Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  It took Fermi’s lunch mates a moment or two to realize that he was still worrying about spacemen. Running a few numbers through his head while eating, it had struck him that even if only a vanishingly small proportion of our galaxy’s 250 billion stars have habitable planets,* outer space should still be teeming with aliens. Earth is relatively young, at less than five billion years, so some of these species should be much older and more advanced than us. Even if their spaceships were as slow as our own, it should have taken them at most 50 million years to explore the whole galaxy. So where were they? Why had they not made contact?

  In 1967 the astronomers Iosif Shklovskii and Carl Sagan offered a sobering solution to Fermi’s paradox. If just one star in every quarter of a million is orbited by just one habitable planet, they calculated, there would be a million potential alien civilizations in the Milky Way. The fact that we have not heard from any of them,* Shklovskii and Sagan concluded, must mean that advanced civilizations always destroy themselves. The astronomers even suggested that they must invariably do so within a century of inventing nuclear weapons, since otherwise the aliens would have plenty of time to fill the cosmos with signals that we would pick up. All the evidence (or, strictly speaking, the lack of it), then, points to Nightfall by 2045, the centenary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (By a slightly unsettling coincidence, 2045 is also the year Kurzweil nominated for the Singularity.)

  It is a clever argument, but as always, there is more than one way to do the numbers. A million civilizations rushing into Nightfall is only a guess, and most solutions of the Drake Equation† (dreamed up by the astronomer Frank Drake in 1961 as a rough way to calculate the number of civilizations in the galaxy) in fact generate much lower scores. Drake himself calculated that our galaxy has produced just ten advanced civilizations in its entire history, in which case ET could be out there without us knowing.

  In the end Fermi’s paradox is not very helpful, because the answer to how the great race will turn out lies not in the stars but in our own past. Even if history cannot give us the precise tools of prediction that Asimov imagined in Foundation, it does provide some rather solid hints. These, I suspect, are the only real foundation for looking forward.

  In the short term, the patterns established in the past suggest that the shift of wealth and power from West to East is inexorable. The transformation of the old Eastern core into a Western periphery in the nineteenth century allowed the East to discover advantages in its backwardness, and the latest of these—the incorporation of China’s vast, poor workforce into the global capitalist economy—is still playing out. Bungling, internal divisions, and external wars may hold China back, as they did so often between the 1840s and 1970s, but sooner or later—probably by 2030, almost certainly by 2040—China’s gross domestic product will overtake that of the United States. At some point in the twenty-first century China will use up the advantages of its backwardness, but when that happens the world’s center of economic gravity will probably still remain in the East, expanding to include South and Southeast Asia. The shift in power and wealth from West to East in the twenty-first century is probably as inevitable as the shift from East to West that happened in the nineteenth century.

  The West-to-East shift will surely be faster than any in earlier history, but the old Western core currently has a huge lead in per capita energy capture, technology, and military capacity, and will almost certainly maintain its rule in some form through the first half of this century. So long as the United States is strong enough to act as globocop, major wars should be as rare as they were when Britain was globocop in the nineteenth century. But beginning somewhere between 2025 and 2050, America’s lead over the rest of the world will narrow, as Britain’s did after about 1870, and the risks of a new world war will increase.

  The speed of technological change may well add to the instability by making access to high-tech weapons easier. According to Steven Metz, a professor at the United States Army War College, “We will see if not identical technologies, then parallel technologies being developed [outside the United States], particularly because of the off-the-shelf nature of it all. We’ve reached the point where the bad guys don’t need to develop it; instead they can just buy it.” A RAND Corporation report even suggested in 2001 that “the U.S. and its military must include in its planning for possible military conflict the possibility that China may be more advanced technologically and militarily by 2020.”

  The United States will probably be the first nation to develop a functional antimissile shield, as well as robots and nanoweapons that render human combatants obsolete, cybertechnology that can neutralize or seize control of enemy computers and robots, and satellites that militarize space. One risk is that if—as seems probable—the United States can deploy some or all of these wonder weapons before 2040, its leaders might be tempted to exploit a temporary but enormous technological edge to reverse their long-term strategic decline. Yet I suspect that is unlikely. Even in the feverish atmosphere of the early 1950s the United States resisted the temptation to strike the Soviet Union before it could build up its nuclear arsenal. The real risk is probably that other nations, fearing American military breakthroughs in the next few decades, might prefer striking first to falling even further behind. That kind of thinking played a big part in taking Germany to war in 1914.

  It is going to take great statesmanship to preserve the peace in the bewildering twenty-first century. I have argued throughout this book that great men/women and bungling idiots have never played as big a part in shaping history as they have believed they did. Rather than changing the course of history, I suggested, the most that chaps could do was to speed up or slow down the deeper processes driven by maps. Even the most disastrous decisions, such as the wars that Justinian of Byzantium and Khusrau of Persia launched between 530 and 630 CE, just accelerated a collapse that was already under way. Without Justinian’s and Khusrau’s wars, Western social development might have started recovering sooner, but even with them, development did eventually bounce back.

  Since 1945, however, leaders really have had the ability to change history. Khrushchev and Kennedy came close to doing so in 1962. Nuclear weapons leave us no margin of error, no second chance. Mistakes used to cause decline and fall; now they cause Nightfall. For the first time in history, leadership really is decisive. We can only hope that our age, like most before it, gets the thought it needs.

  I concluded in Chapter 11 that explanations for why the West rules have to be couched in terms of probabilities, not certainties, and this is even truer of the twenty-first century’s great race. Right now the odds are apparently against us, but it does seem to me that if our age is able to get the thought it needs, the odds will steadily shift in the Singularity’s favor.

  If renewable, clean energy sources replace hydrocarbons across the next fifty years, they should reduce (though certainly not eliminate) the risk of great powers coming to blows over resources or being drawn into feuds in the arc of instability. They should also slow the process of global weirding, reducing the pressures within the arc, and may boost food production even more dramatically than the industrial revolution did. If robotics makes the advances many scientists anticipate, intelligent machines may save wealthy Europe and Japan from demographic disaster, providing cheaply the labor and care that their aging populations need. If nanotechnology similarly lives up to the hype, we might even start cleaning up the air and oceans by the 2040s.

  In the end, though, there is only one prediction we can rely on: neither Nightfall nor the Singularity will actually win the great race, because the race will have no finishing line. When we reach 2045 (Kurzweil’s estimated time of arrival for the Singularity, and Shklovskii and Sagan’s latest date for Nightfall, a century after Hiroshima and Nagasaki) we will not get to declare the end of history and announce a winner. If, as I suspect will happen, we are still holding Nightfall at bay in the mid twenty-first century and social development is soaring past two thousand points, the emerging Singul
arity will not so much end the race as transform the race—and above all, transform the human race.

  Looked at in a really long perspective, the threats that so scare us today seem to have a lot in common with the kinds of forces that have repeatedly pushed evolution into high gear in the past. Time after time, relatively sudden changes in the environment have created conditions in which mutations flourish, transforming the gene pool. About 1.8 million years ago the drying-out of East Africa’s forests apparently allowed freaks with big brains to fare better than Homo habilis. A brutal phase in the Ice Age about a hundred thousand years ago may have given Homo sapiens an equivalent opportunity to shine. And now, in the twenty-first century, something similar is perhaps happening again.

  Mass extinctions are already under way, with one species of plant or land animal disappearing every twenty minutes or so. A 2004 study estimated that the cheeriest possible outcome is that 9 percent of the world’s 10 million species of plants and land animals will face extinction by 2050, and plenty of biologists expect biodiversity to shrink by as much as one-third or one-half. Some even speak of a sixth mass extinction,* with two-thirds of Earth’s species dying out by 2100. Humans may be among them; but rather than simply wiping Homo off the planet, the harsh conditions of the twenty-first century might act like those 1.8 million or a hundred thousand years ago, creating an opportunity for organisms with new kinds of brains—in this case, brains that merge man and machine—to replace older beings. Far from trampling us, the hoofbeats of the horsemen of the apocalypse might serve to turn our baby steps toward a Singularity into a new great leap.

  The Singularity, however, might be every bit as scary as Nightfall. In Kurzweil’s vision, the Singularity culminates with the merging of human and machine intelligence in the 2040s, and those of us who live long enough for this might in effect live forever; but some of the humans who have the most experience with this—technologists in the United States Army—doubt that things will stop at that point. The former colonel Thomas Adams, for instance, suspects that war is already moving beyond “human space” as weapons become “too fast, too small, too numerous, and … create an environment too complex for humans to direct.” Technology, he suggests, is “rapidly taking us to a place where we may not want to go, but probably are unable to avoid.” The merging of humans and computers may be just a brief phase before what we condescendingly call “artificial” intelligence replaces Homo sapiens as thoroughly as Homo sapiens replaced all earlier ape-men.

  If this is where a Singularity takes us in the later twenty-first century, it will mean the end of biology as we have known it, and with it the end of sloth, fear, and greed as the motors of history. In that case my Morris Theorem—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—will finally reach its limits.

  Sociology as we know it will go the same way, though what kinds of rules will govern a robotic society is anyone’s guess; and the Singularity will surely obliterate the old geography. The ancient distinctions between East and West will be irrelevant to robots.

  When historians (if such things still exist) look back from 2103 on the shift from carbon- to silicon-based intelligence, it may strike them as inevitable—as inevitable, in fact, as I have claimed that the earlier shifts from foraging to farming, villages to cities, and agriculture to industry were. It may seem just as obvious that the regional traditions that had grown from the original agricultural cores since the end of the Ice Age were bound to merge into a single posthuman world civilization. The early twenty-first century’s anxiety over why the West ruled and whether it would keep on doing so might look a little ridiculous.

  THE TWAIN MEET

  There is a certain irony in all this. I began this book with a what-if story about the Chinese Empire taking Prince Albert to Beijing as a hostage in 1848, and then spent eleven chapters explaining why that didn’t happen. The answer to the book’s main question, I concluded, is geography; maps, not chaps, sent the little dog Looty to Balmoral rather than Albert to Beijing.

  In this chapter I took the argument further, suggesting that explaining why the West rules also largely answers the question of what will happen next. As surely as geography dictated that the West would rule, it also dictates that the East will catch up, exploiting the advantages of its backwardness until its social development overtakes the West’s. But here we encounter another irony. Rising social development has always changed the meaning of geography, and in the twenty-first century, development will rise so high that geography will cease to mean anything at all. The only thing that will count is the race between a Singularity and Nightfall. To keep Nightfall at bay we will have to globalize more and more of our concerns, and arguments about which part of the world has the highest social development will matter less and less.

  Hence the deepest irony: answering the book’s first question (why the West rules) to a great extent also answers the second (what will happen next), but answering the second robs the first of much of its significance. Seeing what is coming next reveals what should, perhaps, have been obvious all along—that the history that really matters is not about the East, the West, or any other subsection of humanity. The important history is global and evolutionary, telling the story of how we got from single-celled organisms to the Singularity.

  I have argued throughout the book that neither long-term lock-in nor short-term accident theories explain history very well, but now, once again, I want to go further. In the really long run, on the time scale of evolutionary history, neither long-term lock-in nor short-term accident theories actually matter very much. Fifteen thousand years ago, before the Ice Age ended, East and West meant little. A century from now they will once again mean little. Their importance in the intervening era was just a side effect of geography between the age when the first farmers pushed social development past about six points and that when the first machine-enhanced, postbiological creatures push social development past five thousand points. By the time that happens—somewhere, I suspect, between 2045 and 2103—geography will no longer mean very much at all. East and West will be revealed as merely a phase we went through.

  Even if everything in this phase had gone as differently as could be imagined—if, say, Zheng He had really gone to Tenochtitlán, if there had been a new kind of Pacific rather than a new kind of Atlantic economy, if there had been a Chinese rather than a British industrial revolution, and if Albert had gone to Beijing rather than Looty to Balmoral—the deep forces of biology, sociology, and geography would still have pushed history in much the same direction. America (or Zhengland, as we might now call it) would have become part of the Eastern rather than the Western core and the West would now be catching up with the East rather than the other way around, but the world would still have shrunk from size large to size small and would still now be shrinking to size tiny. The early twenty-first century would still have been dominated by Chimerica, and whether it fell or not, the race between Nightfall and the Singularity would still be going on. And East and West would still be losing their significance.

  This should not be a shocking conclusion. As long ago as 1889, while the world was still shrinking from size large to size medium, a young poet named Rudyard Kipling could already see part of the same truth. Freshly back in London from the far-flung battle line, Kipling got his big break with a ripping yarn of imperial derring-do called “The Ballad of East and West.”* It tells the story of Kamal, a border raider who steals an English colonel’s mare. The colonel’s son leaps onto his own horse and pursues Kamal through the desert in a chase of epic proportions (“They have ridden the low moon out of the sky, their hoofs drum up the dawn, / The dun he went like a wounded bull, but the mare like a new-roused fawn”). Finally, though, the Englishman is thrown. Kamal charges back at him, rifle raised. But all ends well: the two men “looked each other between the eyes, and there they found no fault, / They have taken the Oath of the
Brother-in-Blood on leavened bread and salt.”

  Stirring stuff, but it is the poem’s opening line—“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”—that gets all the attention, mostly from people quoting it as an example of the nineteenth-century West’s insufferable self-satisfaction. Yet that was surely not the effect Kipling was hoping for. What he actually wrote was:

  Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

  Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;

  But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

  When two strong men stand face to face,

  tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

  As Kipling saw it, people (real men, anyway) are all much the same; it is just geography that obscures the truth, requiring us to take a trip to the ends of the earth to figure things out. But in the twenty-first century, soaring social development and a shrinking world are making such trips unnecessary. There will be neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birth when we transcend biology. The twain shall finally meet if we can just put off Nightfall long enough.

  Can we do that? I think the answer is yes. The great difference between the challenges we face today and those that defeated Song China when it pressed against the hard ceiling a thousand years ago and the Roman Empire another thousand before that is that we now know so much more about the issues involved. Unlike the Romans and the Song, our age may yet get the thought it needs.

  On the last page of his book Collapse, the biologist and geographer Jared Diamond suggested that there are two forces that might save the world from disaster: archaeologists (who uncover the details of earlier societies’ mistakes) and television (which broadcasts their findings). As an archaeologist who watches a lot of television, I certainly agree, but I also want to add a third savior, history. Only historians can draw together the grand narrative of social development; only historians can explain the differences that divide humanity and how we can prevent them from destroying us.