Why the West Rules--For Now (86 page)

These struggles were simultaneously fronts in the Soviet-American War of the West and wars of national liberation, but were in no sense a renewed War of the East. China and Japan, the East’s great powers, saw little to gain from expansion after 1945. China had troubles enough at home, while Japan—in an irony every bit as odd as West Germany’s successes in Europe—was busy achieving peacefully many of the goals it had sought violently in 1941. Brilliantly exploiting American support, Japan took advantage of the destruction of its old industries to reorganize, mechanize, and find profitable niches. By 1969 Japan’s economy overtook West Germany’s, and through the 1970s it steadily gained on the United States.

By then the United States was feeling the strain of the multifront Cold War. Despite dropping more bombs on Vietnam than it had on Germany, America suffered a humiliating defeat, dividing opinion at home and wounding its influence abroad. Soviet proxies started winning wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and even America’s successes turned to ashes. Eastern clients that the United States had so assiduously built up were now doing so well that they were invading American markets, while the European allies it defended at such expense now talked of disarmament and going nonaligned. By making Israel a client, Washington drove Arab governments toward the Soviets; and when Israel repulsed Arab invasions in 1973, Arab oil embargoes and price hikes set loose the new monster of stagflation—simultaneous stagnation and inflation.

When I was a teenager in 1970s Britain, my friends and I talked casually of the coming American collapse as we sat around wearing American jeans, watching American films, and playing American guitars. So far as I remember, none of us ever saw a contradiction in this, and I’m pretty certain that it never crossed our minds that far from witnessing the end of the American Empire, we were actually doing our bit to win the War of the West for Washington. The decisive front, it would soon emerge, was not in Vietnam or Angola. It was in the shopping malls.

THE AGE OF EVERYTHING

“
Let’s be frank
about it,” Britain’s prime minister told voters in 1957. “Most of our people have never had it so good.” The British might have lost an empire and failed to find a role, but, like increasing numbers of people around the world, they at least had lots of things. By the 1960s luxuries that had not even existed a century before—radios, televisions, record players, cars, refrigerators, telephones, electric lights (and, what I remember best, the plastic toys)—were everyday items in the Western core (
Figure 10.9
).

It struck some as an age of vulgarity, a world, one poet put it, where

…
residents from raw estates
, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires—
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
*
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers—
A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come.

Figure 10.9. Never had it so good: the author and his toys, Christmas Day, 1964

Suburbs and satellite cities unfolded around every exit ramp and bypass, from America’s Levittown to Britain’s Telford, offending the aesthetes with their boxiness and monotony; but they gave the people what we wanted—a little space, indoor plumbing, and garages for our shiny Fords.

The twentieth century was the age of everything, of material abundance beyond the dreams of avarice. Cheap coal and oil generated electricity for all, turning on engines and lighting up houses at the flick of a switch. More than two thousand years earlier Aristotle had observed that slaves would always be with us, unless people had
automata
—self-moving machines—to do the work for them. Now his fantasy came true, electricity giving even the humblest among us the equivalent of dozens of slaves to fulfill our every demand for entertainment, warmth, and—particularly—food.

This energy revolution turned the sixteenth century’s fairy tales of endless feasts into reality. Between 1500 and 1900 wheat yields had roughly doubled in the Western core, thanks to better-organized farming and more draft animals and manure, but by the 1890s farmers were reaching the limits of ingenuity. Adding more animals could drive up productivity only so far, and by 1900 a quarter of North America’s farmland was being used to feed horses. Then gasoline came to the rescue. America’s first tractor factory opened in 1905, and by 1927 tractors provided as much energy on American farms as horses.

There was no gain without pain. Half of all Americans worked the soil in 1875, but a century later only one in fifty did. Machines ate men, tractoring whole communities off land that could be worked more profitably by a few hired hands and diesel engines. “
Snub-nosed monsters
,” the novelist John Steinbeck called the tractors, “raising dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines.”

Steinbeck anticipated the wretched of the earth rising in revolution, but when the tidal waves of dispossession that swept surplus Okies westward and black cotton pickers northward receded, most migrants found city jobs that paid better than the rural grind they had fled. The agrobusinessmen who had displaced them now sold them cheap food and invested the profits in chemical fertilizers and herbicides, electric motors to pump water to dry fields, and eventually genetically modified crops that could withstand almost anything. By 2000 each acre of American farmland absorbed eighty times more energy than it had in 1900 and yielded four times as much food.

Where America went today, the world followed tomorrow. A “green revolution” quadrupled global food production between 1950 and 2000. Prices fell steadily, meat replaced grains in diets, and—except when disaster, stupidity, and brutality intervened—starvation was steadily banished.

Like all organisms, humans converted extra energy into offspring, and the world’s population almost quadrupled along with the food supply in the twentieth century. But in other ways humans departed from the norm. Instead of turning their entire energy windfall into new bodies, they hoarded some of it in their own bodies. On average, adults were 50 percent bigger by 2000 than they had been in 1900. They grew four inches taller, filled out, and had more energy for work. Growing more robust organs and carrying more fat (in rich countries, too much fat), these bigger humans could resist more disease and trauma. Modern Americans and western Europeans typically live thirty years longer than their great-grandparents and enjoy an extra decade or two before their eyes, ears, and other organs weaken and arthritis freezes their joints. In much of the rest of the world, including China and Japan, life spans have lengthened by closer to forty years. Even in Africa, plagued by AIDS and malaria, average life expectancy was twenty years higher in 2009 than it was around 1900.

The human body has changed more in the last hundred years than in the previous fifty thousand, and—particularly in rich countries—people have learned to intervene to correct the failings that remained. Europeans had been using eyeglasses since 1300, but these now spread all over the globe. Doctors invented new techniques to salvage hearing, keep hearts pumping, reattach limbs, and even intervene in cells.
Public health programs eradicated smallpox and measles as mass killers; garbage collection and clean drinking water did still more.

Figure 10.10
, showing what kinds of chronic conditions afflicted veterans from the United States Army, gives a sense of just how much health has improved. Veterans may not be the ideal subset of humanity to study, given the violence of their line of work, but thanks to obsessive military record-keeping they are the best subset we have, and the improvements are stunning.

These veterans were mostly men, but women’s lives changed even more. Throughout history, women had been baby-making machines. Because half of their babies died in their first year (most, in fact, in their first week) and only half of those who survived childhood made it to their fortieth birthdays, maintaining a stable population (rearing two offspring to adulthood to replace a mother and her mate) required the average woman to give birth about five times, spending most of her adult life pregnant and/or nursing. But in the twentieth century this high-mortality, low-technology world collapsed.

Figure 10.10. Be all that you can be: the health of United States Army veterans, 1910–1988

Even before 1900 bigger, better-fed, stronger women were bearing sturdier babies, feeding them more, and keeping them cleaner. Fewer of their young died, so population grew explosively—until women brought their fertility under control. People had always had ways to avoid conception (legend has it that the eighteenth-century lover Casanova made his own condoms by cutting lemons in half) and birth rates were falling in the richest countries by 1900, but in the twentieth century American technology rose to this challenge too. In 1920 came latex condoms; in 1960 the oral contraceptive; and in rich countries the birth rate dropped below the replacement level of two per couple.

As healthier children and the pill released women from lifetimes of breeding, cheap electrical heating coils for irons and toasters and little motors for washing machines and vacuum cleaners released them from household drudgery too. Pressing a button took care of tasks that previously called for hours of tedious labor. A woman’s work was still never done, but by 1960 she could jump in the car (almost every American family had one), drive to the supermarket (where two-thirds of the country’s food was sold), store her purchases in the refrigerator (98 percent of houses had them), and put the laundry on before the two or three kids got back from school and settled in front of the TV.

The changes freed women for work outside the home in an economy rapidly shifting from manufacturing toward services, shedding blue-collar labor but crying out for pink-collar workers. In the richest countries the proportion of women in paid jobs and higher education rose steadily after 1960, and, like every era before it, this age got the thought it needed. Books such as
The Feminine Mystique
and
Sexual Politics
urged middle-class American women to seek fulfillment outside their traditional roles. In 1968 a hundred protestors broke up the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. By the 1990s men were actually sharing housework and parenting (even if their wives and girlfriends generally still did more).

As early as 1951 an American sociologist named David Riesman saw where things were heading. In a story called “The Nylon Wars,” simultaneously celebrating and mocking American consumerism, he imagined strategists advising the president that “
if allowed to
sample the riches of America, the Russian people would not long tolerate masters
who gave them tanks and spies instead of vacuum cleaners.” The United States drops stockings and cigarettes on the Soviet Union and communism at once collapses.

Reality was almost as strange as fiction. In 1958 the Soviet Union and United States, each confident of overawing the other with its industrial strength, agreed to hold manufacturing expositions in each other’s country. To the first, in New York, the Soviets sent tractors, trucks, and mock-ups of rockets to convince the capitalists that resistance was futile. In 1959 the United States struck back brilliantly, dispatching Richard Nixon (then vice president) to Moscow to superintend a fifty-thousand-square-foot exhibit of American home appliances, including an exact copy of a new tract house from Long Island. While puzzled Muscovites looked on, Nixon and Khrushchev squared off across a Westinghouse washing machine.