What's So Great About America (9 page)

First let us consider science. It is based on a shared human trait: the desire to know. People in every culture have tried to learn about the world. Thus the Chinese recorded the eclipses, the Mayans developed a calendar, the Hindus discovered the number zero, and so on. But science—which requires experiments, and laboratories, and induction, and verification, and what one scholar has termed “the invention of invention”—is a Western institution. This explains why the vast majority of major inventions in the past few hundred years have occurred in the West. If science were not a Western institution, there would be no way to account for this disproportion; indeed, we would be forced to conclude that the rest of the world was incredibly stupid.

Why did science develop in the West? This is a hugely complicated question and not one that I can fully answer. The best that I can do is to suggest two lines of thought that led the West in this direction. To locate the first, one has to go back to the ancient Greek philosophers. The ancient Greeks invented philosophy, which was an attempt to learn the truth about the world through unassisted human reason. No other ancient society placed so much confidence in reason. Philosophy as the Greeks understood it
included
science; it was a study of nature and of human nature. Greek philosophy from the time of Socrates emphasized the latter and thus made little headway in figuring out the mysteries of nature.

But even so, the Greeks came up with the notion that the universe as a whole makes sense, that it operates in accordance with
laws, that these laws are accessible in principle to human reason, and that they can be expressed in the language of mathematics. It is important to realize that there is no logical reason why these things should be true. The influential Muslim writer al-Ghazali denies them. In
The Incoherence of Philosophy,
he argues that reason and logic are useless in apprehending the universe because Allah intervenes at every single moment to make things happen in the way that they do. This represented the Muslim version of the belief in an “enchanted universe” governed by spirits that is characteristic of many ancient peoples. To believe in the Greek notion of a reality that is not arbitrary, that obeys mathematical laws, a reality that is reasonable and susceptible to human understanding, is to have a certain kind of faith—a faith in reason.

The Greeks did, and in subsequent centuries this faith was strengthened in the West by the Christian notion of a divine being who embodies reason and truth and who created the universe and man.
²⁰
Many of the greatest scientists of the West—among them, Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton—believed that their work demonstrated the hidden hand of God in the universe. Their science was inspired and fortified by their Christian faith. The faith is much weaker among scientists today; probably very few practicing scientists see their work as confirming a divine presence. But all of them, even those who have never heard of the Greeks and who reject Christianity, nevertheless operate on the Greek and Christian assumption that reality is rational. Without this assumption, without this faith, science itself becomes impossible.

A second notion that is crucial to the development of science is the idea of development itself—the idea of progress. Sociologist Robert Nisbet terms it “one of the master ideas of the West.”
²¹
We see it, for instance, in the teenager who says to her mother, “Mom, how can you believe that? This is 2002!” That cliché is freighted with philosophical significance: it presumes a higher consciousness for the present than existed in the past. The belief in progress is also evident in the widespread expectation that our knowledge and our economy will continue to grow, and that our children will know more and have a better life than we do. Europeans and American take these things for granted, but they are novel concepts that arose quite recently in the West.

The idea of progress, like the idea of reason, is a doctrine that cannot be proved but must be taken on faith. The Greeks didn't have this faith: they believed that history moves in cycles. One may say that the Greeks believed in change, but not in progress. To the degree that the Greeks found a pattern in this change, it was largely one of degeneration. For many Greek thinkers, the golden age was in the past and things had been going steadily downhill since then. Of course the Greeks admitted that things could get better, but they believed that they could just as easily get worse. What governed human destiny was chance or fate. These notions of cyclical change and degeneration and fate were not unique to the Greeks. They were shared by the Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Confucian Chinese, and by virtually everyone else in the world.

The modern West is the only civilization to entertain the idea that there is a meaningful pattern in history, that this pattern is onward and upward, that knowledge is cumulative and that its applications to human betterment are continuous and never-ending, that the future is certain to be better than the past. “Utopia” is in this sense a Western concept, because it
locates perfection in the future. For most people in the world these notions—that history is somehow encoded with meaning, that we know in advance that things will improve instead of degenerate—are even today considered nothing short of ridiculous. In the West, too, the idea of progress continues to be debated. For instance, there is ongoing argument about whether progress is comprehensive, i.e., whether progress involves only material gains or also moral gains. But in some form the faith in progress is very widespread in the West, and the belief in it holds because it is supported by the contemporary experience of the people of the West.

Where, then, did the Western belief in progress come from? From Christianity. It is Christianity that introduced the idea of a divine plan for man and the world. In this view, history was not one meaningless event after another: it represented the fulfillment of a story line—a story line that began with the Fall but would end in triumph with the Second Coming of Christ. The Christian narrative is one of Creation, Incarnation, and Last Judgment. As J. B. Bury points out in
The Idea of Progress,
the Christian doctrine by itself does not generate the notion of progress; for this to happen it must be secularized.
²²
This is done by keeping the concept of development but introducing man as its author and instrument. Human beings, building upon the discoveries of the past and of each other, will assure the continual advance of knowledge and its application to the betterment of the human condition. This is the idea that we recognize as “progress.” The idea of progress is a secular expression of the idea of providence.

I think I have given some indication of why science is a Western institution, and of how it developed in the West. Now let me suggest why democracy and capitalism, too, are Western. Democracy
is based on a broad human aspiration: the aspiration to be heard and to participate in decision-making. Other cultures have accommodated this aspiration: we can imagine a village leader, in Asia or Africa, soliciting input from his people as he makes an important decision. Tribal participation in this sense is universal. But democracy—by which I mean free elections, and peaceful transitions of power, and representative government, and separation of powers, and checks and balances—is a Western idea. The ancient Greeks had a version of democracy. Theirs was direct rather than representative democracy—the people made decisions themselves, rather than electing others to do so on their behalf. Moreover, Greek democracy was a kind of aristocracy because it excluded slaves, women, and resident aliens, and thus limited the franchise to a very small percentage of the population. It is the modern West that first invented the notion of representative democracy based on an expansion of the franchise and on the consent of the governed.

Capitalism, too, is based on a universal human impulse—the impulse to barter and trade. All societies have engaged in some form of exchange. Even the use of money is not Western in origin. But capitalism—by which I mean property rights, and contracts, and courts to enforce them, and free trade; in short, the whole ensemble of arrangements that Adam Smith described in
The Wealth of Nations
—is a Western institution. Modern capitalism also requires limited-liability corporations, stock exchanges, patents, insurance, double-entry bookkeeping, and legal limits on state seizure of assets. This framework also developed in the West.

Moreover, there is the psychology that is critical to capitalist success. Capitalism is based on the belief that the calling of the merchant or entrepreneur is a worthwhile one. In most societies
merchants and entrepreneurs have been regarded as lowlife scum, and for centuries this prejudice was also held in the West. How this prejudice was overcome is a story that I must reserve for the next chapter.

Here I am content to argue that it is the interaction between the three Western institutions of science, democracy, and capitalism that has produced the great wealth and strength and success of Western civilization. An example of this interaction: one of the most powerful engines of that success, technology, arises out of the marriage between science and capitalism. Science provides the knowledge that leads to invention, and capitalism supplies the mechanism by which the invention is transmitted to the larger society, as well as the economic incentive for inventors to continue to make new things.

Now we can understand better why the West was able, between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century, to subdue the rest of the world and bend it to its will. Indian elephants and Zulu spears were no match for British jeeps and rifles. Colonialism and imperialism are not the
cause
of the West's success; they are the
result
of that success. The wealth and military power of the European nations made them arrogant and stimulated their appetite for global conquest: thus the British, the Dutch, and the French went abroad in search of countries to subdue and rule. These colonial possessions added to the prestige, and to a lesser degree to the wealth, of Europe. But the primary cause of Western affluence and power is internal—the institutions of science, democracy, and capitalism acting in concert. Consequently it is simply wrong to maintain that the rest of the world is poor because the West is rich, or that the West grew rich off “stolen goods”
from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, because the West created its own wealth, and still does. The doctrine of oppression ignores this fact, and continues to fuel anti-Western resentment around the world and within the nations of the West. I think we can now conclude that the doctrine is false, and the animus that is based on it is misplaced.

Why the American Idea Is Unique

A
HUNDRED YEARS AGO, WESTERN CIVILIZATION ENJOYED unchallenged political and military supremacy, but its domination of the world was incomplete, even fragile. The reason for this is given in Milton's line from
Paradise Lost
, “Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe.” Even if some aspects of Western civilization were welcomed by the native peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, by and large Western domination was the product of conquest and military superiority. The British, for example, governed India with the police power of 100,000 troops. The rulers were able to secure the conformity, but not the support, of the native peoples. Eventually native leaders emerged who resolved to fight, and uproot, European rule from their soil. The Europeans saw this happening, and
therefore the mood at the dawn of the twentieth century was somber. Intelligent Europeans knew that there was a good chance that the whole colonial enterprise might fall apart.

So it did. The twentieth century witnessed the rise of liberation movements throughout Asia, Africa, and South America in resistance to colonialism and Western domination. Within the West, civil rights movements led by black and brown people demanded the extension of full citizenship and equal rights to minorities that had previously been excluded and discriminated against. These movements met with resistance, political as well as military. In some places, the natives fought guerrilla wars against the colonial powers. But ultimately the nonwhite peoples of the world prevailed. They did not secure their freedom by inflicting a military defeat on the West. This they did not have the power to do. They won by appealing to the principles of the West, including the principle of self-determination, and by shaming the West into relinquishing its empire and granting independence to its former colonies.

One of my high-school teachers in India liked to say, “If Hitler had been ruling India, Gandhi would be a lamp shade.” This man was not known for his sensitivity, but he had a habit of speaking the truth. His point was that the success of Gandhi and of the Indian protesters, who prostrated themselves on the train tracks, depended on the certain knowledge that the trains would stop rather than run over them. With tactics such as these, Gandhi and his followers hoped to paralyze British rule in India, and they succeeded. But what if the British had ordered the trains to keep going? This is certainly what Hitler would have done. I don't see Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun being deterred by Gandhi's strategy.
Even as the Indians denounced the West as wholly unprincipled and immoral, they relied on Western principles and Western morality to secure their independence.