Civilization: The West and the Rest

Niall Ferguson, “Civilization: The West and the Rest", Penguin Press, 2011, 325 pp plus notes.

This is an exceptionally worthwhile book to read. The author answers why, beginning around 1500, a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass came to dominate the rest of the world, including the more populous and in many ways more sophisticated societies of eastern Eurasia. His answer to why the west prevailed centers on the differing approaches the West and the East had to six elements:
1. Competition, in that Europe itself was politically fragmented and that within each monarchy or republic there were multiple competing corporate entities. This competition, after the Reformation, existed between religions as well and yielded an absolute separation of church and state. This decentralization served to launch nation-states and capitalism.
2. The Scientific Revolution, in that all the major seventeenth-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology happened in Western Europe. This resulted in the West having a military advantage over the rest. “An astonishingly high proportion of the [scientific revolution’s] key figures - around 80 percent - originated in a hexagon bounded by Glasgow, Copenhagen, Krakow, Naples, Marseilles, and Plymouth,’’ he argues, “and nearly all the rest were born within a hundred miles of that area.’’
3. The rule of law and representative government, in that an optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on private property rights and the representation of property-owners in elected legislatures.
4. Modern medicine, in that nearly all the major nineteenth and twentieth-century breakthroughs in healthcare, including the control of tropical diseases, were made by Western Europeans and North Americans.
5. The consumer society, in that the Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments. Without a consumer society, the Industrial Revolution would be a non-starter.
6. The work ethic, in that Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation. Protestant Christianity provided the glue for the dynamic and otherwise unstable society that all this dynamism created. Protestantism also encouraged literacy so members could read the bible themselves. (P. 305).

The author then goes on to examine if we are now experiencing the waning of Western dominance; there seems little doubt that we are living through the end of 500 years of Western predominance. The financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 should be understood as an accelerator of an already well-established trend of relative Western decline. This was very nearly a Great Depression and only the correct reaction of the Federal Reserve and other Western central banking systems saved us from it (in 1930 the Fed acted just the opposite). However, the developed world is now in the hangover phase that follows all forms of excessive stimulus. For various reasons the fiscal policies of three Eurozone countries, Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, have lost credibility in the eyes of bond investors, driving up their borrowing costs and deepening their fiscal difficulties.

So the previously listed elements that once set the West apart from the Rest are no longer monopolized by us. The Chinese have got capitalism. The Iranians have got science. The Russians have got democracy. The Africans are (slowly) getting modern medicine. And the Turks have got the consumer society. But what this means is that Western modes of operation are not in decline but are flourishing nearly everywhere. Yet, Western civilization is more than just one thing; it is a package. It is about political pluralism (multiple states and multiple authorities) as well as capitalism; it is about the freedom of thought as well as the scientific method; it is about the rule of law and property rights as well as democracy. Even today, the West still has more of these institutional advantages than the Rest. The Chinese do not have political competition. The Iranians do not have freedom of conscience. The get to vote in Russia, but the rule of law there is a sham. In none of these countries is there a free press. (p.323). The author suggests that “the real threat to the West is posed not by the rise of China, Islam, or CO2 emissions, but by our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors.’’

My notes:
Pg. 17: The financial crisis that began in 2007 seems to indicate a fundamental flaw at the heart of the consumer society, with its emphasis on debt-propelled retail therapy. The Protestant ethic of thrift, that once seemed so central to the Western project, has all but vanished.

Pg. 27: The printing press with movable type was invented in eleventh-century China, not as traditionally credited in fifteenth-century Germany. Paper too originated in China long before it was introduced in the West. The most famous Chinese sailor was Admiral Zheng He and his ships were larger than anything seen in the West until WWI. In 1424 he sailed all the way to Portugal. But then the Chinese Emperor suspended all his voyages and put out a decree banning oceanic voyages. The records of Zheng He’s journeys were destroyed. Like the Apollo moon missions, Zheng He’s voyages had been a formidable demonstration of wealth and technological sophistication, comparable with landing an American astronaut on the moon in 1969. The Emperor’s decree ensured that the economic benefits of this achievement were negligible. History does not divulge why this stupidity was unleashed on Zheng He but history certainly documents the ensuing explorations of the Europeans.

Pg. 39: The political fragmentation that characterized Europe precluded the creation of anything remotely resembling the Chinese Empire. It also propelled Europeans to seek opportunities—economic, geopolitical and religious—in distant lands. You might say it was a case of divide and rule – except that, paradoxically, it was by being divided themselves that Europeans were able to rule the world. In Europe small was beautiful because it meant competition – and competition not just between states, but also within states.

Pg. 46: Long before the Industrial Revolution, England was pulling ahead of the great civilizations of the Orient because of the material advantages of commerce and colonization. The Chinese and Japanese route – turning away from foreign trade and intensifying rice cultivation – meant that with population growth, incomes fell, and so did nutrition, height, and productivity. When crops failed the results were catastrophic.

Pg. 57: The 1683 Western repelling of the Islamic siege of Vienna marked a pivotal moment in the rise of the West. For the late seventeenth century was a time of accelerating change in Europe in two crucial fields: natural philosophy (as science was then known) and political theory. In 1687 Isaac Newton published his Principia; in 1691 Locke published his Second Treatise of Government. If one thing came to differentiate the West from the East it was the widely differing degrees to which such new and profound knowledge was systematically pursued, shared, and applied.

Pg 60: Europe’s path to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment was very far from straight and narrow (ask Galileo). It had its origins in the fundamental Christian tenet that Church and state should be separate. “Render therefore to Caesar the…” (Matthew 22:21) is an injunction radically different from that in the Koran, which insists on the indivisibility of God’s law as revealed to the Prophet and the unity of any power structure based on Islam. This biblical injunction enabled successive European rulers to resist the political pretensions of the papacy in Rome.

Pg. 60: The Reformation and the ensuing fragmentation of Western Christianity after 1517 provided a more decisive breakthrough to knowledge than the Renaissance. This was in large measure because of the revolutionary role of the printing press. Gutenberg’s system of movable metal type was more flexible and scalable than anything developed in China. It was far too powerful a technology to be monopolized (as Gutenberg hoped it could be). The printing press enabled the scientific revolution which began immediately. On the other hand, towards the end of the eleventh century, influential Islamic clerics began to argue that the study of Greek philosophy was incompatible with the teachings of the Koran. Indeed, Islamists now believed it was blasphemous to suggest that man might be able to discern the divine mode of operation, which God might, in any case, vary at will.

Pg. 92: Ataturk transformed Turkey into a Western state. The Caliphate was abolished in 1924; religious courts were shut down and sharia law replaced by a civil code based on Switzerland’s. In Ataturk’s eyes, nothing had done more to retard the advance of the Ottoman Empire than religious interference in the realm of science. (Today this may be going back the other way).

Pg. 103: Fully three-quarters of all European migrants to British America over the entire colonial period came as indentured servants. Nearly two-thirds of migrants to the Americas between 1500 and 1760 were slaves.

Pg. 117: Had the U.S. revolution not progressed beyond the Articles of Confederation, then perhaps the fate of North America would have been more like that of South America – a story of fragmentation rather than unification. It took the constitution of 1787 to establish a viable federal structure for the new republic, crating not only a Lockean quartet of powers – executive, bicameral legislature and supreme court – but also a single market, a single trade policy, a single currency, a single army and a single law of bankruptcy for people whose debts exceeded their property – not forgetting an amendment, the Fourth, protecting the individual against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Pg. 124: In 1910 – on the eve of the Mexican Revolution – only 2.4 percent of household heads in rural areas owned any land at all. The rural property-ownership rate in the U.S. in 1900 was just under 75 percent. This widely distributed private property rights and democracy worked better than the Spanish model of concentrated wealth and authoritarianism.

Pg. 194: In many ways the Nazi empire was the last, loathsome incarnation of a concept that by 1945 was obsolete. It had seemed plausible for centuries that the road to riches lay through the exploitation of foreign peoples and their land. Yet in the course of the twentieth century, it gradually became apparent that an industrial economy could get on perfectly well without colonies. Indeed, colonies might be something of a needless burden. The new world after 1945 would be centered around consumption, not colonization.

Pg. 233: Superficially, WWII was between four distinct versions of Western civilization: national socialism, Soviet communism, European imperialism (which the Japanese had adopted) and American capitalism.

Pg. 236: If the Cold War had ever become hot, the Soviet Union would very likely have won it. With a political system far better able to absorb heavy war losses (the WWII death rate as a percentage of the pre-war population had been fifty times higher than that for the U.S.), the Soviet Union also had an economic system that was ideally suited to the mass production of sophisticated weaponry. Indeed, by 1974 the Soviets had a substantially larger arsenal of strategic bombers and ballistic missiles. Scientifically, they lagged only a little way behind. They were also armed with an ideology that was a great deal more appealing than the American alternative in post-colonial societies all over what became known as the Third World, where poor peasantries contemplated a life of drudgery under the heel of corrupt elites who owned all the land and controlled the armed forces. Indeed, it could be argued that the Soviets actually won the Third World’s War. Where there was a meaningful class war, communism could prevail. Yet the Cold War turned out to be about butter more than guns, ballgames more than bombs.

Pg. 244: 1968 was a year of revolution from Paris to Prague, from Berlin to Berkeley, and even in Beijing. The common factor in all these disruptions of power was youth. Rarely in modern times have people aged between fifteen and twenty-four accounted for so large a share of the population as in the decade after 1968. Having dropped as low as 11 percent of the US population in the mid-1950s, the youth share reached a peak of 17 percent in the mid-1970s. In Latin America and Asia, it rose above 20 percent.

Pg. 259: Since the Reformation, which had led many northern European states to break away from the Roman Catholic Church, there had been a shift of economic power away from Catholic countries. What was it about the teaching of Luther and his successors that encouraged people not just to work hard but also to accumulate capital?

Britain did not find gold in the colonies; Spain did find gold in South America. One developed as a Republic the other as an oligarchy; in the American colonies, land was widely distributed; in Spanish America the right to exploit the indigenous people was granted to a tiny elite (the Spanish Crown retained the rights to the land). This same thing results today but the gold is now called oil. This outside source of revenue supports despots eliminating the need to placate those ruled.

Pg. 261: Western civilization’s economic dynamism was an unintended consequence of the Protestant Reformation. Whereas other religions associated holiness with the renunciation of worldly things – monks in cloisters, hermits in caves – the Protestant sects saw industry and thrift as expressions of a new kind of hard-working godliness (Weber). More importantly, Protestantism encouraged literacy, not to mention printing, and these two things unquestionably encouraged economic development as well as scientific study.

Pg. 274: Today the Western world has divided into the godless Europe and God-fearing America. The author believes it is because of the competition among the many Christian sects that existed in America whereas Europe’s churches were more nationalized with the creation of established Churches. In the US there was always a strict separation between religion and the state.

Pg. 278: There are now around 40 million Protestant Christians in China compared with barely a half million in 1949. Some estimates put the maximum even higher, at 75 or 110 million. Include 20 million Catholics, and there could be as many as 130 million Christians in China. There already could be more practicing Christians in China than in Europe. Many believe the core of Western civilization is Christianity (at least the Chinese believe this).

Pg. 292: The fall of the Western Roman Empire began in 406CE with Germanic invaders. Rome itself was sacked by the Goths in 410. By 452, the Western Roman Empire had lost all of Britain, most of Spain, the richest provinces of North Africa, and south-western and south-eastern Gaul. Not much was left besides Italy. What is most striking of all this is the speed of the Roman Empire’s collapse. It is not unusual for empires to rapidly collapse: Russian monarchy and then Soviets, the Incas, China’s Ming dynasty, France’s Bourbon monarchy, Ottoman empire, or British and Japan.