Each of the 12 ways Davies lists (in which academics have defined the West) addresses some cultural aspect of the European and American continent (e.g. Commander Menzies’ 1421 argues that in that year, sailors from Zheng He’s Treasure Fleets explored the coasts of America, Australia, the Atlantic, and Antarctica. Reviews in History is part of the School of Advanced Study. So, I suspect, Professor Duchesne decided to turn a review of my book into a vehicle for denouncing relativism, multiculturalism, and the enemies of the West. If I might be permitted a little speculation, my guess is that the root problem is that Professor Duchesne is not very interested in what my book actually says. It turned out that I didn’t use either of these words very often in the book (perhaps a telling detail about my view of history!). Early in the 7th century, Archilochus, for instance, broke with the dominance of the hexameter in Homer and Hesiod, and also with the traditional demands of heroic honour, admitting (in a still very warlike culture) that he had thrown away his shield in a flight – ‘I can get another just as good’. It follows that the reasons the west rules for now are to be found entirely (his word) in brute, material forces. He argues that it is physical geography, rather than culture, religion, politics, genetics or great men, that explains Western domination of the globe – for now. Diverse cultures are equally the same in achievements. I spend most of the book tracing the back-and-forth interaction between social development and geography across the 15,000 years since the end of the ice age, showing how this produced the world we live in, and where it may take us in the 21st century. (6) This line of reasoning is less than inadequate. Europe proper thus becomes significant only after 1775. “One of the reasons people care about why the West rules,” Morris explains, “is that they want to know whether, how long and in what ways this will … Why The West Rules – For Now (2010) is a treatise on Western rule. Oh dear, Landes may well have been writing an editorial for Walter Lacqueur's The Last Days of Europe (2007), which is certainly about ‘what happens when a falling native birthrate collides with uncontrolled immigration’. As Roger Scruton has pointed out recently, ‘anybody who publicly disagreed with that [multicultural] claim invited the attentions of the thought police, always ready with the charge of racism, and never so scrupulous as to think it a sin to destroy the career of someone, provided he was white, indigenous, and male.’(5). Why, then, this persistent need to challenge ‘racist theories of western rule’? In a world of nuclear warfare and record levels of extinction, can human development work as an agent for extinction? They are inhabited by peoples of predominantly Indo-European culture and related kin. Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! And neither do I. He cites approvingly Norman Davies’s alleged argument that the term ‘Western civilization’ is a mere ideological construct which has been defined ‘by its advocates in almost any way that they think fit’ (p. 41). By the 18th century, Europe had moved well beyond the study of ancient texts, examining the origins of language itself (Dugald Steward wrote in 1761 his Dissertation on the Origin of Language), the etymology of the Bible from a ’naturalistic‘ standpoint, the bio-social evolution of the human species, and the ethnographic study of language groups. One outcome could be the dawn of a new “dark age.” However, unlike other dark ages, which are eventually followed by a turnaround, this dark age could take a more alarming path. Landes muses over the book's contents: ‘Will Europe undergo a major change? On the one hand, geography determines how societies develop; on the other, the ways that societies develop determine what geography means. “The Industrial Revolution changed our bodies more in one hundred years than ever before in history in the change of diet that it allowed,” says Morris. Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why the West Rules for Now spans fifty thousand years of history and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. The book compares East and West across the last 15,000 years, arguing that physical geography rather than culture, religion, politics, genetics, or great men explains Western domination of the globe. He claims in the introduction to be the only historian to have put together a grand narrative of history unifying long-term and short term theories of development. So much for my thesis. The vision of this movement was conservative, recovery of the ‘original’ or ‘pure’ Confucian norms and language. (28) England played the leading role in this genre, cultivating a new sensibility for authenticity, personal experience and feeling, a spirit of non-conformity towards rigid and ‘insincere’ conventions, a fascination with the inner depths of the affective self. “The distribution of natural resources, the shape of the continents, the placing of oceans, mountains, rivers, plains, etc. The investigations of one of the foremost experts in this area, Cynthia Brokaw, point to a book publishing and reading culture spreading throughout south China from the late 17th century through the early 20th century. Designing the index forced me to define exactly what I was measuring and how I measured it, which I explain in an 80,000-word technical appendix called Social Development that can be downloaded as a pdf from my web site http://www.ianmorris.org. This is one of the arguments I make in my recent book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (2011). Sociology enters the equation, according to Morris, to explain why some innovations are successful and others aren’t. This emphasis on a common cultural humanity is consistent with the officially established academic ideology of ‘diversity’ (35) which is intended precisely to do away with the notion that Western nations have a distinctive, particular identity. G. E. R Lloyd describes this agonistic atmosphere well: Newspapers, a major medium in the creation of a mass readership, were invented in Europe in the seventeenth century. (9) It was this agonistic temperament which found expression in the Sophistic-Socratic ethos of dialogic argument – in the pursuit of knowledge by comparing and criticizing individual speeches, evaluating contradictory claims, collecting out evidence, cross-questioning and arguing by means of open persuasion and refutation. Morris writes: ‘If we think about culture in a broader, more anthropological sense, the West's history again seems to be one example of a larger pattern rather than a unique story.’ The key word here is ‘anthropological’. The novel, in these respects, was invented in Europe, particularly after 1750. While Thales, Anaximander, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Leucippus, and Democritus each had a common interest in the hidden causes of things, each came up with their own radically new explanations. The earliest, biggest, and most richly endowed of these core areas was in Southwest Asia. (22), Morris cavalierly remarks that ‘printing [in late Imperial China] had created an even broader readership for new ideas than in western Europe’ in the 1700s (p. 473). Their names are recognized in the annals of mathematics: Scipio del Ferro, Nicolo Tartaglia, Johann Muller Regiomonanus, Giralamo Cardano – not to forget Luca Pacioli (1446/7–1517), the ‘father’ of the first known accounting textbook, Everything about Arithmetic, Geometry, and proportions.(1). Influenced by the New Age futurist Ray Kurzweil’s idea of ‘singularity’, Morris proposes that human life will be transformed by technology at an expanding speed. Each artist and intellectual was driven by a desire for originality and fame. 377-82, 477), seemed to have played ‘extraordinary’ historical roles. ‘Filial devotion, loyalty to the monarch, and wifely fidelity’ – these were their mottoes combined with ‘punctilious observance of hierarchical relationship, and the exaltation of the ritual authority of the Classics.’(16). To Morris, like Diamond, the West is simply a geographical category; the ultimate origins of the West’s primacy are to be found in geographical factors. I want to spend most of this chapter addressing some of the most obvious objections to it, but before turning to that it might be useful to recap the main details of the story that filled Chapters 2–10. Morris poses his own theory of “paradoxical development”: What happens if human development accelerates to the point that all previous predictions are rendered useless? The search for the truth was a free-for-all, each philosopher competing for intellectual prestige, in a polemical tone which sought to discredit the theories of others and to promote one's own. As if this were not enough, Morris adds that an intellectual movement in 17th to 18th century China known as Kaozheng, ‘paralleled western Europe's scientific revolution in every way – except one: it did not develop a mechanical model of nature’ (p. 473). I hope that the evidence presented in Chapters 2–10 has borne this out’ (p. 559). If I were to reply in this much detail to each one of Professor Duchesne’s criticisms this response would end up being even longer than his review, but I would like to touch on a couple more examples. Morris asks: ‘Why did British boats shoot their way up the Yangtze in 1842, rather than Chinese ones up the Thames?’ (p. 11) – which is basically the same question the local politician in the island of New Guinea, Yali, asked Diamond: ‘Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?’(2). ‘It is hard not to see’, he reflects a few sentences down, ‘a certain kinship between sprawling eighteenth-century novels of manners such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber’ (p. 503). (15) The so-called ‘evidential’ (k'ao-cheng) movement was a response to the threatened position of the Chinese gentry, an effort to restore an elite culture which had been considerably weakened by Ming commercialization. Now we see what a rather innocent call for unbiased ‘geographical labels, not value judgements’ (p. 41) essentially amount to: Welcome to Eurabia! They were dedicated to philological precision in their efforts to achieve or recover the pure classical traditions. Ten thousand copies were printed of the third edition (1787-97) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.(26). Why the West Rules, despite its title, is scarcely about Europe. Towards the end, at the same time as he is hyping up fears about the ‘shocking scale of environmental degradation’, Morris becomes more dismissive, even contemptuous, of ordinary people, regularly calling them ‘bungling idiots’ (pp. Clarissa was just one of such novels; consider Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison by the same author; Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1765), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Moll Flanders (1722), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1764), Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67) and A Sentimental Journey (1767), and more popularly Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline (1788), Ethelinde (1789), Celestina (1791), Desmond (1792), The Old Manor House (1793), The Wandering of Warwick (1794), The Banished Man (1794), Montalbert (1795), Marchmont (1796), The Young Philosopher (1798). I’m not sure how people calculate such things, but it’s commonly said that Zhu is the second most influential thinker in Chinese history, behind Confucius but ahead of Mao. Morris is not thinking of economic indices merely when he writes that ‘as late as 1750, the similarities between the Eastern and Western cores were still striking’ (p. 503). ‘Socrates was part of a huge pattern’, Morris teaches us, ‘not a unique giant who sent the West down a superior path’. Through the dissemination of these books, publisher-booksellers were acting as agents of cultural integration, disseminating the core ancient texts of Chinese culture to poor county seats, interior market towns, and isolated peasant villages. His splendid book is Why the West Rules -- For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. On p. 410, after explaining why pretty much no professional historians believe the arguments in 1421, I add that ‘to my mind Menzies’s 1421 is on a par with von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?’ (p. 410). The best known example of this textual analysis was his determination that the Donation of Constantine, a testament in which Constantine bequeathed his power and wealth to the Church, was actually a forgery. Whether an idea spreads and sparks development, or fails and sends a society into collapse is a sociological concept. This, again, strikes me as odd. In a chapter entitled ‘The Western age,’ which starts on page 503, Morris finally focuses on Europe – mind you, through the prism of Marx’s condemnation of England’s capitalism, and only until page 515, as he returns to the East, the ‘defeat, humiliation, and exploitation’ it suffered ‘at Western hands’ (p. 520). "Why the West Rules - for Now" is a book on the entire history of human civilization. Her research simply traces the networks of itinerant book-selling and bookstores through south-Western China; the spread of primers and textbooks, ritual handbooks, medical manuals, fortune-telling guides, poetry collections, and novels from the past. I contrast this explicitly with 19th-century China, where none of these things happened. In contrast, with St Anselm, Aquinas and others, Christianity went on to conceptualize the movement of material bodies in terms of natural laws. But comparison is only the first step. The actual history of Europe’s industrialization hardly gets more attention than ‘what-ifs’ questions about China’s non-industrialization. The medieval invention of eye glasses and mechanical clocks were part and parcel of what Norman Cantor has called ‘a starting point for new directions and dimensions in all facets of civilized life’. I wonder what the reaction of an audience would be if someone had stated that there is now confirmation that the Black Death was brought on by ‘disgusting Chinese germs’.Westerners are so used to this ethno-masochistic way of speaking (Morris was born in England), that the audience let it passed with a compliant, if unsatisfied, laughter.Back to (31). 565, 568, two times in 578, 616). In his words, ‘history is the same old same old’ (p. 560). And anyone who really wants to explain why the West rules has to account for both of these facts. However, times are changing. Other than his emphasis on Confucian family values, we learn from Morris that Zhu’s ‘extraordinary’ pupil and ‘new Renaissance man’, Wang, ‘spent a week contemplating a bamboo stalk, as Zhu had recommended, instead of providing insight it made him ill’ (p. 426). During the 1620s about 6,000 printed titles had appeared in England, increasing to almost 21,000 during the 1710s, and to about 56,000 by the 1790s. So far as I know, Professor Duchesne is the only reader to have reached such a conclusion. There was a time when Europe could absorb any and all newcomers. My first review of Why the West Rules – For Now by Ian Morris touched on some good things about the book, but in this one I want to complain about some of the unnecessary annoyances. What was Zhu's achievement? Ian Morris Why the West Rules for Now Part 01. By the 1770s, the total annual sale of newspapers (25), when there were nine dailies in London and 50 provincial weeklies, was over 12 million. His grand narrative also pays particular attention to the patterns of human history and the way actual political regimes developed and populations moved in response to environmental challenges. But the same Manchu (or Qing) advocates of these projects conducted the well-known ‘literary inquisitions’ of 1774-89, against books which reflected badly on the alien Manchu rule. Despite his review’s length, rather little of it takes on my book’s central thesis, which is why I spent so long summarizing my argument at the beginning of this response. The roots of the novel can be traced back to i) Spanish picaresque tales (1500s) with their strings of episodic adventures held together by the personality of the central figure; ii) Elizabethan prose fiction and the translation of ancient Greek romances into the vernacular, iii) French heroic romance with its huge baroque narratives about thinly veiled contemporaries (mid-17th century) who always acted nobly and spoke high-flown sentiments. And the reason for that was that unlike Europeans, whose involvement with burgeoning empires of trade around the Atlantic kept thrusting new questions about nature onto them, Chinese thinkers went on refining their answers to old questions. ‘By 1800, a staggering 250 periodicals had been launched in England’, including magazines written by and for women, dealing with love, marriage and the family, education, etiquette and health. None – except one: a brief statement on the travels of a civil servant named Gu Yanwu, who filled some notebooks with detailed descriptions of farming, mining, and banking; and these writings, apparently, heralded a new empirically based vision of nature. Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why the West Rules―for Now spans fifty thousand years of history and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. (29) It is that these scholars were always preoccupied with the Classics, commenting on them, debating, challenging, or re-evaluating past interpretations. And taking a whole paragraph to imply that David Landes – who very generously took the time, despite a serious illness, to comment on the manuscript of a book that disagrees with his own work at many points – blurbed this book without reading it is, I would say, even odder. There were no Possessors of the Way in aristocratic Greece; no Chinese Sages decorously deferential to their superiors and expecting appropriate deference from their inferiors. Interested in reviewing for us? As with the fall of the Roman Empire and the decline of Chinese imperial power a thousand years ago, powerful nations often reach a “sticking point” where further expansion becomes impossible and a once-strong system begins to implode. Morris’s basic theory of historical global dominance looks to biology, sociology and geography to explain why power has centered on certain regions over time. by Morris (2010) 1. It actually starts immediately after the latest Ice Age and tries to understand why Western civilization has been ahead during the entire history except for 1300 years (between the 5th and 18th centuries). In the field of painting alone there was Botticelli, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Giotto, Ghiberti, Michelangelo, Raphael, Vasari, and Titian. Davies writes, in his massive Europe, A History, that ‘Western civilization is essentially an amalgam of intellectual constructs which were designed to further the interests of authors’ (10) (as Morris points out), but he does so only in reference to the divide between Western and Eastern Europe, not to the Near East or any other area of the world. The Chinese could have even chosen to develop a mechanical vision of the universe but they were ‘still as excited about ancient inscriptions [the texts of the Han dynasty] as about mining or agriculture.’ They were not as mechanical as the Europeans who, by contrast, were not the wilful choosers of their Newtonian orientation, but were led to it as a result of their transoceanic explorations; ‘the new frontier across the oceans needed precise measurements of standardized space, money, and time ... [It] would have been obtuse not to wonder whether nature itself was a mechanism’ (p. 476). This, in turn, drives human social development. The best explanation, I conclude, is that geography gave Western development a head start at the end of the ice age, but that as social development rose (and sometimes fell), geography kept changing its meanings. Many other tales were written, satirical, edifying, criminal, and sentimental stories, but today they are generally not seen as having the status of great books of the world. Meanwhile, ‘the birth of the West’ in the Tigris, Euphrates and Jordan valleys, gets his loyal attention, in a long chapter which runs from page 81 to 134. “But five hundred years ago it became instead a geographical plus, because social development had risen so high that ships could cross the oceans. There were some consumer-related techniques that Europeans sought to learn from the Chinese, such as the secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as tea cultivation. This judgment surprised me on several counts, but most of all because one of my main arguments is that Gibbon was right: the Roman Empire of the first two centuries CE was the richest, most sophisticated, and frankly most important society in the whole of preindustrial history, and that its fall was an ‘awful revolution … which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth’. For Christianity the authority of the earthly rulers is limited by God's law, which both grants rights to every person and holds that God is conterminous with reason, whereas in Islam the idea that Allah has limits to his own powers, by making an everlasting covenant with human beings, is unthinkable, in that Allah is viewed as absolutely transcendent. Afterwards, the Eastern world takes the lead. This is why I proposed an index of social development in Why the West Rules – For Now. Astonishing indeed! The American Declaration of Rights with its peculiar imposition of strict limits on the ends of the federal government, and its protection of individual liberty, is akin to the ideals of the Communist Party in China. Across the last ten millennia BCE its population boomed, and complex societies, eventually organized around cities and states, spread from the original Southwest Asian core across Europe and toward central Asia. (19) May I offer a rough, and rather incomplete, catalogue of these immense achievements: i) the investiture controversy and the emergence of a distinctive legal system of canon law which led to the rise of whole new systems of law – urban law, merchant law, royal law, natural law, divine law – that served to create a civil society composed of kingdoms, baronies, bishoprics, urban communes, guilds, and universities, each empowered to enact its own ordinances as well as to adjudicate internal disputes (20); ii) the institutionalization of a university curriculum ‘overwhelmingly oriented toward analytical subjects: logic, science, mathematics, and natural philosophy,’ which gave birth to a unique synthesis of reason and revelation, and made Catholicism the most scholarly religion of the world (21); iii) an ‘epochal shift from qualitative to quantitative perception’ which led to a new conception of time as a succession of quanta, and a new polyphonic music where sounds could be seen as a phenomena moving through time, written on a paper using a codified and standardized system of notation for all sounds and rests. Morris pays more attention than Diamond to the way technological and social changes in turn changed the way geography came to determine the advantages and disadvantages of geographical location. Again following what I think is commonsense, I call all these societies ‘Eastern’. ‘The patterns established in the past suggest that the shift of wealth and power from West to East is inexorable’ (p. 614). There is a striking similarity between the opening paragraphs of Why the West Rules and Jared Diamond’s commonly read Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). Drawing on Gavin Menzies’s discredited book, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (2002), Morris carefully speculates over the possibilities of the ‘even more astonishing voyages that took Zheng's subordinates to the Atlantic Ocean, the North Pole, Antarctica, Australia and Italy’ (p. 410). ‘Humans are all much the same wherever we find them; and, because of this, human societies have all followed much the same sequence of cultural development. Anthropology studies the repeatable behaviours of large numbers of faceless people, and, as such, it is a discipline which has been effectively set against the elite culture of the West. Then again, this emphasis is evident in Diamond’s effort to account for why the Near East, for example, was unable to sustain its initial advantages in terms of its eventual ecological degradation and the new opportunities which arose with the coming of iron in the exploitation of the colder lands of Europe. Morris reasons that all the societies which descended from the Fertile Crescent, including Rome, Byzantium, the Islamic world, and the Americas, should be deemed ‘Western’. My main point, I think, would have been that any explanation of why the West rules has to be comparative. This, I concede again, is just speculation, but to my mind it would explain why Professor Duchesne begins his review not with a summary of my arguments but with complaints about what other people think about my book, why he consistently concludes that my words mean the opposite of what they say, and why he descends so often to ad hominem attacks. (18), Every epoch in European history has seen major innovations and original giants. Starting with the earliest development of humankind, it rules out racist genetic beliefs and theories of cultural superiority. 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