Why the West Rules--For Now (91 page)

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 Japan’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.

Culture and free will are wild cards, complicating the 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. Culture and free will speed up or slow down our reactions to changing circumstances. They deflect and muddy any simple theory. But—as the story that filled
Chapters 1
–10 shows all too clearly—culture and free will never trump biology, sociology, and geography for long.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

The causes of Western rule are both long-term and short-term, lying in the constantly shifting interplay of geography and social development,
but Western rule itself was neither locked-in nor accidental. It would make more sense to call it probable, the most likely result, through most of history, in a game where geography stacked the odds in the West’s favor. Western rule, we might say, has often been a good bet.

To explain these rather cryptic comments I want to borrow a method from Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 comedy
Back to the Future
. Near the beginning of the movie, a mad professor has combined a giant guitar amplifier, stolen plutonium, and a DeLorean car to create a time machine. When terrorists kill the professor, the teenage Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox) gives chase and the time machine/car catapults him back to 1955. There he meets his future parents when they were his age. Disaster strikes—instead of falling in love with his father-to-be, Marty’s mother-to-be falls in love with Marty himself. A small dropped stitch in the tapestry of history, we might say, but to Marty it matters very much: unless he can put the past straight before the film ends, he will never be born.

Instead of following the historian’s normal method of starting a story at the beginning and telling it until we reach our own times, I think it might be useful to leap McFly-like into the past, and then, just as the movie does, stop to ask what could have happened to prevent the future—let us say the year 2000—from turning out more or less as it did.

I will start two centuries ago, in 1800. Alighting in the age of Jane Austen we will find that it was already overwhelmingly likely that the West would come to rule by 2000. Britain’s industrial revolution was under way, science was thriving, and European military power dwarfed everyone else’s. Of course, nothing was set in stone; with a bit more luck Napoleon might yet have won his wars or with a bit less luck Britain’s rulers might have bungled the challenges of industrialization. Either way, the British takeoff would have been slower, or—as I suggested in
Chapter 10
—the industrial revolution might have shifted to northern France. There are all kinds of possibilities. It is very hard, though, to see what could plausibly have happened after 1800 to have prevented a Western industrial revolution altogether. And once industrialization got going, it is equally hard to imagine what could have stopped its insatiable markets from going global. “
It is … in vain
,” Lord Macartney spluttered when the Chinese government rejected his trade embassy
in 1793, “to attempt arresting the progress of human knowledge”—a pompous way to put it, perhaps, but he had a point.

No matter how much we stack the deck against the West, such as by imagining a hundred-year delay in its industrialization and little European imperial expansion until the twentieth century, there is still no obvious reason to think that there would have been an independent Eastern industrial revolution before then. Such an Eastern takeoff would probably have required the rise of a diversified regional economy like the one Westerners had created around the shores of the Atlantic, and that would have taken several centuries to build up. Western rule by 2000 was not locked in in 1800, in the sense of being 100 percent certain, but I suspect it was at least 95 percent probable.

If we leap back another hundred and fifty years from 1800 to 1650, when Newton was still a boy, Western rule by 2000 would look less certain but still likely. Guns were closing the steppes and ships were creating the Atlantic economy. Industrialization remained undreamedof, but its preconditions were settling into place in western Europe. If the Dutch had won their wars against England in the 1650s, if the Dutch-backed coup in England had fallen through in 1688, or if the French had successfully invaded England in 1689, the particular institutions that wet-nursed Boulton and Watt might never have taken shape; and in that case the industrial revolution might, as I suggested earlier, have taken decades longer or have happened somewhere else in western Europe. But once again it is difficult to see what could plausibly have happened after 1650 to prevent it altogether. Perhaps if Western industrialization had slowed and the Qing rulers had also behaved differently, seventeenth-and eighteenth-century China might have caught up more quickly with European science, but as we saw in
Chapter 9
, it would have taken more than that for the East to have industrialized first. Western rule by 2000 was less locked in in 1650 than it would be by 1800, but it was still the most plausible outcome—perhaps 80 percent likely?

Another hundred and fifty years earlier, in 1500, the prognosis was murkier still. Western Europeans had ships that could sail to the New World, but their first instinct was simply to plunder it. If the Habsburgs had been even luckier than they actually were (if, perhaps, Luther had never been born, or if Charles V had co-opted him, or if the armada
against England had succeeded in 1588 and the Dutch rebellion had then folded), perhaps they really would become the shepherds of Christendom—in which case the Spanish Inquisition might have silenced radical voices such as Newton’s and Descartes’s, and arbitrary taxation might have destroyed Dutch, English, and French trade the way it destroyed Spanish commerce in historical reality. That is a lot of ifs, though, and for all we know a Habsburg Empire might have had exactly the opposite effect, driving even more Puritans to cross the Atlantic and build cities on hills, kick-starting an Atlantic economy and scientific revolution from the far side.