Why the West Rules--For Now (23 page)

I think we can draw two conclusions from
Table 2.1
. First, early developments in the Western and Eastern cores were mostly rather similar. I do not want to gloss over the very real differences in everything from styles of stone tools to the plants and animals people ate, but none of these differences lends much support to the long-term lock-in theory we have been discussing, that something about the way Western culture developed after the Ice Age gave it greater potential than Eastern culture and explains why the West rules. That seems to be untrue.

If any long-term lock-in theory can survive confronting the evidence in
Table 2.1
, it is the simplest one of all, that thanks to geography
the West got a two-thousand-year head start in development, retained that lead long enough to arrive first at industrialization, and therefore dominates the world. To test this theory we need to extend our East-West comparison into more recent periods to see if that is what really happened.

That sounds simple enough, but the second lesson of
Table 2.1
is that cross-cultural comparison is tricky. Just listing important developments in two columns was only a start, because making sense of the anomalies in
Table 2.1
required us to put boiling and baking, skulls and graves into context, to find out what they meant within prehistoric societies. And that plunges us into one of the central problems of anthropology, the comparative study of societies.

When nineteenth-century European missionaries and administrators started collecting information about the peoples in their colonial empires, their reports of outlandish customs amazed scholars. Anthropologists catalogued these activities, speculating about their diffusion around the globe and what they might tell us about the evolution of more civilized (by which they meant more European-like) behavior. They sent eager graduate students to exotic climes to collect more examples. One of these bright young men was Bronislaw Malinowski, a Pole studying in London who found himself in the Trobriand Islands in 1914 when World War I broke out. Unable to get a boat home, Malinowski did the only reasonable thing; after sulking briefly in his tent, he got himself a girlfriend. Consequently, by 1918 he understood Trobriand culture from the inside out. He grasped what his professors in their book-lined studies had missed: that anthropology was really about explaining how customs fit together. Comparisons must be between complete functioning cultures, not individual practices torn out of context, because the same behavior may have different meanings in different contexts. Tattooing your face, for instance, may make you a rebel in Kansas, but it marks you as a conformist in New Guinea. Equally, the same idea may take different forms in different cultures, like the circulating skulls and buried jades in the prehistoric West and East, both expressing reverence toward ancestors.

Malinowski would have hated
Table 2.1
. We cannot, he would have insisted, make a grab bag of customs from two functioning cultures and pass judgment on which was doing better. And we certainly cannot write books with chapter titles like “The West Takes the Lead.” What, he would have asked, do we mean by “lead”? How on earth do we justify disentangling specific practices from the seamless web of life and measuring them against each other? And even if we could disentangle reality, how would we know which bits to measure?

All good questions, and we need to answer them if we are to explain why the West rules—even though the search for answers has torn anthropology apart over the last fifty years. With some trepidation, I will now plunge into these troubled waters.

3

TAKING THE MEASURE OF THE PAST

ARCHAEOLOGY EVOLVING

Social evolution was still rather a new idea when cultural anthropologists launched the rebellion against it described at the end of
Chapter 2
. The word’s modern sense goes back only to 1857, when Herbert Spencer, a homeschooled English polymath, published an essay called “Progress: Its Law and Cause.” Spencer was an odd character, who had already tried his hand at being a railway engineer, a copy editor at the then brand-new magazine
The Economist
, and a romantic partner of the lady novelist George Eliot (none of which suited him; he never held a steady job or married). This essay, though, was an overnight sensation. In it Spencer explained, “
From the remotest past
which Science can fathom, up to the novelties of yesterday, that in which progress essentially consists, is the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous.” Evolution, Spencer insisted, is the process by which things begin simply and get more complex, and it explains everything about everything:

The advance from the simple to the complex, through a process of successive differentiations, is seen alike in the earliest changes of the Universe to which we can reason our way back, and in the earliest changes which we can inductively establish; it is seen in the geologic and climatic evolution of the Earth; it is seen in the unfolding of every single organism on its surface, and in the multiplication of kinds of organisms; it is seen in the evolution of Humanity, whether contemplated in the civilized individual, or in the aggregate of races; it is seen in the evolution of Society in respect alike of its political, its religious, and its economical organization; and it is seen in the evolution of all those endless concrete and abstract products of human activity which constitute the environment of our daily life.

Spencer spent the next forty years bundling geology, biology, psychology, sociology, politics, and ethics into a single evolutionary theory. He succeeded so well that by 1870 he was probably the most influential philosopher writing in English, and when Japanese and Chinese intellectuals decided they needed to understand the West’s achievements, he was the first author they translated. The great minds of the age bowed to his ideas. The first edition of Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
, published in 1859, did not contain the word “evolution”; nor did the second or third, nor even the fourth or fifth. But in the sixth imprint, in 1872, Darwin felt compelled to borrow the term that Spencer had by now popularized.
*

Spencer believed that societies had evolved through four levels of differentiation, from the simple (wandering bands without leaders) through the compound (stable villages with political leaders) and doubly compound (groups with churches, states, complex divisions of labor, and scholarship) to the trebly compound (great civilizations like Rome and Victorian Britain). The scheme caught on, though no two theorists quite agreed on how to label the stages. Some spoke of evolution from savagery through barbarism to civilization; others preferred evolution from magic through religion to science. By 1906 the forest of terminologies was so annoying that Max Weber, the founding father
of sociology, complained about “
the vanity
of contemporary authors who conduct themselves in the face of a terminology used by someone else as if it were his toothbrush.”

Whatever the labels evolutionists used, though, they all faced the same problem. They had a gut feeling that they must be right, but little hard evidence to prove it. The newly forming discipline of anthropology therefore set out to supply data. Some societies, the thinking went, are less evolved than others: the colonized peoples of Africa or the Trobriand Islands, with their stone tools and colorful customs, are like living ancestors, reflecting what civilized people in trebly compound societies must have been like in prehistory. All that the anthropologist had to do (apart from putting up with malaria, internal parasites, and ungrateful natives) was take good notes, and he (not too often she in those days) could come home and fill in the gaps in the evolutionary story.

It was this intellectual program that Malinowski rejected. In a way, though, it is odd that the issue came up at all. If evolutionists wanted to document progress, why not do so directly, using archaeological data, the physical remains left behind by actual prehistoric societies, rather than indirectly, using anthropological observations of contemporary groups and speculating that they were survivals? The answer: archaeologists a century ago just did not know very much. Serious excavation had barely begun, so evolutionists had to combine the skimpy information in archaeological reports with incidental details from ancient literature and random ethnographic accounts—which made it all too easy for Malinowksi and like-minded anthropologists to expose evolutionists’ reconstructions as speculative just-so stories.

Archaeology is a young science. As little as three centuries ago, our most ancient evidence about history—China’s Five Classics, the Indian Vedas, the Hebrew Bible, and the Greek poet Homer—barely reached back to 1000
BCE.
Before these masterpieces, all was darkness. The simple act of digging things up changed everything, but it took a while. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1799 he brought with him a legion of scholars, who copied down or carried off dozens of ancient inscriptions. In the 1820s French linguists unlocked the secrets of these hieroglyphic texts, abruptly adding two thousand years to documented history. Not to be outdone, in the 1840s British explorers tunneled into
ruined cities in the lands that are now Iraq or, hanging from ropes, transcribed royal inscriptions in the mountains of Iran; before the decade was over, scholars could read Old Persian, Assyrian, and the wisdom of Babylon.

When Spencer started writing about progress in the 1850s, archaeology was still more adventure than science, bursting with real-life Indiana Joneses. It was only in the 1870s that archaeologists began applying the geological principle of stratigraphy (the commonsense insight that since the uppermost layers of earth on a site must have got there after the lower layers, we can use the sequence of deposits to reconstruct the order of events) to their digs, and stratigraphic analysis became mainstream only in the 1920s. Archaeologists still depended on linking their sites with events mentioned in ancient literature to date what they excavated, and so until the 1940s finds in most parts of the world floated in a haze of conjecture and guesswork. That ended when nuclear physicists discovered radiocarbon dating, using the decay of unstable carbon isotopes in bone, charcoal, and other organic finds to tell how old objects were. Archaeologists began imposing order on prehistory, and by the 1970s a global framework was taking shape.

When I was a graduate student in the 1980s one or two senior professors still claimed that when they had been students their teachers had advised them that the only essential tools for fieldwork were a tuxedo and a small revolver. I am still not sure whether I should have believed them, but whatever the truth of the matter, the James Bond era was certainly dying by the 1950s. The real breakthroughs increasingly came from the daily grind of an army of professionals, grubbing facts, pushing further into prehistory, and fanning out across the globe.

Museum storerooms were overflowing with artifacts and library shelves groaning under the weight of technical monographs, but some archaeologists worried that the fundamental question—
what does it all mean?
—was going unanswered. The situation in the 1950s was the mirror image of the 1850s: where once grand theory sought data, now data cried out for theory. Armed with their hard-won results, mid-twentieth-century social scientists, particularly in the United States, felt ready for another crack at theorizing.

Calling themselves neo-evolutionists to show that they were more advanced than fuddy-duddy “classical” evolutionists like Spencer, some
social scientists began suggesting that while it was wonderful to have so many facts to work with, the mass of evidence had itself become part of the problem. The important information was buried in messy narrative accounts by anthropologists and archaeologists or in historical documents: in short, it was not scientific enough. To get beyond the forest of nineteenth-century typologies and create a unifying theory of society, the neo-evolutionists felt, they needed to convert these stories into numbers. By measuring differentiation and assigning scores they could rank societies and then search for correlations between the scores and possible explanations. Finally, they could turn to questions that might make all the time and money spent on archaeology worthwhile—whether there is just one way for societies to evolve, or multiple ways; whether societies cluster in discrete evolutionary stages (and if so, how they move from one stage to another); or whether a single trait, such as population or technology (or, for that matter, geography), explains everything.

In 1955 Raoul Naroll, an anthropologist working on a vast multi-university data-gathering project called the Human Relations Area Files, took the first serious stab at what he described as an index of social development. Randomly choosing thirty preindustrial societies from around the world (some contemporary, others historical), he trawled the files to find out how differentiated they were, which, he thought, would be reflected in how big their largest settlements were, how specialized their craftworkers were, and how many subgroups they had. Converting the results to a standard format, Naroll handed out scores. At the bottom were the Yahgan people of Tierra del Fuego, who had impressed Darwin in 1832 as “
exist[ing] in a
lower state of improvement than [those] in any other part of the world.” They scored just twelve out of a possible sixty-three points. At the top were the pre-Spanish-conquest Aztecs, with fifty-eight points.