Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Southwest Asia featured in the 1992 planners’ minds largely because they feared a hostile state seizing the region’s oil fields, as Iraq tried to do in 1990. They ignored the Islamist extremism that had been growing since the 1970s, and (like almost everyone else) were blind-sided by the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. But it was in the East that the planners’ assumptions proved most spectacularly wrong. Within weeks of the Defense Planning Guidance being leaked to the press, America’s major Eastern ally, Japan, plunged into recession and its major Eastern rival, China, took off.

  A hundred and fifty years had passed since the West began turning the old Eastern core into a periphery, and the lessons were clear to all who had eyes to see. Given peace, responsible government, and willingness to bend to Western power, Easterners could turn the capitalist world economy to their own ends, converting the huge populations and learned elites that had struck nineteenth-century Westerners as evidence of Eastern backwardness into engines of economic growth. Since the 1840s China had had precious little peace, responsibility, or flexibility, but in the 1990s it began to take its rightful place in the global order.

  From the unlikely podium of the back of a golf cart in the middle of a theme park, Deng announced that economic reform would no longer “proceed slowly like women with bound feet, but … [would] blaze a trail and press forward boldly.” The obstacles to red capitalism crumbled. When Mao and Nixon met in the early 1970s the typical American worker was nearly twenty times as productive as the typical undercapitalized Chinese laborer and the United States created 22 percent of the world’s goods compared with China’s 5 percent. Across the next thirty years American productivity continued to rise, but investment drove China’s up three times as fast. By 2000, American workers were less than seven times as productive as Chinese. The United States’ share of world production had barely changed, at 21 percent, but China’s had nearly tripled, to 14 percent.

  China paid a terrible price for this growth. Virtually unregulated factories dumped waste at will, poisoning major rivers. Cancer rates along these waterways were often double the national average. Other rivers, tapped for equally unregulated agriculture, dried up altogether. Logging ran wild and deserts expanded twice as fast as before the 1970s. Protests against government incompetence and endemic corruption became increasingly violent; most years since 2000 the police have recorded around 25,000 “mass incidents” and far more small riots.

  In return, though, Deng’s program headed off starvation and delivered big income gains. Country folk, who still make up two-thirds of China’s population, saw real wages rise about 6 percent per year. The gains, however, were concentrated along the eastern seaboard, and in dirt-poor inland villages the decline of Mao’s rudimentary but free education and health care often canceled them out. One result was the biggest migration in history: since the 1990s 150 million people have moved to the cities, creating the equivalent of a new Chicago every year. Relocating to a city typically raised a farmer’s income by 50 percent while simultaneously providing manufacturers with labor at a fraction of its cost in rich countries.

  Between 1992 and 2007 China’s exports increased a dozen-fold and its trade surplus with the United States ballooned from $18 billion to $233 billion. In American discount stores such as Wal-Mart, Chinese-made goods typically filled 90 percent of the shelf space by 2008; rare was the American who did not don at least one piece of made-in-China clothing every morning. Business Week magazine observed that “the China price” had become “the three scariest words in U.S. industry.” Companies that could not match it went under.

  Like nineteenth-century Britain and twentieth-century America, China became the workshop to the world. The financial journalist James Kynge describes overhearing a conversation on a train in Italy between two Chinese businessmen, sounding for all the world like a couple of Gradgrinds wrenched from the pages of Dickens:

  The boss remarked that they had been traveling for an hour and a half and had hardly seen a single factory. “Foreigners like looking at scenery,” the young man offered. The boss paused for thought, then asked, “Scenery or production, which is more important?” … The boss’s curiosity ranged over many subjects … Why were foreigners so lazy? What was Europe going to do when it did not have much industry left? Could you really run an economy on services alone? Did European cows really consume two dollars a day in farm subsidies?

  Half a century earlier, Mao had claimed, “The direction of the wind in the world has changed … At present, it is not the west wind that prevails over the east wind but the east wind that prevails over the west.” At the time, he was fooling himself; the 1950s East was very much under the West’s wing, divided between Soviet and American spheres. But by 2000 Mao’s words were coming true, albeit not in ways he had intended. Western social development was further ahead of Eastern—over three hundred points—than ever before, but whereas the ratio between the Western and Eastern score had been almost 2.4:1 in 1900, by 2000 it was only a little over 1.6:1. The twentieth century was both the high point of the Western age and the beginning of its end.

  Figure 10.11. Knowing which way the wind blows: Was the twentieth century both the high point and the end point of Western rule? The West’s lead in social development increased from 101 points in 1900 to 336 in 2000, but the ratio between the Western and Eastern scores shrank by one-third, from 2.4:1 in 1900 to 1.6:1 in 2000.

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  PART III

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  11

  WHY THE WEST RULES …

  WHY THE WEST RULES

  The West rules because of geography. Biology tells us why humans push social development upward; sociology tells us how they do this (except when they don’t); and geography tells us why the West, rather than some other region, has for the last two hundred years dominated the globe. Biology and sociology provide universal laws, applying to all humans in all times and places; geography explains differences.

  Biology tells us that we are animals, and like all living things we exist only because we capture energy from our surroundings. When short of energy, we grow sluggish and die; when filled with it, we multiply and spread out. Like other animals, we are inquisitive but also greedy, lazy, and fearful; we are unlike other animals only in the tools we have for pursuing these moods—the faster brains, more pliable throats, and opposable thumbs that evolution gave us. Using these, we humans have imposed our wills on our environments in ways quite unlike other animals, capturing and organizing ever more energy, spreading villages, cities, states, and empires across the planet.

  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries plenty of Westerners thought biology was the whole answer to why the West rules. The white European race, they insisted, had evolved further than anyone else. They were mistaken. For one thing, the genetic and skeletal evidence that I discussed in Chapter 1 is unequivocal: there is one kind of human, which evolved gradually in Africa around a hundred thousand years ago and then spread across the globe, making older kinds of humans extinct. The genetic differences between modern humans in different parts of the world are trivial.

  For another thing, if Westerners really were genetically superior to everyone else, the graphs of social development that fill Chapters 4–10 would look very different. After taking an early lead, the West would have stayed ahead. But that, of course, is not what happened (Figure 11.1). The West did get a head start at the end of the Ice Age, but its lead grew at some times and shrank at others. Around 550 CE it disappeared altogether, and for the next twelve hundred years the East led the world in social development.

  Figure 11.1. The shape of history revisited: Eastern and Western social development and the hard ceiling, 14,000 BCE–2000 CE, shown on a log-linear scale

  Very few scholars nowadays propagate racist theories that Westerners are genetically superior to everyone else, but anyone who does want to take this line will need to show that all the mettle was somehow br
ed out of Westerners in the sixth century CE, then bred back in in the eighteenth; or that Easterners bred themselves into superiority in the sixth century, then lost it in the eighteenth. That, to put it mildly, is going to be a tough job. Everything suggests that wherever we look, people—in large groups—are all much the same.

  We cannot explain why the West rules without starting from biology, since biology explains why social development has kept moving up; but biology alone is not the answer. The next step is to bring in sociology, which tells us how social development has increased so much.

  As Figure 11.1 shows, this has not been a smooth process. In the introduction, I proposed a “Morris Theorem” (expanding an idea of the great science fiction writer Robert Heinlein) to explain the entire course of history—that change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people (who rarely know what they’re doing) looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. I hope that the evidence presented in Chapters 2–10 has borne this out.

  We have seen people constantly tinkering, making their lives easier or richer or struggling to hold on to what they already have as circumstances change, and, in the process, generally nudging social development upward. Yet none of the great transformations in social development—the origins of agriculture, the rise of cities and states, the creation of different kinds of empires, the industrial revolution—was a matter of mere tinkering; each was the result of desperate times calling for desperate measures. At the end of the Ice Age, hunter-gatherers became so successful that they put pressure on the resources that sustained them. Further efforts to find food transformed some of the plants and animals they preyed on into domesticates and transformed some of the foragers into farmers. Some farmers succeeded so well that they put renewed pressure on resources, and to survive—especially when the weather went against them—they transformed their villages into cities and states. Some cities and states succeeded so well that they, too, ran into resource problems and transformed themselves into empires (first land-based, later ruling the steppes and oceans, too). Some of these empires repeated the same cycle, putting pressure on their resources and turning themselves into industrial economies.

  History is not just one damn thing after another. In fact, history is the same old same old, a single grand and relentless process of adaptations to the world that always generate new problems that call for further adaptations. Throughout this book I have called this process the paradox of development: rising social development creates the very forces that undermine it.

  People confront and solve such paradoxes every day, but once in a while the paradox creates tough ceilings that will yield only to truly transformative change. It is rarely obvious what to do, let alone how to do it, and as a society approaches one of these ceilings a kind of race begins between development and collapse. Societies rarely—perhaps never—simply get stuck at a ceiling and stagnate, their social development unchanging for centuries. Rather, if they do not figure out how to smash the ceiling, their problems spiral out of control. Some or all of what I have called the five horsemen of the apocalypse break loose, and famine, disease, migration, and state collapse—particularly if they coincide with an episode of climate change—will drive development down, sometimes for centuries, even into a dark age.

  One of these ceilings comes around twenty-four points on the social development index. This was the level where Western social development stalled and then collapsed after 1200 BCE. The most important ceiling, though, which I have called the hard ceiling, comes around forty-three points. Western development hit this in the first century CE, then collapsed; Eastern development did the same a thousand or so years later. This hard ceiling sets a rigid limit on what agricultural empires can do. The only way to break it is to tap into the stored energy of fossil fuels, as Westerners did after 1750.

  Adding sociology to biology explains much of the shape of history, telling us how people have pushed social development upward, why it rises quickly at some times and slowly at others, and why it sometimes falls. Yet even when we put them together, biology and sociology do not tell us why the West rules. To explain that, we need geography.

  I have stressed a two-way relationship between geography and social development: the physical environment shapes how social development changes, but changes in social development shape what the physical environment means. Living on top of a coalfield meant very little two thousand years ago, but two hundred years ago it began meaning a lot. Tapping into coal drove social development up faster than ever before—so fast, in fact, that soon after 1900 new fuels began to displace coal. Everything changes, including the meaning of geography.

  So much for my thesis. I want to spend most of this chapter addressing some of the most obvious objections to it, but before turning to that it might be useful to recap the main details of the story that filled Chapters 2–10.

  At the end of the Ice Age, around fifteen thousand years ago, global warming marked off a band of Lucky Latitudes (roughly 20–35 degrees north in the Old World and 15 degrees south to 20 degrees north in the New) where an abundance of large, potentially domesticable plants and animals evolved. Within this broad band, one region, the so-called Hilly Flanks of southwest Asia, was luckiest of all. Because it had the densest concentration of potential domesticates it was easier for people who lived there to become farmers than for people anywhere else. So, since people (in large groups) are all much the same, Hilly Flankers were the first to settle in villages and domesticate plants and animals, starting before 9000 BCE. From these first farmers descended the societies of the West. About two thousand years later people in what is now China—where potential domesticates were also plentiful, though not so plentiful as in the Hilly Flanks—moved the same way; from them descend the societies of the East. Over the next few thousand years people independently began domesticating plants and/or animals in half a dozen other parts of the world, each time beginning another regional tradition.

  Because Westerners were the first to farm, and because people (in large groups) are all much the same, Westerners were also the first to feel the paradox of development in a serious way and the first to learn what I have called the advantages of backwardness. Rising social development meant bigger populations, more elaborate lifestyles, and greater wealth and military power. Through various combinations of colonization and emulation, societies with relatively high social development expanded at the expense of those with lower development, and farming spread far and wide. To make farming work in new lands such as the sweltering river valleys of Mesopotamia, farmers were forced practically to reinvent it, and in the process of creating irrigation agriculture discovered advantages that made this rather backward frontier even more fruitful than the original agricultural core in the Hilly Flanks. And some time after 4000 BCE, with the biggest farming villages in the crowded Hilly Flanks struggling to manage, it was the Mesopotamians who worked out how to organize themselves into cities and states. About two thousand years later the same process played out in the East too, with the paradox of development exposing somewhat similar advantages of backwardness in the valleys that fed into the Yellow River basin.

  The new states had to interact with their neighbors in new ways, which created even more disruptive paradoxes of development along their frontiers. They had to learn to manage these; when they got things wrong—as perhaps happened at Uruk in Mesopotamia around 3100 BCE and Taosi in China around 2300, and definitely happened in the West after 2200 and 1750 BCE—they collapsed in chaos. Each collapse coincided with a period of climate change, which, I suggested, added a fifth horseman of the apocalypse to the four man-made ones.

  Rising social development produced worse disruptions and collapses, but it also produced more resilience and greater powers of recovery. After 1550 BCE Western cities and states bounced back from the disasters and expanded around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. A second great geographical contrast between East and West then came into play; the East had nothing like this extrao
rdinary inland sea, providing cheap and easy transport. But like so much else, the Mediterranean was a paradox, offering both opportunities and challenges. When social development reached about twenty-four points the forces of disruption on this wide-open frontier spun out of control, and around 1200 BCE the horsemen of the apocalypse rode (or, to mix the metaphor, sailed) again. The Western core collapsed even more dramatically than before, ushering in a centuries-long dark age.

  Thanks to the paradox of development, the lead in social development that geography had given the West at the end of the Ice Age was long-term but not locked in. Collapses are unpredictable things. Sometimes a few different decisions or a little good luck can postpone, reduce, or even head off disaster; our choices can make a difference. To break through the twenty-four-point ceiling, states had to reorganize themselves and develop a whole new way of thinking about the world, creating what we might call first-wave Axial thought. Because Westerners failed to reorganize and rethink around 1200 BCE, their lead over the East in social development narrowed; and because Westerners and Easterners both succeeded in making the necessary adjustments as development rose in the first millennium BCE, they remained neck and neck for a thousand years.

  Westerners and Easterners alike created more centralized states and then full-blown empires, and after 200 BCE reached a scale that began changing the meanings of geography again. In the West the Roman Empire brought the unruly Mediterranean under control and social development spiked up past forty points. By the first century CE it was pressing against the hard ceiling. At the same time, though, the rise of the Roman and Han empires also changed the meaning of the vast spaces that separated East and West. With so much wealth at each end of Eurasia, traders and steppe nomads found new reasons to move around, tentatively linking the cores and beginning the First Old World Exchange. Contacts pushed Eastern and Western development higher still, but they also set off unprecedented disruptions. For the first time, the five horsemen of the apocalypse linked the cores, exchanging microbes as well as goods and ideas. Instead of breaking through the hard ceiling, the Roman and Han empires both came apart after 150 CE.