It has taken me a while to read Ian Morris's magnificent Why The West Rules for Now – all 650+ pages of it. Although there's plenty in it to debate and challenge, his general hypothesis is persuasive and it's a terrific read.
Morris's argument goes like this: human social development is the result of an interplay between the upward pressure arising from our ever-evolving biological nature, on the one hand, and on the other hand the challenges posed by geography (mainly changes in climate) and the increasing complexity of social organisation. Like all living beings, we need to extract energy from our environment. Until the Industrial revolution, there were firm limits to our ability to do so. The earlier episodes in history when humankind had taken giant strides in social development had resulted from social innovations such as farming, urbanisation, centralised organisation in empires and nation states. Since around 1800, technological innovation has been the main driver. There is no guarantee of continuing progress. For lengthy periods in the past, human development has gone into reverse – both West and East had their long Dark Ages. But Morris is somewhat optimistic about our collective ability now to avoid that kind of catastrophic setback, when it took half a millennium for the level of development to return to its starting point.
He also discusses at length the dynamics of the process. There is a paradox of development: progress creates its internal tensions including population pressure and the challenge of organising an increasingly complex society. And there are advantages to backwardness: areas on the periphery are more inventive if they are economically marginal or face a less favourable environment. These dynamics mean that history is not 'locked in' – the West has not always been more highly developed than the East (for five centuries from around 1250 to 1750 it was the other way round). Besides, looking over the long sweep of history to 10000 BCE, the paths of East and West are strikingly similar – the people and the processes are the same everywhere. (See my earlier posts on measuring the level of development and on the earliest periods of human history.) However, the dynamics are also very slow so short-term reversals are unlikely.
This book sits firmly in the tradition of authors such as Jared Diamond in Collapse or Joseph Tainter. One grumpy review (by George Walden in the Guardian) has dismissed Morris's argument as completely overlooking the role of culture and ideas. That isn't correct. Rather, Morris sees these are the result of the geographic and biological conditions facing any given society. Conventional historical arguments, he suggests, explain why the Industrial Revolution centred on Manchester rather than Lille (p500) – British politics and institutions, its command of the seas, the character of its inventors. But the broader forces mean there would have been an Industrial Revolution about then somewhere in northern or western Europe. He says: “Intellectuals ask the question that social development forces onto them: each age gets the thought it needs.” (p476). I'm not sure this would satisfy Walden either, but it seems completely persuasive to me – ideas and culture do not emerge in a vacuum but are themselves shaped by society. They in turn shape the resilience of the society to fresh organisational or environmental challenges, and the evolution of ideas and culture helps explain why a second period of Dark Ages did not follow the turmoil of the 16th century, its mini-ice age and widespread war and disease.
I don't think Why the West Rules For Now is a substitute for more conventional cultural or political accounts of history. Rather, it has a different focal length. I highly commend it.
Oh, and the '….For Now' part? Morris predicts that current long term trends indicate the East will overtake the West once again in its level of social development in 2103 or thereabouts. The 22nd century will be the Chinese century. He's careful not to claim this is inevitable. He notes the global challenges which could add up to a serious threat to everybody's level of social development, not least climate change – the world faces another 'hard ceiling' of the kind which led to the collapse of the Dark Ages. The book concludes: “The next 40 years will be the most important in history.” In the face of an account of 15,000 years or so of history, that's pretty sobering.
