Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Both East and West slid into new dark ages in which second-wave Axial thought (Christianity, Islam, and new forms of Buddhism) displaced older first-wave ideas, but in other ways their collapses were quite different. In the West, Germanic invaders broke up the less-developed part of the Roman Empire around the western Mediterranean, and the core retreated into its older and more developed heartland around the eastern Mediterranean. In the East, Inner Asian invaders broke up the older and more developed part of the former Han Empire around the Yellow River, and the core retreated into the less-developed lands beyond the Yangzi River.

  This geographical contrast made a world of difference. By 450 CE a new frontier of rice agriculture had begun booming around the Yangzi; by 600 China had been reunited; and over the following century the Grand Canal, linking the Yangzi and Yellow rivers, gave China a system of internal waterways that functioned rather like the Mediterranean had done for ancient Rome. In the West, though, where the Arab invaders were strong enough to break up the old Mediterranean core but not strong enough to remake it, social development kept falling until 700.

  Around 541 Eastern development rose above Western (proving beyond all doubt that Western rule was never locked in) and by 1100 was pressing against the hard ceiling. As economic growth outran resources, ironworkers tapped into fossil fuels, inventors created new machines, and Song dynasty intellectuals plunged into a veritable Chinese renaissance. But like Rome a thousand years before, the Song Chinese could not break the hard ceiling.

  To some extent, events in the early second millennium BCE paralleled those in the first, but with East and West reversed. Rising development set off a Second Old World Exchange and freed the five horsemen again. Social development fell in both cores, but fell longest and furthest in the East. In the West, the more developed Muslim heartland east of the Mediterranean suffered most, and by 1400 a new core was forming and having its own renaissance in western Europe.

  These fragmented, previously peripheral European lands now discovered advantages in their own backwardness. Shipbuilding and gunnery, technologies western Europeans had learned from the East during the Second Old World Exchange, allowed them to turn the Atlantic Ocean into a highway, once again transforming the meanings of geography. Eager to tap into the wealth of the East, Western sailors fanned out and—to their surprise—bumped into the Americas.

  Easterners could have discovered America in the fifteenth century (some people believe they did) but geography always made it more likely that Westerners would get there first. Easterners had far more to gain by sailing toward the riches of the Indian Ocean than into the empty Pacific and by pushing inland into the steppes, which had been the greatest threat to their security for nearly two thousand years.

  In the seventeenth century the expansion of the cores changed the meanings of geography more dramatically than ever before. Centralized empires with muskets and cannons closed the Inner Asian steppe highway that linked East and West, ending nomadic migration and effectively killing one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. On the Atlantic, by contrast, the oceanic highway that western European merchants had opened fueled the rise of new kinds of markets and raised entirely new questions about how the natural world worked. By 1700 social development was again pressing the hard ceiling, but this time, with the full complement of horsemen of the apocalypse unable to ride, disaster was held at bay long enough for western European entrepreneurs to respond to the incentives of the oceanic highway by unleashing the awesome powers of coal and steam.

  Given enough time, Easterners would probably have made the same discoveries and had their own industrial revolution, but geography made it much easier for Westerners—which meant that because people (in large groups) are all much the same, Westerners had their industrial revolution first. It was geography that took Looty to Balmoral rather than Albert to Beijing.

  NOT WHY THE WEST RULES

  But what, you might well ask, about people? The pages of this book have been full of great men (and women), bungling idiots, the beliefs they propounded, and their unremitting conflicts; did none of these in the end matter?

  Yes and no. We all have free will, and, as I have repeatedly stressed, our choices do change the world. It is just that most of our choices do not change the world very much. I could, for instance, decide right now to stop writing this book, quit my job, and become a hunter-gatherer. That would certainly make a difference. I would lose my home and, since I know rather little about hunting or gathering, would probably poison myself or starve. A few people around me would be strongly affected, and rather more people would be mildly affected. You, for instance, would have to find something else to read. But otherwise the world would go on. No decision I could conceivably make is going to change whether the West rules.

  Of course, if millions of other Americans also decided to walk away from the nine-to-five and take up foraging, my odd individual decision would be transformed from a crazy personal aberration into part of a mass (but still odd) movement that really would make a difference. There are plenty of examples of such mass decisions. At the end of World War II, for instance, half a billion women decided to marry younger than their mothers had done and bear more children. Population soared. Then, thirty years later, a full billion of their own daughters decided to do the opposite, and population growth slowed. Collectively, these choices changed the course of modern history.

  They were not, however, just whims. Karl Marx cut to the chase a century and a half ago: “Men [and women] make their own history,” he insisted, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.” Twentieth-century women had such good reasons for deciding to have more (and then fewer) babies that they often felt they really had no choice in the matter at all—just as the people who decided to take up farming ten thousand years ago, or to move to cities five thousand years ago, or to get jobs in factories two hundred years ago, must often have felt that there was no real alternative.

  There are strong pressures on all of us to make choices that conform to reality. We all know people who ignore these pressures and make eccentric decisions anyway. Often we admire these radicals, rebels, and romantics, but rarely do we follow their lead. Most of us know all too well that predictable conformists tend to fare better (by which I mean win more access to food, shelter, and mates) than Anna Kareninas. Evolution selects for what we call common sense.

  That said, eccentric choices clearly can have extraordinary consequences. Take Muhammad, perhaps the extreme case. This rather undistinguished Arab merchant could have chosen to be sensible, blaming his encounter with the Archangel Gabriel around 610 CE on a disorder of the stomach or any of a thousand plausible causes. But instead he chose to listen to his wife, who insisted that the visitation had been real. For years Muhammad looked likely to go the way of most prophets, into ridicule, contempt, and oblivion, but instead he united the Arabs. The caliphs who succeeded him destroyed Persia, shattered Byzantium, and split the West in two.

  Everyone agrees that Muhammad was a great man. Few humans have had more impact on history. But even so, the transformation of the Western core in and after the seventh century cannot be ascribed solely to his idiosyncrasy. Arabs had been inventing new versions of monotheism and forming their own states in the desert for some time before Gabriel visited Muhammad. Byzantium and Persia were in desperate trouble well before Muslim war parties started crossing their borders, and the Mediterranean had been coming apart since the third century.

  If Muhammad had made different choices, seventh-century Christians might only have had one another to fight, rather than the invading Muslims. Maybe without Muhammad, Western social development would have recovered faster after 750, and maybe it wouldn’t, but it would still have taken centuries to catch up with the East. The Western core would have stayed in the eastern Mediterranean whatever Muhammad did; the Turks would still have overrun it in the eleventh century and the Mongols in the thirteenth (and again around 1400)
; and the core would still have shifted westward toward Italy and then the Atlantic in and after the fifteenth century. If Muhammad had been more normal, the cross, not the crescent, might now inspire the faithful from Morocco to Malaysia—no small thing; but there is no reason to doubt that Europeans would still have conquered the Americas or that the West would now rule.

  What is true of Muhammad is probably even truer of the other great men we have met. Assyria’s Tiglath-Pileser III and the Qin First Emperor both created terrible, centralized, high-end ancient empires; Europe’s Habsburgs and Japan’s Hideyoshi both failed to create great land empires in the sixteenth century; England’s Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the death of Mao in 1976 both put reformist cliques in power. Yet the most that any of these great men/bungling idiots did was to speed up or slow down processes that were already under way. None really wrestled history down a whole new path. Even Mao, perhaps the most megalomaniac of all, only managed to postpone China’s industrial takeoff, giving Deng Xiaoping the opportunity to be remembered as the great man who turned China around. If we could rerun the past like an experiment, leaving everything else the same but substituting bungling idiots for great men (and vice versa), things would have turned out much the same, even if they might have moved at a slightly different pace. Great men (and women) clearly like thinking that by force of will alone they are changing the world, but they are mistaken.

  This applies outside politics as well as within. Matthew Boulton and James Watt, for instance, were certainly great men, the latter inventing and the former marketing machines that really did change the world. But they were not unique great men, any more than Alexander Graham Bell was unique when he filed a patent for his newly invented telephone on February 14, 1876—the same day that Elisha Gray filed a patent for his newly invented telephone. Nor were Boulton and Watt more unique than their acquaintance Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen in 1774, a year after a Swedish chemist had also discovered it. Or more unique than the four Europeans who separately discovered sunspots in 1611.

  Historians often marvel at the tendency for inventions to come in multiples, the lightbulb going on in several people’s brains at almost exactly the same moment. Great ideas often seem to be less the result of brilliance than the logical outcome of having a set of thinkers who share the same questions and methods. So it was with European men of letters in the early seventeenth century; once someone invented the telescope (which nine different men claimed to have done) it would have been remarkable if multiple astronomers had not promptly discovered sunspots.

  An extraordinary number of modern inventions were made more than once, and the statistician Stephen Stigler even proposed a law that no discovery is ever named after its real discoverer (Stigler’s Law, he observed, was actually discovered by the sociologist Robert Merton twenty-five years earlier). Boulton and Watt were ahead of the pack, but there was a pack, and if Boulton and Watt had not marketed a relatively fuel-efficient steam engine in the 1770s, one of their many rivals would surely have done so soon after. In fact, the pack might have got in even faster had Watt not finagled an extraordinary patent that excluded all competitors from the field.

  Great men/women and bungling idiots are creatures of their times. So should we conclude that some sort of spirit of the age, rather than specific individuals, determined the shape of history by sometimes creating an atmosphere conducive to greatness and other times generating a culture of bungling? Some historians think so, suggesting, for instance, that the real reason the West rules is that Chinese culture turned inward in the fourteenth century, giving up on the world, while European culture turned outward, propelling explorers over the oceans until they washed up in the Americas.

  I spent some time on this idea in Chapter 8, suggesting that it just does not make much sense of the facts. Culture is less a voice in our heads telling us what to do than a town hall where we argue about our options. Each age gets the thought it needs, dictated by the kind of problems that geography and social development force on it.

  This would explain why the histories of Eastern and Western thought have been broadly similar across the last five thousand years. In both cores the rise of the first states, around 3500 BCE in the West and after 2000 BCE in the East, set off arguments over the nature of and limits on divine kingship. As states in both cores became more bureaucratic, after 750 BCE in the West and 500 BCE in the East, these discussions yielded to first-wave Axial thought, debating the nature of personal transcendence and its relationship to secular authority. By about 200 CE, as the great Han and Roman empires fell apart, these questions in turn gave way to second-wave Axial thought, arguing over how organized churches could save the believer in a chaotic, dangerous world. And when social development revived, by 1000 in China and 1400 in Italy, renaissance questions—how to skip over the disappointing recent past to regain the lost wisdom of the first Axial Age—became more interesting still.

  Eastern and Western thought developed so similarly for so long, I suspect, because there was only one path by which social development could keep rising. To break through the twenty-four-point ceiling, Easterners and Westerners both had to centralize their states, which inevitably led intellectuals toward first-wave Axial thought. The decline of these states pushed people toward second-wave Axial thought; their revival led almost inevitably toward renaissances. Each great change pushed people to think the thoughts the age needed.

  But what of the great divergence around 1600, when western Europeans moved toward scientific thought while Easterners (plus those Westerners who lived outside the core around the Atlantic’s shores) did not? Did this epochal shift in thinking reflect deep cultural differences between Easterners and Westerners rather than simply the age getting the thought it needs?

  Some (Western) sociologists think so. When psychologists strap people into functional magnetic resonance imaging machines and ask them to solve problems, these scholars point out, the frontal and parietal areas in Western subjects’ brains light up more (indicating that they are working harder to maintain attention) if the question requires placing information within a broad context than if it calls for isolating facts from their background and treating them independently. For Easterners the reverse is true.

  What does this difference mean? Isolating facts and treating them independently from their context are hallmarks of modern science (as in the beloved caveat “other things being equal …”); perhaps, one theory runs, the contrast in brain function means that Westerners are simply more logical and scientific than Easterners.

  But perhaps not. The experiments do not show that Easterners cannot separate facts from their background or that Westerners cannot put things in perspective; only that each group is less accustomed to thinking that way, and has to work harder to pull it off. Both groups can, and regularly do, perform both kinds of tasks.

  In every age and every land we find rationalists and mystics, those who abstract from the details and those who revel in the complexities, and even a few who do all these things at once. What varies is the challenges facing them. When Europeans started creating the Atlantic economy around 1600, they also created new problems for themselves, and mechanical, scientific models of reality turned out to solve these best. Across the next four hundred years these ways of thinking became embedded in Western education, increasingly becoming the default mode of thought. In the East, where the kind of challenges that the Atlantic economy created seemed less pressing until well into the nineteenth century, this process has not yet gone as far.

  As recently as the 1960s some Western sociologists argued that Eastern culture—in particular, Confucianism—had prevented those who were steeped in it from developing the entrepreneurial spirit of competition and innovation essential for economic success. In the 1980s, faced with the obvious fact of Japanese economic success, a new generation of sociologists concluded that Confucian values of respect for authority and self-sacrifice for the group did not inhibit capitalism; rather, they actually explained Ja
pan’s success. A more sensible conclusion might be that people accommodate their culture to the needs of social development, which, in the late twentieth century, produced Confucian and Communist capitalists as well as liberal ones.

  The conclusion that we get the thought we need might also make sense of another odd phenomenon, which psychologists call the Flynn Effect. Since IQ tests began, average scores have steadily moved upward (by about three points per decade). It would be cheering to think that we are all getting smarter, but most likely we are just getting better at thinking in the modern, analytical ways that these tests measure. Reading books made us more modern than telling stories, and (to the horror of many educators) playing computer games apparently makes us more modern still.

  It is certainly true that not all cultures are equally responsive to changing circumstances. The Islamic lands, for instance, have produced notoriously few democracies, Nobel Prize–winning scientists, or diversified modern economies. Some non-Muslims conclude that Islam must be a benighted creed, miring millions in superstition. But if that were true it would be hard to explain why a thousand years ago many of the world’s best scientists, philosophers, and engineers were Muslims or why Muslim astronomers outperformed all comers until the sixteenth century.

  The real explanation, I suspect, is that since 1700 many Muslims have turned inward in response to military and political defeat, just as many Chinese Confucians did in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Islam remains a broad tent. At one extreme is Turkey, which has modernized so effectively that it is a plausible candidate to join the European Union; at the other we find people such as some of the Taliban, who would kill women for showing their faces in public. Overall, though, as the Muslim world slid from being the core of the West to being an exploited periphery, its social development stagnated in a sense of victimhood. Ending that is modern Islam’s great burden; and who knows what advantages the Muslim world might then discover in its backwardness.