Why western ascendency may be slipping
Review of Why the West Rules – for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris
To answer the question of why the west has outpaced the east over the last 200 years, the author digs deeper than any single-volume history I have ever read, from the emergence of homo sapiens 150,000 years ago to present. The whole way, however, he examines key concepts to tie it all together – it is not a descriptive tour, but an attempt to elicit laws from that history. This is by far the best grand synthesis I have yet read. Even better, it is simply fun to read and not a single page is dry.
At its most basic, Morris says there are 3 possible explanations for the west's ascendance. Is there could be a genetic difference of some sort, setting out superior intelligence or inventiveness as an innate quality of the white man? This, he demonstrates, is easily disproved by the fact that the from 700 CE over the next 1,000 years, eastern civilizations were by far the more dynamic. While Europe was a stagnant backwater, Islam had represented an eclectic and innovative culture in its first few centuries.
If it isn't genetic, then there might be a sociological explanation, i.e., the organization that various societies choose or develope as a way of managing themselves? This is the bailiwick of such ideas as "democratic capitalism", the socio-economic system that sprung up in the west. According to this narrative, its roots included the ideas of the classical Greeks, as rediscovered during the Renaissance and transmitted during the Enlightenment - this combination, the story goes, led inexorably to the development of the "free market", private property ownership, the rule of law, and investment of surplus in productive enterprises. Once again, Morris refutes this by comparing – from classical antiquity to the present – the various civilizations that repeatedly came close to developing capitalism. After an exhaustive review, he concludes that when there are masses of men, people act more or less the same, seeking power, wealth, and security.
Among many things, this means that individuals, even great leaders or conquerors, matter only to the extent that they accelerate or impede trends that are already in the making. There is, he concludes, nothing accidental about historical progress, no contingencies that could have turned out radically differently if circumstances or the people involved had been different. In other words, economic development is somehow inexorable.
Personally, I think Morris’ argument of inexorability is dead flat wrong. Morris’ reasoning smacks of typical Enlightenment over-confidence, that is, that there is a discernible, indeed unavoidable, right way to do things, that this can be understood objectively via reason, that eventually we must conform to it.
Having eliminated genetic and sociological explanations, Morris continues, some third factor must explain things better: geography (!). I must admit that when he states this – in the first chapter – I was skeptical that he could pull off a convincing (or simply interesting) explanation over the next 600 pages. Happily, he succeeds, even though I disagree with his principal conclusion.
To make his comparisons between socio-economic systems possible, Morris sets out a number of measurement factors for a kind of index to social development. They are: 1) energy capture (muscle, plant, finally chemical/nuclear); 2) urbanism (a proxy for social organization); 3) the capacity to process and communicate information (oral/memory, writing, mass-produced books, electronic media); and 4) the ability to make war.
From these measures, we can see three great phases in human history after the last ice age (approximately from 14,000 BCE). There was the winddown of the hunter-gatherer phase (small nomadic bands of about 200 individuals), then the neolithic age (with metalwork, farming, domesticated animals, writing, and cities), and lastly the industrial age, when the use of energy and development of technology took off vertiginously.
Until the industrial age, he argues, we were dependent of muscle power and then farming economies, which kept the overwhelming majority of humans at near-subsistence levels. The few exceptions of more generalized opulence were controlled by elites along unified trade routes (first the Mediterranean with the late Bronze age and Roman empire and later the canal routes of China).
Before the industrial age, according to Morris, societies essentially played with elements of modern capitalism: large trade markets with economies of scale and comparative advantage, the mobilization of man power through social organization, and various new technologies, such as harnesses that no longer choked horses or iron plows, fertilizer, and crop rotation. Unfortunately, with only muscle power, limits remained that were impossible to transcend.
Throughout history, with inevitable setbacks, technological knowledge accumulated until the birth of the modern scientific method. However, they kept hitting against the limits of agricultural and animal capacities: they could only breed and feed so many work animals on so much cleared land, which is about a maximum of 43 on Morris's social development scale. To be sure, there was colonization of new land and the improvement of agricultural yields through various innovations, but they could rarely develop beyond the 43 mark that was hit in the Roman Empire and in 11th century China.
Then, Morris argues, something new happened with the discovery of the Americas, creating the trade triangle that brought manufactured goods from Europe to Africa, then slaves to the Americas, and food and cotton to Europe on the final leg. Each leg paid dividends to shippers and investors, allowing an unprecedented surplus of capital to accumulate. At the same time, the gun enabled China to rid itself of the raids from steppe nomads, creating a huge zone of trade and relative peace. Unfortunately, China lacked the fecundity (or diversity of goods and resources) and easy proximity that the Atlantic corridor of trade offered the Europeans, hence it was unable to progress into large capital surpluses. This is the geographical factor, largely a matter of luck.
Once steam power was harnessed, the West’s capitalists began to invest their surplus into productive enterprises, economic growth became explosive. In addition, they applied the insights from Enlightenment science into the development of transportation and communications technologies as well as organizational methods to manage all of this. According to Morris, this is the acceleration factor, a coming together of trends under development that culminated in the industrial revolution, first in the West. Once other sources of energy were tapped, the acceleration increased exponentially, creating a momentum that lasted 200 years.
Therefore, capitalism emerges as an endpoint, a logical synthesis of various developments in the right geographic location. While Morris doesn’t state that it is the one best way, his argument implies an inevitability and efficiency that verges on the teleological. I think capitalism itself could function in a far wider range of possibilities than currently discussed, mixing elements of entrepreneurship with state involvement and direction, a more equitable distribution regime, and greater health, welfare and educational subsidies. While this isn’t an economics text, I am unsure if Morris is aware of how limited the scope of his concepts are.
There are two more principles that Morris posits. On the one hand, innovation creates its own problems, sowing the seeds of its own destruction. The relative peace and prosperity of Rome, for example, attracted Germanic tribes, who wished to plunder (or receive bribes for refraining from doing so), eventually undermining the trade structure of the Empire. In the industrial age, that translates into not just over-population, but also pollution, health degradation, and any number of other consequences. He calls this the development paradox.
On the other hand, peripheral actors tend to copy and incrementally improve upon innovations, leading in many cases to superior adaptations when combined with different circumstances and their own advantages in social organization and costs. This happened in Mesopotamia with its irrigation techniques to improve farming yields in poorer soil and today with Japanese and then Chinese industrial methods, which move them up the value chain after attracting capital to exploit the cheap labor of communally disciplined workers. Moreover, with the development of transportation technologies, such as container shipping, as well as authoritarian decision-making to mobilize resources and infrastructure without opposition, the advantage may be shifting to the east – decisively. Time will tell, of course, but we hear plenty of this in the hysteria regarding the China “threat”.
Where I disagree with Morris is his insistence on a rather inflexible determinism. I think that accident, circumstance, and luck matter in history far more than we care to admit. If Diocletian had succeeded in reorganizing the Roman Empire, it may have survived and developed a new, quasi-capitalist trade system; conversely, if he had not partially succeeded, Rome may have collapsed before Constantine had the opportunity to convert himself and then the entire Empire to Christianity. There are many such examples where, depending on the behavior of individuals, history could have turned out very, very differently.
I view history as much more contingent than he does. As an illustration of the way that Morris reasons, he repeatedly states throughout the book that "men get the ideas that they need", which smacks a bit too much of the wisdom of hindsight. Moreover, if geography is certainly a factor, it is not necessarily the principal one in my view, perhaps more of a catalyst of lucky endowments. That being said, his insistence that race and sociology matter less than is often assumed is a point well taken, in my opinion.
Finally, Morris’ attempt to elicit laws of history or elucidate the traits of human nature may be a misguided enterprise. Maybe our possibilities and capabilities are greater than we can yet imagine, if for no other reason than we can’t see much beyond our current society. Maybe we can learn to cooperate, to nurture the environment and preserve our natural resources better than we do under supply-side capitalism. Maybe information technology – AI and robotics – will enable us to create better, more equitable societies with greater leisure time. I don’t see any of these scenarios as likely, but I do believe they might be possible. If we choose to pursue them.
This book is a masterpiece that will get the history-obsessed to think, to refine and clarify their point of view about many trends and incidents, and to question their most basic assumptions of how things work, even of who we are. It is a first rate thought experiment and well worth the ride. Morris' long view is particularly valuable. He is an archaeologist by training, but he has accomplished an immense intellectual labor to connect the dots between past and present – there was not a single reference that I thought was wrong or misinterpreted, though I was not convinced by his central idea.