V V: What makes the West rule?

source:Business Standard


After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities.
T S Eliot: Gerontion

Ian Morris, a polymathic Stanford university professor is a classical archaeologist by training who has written an ambitious book titled “Why the West Rules – For Now: the Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future” (Profile Books, £20), which would be as widely read as Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. Geography, he claims, explains the arc of world history, a point he hammered home in a recent article, Latitudes, Not Attitudes. In Why the West Rules, he elaborates his thesis over 700 pages with all the paraphernalia of scholarship of footnotes, diagrams, charts, on how western pre-eminence came about through accidents of geography, technology and social change, and how these factors are universal.


Morris believes that since time immemorial, some crucial factors – geography, climate, or culture – made the East and the West unalterably different and this determined that the Industrial Revolution would happen in the West and push it further ahead than the East. Morris acknowledges that the East led the West between 500 and 1600 and this development couldn’t have been inevitable and western rule was, therefore, an aberration. But Morris reminds his audience that the West led the world for 9,000 of the previous 10,000 years and, therefore, the West’s rule couldn’t be dismissed as “a mere aberration”. To make sense of the past, present and the future it was necessary to have a wider perspective of history, the anthropological-archaeological awareness of the past and a social scientist’s methodology of comparative studies, a multidisciplinary approach that hasn’t been attempted earlier. This is a huge task and therein lies the flaw.

But begin with the beginning. The East and the West are geopolitical constructs. The West, according to Morris, extended from south-west Asia to the Mediterranean basin, Europe and in the last few centuries to America and Australia.

The primacy of the West is not because of its supposed superior values like “democracy, tolerance and the rule of law” (this came much later) but because of “the domestication of plants and animals began in the western core around 9500BC, some 2,000 years before it did in the East”. Settled communities meant that these societies could expend more time and energy to the development of new technologies like new kinds of ships that could cross seas and impassable oceans that would help discover new worlds.

As Morris sees it, “It was not Greek philosophy, Roman law, Judaeo-Christian monotheism or European Enlightenment that enabled West’s rise to global power but the brute fact of location, interacting with universal laws of biology and sociology.” Morris shows how this interaction played out with the emergence of modern man and the rise of nation states and the Industrial Revolution. This happened alongside the decline of the East that succumbed to superior western powers and influence.

Morris tells us that the development of society is governed by universal laws. But what are these laws? Human beings are constrained by biology and evolutionary psychology could explain some patterns of their behaviour but is there a single sociological law that is truly universal that would explain all aspects of human behaviour? Of all the social sciences, it is economics that comes closest to formulating law-like principles based on reason. But over the past few years, evidence from psychology has persuaded many economists that reason does not always have its way; that it is both emotion and reason that play a role in taking crucial decisions and of the two, it is the “feeling” that tilts the balance.

But forget the past that is relatively easy to reconstruct the way you want it by skipping over inconvenient facts. What of the future which is the main thrust of this massive exercise? Morris produces a graph that shows social development. It suggests the era of western dominance will end not later than 2013, perhaps a little earlier. Driven by India, Brazil and other emerging countries, the global economic shift that is underway will continue even if China falters or collapses. Whatever happens, the US will still be around even if has to borrow heavily to fund a position in the world it can no longer afford. Besides, the US will have its awesome military power to enforce its interests and threaten other countries with tariff and currency wars.

Morris is weakest when it comes to predicting the future, which, he believes, will be shaped by technology that is “expanding at infinite speed.” He is convinced that humans are approaching “a massive discontinuity” because of the fusion of humans with computers and robots, or the emergence of silicon-based life forms that will wipe out the old forms, including the distinction between east and west. Technology may take over large areas of life but it will never control the irrational human mind.

At the end, you really don’t know what to make of the book: history or meta-history, science or science fiction or simply a well-told yarn? Read it all the same.