Ian Morris, the Oracle of Stanford

Why The West Rules — For Now, is a very stimulating book (a serendipitous find, while on break from my valient quest for a suitable birthday present for a 6-year-old...) in which the English historian and archeologist Ian Morris examines the broadest patterns of human history and tries to answer the vexing question: why was it that, starting in the late 15th century, the people of Western Europe came to gradually dominate the whole world — a domination then greatly accelerated and accentuated by the (again European) Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century. Since all evidence seems to attest to the fact that all humans, taken in large groups, are basically equally gifted in terms of talent and intelligence and ingenuity, what gave the West its (temporary?) edge?

The answer Morris gives — geography!— is basically the same as the one offered by the shockingly brilliant biologist and geographer Jared Diamond in his classic Guns, Germs and Steel, but arrived at in a different manner.

The general idea is that some people happened to live in places where, after the end of the last ice age about 10 000 years ago, it was relatively straightforward to develop a new means of subsitance — i.e. farming — that gave the people who adopted it advantages over those of their neighbours who retained their ancestral hunter-gatherer lifestyles. These places where farming first evolved were special only because they happened to enjoy propicious climactic conditions and the presence of useful domesticable plants (like wheat or barley or millet) and animals (like cows and pigs and horses). The opportunistic farmers who appeared in these places worked harder on the whole and were less healthy than their hunter-gatherer neighbours but were nonetheless able to multiply faster and gradually establish larger political units that allowed them to displace or assimilate the nomadic hunter-gatherers. Now the first place where this came to pass was in the Hilly Flanks, in Western Asia.

The Fertile Crescent (the Hilly Flanks curl around the outlying borders).

A couple of thousand years later, the same process repeated itself independently in the Yellow River valley of China (and later in a few other places around the world).

Shang civilization centers around the Yellow River valley.

Just for fun, since this last map is kind of ugly, here is another, more beautiful, representation of the Yellow River by the famous Song Dynasty painter Ma Yuan:

Anyways... The Hilly Flanks constituted the first "core" of agrarian culture, from which, eventually  civilizations with cities and then territorial states and eventually regional empires with elaborate bureaucracies, military organizations and means of communication would evolve.

Morris explains that this is a dynamic process in which, given the right conditions, a core of higher cultural development appears and the people from this core start imposing their way of life on their neighbours, either by conquest or when the neighbours willfully adopt the new way of life by emulation. This way, the new material culture spreads to more and more distant peripheries that don't have quite the same propicious geographic conditions as the core. This forces the people of these peripheries to innovate and find new technical solutions to problems that are not an issue in the core: for exemple, in Mesopotamia, it was necessary to master irrigation before agriculture could be practiced. This transition often results in new social conditions and a more complex and developed society emerging in the periphery — like the emergence of city-states in Mesopotamia, because mere Hilly Flanks-style villages would have been too small to support the work required to set up mass irrigation. In time, this gives these peripheries a paradoxical "advantage of backwardness" that allows them to face problems in more successful ways then in the periclitating core, especially if there are changes in the climate that make the core somehow less suitable for exploitation than it used to be. The old core then collapses and the former periphery becomes a new higher-level core.

The really clever thing that Morris does in this book is to come up with a way of credibly quantifying human development so that it can be meaningfully tracked and compared throughout history. He does this with with a "social development index" that uses four traits — energy capture, organization, war-making and information technology — to set up a barrometer that allows historians to plot out and read the highs and lows of civilization with some precision and in an objective way.

With this instrument, he is able to show that there seem to be specific numerical threshholds in social development that cultures run into, which represent the limits of given types of socio-economic and political organizations, and that societies either modify themselves profoundly through political or technological innovation to break through the threshholds, or they risk collasping altogether. (For example, the territorial states of Ancient Egypt or the Hittite kingdom collapsed and gave way to vast regional dominions like the Persian or Roman Empires.)

It seems that as societies develop and interact with their natural environment, at certain points in their ascent, they become particularly vulnerable to what Morris calls the "four horsmen of the apocalypse" —  migration, state failure, famine and disease — plus an extra horseman that for most of history and until recently has been unaffected by human development but could affect it from the outside quite decisively : climate change. He calls this the paradox of social develoment, whereby development itself tends to generate the very problems that threaten and could ultimately undermine societies. Cores become bigger, more complex and more integrated — and the bigger and more complex and more integrated they are, the more globalized and destructive the disruptions that threaten them become — but also the more powerful and sophisticated the ways of these cores have to deal with disruptions.

To illustrate this process, the book tracks the ups and downs of human civilizations in quite a masterful historical narrative, focusing especially on the one hand on the Western core, which expanded from the Hilly Flanks, then to the Fertile Crescent, then to the Mediterranean and then to Western Europe and eventually beyond the Atlantic to the Americas; and on the other hand on the Eastern core, which started developing a couple of millenia later and expanded from the Yellow River valley to all of modern China and later to a large portion of East Asia. Morris shows that for a long time the West was ahead in social development thanks to its early start, but that around the 6th century AD, after the catastrophic collapse of the Roman world, the Eastern core jumped ahead and stayed ahead until the 18th century, when the Atlantic trade, the Scientific Revolution, and then the Industial Revolution (combined with conservative attitudes and a temporary reticence for innovation in Ming and Qing dynasty China), gave the West the lead back again. At the present, Morris argues that this lead is fast dissapearing — but that in the truly global social context in which we are now evolving, where all the cores are interlinked, intergrated and entangled in myriad complex ways, perhaps even the distinction between East and West may soon stop to be meaningful.

The really scary part of this super brilliant book is the final one, in which Morris tells us we are cursed to live in interesting times and contemplates the century ahead. He basically sees it as a race between the ultimate collapse of our global civilization, smitten by nuclear war and/or global weirding and/or mass migration and/or famine — and a "singularity", i.e., a game-changing technological innovation in energy capture, which would — similarly to the way the Industrial Revolution harnessed the hitherto untapped energy of fossil fuels, made the social development index shoot up to dizzy hights and radically transformed every aspect of life during the 19th and 20th centuries — allow the human race to live on into the 21st century and beyond, breaking through the formidable development barriers that threaten planetary societies, so that we may perhaps evolve into something new, some biomechanical hybrid or pure machine beings, say, for whom the whole of human history could be understood as the evolutionary step that led to the rize of the soulfull machines... (Cue the dread music from The Terminator.)

Joking aside (laughter in the dark...), it seems to me this is a very profound book. One that successfully outlines the deep dynamics and shape of human history. It places history within a coherent framework that reveals the meaning or significance of historical events: not just one thing after another, but a coherent, intelligible evolution. This is what a good explanation is supposed to do: to allow one to grasp the object that is being studied synthetically. I think this book is a great triumph for the social sciences — spectacularly validating their methods, value and relevance — and for the adventure of human understanding itself. It is so very convincing, and yet one hopes its darker prophesies for the future will not come to pass...

Big up Ian Morris! Respect. Respect!