Why the West Rules--For Now (24 page)

Over the next twenty years other anthropologists tried their hands at the game. Despite the fact that each used different categories, data sets, mathematical models, and scoring techniques, they agreed on the results between 87 and 94 percent of the time, which is pretty good for social science. Fifty years after Spencer’s death, a hundred after his essay on progress, neo-evolutionists looked poised to prove the laws of social evolution.

ANTHROPOLOGY DEVOLVING

So what happened? If neo-evolutionists had delivered the goods and explained everything about social evolution, we would all have heard about it. And more to the point right now, they would already have answered the why-the-West-rules question. That question is, after all, about the relative levels of development of Eastern and Western societies: whether, as long-term lock-in theorists claim, the West pulled ahead long ago, or, as short-term accident theorists would have it, the West’s lead is very recent. If neo-evolutionists could measure social development we would not have to mess around with complicated diagrams like Table 2.1. It would just be a matter of calculating Eastern and Western scores at various points since the end of the Ice Age, comparing them, and seeing which theory corresponds better with reality. So why has no one done this?

Largely, I suspect, because neo-evolutionism imploded. Even before Naroll took up his slide rule in the 1950s, the desire to measure societies struck many anthropologists as naïve. The “law-and-order crowd” (as critics called Naroll and his ilk), with their punch cards of coded data, arcane debates about statistics, and warehouse-size computers, seemed strangely divorced from the reality of archaeologists digging trenches or anthropologists interviewing hunter-gatherers; and as the times started a-changing in the 1960s, neo-evolutionism began to look not so much ridiculous as downright sinister. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, for example, whose “Original Affluent Society” essay I mentioned in
Chapter 2
, had begun his career in the 1950s as an evolutionist, but in the 1960s decided that “
sympathy and even admiration
for the Vietnamese struggle, coupled to moral and political disaffection with the American war, might undermine an anthropology of economic determinism and evolutionary development.”

By 1967, when Sahlins was in Paris arguing that hunter-gatherers were not really poor, a new generation of anthropologists—who had cut their teeth on America’s civil rights, antiwar, and women’s movements, and were often steeped in the counterculture—was staking out much tougher positions. The only thing evolutionists were really doing, they suggested, was ranking non-Western societies by how much they
resembled the Westerners doing the measuring, who—amazingly—always gave themselves the highest scores.

“
Evolutionary theories
,” the archaeologists Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley wrote in the 1980s, “easily slip into ideologies of self-justification or assert the priorities of the West in relation to other cultures whose primary importance is to act as offsets for our contemporary ‘civilization.’” Nor, many critics felt, was this confidence in numbers merely a harmless game Westerners played to make themselves feel good; it was part and parcel of the hubris that had given us carpetbombing, the Vietnam War, and the military-industrial complex. Hey hey, ho ho, LBJ had got to go; and so, too, the professors of ethnocentrism with their arrogance and their mathematics.

The sit-ins and name-calling turned an academic debate into a Manichean showdown. To some evolutionists, their critics were morally bankrupt relativists; to some critics, evolutionists were stooges of American imperialism. Through the 1980s and ’90s anthropologists fought it out in hiring, tenure, and graduate admissions committees, ruining careers and polarizing scholarship. Anthropology departments on America’s most famous campuses degenerated into something resembling bad marriages, until, broken down by years of mutual recriminations, the couples started leading separate lives. “
We no longer
[even] call each other names,” one prominent anthropologist lamented in 1984. In the extreme case—at Stanford, my own university—the anthropologists divorced in 1998, formally splitting into the Department of Anthropological Sciences, which liked evolution, and the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, which did not. Each did its own hiring and firing and admitted and trained its own students; members of one group had no need to acknowledge members of the other. They even gave rise to a new verb, to “stanfordize” a department.

The woes—or joys, depending on who was talking—of stanfordization kept anthropologists entertained in bars at professional conferences for several years, but stanfordizing is not much of a solution to one of the biggest intellectual problems in the social sciences.
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If we are going to explain why the West rules we need to confront the arguments on both sides of this issue.

Social evolution’s critics were surely right that the law-and-order crowd was guilty of hubris. Like Herbert Spencer himself, in trying to explain everything about everything they perhaps ended up explaining rather little about anything. There was a lot of confusion over what neo-evolutionists were actually measuring, and even when they agreed on just what was supposed to be evolving within societies (which mostly happened when they stuck to Spencer’s favorite idea of differentiation) it was not always obvious what ranking the world’s societies in a league table would actually accomplish.

Score sheets, the critics insisted, obscure more than they reveal, masking the peculiarities of individual cultures. I certainly found that to be true when I was studying the origins of democracy in the 1990s. The ancient Greek cities that invented this form of government were really peculiar; many of their residents honestly believed that instead of asking priests what the gods thought, the best way to find the truth was to get all the men together on the side of a hill, argue, and take a vote. Giving ancient Greece a score for differentiation does not explain where democracy came from, and burying the Greeks’ peculiarity somewhere in an index of social development can actually make the task harder by diverting attention from their unique achievements.

Yet that does not mean that an index of social development is a waste of time; just that it was the wrong tool for that specific question. Asking why the West rules is a different
kind
of question, a grand comparative one that requires us to range across thousands of years of history, look at millions of square miles of territory, and bring together billions of people. For this task an index of social development is exactly the tool we need. The disagreement between long-term lock-in and short-term accident theories is, after all, about the overall shape of social development in East and West across the ten or so millennia that “East” and “West” have been meaningful concepts. Instead of concentrating on this and directly confronting each other’s arguments, long-termers and short-termers tend to look at different parts of the story, use different bodies of evidence, and define their terms in different ways. Following the law-and-order crowd’s lead and reducing the ocean of facts to simple numerical scores has drawbacks but it also has the one great merit of forcing everyone to confront the same evidence—with surprising results.

WHAT TO MEASURE?

The first step is to figure out exactly what we need to measure. We could do worse than listen to Lord Robert Jocelyn, who fought in the Opium War that made Western rule clear to all. On a sweltering Sunday afternoon in July 1840 he watched as British ships approached Tinghai, where a fort blocked their approach to the Yangzi River mouth. “
The ships
opened their broadsides upon the town,” Jocelyn wrote, “and the crashing of timber, falling houses, and groans of men resounded from the shore. The firing lasted from our side for nine minutes … We landed on a deserted beach, a few dead bodies, bows and arrows, broken spears and guns remaining the sole occupants of the field.”

The immediate cause of Western rule is right here: by 1840 European ships and guns could brush aside anything an Eastern power could field. But there was, of course, more to the rise of Western rule than military power alone. Armine Mountain, another officer with the British fleet in 1840, likened the Chinese force at Tinghai to something out of the pages of medieval chronicles: it looked “
as if the subjects
of [those] old prints had assumed life and substance and colour,” he mused, “and were moving and acting before me unconscious of the march of the world through centuries, and of all modern usage, invention, or improvement.”

Mountain grasped that blowing up ships and forts was merely the proximate cause of Western dominance, the last link in a long chain of advantages. A deeper cause was that British factories could turn out explosive shells, well-bored cannon, and oceangoing warships, and British governments could raise, fund, and direct expeditions operating halfway round the world; and the ultimate reason that the British swept into Tinghai that afternoon was their success at extracting energy from the natural environment and using it to achieve their goals. It all came down to the fact that Westerners had not only scrambled further up the Great Chain of Energy than anyone else but also scrambled so high that—unlike any earlier societies in history—they could project their power across the entire world.

This process of scrambling up the Great Chain of Energy is the foundation of what, following the tradition of evolutionary anthropologists
since Naroll in the 1950s, I will call social development—basically, a group’s ability to master its physical and intellectual environment to get things done.
*
Putting it more formally, social development is the bundle of technological, subsistence, organizational, and cultural accomplishments through which people feed, clothe, house, and reproduce themselves, explain the world around them, resolve disputes within their communities, extend their power at the expense of other communities, and defend themselves against others’ attempts to extend power. Social development, we might say, measures a community’s ability to get things done, which, in principle, can be compared across time and space.

Before we go any further with this line of argument, there is one point I need to make in the strongest possible terms: measuring and comparing social development is not a method for passing moral judgment on different communities. For example, twenty-first-century Japan is a land of air-conditioning, computerized factories, and bustling cities. It has cars and planes, libraries and museums, high-tech healthcare and a literate population. The contemporary Japanese have mastered their physical and intellectual environment far more thoroughly than their ancestors a thousand years ago, who had none of these things. It therefore makes sense to say that modern Japan is more developed than medieval Japan. Yet this implies nothing about whether the people of modern Japan are smarter, worthier, or luckier (let alone happier) than the Japanese of the Middle Ages. Nor does it imply anything about the moral, environmental, or other costs of social development. Social development is a neutral analytical category. Measuring it is one thing; praising or blaming it is another altogether.

I will argue later in this chapter that measuring social development shows us what we need to explain if we are to answer the why-the-West-rules question; in fact, I will propose that unless we come up with a way to measure social development we will never be able to answer this question. First, though, we need establish some principles to guide our index-making.

I can think of nowhere better to start than with Albert Einstein, the most respected scientist of modern times. Einstein is supposed to have
said that “
in science
, things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”: that is, scientists should boil their ideas down to the core point that can be checked against reality, figure out the simplest possible way to perform the check, then do just that—nothing more, but nothing less either.

Einstein’s own theory of relativity provides a famous example. Relativity implies that gravity bends light, meaning—if the theory is right—that every time the sun passes between Earth and another star, the sun’s gravity will bend the light coming from that star, making the star appear to shift position slightly. That provides an easy test of the theory—except for the fact that the sun is so bright that we cannot see stars near it. But in 1919 the British astronomer Arthur Eddington came up with a clever solution, very much in the spirit of Einstein’s aphorism: by looking at the stars near the sun during a solar eclipse, Eddington realized, he could measure whether they had shifted by the amount Einstein predicted.

Eddington set off to the South Pacific, made his observations, and pronounced Einstein correct. Acrimonious arguments ensued, because the difference between results that supported Einstein and results that disproved him was tiny, and Eddington was pushing the instruments available in 1919 to their very limits; yet despite the theory of relativity’s complexity,
*
astronomers could agree on what they needed to measure and how to measure it. It was then just a matter of whether Eddington had got the measurements right. Coming down from the sublime movement of the stars to the brutal bombardment of Tinghai, though, we immediately see that things are much messier when we are dealing with human societies. Just what should we be measuring to assign scores to social development?

If Einstein provides our theoretical lead, we might take a practical lead from the United Nations Human Development Index, not least because it has a lot in common with the kind of index that will help answer our question. The UN Development Programme devised the index to measure how well each nation is doing at giving its citizens
opportunities to realize their innate potential. The Programme’s economists started by asking themselves what human development really means, and boiled it down to three core traits: average life expectancy, average education (expressed by literacy levels and enrollments in school), and average income. They then devised a complicated weighting system to combine the traits to give each country a score between zero, meaning no human development at all (in which case everyone would be dead) and one—perfection, given the possibilities of the real world in the year the survey was done. (In case you’re wondering, in the most recent index available as I write, that for 2009,
Norway came first
, scoring .971, and Sierra Leone last, with .340.)