now data cried out for theory. Armed with their hard-won results, mid-twentieth-century social scientists, particularly in the United States, felt ready for another crack at theorizing.

  Calling themselves neo-evolutionists to show that they were more advanced than fuddy-duddy “classical” evolutionists like Spencer, some social scientists began suggesting that while it was wonderful to have so many facts to work with, the mass of evidence had itself become part of the problem. The important information was buried in messy narrative accounts by anthropologists and archaeologists or in historical documents: in short, it was not scientific enough. To get beyond the forest of nineteenth-century typologies and create a unifying theory of society, the neo-evolutionists felt, they needed to convert these stories into numbers. By measuring differentiation and assigning scores they could rank societies and then search for correlations between the scores and possible explanations. Finally, they could turn to questions that might make all the time and money spent on archaeology worthwhile—whether there is just one way for societies to evolve, or multiple ways; whether societies cluster in discrete evolutionary stages (and if so, how they move from one stage to another); or whether a single trait, such as population or technology (or, for that matter, geography), explains everything.

  In 1955 Raoul Naroll, an anthropologist working on a vast multi-university data-gathering project called the Human Relations Area Files, took the first serious stab at what he described as an index of social development. Randomly choosing thirty preindustrial societies from around the world (some contemporary, others historical), he trawled the files to fin
d out how differentiated they were, which, he thought, would be reflected in how big their largest settlements were, how specialized their craftworkers were, and how many subgroups they had. Converting the results to a standard format, Naroll handed out scores. At the bottom were the Yahgan people of Tierra del Fuego, who had impressed Darwin in 1832 as “exist[ing] in a lower state of improvement than [those] in any other part of the world.” They scored just twelve out of a possible sixty-three points. At the top were the pre-Spanish-conquest Aztecs, with fifty-eight points.

  Over the next twenty years other anthropologists tried their hands at the game. Despite the fact that each used different categories, data sets, mathematical models, and scoring techniques, they agreed on the results between 87 and 94 percent of the time, which is pretty good for social science. Fifty years after Spencer’s death, a hundred after his essay on progress, neo-evolutionists looked poised to prove the laws of social evolution.

  ANTHROPOLOGY DEVOLVING

  So what happened? If neo-evolutionists had delivered the goods and explained everything about social evolution, we would all have heard about it. And more to the point right now, they would already have answered the why-the-West-rules question. That question is, after all, about the relative levels of development of Eastern and Western societies: whether, as long-term lock-in theorists claim, the West pulled ahead long ago, or, as short-term accident theorists would have it, the West’s lead is very recent. If neo-evolutionists could measure social development we would not have to mess around with complicated diagrams like Table 2.1. It would just be a matter of calculating Eastern and Western scores at various points since the end of the Ice Age, comparing them, and seeing which theory corresponds better with reality. So why has no one done this?