How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity
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Authors: Rodney Stark
Tags: #History, #World, #Civilization & Culture
HOW THE WEST
WON
The Neglected Story of
the Triumph of Modernity
Rodney Stark
Wilmington, Delaware
Contents
What You
Don’t
Know about the Rise of the West
Part I Classical Beginnings (500 BC–AD 500)
1
Stagnant Empires and the Greek “Miracle”
Part II The Not-So-Dark Ages (500–1200)
5
Northern Lights over Christendom
Part III Medieval Transformations (1200–1500)
7
Climate, Plague, and Social Change
9
Industry, Trade, and Technology
Part IV The Dawn of Modernity (1500–1750)
11
New World Conquests and Colonies
13
The Lutheran Reformation: Myths and Realities
18
Globalization and Colonialism
Introduction
What You
Don’t
Know about the Rise of the West
T
his is a remarkably unfashionable book.
Forty years ago the most important and popular freshman course at the best American colleges and universities was “Western Civilization.” It not only covered the general history of the West but also included historical surveys of art, music, literature, philosophy, and science. But this course has long since disappeared from most college catalogues on grounds that Western civilization is but one of many civilizations and it is ethnocentric and arrogant for us to study ours.
1
It is widely claimed that to offer a course in “Western Civilization” is to become an apologist “for Western hegemony and oppression” (as the classicist Bruce Thornton aptly put it).
2
Thus, Stanford dropped its widely admired “Western Civilization” course just months after the Reverend Jesse Jackson came on campus and led members of the Black Student Union in chants of “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ has got to go.”
3
More recently, faculty at the University of Texas condemned “Western Civilization” courses as inherently right wing, and Yale even returned a $20 million contribution rather than reinstate the course.
To the extent that this policy prevails, Americans will become increasingly ignorant of how the modern world came to be. Worse yet, they are in danger of being badly misled by a flood of absurd, politically correct fabrications, all of them popular on college campuses: That the Greeks copied their whole culture from black Egyptians.
4
That European science originated in Islam.
5
That Western affluence was stolen from
non-Western societies.
6
That Western modernity was really produced in China, and not so very long ago.
7
The truth is that, although the West wisely adopted bits and pieces of technology from Asia, modernity is
entirely
the product of Western civilization.
I use the term
modernity
to identify that fundamental store of scientific knowledge and procedures, powerful technologies, artistic achievements, political freedoms, economic arrangements, moral sensibilities, and improved standards of living that characterize Western nations and are now revolutionizing life in the rest of the world. For there is another truth: to the extent that other cultures have failed to adopt at least major aspects of Western ways, they remain backward and impoverished.
Ideas Matter
This book is not, however, simply a summary of the standard lessons of the old “Western Civilization” classes. Despite their value, these courses usually were far too enamored of philosophy and art, far too reluctant to acknowledge the positive effects of Christianity, and amazingly oblivious to advances in technology, especially those transforming mundane activities such as farming and banking.
In addition, while writing this volume I frequently found it necessary to challenge the received wisdom about Western history. To mention only a few examples:
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Also, both the textbooks and the instructors involved in the old “Western Civ” courses were content merely to describe the rise of Western civilization. They usually avoided any comparisons with Islam or Asia and ignored the issue of
why
modernity happened only in the West. That is the neglected story I aim to tell.
To explore that question is not ethnocentric; it is the only way to develop an informed understanding of how and why the modern world emerged as it did.
In early times China was far ahead of Europe in terms of many vital technologies. But when Portuguese voyagers reached China in 1517, they found a backward society in which the privileged classes were far more concerned with crippling young girls by binding their feet than with developing more productive agriculture—despite frequent famines. Why?
Or why did the powerful Ottoman Empire depend on Western foreigners to provide it with fleets and arms?
8
Or how was it possible for a relative handful of British officials, aided by a few regular army officers and noncommissioned officers, to rule the enormous Indian subcontinent?
Or, to change the focus, why did science and democracy originate in the West, along with representational art, chimneys, soap, pipe organs, and a system of musical notation? Why was it that for several hundred years beginning in the thirteenth century only Europeans had eyeglasses and mechanical clocks? And what about telescopes, microscopes, and periscopes?
There have been many attempts to answer these questions. Several recent authors attribute it all to favorable geography—that Europe benefited from a benign climate, more fertile fields, and abundant natural resources, especially iron and coal.
9
But, as Victor Davis Hanson pointed out in his book
Carnage and Culture
, “China, India, and Africa are especially blessed in natural ores, and enjoy growing seasons superior to those of northern Europe.”
10
Moreover, much of Europe was covered with dense hardwood forests that could not readily be cleared to permit farming or grazing until iron tools became available. Little wonder that Europe was long occupied by cultures far behind those of the Middle East and Asia.