Why the West Rules—for Now

The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future

Bibliographic Data

ID6011584
AuthorsJohn R Pfeiffer (0000-0001-8258-8757, Central Michigan University, corresponding author), John Pfeiffer (0000-0001-5368-0589, Central Michigan University)
Year2012
Volume23
Issue1
Pages285-290
Publication date2012-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueUtopian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1045-991X • E-ISSN: 2154-9648
PublisherThe Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5325/utopianstudies.23.1.0285
OpenAlexW4237962977
LanguageEN
Citations received28

An appreciation of Ian Morris's magisterially synthesized Why the West Rules requires attention to a short roll of other “grand narrative” historiographical hybrids that, like West, join erudition and polemic. With Morris's book as a wonderfully illuminated representative, this recent crop of books may be the most useful ever in reporting the advanced and promising and precarious state of social order in the world: Prestigious titles are Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976), Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Vintage, 1987), Daniel Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (Free Press, 1991) and The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (Penguin Press, 2011), William H. McNeill's The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes, and Community (Princeton University Press, 1992), Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (Norton, 1997) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2004), Ray Kurtweil's The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005), Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007), Harm de Blij's Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America: Climate Change, the Rise of China, and Global Terrorism (Oxford University Press, 2007) and The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape (Oxford University Press, 2009), Melvin Konner's Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind (Harvard University Press, 2010), Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order, vol. 1: From Pre-human Times to the French Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), Joseph Nye Jr.'s The Future of Power (Public Affairs, 2011), Tim Flannery's Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011), Robert N. Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Harvard University Press, 2011), David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (Viking, 2011), and the special issue “Population” of the journal Science (July 29, 2011). The harvest of the special research of others that these books accomplish is breathtaking. Their resectioning of many and vast archives of information is Herculean. West expertly surfs and represents this genre, which acquired formidable mass in the last quarter of the twentieth century.Morris auditioned for his new book in his more traditional vertical studies of the luminal era between prehistory and history in such works as Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Death Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Classical Greece: Ancient Histories and Modern Archeologies (Cambridge University Press, 1994), and, with Walter Scheidel, The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford University Press, 2009). West's three parts include twelve chapters: Part 1 presents (1) the “biological basis of the story in the evolution and dispersal of humans over the planet,” (2) “the formation and growth of the original Eastern and Western ‘cores’ [geographical locations of highest habitation] after the Ice Age,” and (3) Morris's explanation of his social development index (SDI) used throughout the book to “measure the relative progress of East and West.” Part 2 presents (4) the origins of the earliest states and the disruptions that wracked the Western core [before] ... 1200 BCE”; (5) “the first great Eastern and Western empires and how their social development rose toward the limits of what was possible in agricultural economies”; (6) “the great collapse that swept Eurasia after about 150 CE”; (7) “a turning point, with the Eastern core opening a new frontier and taking the lead in social development,” only to reach again by “about 1100 CE ... the limits of what was possible in an agricultural world”; (8) the description of a second Eurasian “great collapse”; (9) “the new frontiers that Eastern and Western empires created on the steppes and across the oceans as they recovered, and ... how the West” caught up to the East in social development; and (10) “how the industrial revolution converted the West's lead into rule and the enormous consequences this had” (italics added). Finally, part 3 explains Morris's (11) “argument that behind all the details of what has happened in the last fifteen thousand years, two sets of laws—those of biology and sociology—determined the shape of history on a global scale, while a third set—those of geography—determined the differences between Eastern and Western development.... It was the ongoing interplay between these laws, not long-term lock-ins or short-term accidents” that gave the big edge, temporarily, to the West. Finally, (12) Morris proposes that “the laws of history in fact give us a pretty good sense of what is likely to happen next. History has not come to an end with Western rule” (36). (West's look into the future is summarized at the end of this review.)Morris's “index of social development” tracks (1) the efficiency of energy capture, (2) the success of urbanism, (3) the speed of information processing, and (4) war-making capacity—because an index that did not include military power would be “no use at all” (149). On its own terms this neo-evolutionary and utilitarian metric of human progress is compelling. As the engine of West's analyses, the SDI is established in dozens of illustrations in his text, in a twenty-three-page appendix, and in a 233-page online supplement (http://ianmorris.org/socdev.html) that radically iterates, elaborates, and rigorously explains the already quite ambitious presentation of SDI in the book. It is supported by enough material to require a forty-four-page, reduced-print bibliography. This index does not privilege the appearance and effects of great leaders and linear technological advancement as permanently “locked in.” Instead, it interrogates many theories of history: (1) that it is determined; (2) that it appears to follow laws; (3) that geography and climate are influential; (4) that social and technological progress are linked and even parallel; and (5) that in the long history of a species on a planet, skill and luck are statistically impartial. One exception persists: The technology for war could destroy us.The subtexts of all histories define utopia's opportunities—as well as its moral disorientations: Traditional utopias presuppose human survival and progress as a prologue to an enlightened social order in which each person is fully enfranchised. In accounts such as West this priority—a privileging of the individual—is set aside. For example, both Morris and Freeman Dyson, the famous polemical physicist-mathematician, consider the technique of China in pulling abreast of the progress of the West, with equanimity (Morris), if not approval (Dyson). Centrally governed, China's centuries-old technique is to kill untold numbers of its citizens with police and militia to remove interference with progress. Dyson seems cold-blooded: “We should hope that the Chinese tradition will continue to be different from ours, so that they will dare to undertake new ventures that our more timid Western rules forbid” (review of David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, New York Review of Books, November 10, 2011, 27). Morris summarizes this as “the paradox of violence: when the rivers of blood dried, their [Qin (early China) and Rome] imperialism left most people, in both East and West, better off” (264). These views reflect the virtue and the defect of science. They intend scientific objectivity. And yet they cannot privilege the biases of politics and mythology by the exclusive means by which people represent their individual selves.The individual cannot be represented in the vortex of the abstraction of books like West. They are so necessarily impersonal. The absolute nonsignificance the individual person is awarded in these arching timescapes and evolutionary promenades—the characteristic abstractions to which humans are assigned in grand histories—can be dismaying. They are narratives of the hive—Dune (1965) author Frank Herbert's prizewinning Hellstrom's Hive (1973) comes to mind. Such histories are marvelous animations, the sum of which is an abstraction, as, indeed, “collapse” and catastrophe predictions are also abstractions. They summarize a reality in which one's own insignificance may be inescapable. In West, buffering the presumptive emotional sterility of this rite of passage that the reader undergoes is the very personal voice of Morris's narration, with its humor, grace, and common touch.West's daunting story of fifteen thousand years of the history of modern humans is sorted by Morris's mythic counterpoint of their lives, deaths, and posterities. Deliberately, he channels the visions and voices of Dante, Voltaire, Dickens, Yeats, and Wells and the conceits of catastrophe science fiction. It is an epic of pain, and growth, after all. Organized by politics and religion—sectarian and institutionalized—which are crippling, it is depressing to have it confirmed that “our” species' collective behavior has not been conscious enough to escape the dooms—“collapses”—they lead to. His agenda eschews smaller moralities: “I am not interested in passing judgment on our capacities to capture energy, build cities, communicate information, and wage war; only in measuring them” (153).Early on, Morris calls his first-person narrative “chainsaw art” (153). His subchapter titles rock, and they make an antic poetry: “Lucking Out”; “Location, Location, Location”; “In the Beginning”; “The First Westerners: Neanderthals”; “Baby Steps”; “Out of Africa—Again”; “Prehistoric Picassos”; “Paradise Lost”; “Going Forth and Multiplying [Bible];” “What All the World Desires” (490); “East of Eden”; “Boiling and Baking, Skulls and Graves [Shakespeare resectioned]”; “Scrooge's Question [Dickens]”; “The Elephant in the Room”; “Hotlines to the Gods”; “The Gods Made Flesh”; “The Wild West”; “Things Fall Apart [Yeats]”; ‘Chariots, Not of the Gods”; “Horseman of the Apocalypse”; “Kingship on the Cheap”; “Surveillance and Discipline [Foucault!]” (265); “The Centers Do Not Hold [Yeats again]”; “Guns, Germs, and Cast Iron [Jared Diamond revised]”; “Great Men and Bungling Idiots”; “What All the World Desires”; “The Joy of Steam”; “The Gradgrinds [Dickens]”; “Nemesis [Star Trek]”; “The Wars of the World [Wells]”; “The Age of Everything.” “Hence the deepest irony: ... The important history is global and evolutionary, telling the story of how we got from single-celled organisms to the Singularity” (619)—not unlike the wildly optimistic destiny for humanity of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953).West is a kind of account especially intended to be a search for auguries of survival and progress. Should they be realized, for Morris they may soon converge as Ray Kurzweil's “Singularity.” Thus, Morris ends his book riffing like a jazz musician: The Singularity ... might be every bit as scary as Nightfall.... Technology is “rapidly taking us to a place where we may not want to go, but probably are unable to avoid.” ... The merging of humans and computers may be just a brief phase before what we condescendingly call “artificial” intelligence replaces Homo sapiens as thoroughly as Homo sapiens replaced all earlier ape-men.... It will mean the end of biology as we have known it, with it the end of sloth, fear, and greed as the motors of history.... Sociology [describing the rules of a robotic carbon- to silicon-based intelligence] ... will go the same way.... When historians look back from 2103 ... it may strike them as inevitable ... [that the original cores of human habitation] merge[d] into a single post-human world civilization. The early twenty-first century anxiety over why the West ruled and whether it would keep on doing so might look a little ridiculous. (618–19) Morris continues, “Only historians can draw together the grand narrative of social development; only historians can explain the differences that divide humanity and how we can prevent them from destroying us. This book, I hope, might help a little in the process” (622).Finally, we remain charmed by the vulgar superlative, “the best ever,” mostly without knowing the history that gives “ever” a script. Morris removes some of this ignorance in West: “In a pattern we will see repeated many times ..., as social development rose, the new age got the culture it needed.... Axial thought was just one of the things that happened when people created high-end states and disenchanted the world” (263). But people will insist upon enchantments

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