Why the West Rules--For Now (90 page)

The new states had to interact with their neighbors in new ways, which created even more disruptive paradoxes of development along their frontiers. They had to learn to manage these; when they got things wrong—as perhaps happened at Uruk in Mesopotamia around 3100
BCE
and Taosi in China around 2300, and definitely happened in the West after 2200 and 1750
BCE
—they collapsed in chaos. Each collapse coincided with a period of climate change, which, I suggested, added a fifth horseman of the apocalypse to the four man-made ones.

Rising social development produced worse disruptions and collapses, but it also produced more resilience and greater powers of recovery. After 1550
BCE
Western cities and states bounced back from the disasters and expanded around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. A second great geographical contrast between East and West then came into play; the East had nothing like this extraordinary inland sea, providing cheap and easy transport. But like so much else, the Mediterranean was a paradox, offering both opportunities and challenges. When social development reached about twenty-four points the forces of disruption on this wide-open frontier spun out of control, and around 1200
BCE
the horsemen of the apocalypse rode (or, to mix the metaphor, sailed) again. The Western core collapsed even more dramatically than before, ushering in a centuries-long dark age.

Thanks to the paradox of development, the lead in social development that geography had given the West at the end of the Ice Age was long-term but not locked in. Collapses are unpredictable things. Sometimes a few different decisions or a little good luck can postpone, reduce, or even head off disaster; our choices can make a difference. To break through the twenty-four-point ceiling, states had to reorganize themselves and develop a whole new way of thinking about the world, creating what we might call first-wave Axial thought. Because Westerners
failed to reorganize and rethink around 1200
BCE,
their lead over the East in social development narrowed; and because Westerners and Easterners both succeeded in making the necessary adjustments as development rose in the first millennium
BCE,
they remained neck and neck for a thousand years.

Westerners and Easterners alike created more centralized states and then full-blown empires, and after 200
BCE
reached a scale that began changing the meanings of geography again. In the West the Roman Empire brought the unruly Mediterranean under control and social development spiked up past forty points. By the first century
CE
it was pressing against the hard ceiling. At the same time, though, the rise of the Roman and Han empires also changed the meaning of the vast spaces that separated East and West. With so much wealth at each end of Eurasia, traders and steppe nomads found new reasons to move around, tentatively linking the cores and beginning the First Old World Exchange. Contacts pushed Eastern and Western development higher still, but they also set off unprecedented disruptions. For the first time, the five horsemen of the apocalypse linked the cores, exchanging microbes as well as goods and ideas. Instead of breaking through the hard ceiling, the Roman and Han empires both came apart after 150
CE.

Both East and West slid into new dark ages in which second-wave Axial thought (Christianity, Islam, and new forms of Buddhism) displaced older first-wave ideas, but in other ways their collapses were quite different. In the West, Germanic invaders broke up the less-developed part of the Roman Empire around the western Mediterranean, and the core retreated into its older and more developed heartland around the eastern Mediterranean. In the East, Inner Asian invaders broke up the older and more developed part of the former Han Empire around the Yellow River, and the core retreated into the less-developed lands beyond the Yangzi River.

This geographical contrast made a world of difference. By 450
CE
a new frontier of rice agriculture had begun booming around the Yangzi; by 600 China had been reunited; and over the following century the Grand Canal, linking the Yangzi and Yellow rivers, gave China a system of internal waterways that functioned rather like the Mediterranean had done for ancient Rome. In the West, though, where the Arab
invaders were strong enough to break up the old Mediterranean core but not strong enough to remake it, social development kept falling until 700.

Around 541 Eastern development rose above Western (proving beyond all doubt that Western rule was never locked in) and by 1100 was pressing against the hard ceiling. As economic growth outran resources, ironworkers tapped into fossil fuels, inventors created new machines, and Song dynasty intellectuals plunged into a veritable Chinese renaissance. But like Rome a thousand years before, the Song Chinese could not break the hard ceiling.

To some extent, events in the early second millennium
BCE
paralleled those in the first, but with East and West reversed. Rising development set off a Second Old World Exchange and freed the five horsemen again. Social development fell in both cores, but fell longest and furthest in the East. In the West, the more developed Muslim heartland east of the Mediterranean suffered most, and by 1400 a new core was forming and having its own renaissance in western Europe.

These fragmented, previously peripheral European lands now discovered advantages in their own backwardness. Shipbuilding and gunnery, technologies western Europeans had learned from the East during the Second Old World Exchange, allowed them to turn the Atlantic Ocean into a highway, once again transforming the meanings of geography. Eager to tap into the wealth of the East, Western sailors fanned out and—to their surprise—bumped into the Americas.

Easterners
could
have discovered America in the fifteenth century (some people believe they did) but geography always made it more likely that Westerners would get there first. Easterners had far more to gain by sailing toward the riches of the Indian Ocean than into the empty Pacific and by pushing inland into the steppes, which had been the greatest threat to their security for nearly two thousand years.

In the seventeenth century the expansion of the cores changed the meanings of geography more dramatically than ever before. Centralized empires with muskets and cannons closed the Inner Asian steppe highway that linked East and West, ending nomadic migration and effectively killing one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. On the Atlantic, by contrast, the oceanic highway that western European merchants had opened fueled the rise of new kinds of markets and raised entirely new questions about how the natural world worked. By 1700 social
development was again pressing the hard ceiling, but this time, with the full complement of horsemen of the apocalypse unable to ride, disaster was held at bay long enough for western European entrepreneurs to respond to the incentives of the oceanic highway by unleashing the awesome powers of coal and steam.

Given enough time, Easterners would probably have made the same discoveries and had their own industrial revolution, but geography made it much easier for Westerners—which meant that because people (in large groups) are all much the same, Westerners had their industrial revolution first. It was geography that took Looty to Balmoral rather than Albert to Beijing.

NOT WHY THE WEST RULES

But what, you might well ask, about people? The pages of this book have been full of great men (and women), bungling idiots, the beliefs they propounded, and their unremitting conflicts; did none of these in the end matter?

Yes and no. We all have free will, and, as I have repeatedly stressed, our choices do change the world. It is just that most of our choices do not change the world very much. I could, for instance, decide right now to stop writing this book, quit my job, and become a hunter-gatherer. That would certainly make a difference. I would lose my home and, since I know rather little about hunting or gathering, would probably poison myself or starve. A few people around me would be strongly affected, and rather more people would be mildly affected. You, for instance, would have to find something else to read. But otherwise the world would go on. No decision I could conceivably make is going to change whether the West rules.

Of course, if millions of other Americans also decided to walk away from the nine-to-five and take up foraging, my odd individual decision would be transformed from a crazy personal aberration into part of a mass (but still odd) movement that really would make a difference. There are plenty of examples of such mass decisions. At the end of World War II, for instance, half a billion women decided to marry younger than their mothers had done and bear more children. Population soared. Then, thirty years later, a full billion of their own daughters
decided to do the opposite, and population growth slowed. Collectively, these choices changed the course of modern history.

They were not, however, just whims. Karl Marx cut to the chase a century and a half ago: “
Men [and women]
make their own history,” he insisted, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.” Twentieth-century women had such good reasons for deciding to have more (and then fewer) babies that they often felt they really had no choice in the matter at all—just as the people who decided to take up farming ten thousand years ago, or to move to cities five thousand years ago, or to get jobs in factories two hundred years ago, must often have felt that there was no real alternative.

There are strong pressures on all of us to make choices that conform to reality. We all know people who ignore these pressures and make eccentric decisions anyway. Often we admire these radicals, rebels, and romantics, but rarely do we follow their lead. Most of us know all too well that predictable conformists tend to fare better (by which I mean win more access to food, shelter, and mates) than Anna Kareninas. Evolution selects for what we call common sense.

That said, eccentric choices clearly can have extraordinary consequences. Take Muhammad, perhaps the extreme case. This rather undistinguished Arab merchant could have chosen to be sensible, blaming his encounter with the Archangel Gabriel around 610
CE
on a disorder of the stomach or any of a thousand plausible causes. But instead he chose to listen to his wife, who insisted that the visitation had been real. For years Muhammad looked likely to go the way of most prophets, into ridicule, contempt, and oblivion, but instead he united the Arabs. The caliphs who succeeded him destroyed Persia, shattered Byzantium, and split the West in two.

Everyone agrees that Muhammad was a great man. Few humans have had more impact on history. But even so, the transformation of the Western core in and after the seventh century cannot be ascribed solely to his idiosyncrasy. Arabs had been inventing new versions of monotheism and forming their own states in the desert for some time before Gabriel visited Muhammad. Byzantium and Persia were in desperate trouble well before Muslim war parties started crossing their borders, and the Mediterranean had been coming apart since the third century.

If Muhammad had made different choices, seventh-century Christians might only have had one another to fight, rather than the invading Muslims. Maybe without Muhammad, Western social development would have recovered faster after 750, and maybe it wouldn’t, but it would still have taken centuries to catch up with the East. The Western core would have stayed in the eastern Mediterranean whatever Muhammad did; the Turks would still have overrun it in the eleventh century and the Mongols in the thirteenth (and again around 1400); and the core would still have shifted westward toward Italy and then the Atlantic in and after the fifteenth century. If Muhammad had been more normal, the cross, not the crescent, might now inspire the faithful from Morocco to Malaysia—no small thing; but there is no reason to doubt that Europeans would still have conquered the Americas or that the West would now rule.

What is true of Muhammad is probably even truer of the other great men we have met. Assyria’s Tiglath-Pileser III and the Qin First Emperor both created terrible, centralized, high-end ancient empires; Europe’s Habsburgs and Japan’s Hideyoshi both failed to create great land empires in the sixteenth century; England’s Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the death of Mao in 1976 both put reformist cliques in power. Yet the most that any of these great men/bungling idiots did was to speed up or slow down processes that were already under way. None really wrestled history down a whole new path. Even Mao, perhaps the most megalomaniac of all, only managed to postpone China’s industrial takeoff, giving Deng Xiaoping the opportunity to be remembered as the great man who turned China around. If we could rerun the past like an experiment, leaving everything else the same but substituting bungling idiots for great men (and vice versa), things would have turned out much the same, even if they might have moved at a slightly different pace. Great men (and women) clearly like thinking that by force of will alone they are changing the world, but they are mistaken.

This applies outside politics as well as within. Matthew Boulton and James Watt, for instance, were certainly great men, the latter inventing and the former marketing machines that really did change the world. But they were not
unique
great men, any more than Alexander Graham Bell was unique when he filed a patent for his newly invented telephone on February 14, 1876—the same day that Elisha Gray filed a patent for
his
newly invented telephone. Nor were Boulton and Watt more unique than their acquaintance Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen in 1774, a year after a Swedish chemist had also discovered it. Or more unique than the four Europeans who separately discovered sunspots in 1611.

Historians often marvel at the tendency for inventions to come in multiples, the lightbulb going on in several people’s brains at almost exactly the same moment. Great ideas often seem to be less the result of brilliance than the logical outcome of having a set of thinkers who share the same questions and methods. So it was with European men of letters in the early seventeenth century; once someone invented the telescope (which nine different men claimed to have done) it would have been remarkable if multiple astronomers had
not
promptly discovered sunspots.