by Morris, Ian;
Largely, I suspect, because neo-evolutionism imploded. Even before Naroll took up his slide rule in the 1950s, the desire to measure societies struck many anthropologists as naïve. The “law-and-order crowd” (as critics called Naroll and his ilk), with their punch cards of coded data, arcane debates about statistics, and warehouse-size computers, seemed strangely divorced from the reality of archaeologists digging trenches or anthropologists interviewing hunter-gatherers; and as the times started a-changing in the 1960s, neo-evolutionism began to look not so much ridiculous as downright sinister. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, for example, whose “Original Affluent Society” essay I mentioned in Chapter 2, had begun his career in the 1950s as an evolutionist, but in the 1960s decided that “sympathy and even admiration for the Vietnamese struggle, coupled to moral and political disaffection with the American war, might undermine an anthropology of economic determinism and evolutionary development.”
By 1967, when Sahlins was in Paris arguing that hunter-gatherers were not really poor, a new generation of anthropologists—who had cut their teeth on America’s civil rights, antiwar, and women’s movements, and were often steeped in the counterculture—was staking out much tougher positions. The only thing evolutionists were really doing, they suggested, was ranking non-Western societies by how much they resembled the Westerners doing the measuring, who—amazingly—always gave themselves the highest scores.
“Evolutionary theories,” the archaeologists Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley wrote in the 1980s, “easily slip into ideologies of self-justification or assert the priorities of the West in relation to other cultures whose primary importance is to act as offsets for our contemporary ‘civilization.’” Nor, many critics felt, was this confidence in numbers merely a harmless game Westerners played to make themselves feel good; it was part and parcel of the hubris that had given us carpetbombing, the Vietnam War, and the military-industrial complex. Hey hey, ho ho, LBJ had got to go; and so, too, the professors of ethnocentrism with their arrogance and their mathematics.
The sit-ins and name-calling turned an academic debate into a Manichean showdown. To some evolutionists, their critics were morally bankrupt relativists; to some critics, evolutionists were stooges of American imperialism. Through the 1980s and ’90s anthropologists fought it out in hiring, tenure, and graduate admissions committees, ruining careers and polarizing scholarship. Anthropology departments on America’s most famous campuses degenerated into something resembling bad marriages, until, broken down by years of mutual recriminations, the couples started leading separate lives. “We no longer [even] call each other names,” one prominent anthropologist lamented in 1984. In the extreme case—at Stanford, my own university—the anthropologists divorced in 1998, formally splitting into the Department of Anthropological Sciences, which liked evolution, and the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, which did not. Each did its own hiring and firing and admitted and trained its own students; members of one group had no need to acknowledge members of the other. They even gave rise to a new verb, to “stanfordize” a department.
The woes—or joys, depending on who was talking—of stanfordization kept anthropologists entertained in bars at professional conferences for several years, but stanfordizing is not much of a solution to one of the biggest intellectual problems in the social sciences.* If we are going to explain why the West rules we need to confront the arguments on both sides of this issue.
Social evolution’s critics were surely right that the law-and-order crowd was guilty of hubris. Like Herbert Spencer himself, in trying to explain everything about everything they perhaps ended up explaining rather little about anything. There was a lot of confusion over what neo-evolutionists were actually measuring, and even when they agreed on just what was supposed to be evolving within societies (which mostly happened when they stuck to Spencer’s favorite idea of differentiation) it was not always obvious what ranking the world’s societies in a league table would actually accomplish.
Score sheets, the critics insisted, obscure more than they reveal, masking the peculiarities of individual cultures. I certainly found that to be true when I was studying the origins of democracy in the 1990s. The ancient Greek cities that invented this form of government were really peculiar; many of their residents honestly believed that instead of asking priests what the gods thought, the best way to find the truth was to get all the men together on the side of a hill, argue, and take a vote. Giving ancient Greece a score for differentiation does not explain where democracy came from, and burying the Greeks’ peculiarity somewhere in an index of social development can actually make the task harder by diverting attention from their unique achievements.
Yet that does not mean that an index of social development is a waste of time; just that it was the wrong tool for that specific question. Asking why the West rules is a different kind of question, a grand comparative one that requires us to range across thousands of years of history, look at millions of square miles of territory, and bring together billions of people. For this task an index of social development is exactly the tool we need. The disagreement between long-term lock-in and short-term accident theories is, after all, about the overall shape of social development in East and West across the ten or so millennia that “East” and “West” have been meaningful concepts. Instead of concentrating on this and directly confronting each other’s arguments, long-termers and short-termers tend to look at different parts of the story, use different bodies of evidence, and define their terms in different ways. Following the law-and-order crowd’s lead and reducing the ocean of facts to simple numerical scores has drawbacks but it also has the one great merit of forcing everyone to confront the same evidence—with surprising results.
WHAT TO MEASURE?
The first step is to figure out exactly what we need to measure. We could do worse than listen to Lord Robert Jocelyn, who fought in the Opium War that made Western rule clear to all. On a sweltering Sunday afternoon in July 1840 he watched as British ships approached Tinghai, where a fort blocked their approach to the Yangzi River mouth. “The ships opened their broadsides upon the town,” Jocelyn wrote, “and the crashing of timber, falling houses, and groans of men resounded from the shore. The firing lasted from our side for nine minutes … We landed on a deserted beach, a few dead bodies, bows and arrows, broken spears and guns remaining the sole occupants of the field.”
The immediate cause of Western rule is right here: by 1840 European ships and guns could brush aside anything an Eastern power could field. But there was, of course, more to the rise of Western rule than military power alone. Armine Mountain, another officer with the British fleet in 1840, likened the Chinese force at Tinghai to something out of the pages of medieval chronicles: it looked “as if the subjects of [those] old prints had assumed life and substance and colour,” he mused, “and were moving and acting before me unconscious of the march of the world through centuries, and of all modern usage, invention, or improvement.”
Mountain grasped that blowing up ships and forts was merely the proximate cause of Western dominance, the last link in a long chain of advantages. A deeper cause was that British factories could turn out explosive shells, well-bored cannon, and oceangoing warships, and British governments could raise, fund, and direct expeditions operating halfway round the world; and the ultimate reason that the British swept into Tinghai that afternoon was their success at extracting energy from the natural environment and using it to achieve their goals. It all came down to the fact that Westerners had not only scrambled further up the Great Chain of Energy than anyone else but also scrambled so high that—unlike any earlier societies in history—they could project their power across the entire world.
This process of scrambling up the Great Chain of Energy is the foundation of what, following the tradition of evolutionary anthropologists since Naroll in the 1950s, I will call social development—basically, a group’s ability to master its physical and intellectual environment to get t
hings done.* Putting it more formally, social development is the bundle of technological, subsistence, organizational, and cultural accomplishments through which people feed, clothe, house, and reproduce themselves, explain the world around them, resolve disputes within their communities, extend their power at the expense of other communities, and defend themselves against others’ attempts to extend power. Social development, we might say, measures a community’s ability to get things done, which, in principle, can be compared across time and space.
Before we go any further with this line of argument, there is one point I need to make in the strongest possible terms: measuring and comparing social development is not a method for passing moral judgment on different communities. For example, twenty-first-century Japan is a land of air-conditioning, computerized factories, and bustling cities. It has cars and planes, libraries and museums, high-tech healthcare and a literate population. The contemporary Japanese have mastered their physical and intellectual environment far more thoroughly than their ancestors a thousand years ago, who had none of these things. It therefore makes sense to say that modern Japan is more developed than medieval Japan. Yet this implies nothing about whether the people of modern Japan are smarter, worthier, or luckier (let alone happier) than the Japanese of the Middle Ages. Nor does it imply anything about the moral, environmental, or other costs of social development. Social development is a neutral analytical category. Measuring it is one thing; praising or blaming it is another altogether.
I will argue later in this chapter that measuring social development shows us what we need to explain if we are to answer the why-the-West-rules question; in fact, I will propose that unless we come up with a way to measure social development we will never be able to answer this question. First, though, we need establish some principles to guide our index-making.
I can think of nowhere better to start than with Albert Einstein, the most respected scientist of modern times. Einstein is supposed to have said that “in science, things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”: that is, scientists should boil their ideas down to the core point that can be checked against reality, figure out the simplest possible way to perform the check, then do just that—nothing more, but nothing less either.
Einstein’s own theory of relativity provides a famous example. Relativity implies that gravity bends light, meaning—if the theory is right—that every time the sun passes between Earth and another star, the sun’s gravity will bend the light coming from that star, making the star appear to shift position slightly. That provides an easy test of the theory—except for the fact that the sun is so bright that we cannot see stars near it. But in 1919 the British astronomer Arthur Eddington came up with a clever solution, very much in the spirit of Einstein’s aphorism: by looking at the stars near the sun during a solar eclipse, Eddington realized, he could measure whether they had shifted by the amount Einstein predicted.
Eddington set off to the South Pacific, made his observations, and pronounced Einstein correct. Acrimonious arguments ensued, because the difference between results that supported Einstein and results that disproved him was tiny, and Eddington was pushing the instruments available in 1919 to their very limits; yet despite the theory of relativity’s complexity,* astronomers could agree on what they needed to measure and how to measure it. It was then just a matter of whether Eddington had got the measurements right. Coming down from the sublime movement of the stars to the brutal bombardment of Tinghai, though, we immediately see that things are much messier when we are dealing with human societies. Just what should we be measuring to assign scores to social development?
If Einstein provides our theoretical lead, we might take a practical lead from the United Nations Human Development Index, not least because it has a lot in common with the kind of index that will help answer our question. The UN Development Programme devised the index to measure how well each nation is doing at giving its citizens opportunities to realize their innate potential. The Programme’s economists started by asking themselves what human development really means, and boiled it down to three core traits: average life expectancy, average education (expressed by literacy levels and enrollments in school), and average income. They then devised a complicated weighting system to combine the traits to give each country a score between zero, meaning no human development at all (in which case everyone would be dead) and one—perfection, given the possibilities of the real world in the year the survey was done. (In case you’re wondering, in the most recent index available as I write, that for 2009, Norway came first, scoring .971, and Sierra Leone last, with .340.)
The index satisfies Einstein’s rule, since three traits is probably as simple as the UN can make things while still capturing what human development means. Economists still find a lot not to like about it, though. Most obviously, life expectancy, education, and income are not the only things we could measure. They have the advantage of being relatively easy to define and document (some potential traits, like happiness, would be much harder), but there are certainly other things we could look at (say employment rates, nutrition, or housing) that might generate different scores. Even economists who agree that the UN’s traits are the best ones sometimes balk at conflating them into a single human development score; they are like apples and oranges, these economists say, and bundling them together is ridiculous. Other economists are comfortable both with the variables chosen and with conflating them, but do not like the way the UN statisticians weight each trait. The scores may look objective, these economists point out, but in reality they are highly subjective. Still other critics reject the very idea of scoring human development. It creates the impression, they say, that Norwegians are 97.1 percent of the way toward ultimate bliss, and 2.9 times as blissful as people in Sierra Leone—both of which seem, well, unlikely.
But despite all the criticisms, the human development index has proved enormously useful. It has helped relief agencies target their funds on the countries where they can do most good, and even the critics tend to agree that the simple fact of having an index moves the debates forward by making everything more explicit. An index of social development across the last fifteen-thousand-plus years faces all the same problems as the UN’s index (and then some), but it also, I think, offers some similar advantages.
Like the UN economists, we should aim to follow Einstein’s rule. The index must measure as few dimensions of society as possible (keep it simple) while still capturing the main features of social development as defined above (don’t make it too simple). Each dimension of society that we measure should satisfy six rather obvious criteria. First, it must be relevant: that is, it must tell us something about social development. Second, it must be culture-independent: we might, for example, think that the quality of literature and art are useful measures of social development, but judgments in these matters are notoriously culture-bound. Third, traits must be independent of one another—if, for instance, we use the number of people in a state and the amount of wealth in that state as traits, we should not use per capita wealth as a third trait, because it is just a product of the first two traits. Fourth, traits must be adequately documented. This is a real problem when we look back thousands of years, because the available evidence varies so much. Especially in the distant past, we simply do not know much about some potentially useful traits. Fifth, traits must be reliable, meaning that experts more or less agree on what the evidence says. Sixth, traits must be convenient. This may be the least important criterion, but the harder it is to get evidence for something or the longer it takes to calculate results, the less useful that trait is.
There is no such thing as a perfect trait. Each trait we might choose inevitably performs better on some of these criteria than on others. But after spending many months now looking into the options, I have settled on four traits that I think do quite well on all six criteria. They do not add up to a comprehensive picture of Eastern and Western society, any more than the UN’s traits of life expectancy, educa
tion, and income tell us everything there is to know about Norway or Sierra Leone. But they do give us a pretty good snapshot of social development, showing us the long-term patterns that need to be explained if we are to know why the West rules.
My first trait is energy capture. Without being able to extract energy from plants and animals to feed soldiers and sailors who did little farming themselves, from wind and coal to carry ships to China, and from explosives to hurl shells at the Chinese garrison, the British would never have reached Tinghai in 1840 and blown it to pieces. Energy capture is fundamental to social development—so much so that back in the 1940s the celebrated anthropologist Leslie White proposed reducing all human history to a single equation: E x T →C, he pronounced, where E stands for energy, T for technology, and C for culture.
This is not quite as philistine as it sounds. White was not really suggesting that multiplying energy by technology tells us all we might want to know about Confucius and Plato or artists like the Dutch Old Master Rembrandt and the Chinese landscape painter Fan Kuan. When White spoke of “culture” he in fact meant something rather like what I am calling social development. But even so, his formulation is too simple for our purposes. To explain Tinghai we need to know more.
All the energy capture in the world would not have taken a British squadron to Tinghai if they had not been able to organize it. Queen Victoria’s minions had to be able to raise troops, pay and supply them, get them to follow leaders, and carry out a host of other tricky jobs. We need to measure this organizational capacity. Up to a point organizational capacity overlaps with Spencer’s old idea of differentiation, but neo-evolutionists learned in the 1960s that it is almost impossible to measure differentiation directly, or even to define it in a way that will satisfy critics. We need a proxy, something closely related to organizational capacity but easier to measure.
