Civilization
Kindle Highlights
Had that Western edge now gone?
The Russians have got democracy. The
The only thing one can do in America is to emigrate;
(to say nothing of his now slightly grating de haut en bas manner).
Roger Bacon acknowledged it: ‘Philosophy is drawn from the Muslims.’
that we are living through the end of 500 years of Western ascendancy.
among them Lucretius’ De natura rerum, which had been rediscovered in 1417,
The first true novel was the anonymous La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (1500).
The critical point is that the differential between the West and the Rest was institutional.
Competition 2. Science 3. Property rights 4. Medicine 5. The consumer society 6. The work ethic
In 1950 the West as defined by Samuel Huntington – Western Europe, North America and Australasia –
Today, Admiral Zheng He, the personification of Chinese expansionism and for so long forgotten, is a hero in China.
In Frederick’s opinion, regal robes had no practical purpose, and a crown was merely ‘a hat that let the rain in’.55
They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast.
Hitler was a latter-day Genghis Khan – a specialist in destruction, whose empire of barbarism could not hope to endure.
It is important to remember that most cases of civilizational collapse are associated with fiscal crises as well as wars.
Finally, and most important to Tocqueville, the French put equality above liberty. In sum, they chose Rousseau over Locke.
Conceptio culpa Nasci pena Labor vita Necesse mori ‘Conception is sin, birth is pain, life is toil, death is inevitable.’
The Roman Catholic presumption was that slavery was at best a necessary evil; it could not alter the fact that Africans had souls.
(mestizos, the offspring of Spanish men and Indian women; mulattos, born of unions of creoles and blacks; and zambos, the children of Indians and blacks)
A century later the Italian artist Salvator Rosa painted perhaps the most moving of all memento mori, entitled simply L’umana fragilità (‘Human Frailty’).
Are we living through the descent of the West? It would not be the first time. Here is how Edward Gibbon described the Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410 AD:
The results of the Ming collapse were devastating. Between 1580 and 1650 conflict and epidemics reduced the Chinese population by between 35 and 40 per cent.
Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even try to) establish universal laws of social or political ‘physics’ with reliable predictive powers.
For it is only by identifying the true causes of Western ascendancy that we can hope to estimate with any degree of accuracy the imminence of our decline and fall.
A devastating earthquake that struck Caracas in March 1812, killing around 10,000 people, seemed to vindicate the Church’s condemnation of the independence movement.
It is often asserted that the English agricultural pioneer Jethro Tull discovered the seed drill in 1701. In fact it was invented in China 2,000 years before his time.
Rather, civilizations behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse.
The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity.
On 10 November 1793 the worship of God was prohibited and the cult of Reason instituted, the first political religion of the modern age, complete with icons, rites – and martyrs.
The raising of the siege of Vienna was not only a turning point in the centuries-old struggle between Christianity and Islam. It was also a pivotal moment in the rise of the West.
Ironically, the Land of the Free looked like being, for around a fifth of its population, the Land of the Permanently Unfree. North of the Rio Grande, slavery had become hereditary
Ben Gunn on Treasure Island did not actually say to Jim Hawkins, ‘I feel myself out of touch with a certain type of civilization’; but he did say, ‘I haven’t tasted Christian food.’24
In his eyes, Christianity is thriving in China because it offers an ethical framework to people struggling to cope with a startlingly fast social transition from communism to capitalism.
Yongle died – and China’s overseas ambitions were buried with him. Zheng He’s voyages were immediately suspended, and only briefly revived with a final Indian Ocean expedition in 1432 – 3.
Small wonder average life expectancy for a Brazilian slave was just twenty-three as late as the 1850s; a slave had to last only five years for his owner to earn twice his initial investment.
For all the best efforts of Ivy League economists and Irish rock stars, Africa remains the poor relation of the continents, reliant either on Western alms or on the extraction of its raw materials.
for cathedrals in Norwich, St Alban’s and Salisbury. The printing press with movable type is traditionally credited to fifteenth-century Germany. In reality it was invented in eleventh-century China.
Just as in Protestant Europe and America in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, religious communities double as both credit networks and supply chains of creditworthy, trustworthy fellow believers.
In East Africa 3,156 whites in British service died in the line of duty; of these, fewer than a third were victims of enemy action. But if black troops and carriers are included, total losses were over 100,000.
In Confucianism and Taoism (1915) the German sociologist Max Weber defined Confucian rationalism as meaning ‘rational adjustment to the world’, as opposed to the Western concept of ‘rational mastery of the world’.
The red revolutionary promise of the Declaration of the Rights of Man could not simply be wrapped up in clerical black and forgotten, a point made with the utmost force in Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black (1830).
If you take the same people, with more or less the same culture, and impose communist institutions on one group and capitalist institutions on another, almost immediately there will be a divergence in the way they behave.
In 1557 the Portuguese were ceded Macau, a peninsula on the Pearl River delta. Among the first things they did was to erect a gate – the Porta do Cerco – bearing the inscription: ‘Dread our greatness and respect our virtue.’
‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’. It contains one of the most influential of all arguments about Western civilization: that its economic dynamism was an unintended consequence of the Protestant Reformation.
Why did capitalism and democracy fail to thrive in Latin America? Why, when I once asked a colleague at Harvard if he thought Latin America belonged to the West, was he unsure? Why, in short, was Bolívar not the Latin Washington?
The XIVth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was presented with a report specifying three requirements for sustainable economic growth: property rights as a foundation, the law as a safeguard and morality as a support.
‘War’, Clausewitz declares, ‘is . . . an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will . . . [It is] not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means.’
In the fifteenth century, as we saw earlier, political and economic competition had given the West a crucial advantage over China. By the eighteenth century, its edge over the Orient was a matter as much of brainpower as of firepower.
Just why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world, including the more populous and in many ways more sophisticated societies of Eastern Eurasia?
From aromatherapy to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the West today is indeed awash with post-modern cults, none of which offers anything remotely as economically invigorating or socially cohesive as the old Protestant ethic.
In reality, democracy was the capstone of an edifice that had as its foundation the rule of law – to be precise, the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government.
On the contrary, North America was better off than South America purely and simply because the British model of widely distributed private property rights and democracy worked better than the Spanish model of concentrated wealth and authoritarianism
What if historical time is less like the slow and predictable changing of the seasons and more like the elastic time of our dreams? Above all, what if collapse is not centuries in the making but strikes a civilization suddenly, like a thief in the night?
A year later the French opted to sell the vast North American territory then known as Louisiana (not to be confused with the present-day state) to the United States at a bargain-basement price: 828,800 square miles for $15 million (less than 3 cents an acre).
We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings . . . [It] is not the sole nexus of man with man, – how far from it! Deep, far deeper than Supply-and-demand, are Laws, Obligations sacred as Man’s Life itself.
The only way of limiting the spread throughout Scotland and England of the Calvinists’ Geneva Bible (1560) was for King James VI and I to commission an alternative ‘authorized’ version, the third and most successful attempt to produce an official English translation.
The compendium of Chinese learning he commissioned took the labour of more than 2,000 scholars to complete and filled more than 11,000 volumes. It was surpassed as the world’s largest encyclopaedia only in 2007, after a reign of almost exactly 600 years, by Wikipedia.
Inequality has risen steeply since the introduction of economic reforms, so that the income distribution is now essentially American (though not quite Brazilian). An estimated 0.4 per cent of Chinese households currently own around 70 per cent of the country’s wealth.
Donne wrote his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), which contains the greatest of all exhortations to commiserate with the dead: ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’
Landing a Chinese eunuch on the East African coast in 1416 was in many ways an achievement comparable with landing an American astronaut on the moon in 1969. But by abruptly cancelling oceanic exploration, Yongle’s successors ensured that the economic benefits of this achievement were negligible.
Addressing a large invited audience, he asked for someone who could read Turkish to recite from a paper in his hand. When the volunteer looked in obvious bafflement at what was written on the sheet, Atatürk told the crowd: ‘This young man is puzzled because he does not know the true Turkish alphabet.’
The great puzzle is that, somehow, out of this atrocious age of destruction, there emerged a new model of civilization centred around not colonization but consumption. By 1945, it was time for the West to lay down its arms and pick up its shopping bags – to take off its uniform and put on its blue jeans.
Now every European power with serious imperial ambitions had to have a tropical medicine institute: the Pasteur Institute in Paris, founded in 1887, was later matched by the London and Liverpool schools of tropical medicine (1899) and by the Hamburg-based Institute for Shipping and Tropical Illnesses (1901).
Suleiman the Magnificent (1520 – 66) could legitimately claim: ‘I am the Sultan of Sultans, the Sovereign of Sovereigns, the distributor of crowns to the monarchs of the globe, the shadow of God upon Earth . . .’h The mosque in Istan-bul that bears his name is an enduring vindication of his claim to greatness. Less
The Enlightenment was always most effective when it was being ironical – in Gibbon’s breathtaking chapter on early Christianity (volume I, chapter 15 of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) or in Candide, Voltaire’s devastating mockery of Leibniz’s claim that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’.
Far from being indispensable to its success, slavery and segregation were handicaps to American development, their legacy still painfully apparent in the social problems – teenage pregnancy, educational underachievement, drug abuse and disproportionate incarceration – that now bedevil so many African-American communities.
In America four European powers had tried their hands at planting their civilizations in foreign soil (five if we count the Dutch in Guiana and ‘New Amsterdam’, six if we count the Swedes in Saint-Barthélemy, seven including the Danes in the Virgin Islands, and eight with the Russian settlements in Alaska and California),
Capitalists understood what Marx missed: that workers were also consumers. It therefore made no sense to try to grind their wages down to subsistence levels. On the contrary, as the case of the United States was making increasingly clear, there was no bigger potential market for most capitalist enterprises than their own employees.
Study me then, you who shall lovers be At the next world, that is, at the next spring; For I am every dead thing, In whom Love wrought new alchemy. For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness; He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death – things which are not.
Where the Enlightenment scored easy points was in pitting reason against the superstitions associated with religious faith or metaphysics. In heaping scorn on Christianity, Frederick the Great was putting very bluntly what Voltaire, David Hume, Edward Gibbon and others suggested more subtly in their philosophical or historical writings.
So Bolívar’s dream turned out to be not democracy but dictatorship, not federalism but the centralization of authority, ‘because’, as he had put it in the Cartagena Manifesto, ‘our fellow-citizens are not yet able to exercise their rights themselves in the fullest measure, because they lack the political virtues that characterize true republicans’.
One authoritative estimate is that the average annual rate of growth of per-capita national income rose from below 0.2 per cent between 1760 and 1800 to 0.52 per cent between 1800 and 1830 and to 1.98 per cent between 1830 and 1870. 3 All these figures are miserably low by twenty-first-century standards. Nevertheless the effect was revolutionary. No
In the United States, by contrast, elaborate efforts were made to prohibit (or at least deny the legitimacy of) such unions. This was partly a practical consequence of another difference. When the British emigrated to America, they often took their womenfolk with them. When Spanish and Portuguese men crossed the Atlantic, they generally travelled alone.
For the many ex-colonial soldiers who joined the ranks of the Nazi Party – their old uniforms provided the SA with their first brown shirts – it was entirely natural that the theories born in the concentration camps of Africa should be carried over to the Nazi ‘colonization’ of Eastern Europe and the murderous racial policies that produced the Holocaust.
As Nassim Taleb has argued, the global economy by the spring of 2007 had come to resemble an over-optimized electricity grid. The relatively small surge represented by defaults on subprime mortgages in the United States sufficed to tip the entire world economy into the financial equivalent of a blackout, which for a time threatened to cause a complete collapse of international trade.
Was it, as Conrad suggested in his novel Heart of Darkness , a case of Africa turning Europeans into savages, rather than Europeans civilizing Africa? Where was the real heart of darkness? In Africa? Or within the Europeans who treated it as a laboratory for a racial pseudo-science that ranks alongside the ideology of communism as the most lethal of all Western civilization’s exports?
In The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, David Landes made the cultural case by arguing that Western Europe led the world in developing autonomous intellectual inquiry, the scientific method of verification and the rationalization of research and its diffusion. Yet even he allowed that something more was required for that mode of operation to flourish: financial intermediaries and good government.
To Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, the Slavic peoples were all ‘Mongol types’ who had to be replaced with ‘Aryans’ in order to create a new ‘blond province’ in the East. To Hitler, Russians could easily be equated with ‘Redskins’. If Auschwitz marked the culmination of state violence against racially defined alien populations, the war against the Herero and Nama was surely the first step in that direction.
However, nearly all the Japanese debt is in the hands of Japanese investors and institutions, whereas half the US federal debt in public hands is in the hands of foreign creditors, of which just over a fifth is held by the monetary authorities of the People’s Republic of China. Only the American ‘exorbitant privilege’ of being able to print the world’s premier reserve currency gives the US breathing space.
More recently, it is the anthropologist Jared Diamond who has captured the public imagination with a grand theory of rise and fall. His book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), is cyclical history for the Green Age: tales of societies, from seventeenth-century Easter Island to twenty-first-century China, that risked, or now risk, destroying themselves by abusing their natural environments.
Marx and Engels called for the abolition of private property; the abolition of inheritance; the centralization of credit and communications; the state ownership of all factories and instruments of production; the creation of ‘industrial armies for agriculture’; the abolition of the distinction between town and country; the abolition of the family; ‘community of women’ (wife-swapping) and the abolition of all nationalities. By
Slave-traders laid themselves open to attack by abolitionists only when they overstepped a very elevated threshold, as the captain of the Liverpool ship the Zong did when, in 1782, he threw 133 slaves overboard, alive and chained, because of a shortage of water on board. Significantly, he was first prosecuted for insurance fraud before Olaudah Equiano alerted the abolitionist Granville Sharp to the real nature of the crime that had been committed.
As Burke had foreseen, for he knew his classical political theory, such a democracy must inevitably be supplanted by an oligarchy and finally by the tyranny of a general. In the space of a decade, the Convention was replaced by the Directory (October 1795), the Directory by the First Consul (November 1799) and the title of first consul by that of emperor (December 1804). What had begun with Rousseau ended as a remake of the fall of the Roman Republic.
To a later generation of white supremacists, segregation was the key reason why the United States had prospered, while the ‘mongrel’ peoples of Latin America were mired in poverty (not to mention, in some cases, communism). With the rallying cry ‘Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!’ Alabama Governor George Wallace put racial separateness at the heart of the American success story as recently as 1963, in his inaugural gubernatorial address:
Another academic, Zhuo Xinping, has identified the ‘Christian understanding of transcendence’ as having played ‘a very decisive role in people’s acceptance of pluralism in society and politics in the contemporary West’: Only by accepting this understanding of transcendence as our criterion can we understand the real meaning of such concepts as freedom, human rights, tolerance, equality, justice, democracy, the rule of law, universality, and environmental protection.
As we have seen, it was John Locke who had made private property the foundation of political life in Carolina. But it was not only landed property he had in mind. In article 110 of his ‘Fundamental Constitutions’, he had stated clearly: ‘Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.’ For Locke, the ownership of human beings was as much a part of the colonial project as the ownership of land.
It made a big difference, then, where African slaves went. Those bound for Latin America ended up in something of a racial melting pot where a male slave had a reasonable chance of gaining his freedom if he survived the first few years of hard labour and a female slave had a non-trivial probability of producing a child of mixed race. Those consigned to the United States entered a society where the distinction between white and black was much more strictly defined and upheld.
The two ships symbolized this tale of two Americas. On one, conquistadors; on the other indentured servants. One group dreamt of instant plunder – of mountains of Mayan gold, there for the taking. The others knew that they had years of toil ahead of them, but also that they would be rewarded with one of the world’s most attractive assets – prime North American land – plus a share in the process of law-making. Real estate plus representation: that was the North American dream.
In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond explained why Eurasia had advanced ahead of the rest of the world.28 But not until his essay ‘How to Get Rich’ (1999) did he offer an answer to the question of why one end of Eurasia forged so far ahead of the other. The answer was that, in the plains of Eastern Eurasia, monolithic Oriental empires stifled innovation, while in mountainous, river-divided Western Eurasia, multiple monarchies and city-states engaged in creative competition and communication.
The line that led from Newton’s laws to Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine – first used to drain the Whitehaven collieries in 1715 – was remarkably short and straight, though Newcomen was but a humble Dartmouth ironmonger. 46 It is not accidental that three of the world’s most important technological innovations – James Watt’s improved steam engine (1764), John Harrison’s longitude-finding chronometer (1761) and Richard Arkwright’s water frame (1769) – were invented in the same country, in the same decade.
In the end, of course, the anomaly of slavery in a supposedly free society could be resolved only by war between the pro-slavery states of the South and the anti-slavery states of the North. Only British naval intervention on the side of the Confederacy could have defeated the upholders of the Union and that was never very likely. Yet, although the Civil War ended slavery, many Americans continued to believe for more than a century that they owed their prosperity to the dividing line between white and black.
Some of the finest British writers of the twentieth century anticipated Britain’s crisis of faith. The Oxford don C. S. Lewis (best known today for his allegorical children’s stories) wrote The Screwtape Letters (1942) in the hope that mocking the Devil might keep him at bay. Evelyn Waugh knew, as he wrote his wartime Sword of Honour trilogy (1952 – 61), that he was writing the epitaph of an ancient form of English Roman Catholicism. Both sensed that the Second World War posed a grave threat to Christian faith.
Average global life expectancy at birth in around 1800 was just 28.5 years. Two centuries later, in 2001, it had more than doubled to 66.6 years. The improvement was not confined to the imperial metropoles. Those historians who habitually confuse famines or civil wars with genocides and gulags, in a wilful attempt to represent colonial officials as morally equivalent to Nazis or Stalinists, would do well to ponder the measurable impact of Western medicine on life expectancy in the colonial and post-colonial world.
Not only was this active planting of land an economically superior form of imperialism. It also legitimized the expropriation of land from indigenous hunter-gatherers. In Locke’s words: ‘As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common.’40 Indian hunting grounds were, by this definition of private property, terra nullius – ownerless land, ripe for development. This was a charter for expropriation.
In breaking up the Ottoman Empire and propelling its Turkish core towards secularism, the First World War struck a blow – admittedly an unintended one – for the values of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. To ensure victory, however, the British sought to mobilize internal enemies against the Sultan, among them the Arabs and the Jews. To the Arabs the British promised independent kingdoms. To the Jews they promised a new ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine. These promises, as we know, proved to be incompatible.
Even after that, it was not until 1871 that the last Taiping army was defeated. The cost in human life was staggering: more than twice that of the First World War to all combatant states. Between 1850 and 1864 an estimated 20 million people in central and southern China lost their lives as the rebellion raged, unleashing famine and pestilence in its wake. By the end of the nineteenth century, many Chinese had concluded that Western missionaries were just another disruptive alien influence on their country, like opium-trading Western merchants.
The calamitous years of the misnamed Great Leap Forward (1958 – 62) – in reality a man-made famine that claimed around 45 million lives67 – saw a fresh wave of church closures. There was full-blown iconoclasm during the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 76), which also led to the destruction of many ancient Buddhist temples. Mao himself, ‘the Messiah of the Working People’, became the object of a personality cult even more demented than those of Hitler and Stalin.68 His leftist wife Jiang Qing declared that Christianity in China had been consigned to the museum.
Africa was about to become another kind of laboratory – this time for racial biology. Each European power had its own distinctive way of scrambling for Africa. The French, as we have seen, favoured railways and health centres. The British did more than just dig for gold and hunt for happy valleys; they also built mission schools. The Belgians turned the Congo into a vast slave state. The Portuguese did as little as possible. The Germans were the latecomers to the party. For them, colonizing Africa was a giant experiment to test, among other things, a racial theory.
Long before then, however, France had already lost the war at sea. At Aboukir Bay (the Battle of the Nile) in 1798, Sir Horatio Nelson won his ennoblement by craftily attacking the French fleet from both sides, dealing a deathblow to Napoleon’s dream of conquering Egypt. Seven years later, at Trafalgar, Nelson’s force of twenty-seven ships outmanoeuvred a larger Franco-Spanish flotilla by employing the ‘Nelson touch’ – the tactic of sailing at high speed through the enemy line, firing broadsides to the starboard side of one ship, the rear of another and then the second ship’s port side.
So why worry? Such complacency can persist for a surprisingly long time – long after the statistical indicators have started flashing red. But one day, a seemingly random piece of bad news – perhaps a negative report by a rating agency – will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few specialists who worry about the sustainability of US fiscal policy but also the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial, for a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when a critical mass of its constituents loses faith in its viability.
Yet the most influential recent definition of Western civilization, by Samuel Huntington, excludes not just Russia but all countries with a religious tradition of Orthodoxy. Huntington’s West consists only of Western and Central Europe (excluding the Orthodox East), North America (excluding Mexico) and Australasia. Greece, Israel, Romania and Ukraine do not make the cut; nor do the Caribbean islands, despite the fact that many are as Western as Florida.34 ‘The West’, then, is much more than just a geographical expression. It is a set of norms, behaviours and institutions with borders that are blurred in the extreme.
So what were Napoleon’s policy aims? In some respects, it is true, they acquired a reactionary patina: contrast Jacques-Louis David’s Consecration of Napoleon I (1804), swathed in imperial ermine in Notre Dame, with the romantic hero of the same artist’s Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass (1801), every inch the revolutionary Zeitgeist on horseback (in the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s phrase). This was the metamorphosis so repellent to Ludwig van Beethoven, the musical spirit of the age, that he angrily scratched out the original title of his Third Symphony – ‘Buonaparte’ – and changed it to ‘Sinfonia eroica’.
It should be emphasized that this was not an exclusively US phenomenon. The rate of rural property-ownership was even higher for Canada – 87 per cent – and similar results were achieved in Australia, New Zealand and even parts of British Africa, confirming that the idea of widely dispersed (white) landownership was specifically British rather than American in character. To this day, this remains one of the biggest differences between North and South America. In Peru as recently as 1958, 2 per cent of landowners controlled 69 per cent of all arable land; 83 per cent held just 6 per cent, consisting of plots of 12 acres or less.
Protestantism made the West not only work, but also save and read. The Industrial Revolution was indeed a product of technological innovation and consumption. But it also required an increase in the intensity and duration of work, combined with the accumulation of capital through saving and investment. Above all, it depended on the accumulation of human capital. The literacy that Protestantism promoted was vital to all of this. On reflection, we would do better to talk about the Protestant word ethic. The question is: has the West today – or at least a significant part of it – lost both its religion and the ethic that went with it?
As the economist Thomas Sargent demonstrated two decades ago, such decisions are self-fulfilling, because it is not the supply of base money that determines inflation but the velocity of its circulation, which in turn is a function of expectations.29 In the same way, it is not the debt-to-GDP ratio that determines government solvency but the interest rate that investors demand. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations change about future government solvency or currency stability, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. The result is a kind of death spiral of falling confidence, rising yields and rising deficits.
Europeans had come to Africa claiming that they would civilize it. But even the French, with all their good intentions, failed to implant more than a very limited version of Western civilization there. Elsewhere, the challenges of inhospitable terrain and tribal resistance brought out the destructive worst in Europeans, most obviously but by no means uniquely in the German colonies. Methods of total warfare first tried out on the likes of the Herero were then imported back to Europe and combined to devastating effect with the next generation of industrialized weaponry. And in a final bitter twist, Africans were lured to Europe and sacrificed in one of the war’s stupidest offensives.
According to one scholar from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences: We were asked to look into what accounted for the . . . pre-eminence of the West all over the world . . . At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.
It was not only French that the Governor’s correspondent had learned at school. Under another pseudonym, ‘Ho Chi Minh’, he would later lead the movement for an independent Vietnam – pointedly citing the 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Man in his own declaration of Vietnamese independence, just as Vo Nguyen Giap, the victor of the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu (and an alumnus of the same lycée), had learned the art of war by studying the campaigns of Napoleon. Such was the inevitable fate of a civilizing mission that exported the revolutionary tradition along with boules and baguettes.48 It was no accident that the presidents of the independent Ivory Coast, Niger, Dahomey and Mali were all graduates of the Ecole William Ponty – as was the Senegalese Prime Minister.
The philosopher showed his gratitude in a remarkable passage in his seminal essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, which called on all men to ‘Dare to reason!’ (Sapere aude!), but not to disobey their royal master: Only one who is himself enlightened . . . and has a numerous and well-disciplined army to assure public peace, can say: ‘Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, only obey!’ A republic could not dare say such a thing . . . A greater degree of civil freedom appears advantageous to the freedom of mind of the people, and yet it places inescapable limitations upon it. A lower degree of civil freedom, on the contrary, provides the mind with room for each man to extend himself to his full capacity.73 Prussia’s Enlightenment, in short, was about free thought, not free action.
A host of legends sprang up in the wake of Vienna’s relief: that the crescents on the Turkish flags inspired the croissant,j that abandoned Ottoman coffee was used to found the first Viennese café and to make the first cappuccino, and that the captured Turkish percussion instruments (cymbals, triangles and bass drums) were adopted by the Austrian regimental bands. The event’s true historical significance was far greater. For the Ottoman Empire, this second failure to take Vienna marked the beginning of the end – a moment of imperial overstretch with disastrous long-term consequences. In battle after battle, culminating in Prince Eugene of Savoy’s crushing victory at Zenta in 1697, the Ottomans were driven from nearly all the European lands conquered by Suleiman the Magnificent. The Treaty of Karlowitz
Gibbon’s most provocative argument in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was that Christianity was one of the fatal solvents of the first version of Western civilization. Monotheism, with its emphasis on the hereafter, was fundamentally at odds with the variegated paganism of the empire in its heyday. Yet it was a very specific form of Christianity – the variant that arose in Western Europe in the sixteenth century – that gave the modern version of Western civilization the sixth of its key advantages over the rest of the world: Protestantism – or, rather, the peculiar ethic of hard work and thrift with which it came to be associated. It is time to understand the role God played in the rise of the West, and to explain why, in the late twentieth century, so many Westerners turned their backs on Him.
Europe’s path to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment was very far from straight and narrow; rather, it was long and tortuous. It had its origins in the fundamental Christian tenet that Church and state should be separate. ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s’ (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. It was Christ’s distinction between the temporal and the spiritual, adumbrated in the fifth century by St Augustine’s City of God (as opposed to the Roman Empire’s ‘City of Man’), that enabled successive European rulers to resist the political pretensions of the papacy in Rome;
Meanwhile, one of the most dynamic economies in the world is that of multi-coloured Brazil. The key to success in Brazil – still among the world’s most unequal societies – has been long-overdue reform to give a rising share of the population a chance to own property and make money. After more than a century of over-reliance on protectionism, import substitution and other forms of state intervention, most of Latin America – with the sorry exception of Venezuela – has achieved higher growth since the 1980s with a combination of privatization, foreign investment and export orientation. 101 The days when the region’s economies veered between hyperinflation and debt default appear to be receding into the past. In 1950 South America’s gross domestic product was less than a fifth of US GDP. Today it is approaching a third.
Especially in France, empiricism was at a discount. The seventeenth-century scientists had been interested in discovering how the natural world actually was. The eighteenth-century philosophes were more concerned to propose how human society might or ought to be. We have already encountered Montesquieu asserting the role of climate in shaping China’s political culture, Quesnay admiring the primacy of agriculture in Chinese economic policy and Smith arguing that China’s stagnation was due to insufficient foreign trade. Not one of these men had been to China. John Locke and Claude Adrien Helvétius concurred that the human mind was like a blank slate, to be formed by education and experience. But neither had the slightest experimental evidence for this view. This, and much else, was the result of reflection, and a great deal of reading.
The political and economic structures made by humans share many of the features of complex systems. Indeed, heterodox economists such as W. Brian Arthur have been arguing along these lines for decades, going far beyond Adam Smith’s notion of an ‘Invisible Hand’, seeming to guide multiple profit-maximizing individuals, or Friedrich von Hayek’s later critique of economic planning and demand management. 12 To Arthur, a complex economy is characterized by the interaction of dispersed agents, a lack of any central control, multiple levels of organization, continual adaptation, incessant creation of new market niches and no general equilibrium. In contradiction to the core prediction of classical economics that competition causes diminishing returns, in a complex economy increasing returns are quite possible. Viewed in this light, Silicon Valley is economic complexity in action; so is the internet itself.
The sun set on the British Empire with comparable suddenness. In February 1945 Prime Minister Winston Churchill bestrode the world stage as one of the ‘Big Three’, deciding the fates of nations with US President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Yalta. No sooner had the war ended than he was swept from office. Within a dozen years, the United Kingdom had conceded independence to Burma, Egypt, Ghana, India, Israel, Jordan, Malaya, Pakistan, Ceylon and Sudan. The Suez Crisis in 1956 proved that the United Kingdom could not act in defiance of the United States in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of empire. Although it took until the 1960s for Harold Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ to blow through sub-Saharan Africa and the remnants of colonial rule east of Suez, the United Kingdom’s age of hegemony was effectively over less than a dozen years after its victories over Germany and Japan.
Their master and commander was an extraordinary man. At the age of eleven, he had been captured on the field of battle by the founder of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang. As was customary, the captive was castrated. He was then assigned as a servant to the Emperor’s fourth son, Zhu Di, the man who would seize and ascend the imperial throne as Yongle. In return for Zheng He’s loyal service, Yongle entrusted him with a task that entailed exploring the world’s oceans. In a series of six epic voyages between 1405 and 1424, Zheng He’s fleet ranged astoundingly far and wide.f The Admiral sailed to Thailand, Sumatra, Java and the once-great port of Calicut (today’s Kozhikode in Kerala); to Temasek (later Singapore), Malacca and Ceylon; to Cuttack in Orissa; to Hormuz, Aden and up the Red Sea to Jeddah.16 Nominally, these voyages were a search for Yongle’s predecessor, who had mysteriously disappeared, as well as for the imperial seal that had vanished with him.
I have serious reason to believe that the planet from which the little prince came is the asteroid known as B-612. This asteroid has only once been seen through the telescope. That was by a Turkish astronomer, in 1909. On making his discovery, the astronomer had presented it to the International Astronomical Congress, in a great demonstration. But he was in Turkish costume, and so nobody would believe what he said . . . Fortunately, however, for the reputation of Asteroid B-612, a Turkish dictator made a law that his subjects, under pain of death, should change to European costume. So in 1920 the astronomer gave his demonstration all over again, dressed with impressive style and elegance. And this time everybody accepted his report. In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s story, The Little Prince, the modernization of Turkey was gently mocked. To be sure, the Turks changed their mode of dress after the First World War, increasingly conforming to Western norms, just as the Japanese had after their Meiji Restoration (see
- Competition, in that Europe itself was politically fragmented and that within each monarchy or republic there were multiple competing corporate entities 2. The Scientific Revolution, in that all the major seventeenth-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology happened in Western Europe 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 6. The work ethic, in that Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labour with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.
Britain differed significantly from other North-west European countries in two ways that make the Industrial Revolution intelligible. The first was that labour was significantly dearer than on the continent – or indeed anywhere for which records exist. In the second half of the eighteenth century a Parisian worker’s real wages (in terms of silver adjusted for consumer prices) were just over half a Londoner’s. Real wages in Milan were 26 per cent of the London level.20 Wages in China and South India were even lower, and not only because of the higher productivity of Asian rice cultivation relative to European wheat production. 21 The second reason was that coal in Britain was abundant, accessible and therefore significantly cheaper than on the other side of the English Channel. Between the 1820s and the 1860s, the annual out-put of British coal mines quadrupled; the price per ton fell by a quarter. Together, these differentials explain why British entrepreneurs were so much more motivated to pursue technological innovation than their continental counterparts. It made better sense in Britain than anywhere else to replace expensive men with machines fuelled by cheap coal.
Indeed, some theorists would go so far as to say that certain complex systems are wholly non-deterministic, meaning that it is next to impossible to make predictions about their future behaviour based on past data. There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of ‘self-organized criticality’; it is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the breakdown is unknown, because the distribution of forest fires by magnitude does not follow the familiar bell curve, with most fires clustered around a mean value, the way most adult male heights are clustered around five foot nine. Rather, if you plot the size of fires against the frequency of their occurrence, you get a straight line. Will the next fire be tiny or huge, a bonfire or a conflagration ? The most that can be said is that a forest fire twice as large as last year’s is roughly four (or six or eight, depending on the forest) times less likely to happen this year. This kind of pattern – known as a ‘power-law distribution’ – is remarkably common in the natural world. It can be seen not just in forest fires but also in earthquakes and epidemics.
As we saw in the last chapter, Western civilization in its first incarnation – the Roman Empire – did not decline and fall sedately. It collapsed within a generation, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders in the early fifth century. Comparably swift collapses have been a leitmotif of this book. In 1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from their lofty Andean cities. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses, gunpowder and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. The Ming dynasty’s rule in China also fell apart with extraordinary speed in the mid-seventeenth century. Again, the transition from equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade. In much the same way, the Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity. French intervention on the side of the colonial rebels against British rule in North America seemed like a good idea in the 1770s, but it served to push French finances into a critical state. The summoning of the Estates General in May 1789 unleashed a political chain reaction and a collapse of royal legitimacy so swift that within four years the King had been decapitated by guillotine, a device invented only in 1791. At
The political chain reaction that began in 1789 was the result of a chronic fiscal crisis that had been rendered acute by French intervention in the American Revolution. Since the traumatic financial crisis of 1719 – 20 – the Mississippi Bubble – the French fiscal system had lagged woefully behind the English. There was no central note-issuing bank. There was no liquid bond market where government debt could be bought and sold. The tax system had in large measure been privatized. Instead of selling bonds, the French Crown sold offices, creating a bloated public payroll of parasites. A succession of able ministers – Charles de Calonne, Loménie de Brienne and Jacques Necker – tried and failed to reform the system. The easy way out of the mess would have been for Louis XVI to default on the monarchy’s debts, which took a bewildering variety of different forms and cost almost twice what the British government was paying on its standardized bonds.12 Instead, the King sought consensus. An Assembly of Notables went nowhere. The lawyers of the parlements only made trouble. Finally, in August 1788, Louis was persuaded to summon the Estates General, a body that had not met since 1614. He should have foreseen that a seventeenth-century institution would give him a seventeenth-century crisis.
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. The capitalist ‘calling’ was, in other words, religious in origin: ‘To attain . . . self-confidence [in one’s membership of the Elect] intense worldly activity is recommended . . . [Thus] Christian asceticism . . . strode into the market-place of life.’4 ‘Tireless labour’, as Weber called it, was the surest sign that you belonged to the Elect, that select band of people predestined by God for salvation. Protestantism, he argued, ‘has the effect of liberating the acquisition of wealth from the inhibitions of traditionalist ethics; it breaks the fetters on the striving for gain not only by legalizing it, but . . . by seeing it as directly willed by God’. The Protestant ethic, moreover, provided the capitalist with ‘sober, conscientious, and unusually capable workers, who were devoted to work as the divinely willed purpose of life’.5 For most of history, men had worked to live. But the Protestants lived to work. It was this work ethic, Weber argued, that gave birth to modern capitalism, which he defined as ‘sober, bourgeois capitalism with its rational organization of free labour’.
In many ways, then, 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. Long before the word Lebensraum was coined, as we have seen, European empires had contended for new places to settle, new people to tax – and before them Asian, American and African empires. 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. Writing in 1942, the economist Helmut Schubert noted that Germany’s real future was as ‘a large industrial zone’, dependent on ‘a permanent and growing presence of foreign workers’. Germanization of the East was an impossibility; Easternization of Germany was far more likely as the shift of labour from agriculture to industry continued. The exigencies of the war economy vindicated this view. By the end of 1944 around 5 million foreigners had been conscripted to work in the factories and mines of the old Reich. By a rich irony, the dream of a racially pure imperium had turned Germany itself into a multi-ethnic state, albeit a slave state. The replacement of East European slaves with Turkish and Yugoslav ‘guest workers’ after the war did not change the economic argument. Modern Germany did not in fact need ‘living space’. It needed living immigrants.
A generation of historians in thrall to the ideas of Karl Marx (see Chapter 5) sought the answer in class conflict, attributing the Revolution to bad harvests, the rising price of bread and the grievances of the sans-culottes, the nearest thing the ancien régime had to a proletariat. But Marxist interpretations foundered on the abundant evidence that the bourgeoisie did not wage class war on the aristocracy. Rather, it was an elite of ‘notables’, some bourgeois, some aristocrats, who together made the Revolution. A far subtler interpretation had already been offered by an aristocratic intellectual named Alexis de Tocqueville whose two major works, Democracy in America (1835) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), offer an unrivalled answer to the question: why was France not America? There were, Tocqueville argues, five fundamental differences between the two societies, and therefore between the two revolutions they produced. First, France was increasingly centralized, whereas America was a naturally federal state, with a lively provincial associational life and civil society. Second, the French tended to elevate the general will above the letter of the law, a tendency resisted by America’s powerful legal profession. Third, the French revolutionaries attacked religion and the Church that upheld it, whereas American sectarianism provided a bulwark against the pretensions of secular authorities. (Tocqueville was a religious sceptic but he grasped sooner than most the social value of religion.) Fourth, the French ceded too much power to irresponsible intellectuals, whereas in America practical men reigned supreme.
Weber’s thesis is not without its problems. He saw ‘rational conduct on the basis of the idea of the calling’ as ‘one of the fundamental elements of the spirit of modern capitalism’ . 7 But elsewhere he acknowledged the irrational character of ‘Christian asceticism’: ‘The ideal type of the capitalistic entrepreneur . . . gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having done his job well’; he ‘exists for the sake of his business, instead of the reverse’, which ‘from the view-point of personal happiness’ was once again ‘irrational’.8 Even more problematic was Weber’s scathing sideswipe at the Jews, who posed the most obvious exception to his argument.av ‘The Jews’, according to Weber, ‘stood on the side of the politically and speculatively oriented adventurous capitalism; their ethos was . . . that of pariah-capitalism. Only Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labour.’9 Weber was also mysteriously blind to the success of Catholic entrepreneurs in France, Belgium and elsewhere. Indeed, his handling of evidence is one of the more glaring defects of his essay. The words of Martin Luther and the Westminster Confession sit uneasily alongside quotations from Benjamin Franklin and some distinctly unsatisfactory data from the German state of Baden about Protestant and Catholic educational attainment and income. Later scholars, notably the Fabian economic historian R. H. Tawney, have tended to cast doubt on Weber’s underlying argument that the direction of causation ran from religious doctrine to economic behaviour.10 On the contrary, much of the first steps towards a spirit of capitalism occurred before the Reformation, in the towns of Lombardy and Flanders; while many leading reformers expressed distinctly anti-capitalist views. At least one major empirical study of 276 German cities between 1300 and 1900 found ‘no effects of Protestantism on economic growth’, at least as measured by the growth of city size.11 Some cross-country studies have arrived at similar conclusions.12 Nevertheless, there are reasons to think that Weber was on to something, even if he was right for the wrong reasons.
If Burke had written those words in 1793, there would be no great mystery. But to have foreseen the true character of the French Revolution within a year of its outbreak was extraordinary. What had he spotted? The answer is Rousseau. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book The Social Contract (1762) was among the most dangerous books Western civilization ever produced. Man, Rousseau argued, is a ‘noble savage’ who is reluctant to submit to authority. The only legitimate authority to which he can submit is the sovereignty of ‘the People’ and the ‘General Will’. According to Rousseau, that General Will must be supreme. Magistrates and legislators must bow down before it. There can be no ‘sectional associations’. There can be no Christianity, which after all implies a separation of powers (the spiritual from the temporal). Freedom is a good thing, no doubt. But for Rousseau virtue is more important. The General Will should be virtue in action.15 Turning back to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the modern reader can begin to see what appalled Burke: 6.Law is the expression of the general will . . . 10.No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law . . . 17.Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it . . . [emphasis added] It was these caveats that Burke mistrusted. The primacy Rousseau gave to ‘the public order’ and ‘public necessity’ struck him as deeply sinister. The General Will was, to Burke’s mind, a less reliable selector of a ruler than the hereditary principle, since rulers chosen that way were more likely to respect ‘ancient liberties’, which Burke preferred to the new, singular and abstract ‘freedom’. The Third Estate, he argued, would inevitably be corrupted by power (and by the ‘monied interest’), unlike an aristocracy, which enjoyed the independence that private wealth confers. Burke also grasped the significance of the expropriation of Church lands in November 1789 – one of the first truly revolutionary acts – and the dangers of printing paper money (the assignats) with nothing more than confiscated Church land as backing. The real social contract, he argued, was not Rousseau’s pact between the noble savage and the General Will, but a ‘partnership’ between the present generation and future generations. With astonishing prescience, Burke warned against the utopianism of ‘the professors’: ‘At the end of every vista’, he wrote in the greatest prophecy of the era, ‘you see nothing but the gallows.’w The assault on traditional institutions, he warned, would end in a ‘mischievous and ignoble oligarchy’ and, ultimately, military dictatorship.16 In all of this, Burke was to be proved right.