Why the West is better than the rest

Civilization:  The West and the Rest
By Niall Ferguson
(Allen Lane, 2011, 402 pages)

In 2009, I established my Foundations of Western Civilisation program to defend and extend Australians' understanding of the influential, historical role of the West in establishing many of the liberties enjoyed by members of our society.  In the preface to the UK edition of his new book, Civilization:  The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson neatly encapsulates why there was such a gap in the market for me to fill:

For roughly thirty years, young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge.  They have been taught isolated ''modules'', not narratives, much less chronologies.  They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast.  They have been encouraged to feel empathy with imagined Roman centurions or Holocaust victims, not to write essays about why and how their predicaments arose.

Already this year, the value of the program has been highlighted by the extraordinary response of education academic Tony Taylor to my critique of the proposed national curriculum, particularly the history component that Taylor helped write.  Taylor claimed that there was no reason to include the English Civil War in the curriculum, as it was ''arguably just a series of confused and confusing localised squabbles that may have a special significance for UK history, but not for anybody else (unless they like dressing up in period costume)''.  As several writers argued in response to Taylor, few events in world history have had as much lasting significance as the English Civil War.  Much modern debate about the nature of the state and its power can be traced back to 17th century England, where, as Ferguson points out, the two great rival works, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan and John Locke's Treatises on Government, provided ground-breaking ideas on the subject.

The response to Ferguson's book in Britain shows that a similar program to mine may also be required there.  The thought that Ferguson might be providing advice on their national history curriculum to Cameron government Education Secretary Michael Gove, horrifies the UK education establishment.

Reviewing the book in The Guardian, historian Bernard Porter argued that ''it furnishes an almost perfect illustration of why children need to be taught analytical skills, more than 'big stories' or facts''.  Porter seems to think that Ferguson and Govc may get together and ensure that Ferguson's text becomes the sole element of the syllabus, hardly likely since one of the Ferguson key aims for history students is ''reading widely''.  However, if there is one ''big story'' that requires attention, it is the one Ferguson attempts to address in this book, as he goes about explaining how ''the West shrank the world''.

So what will students in the UK or Australia get from reading Ferguson's book?  They will certainly get one slightly silly gimmick.  As with four of his past five books, this work has a companion television series and perhaps to appeal to that medium, or to capture the attention of the young, Ferguson describes the factors which led to the rise of the West as ''killer apps'' and identifies six of them:

• Competition
• Science
• Property rights
• Medicine
• The consumer society
• The work ethic.

In the words of Porter, Ferguson argues that ''western predominance in the world has lasted 500 years, no less''.  Actually, Ferguson makes clear that for the first part of this period the West was still behind, but he also identifies the early signs that the West was making more rapid progress than the two civilisations, Chinese and Islamic, that had been the most dynamic since the fall of Rome.

Ferguson discusses China in the chapter on ''competition''.  Presenting a long list of Chinese innovations, including the mechanical clock, printing with movable type, paper, the blast furnace and iron bridges, Ferguson also explains how, by the early 15th century, the Chinese had a clear capacity to spread their geo-political dominance via admiral Zheng He's naval fleet, larger than anything assembled in the West until the First World War.  But the death of his imperial sponsor in 1424 saw his voyages stopped.  This was a precursor to the collapse of the Ming dynasty in the 17th century with a decline in population of between 35 and 40 per cent.  Ferguson ascribes the blame primarily to its status as a closed society, which worked for a time, but when something went wrong had no external resources to alleviate a problem.

In contrast, when the West began to explore, there were numerous jurisdictions all competing with each other to see who could better trade with, or better exploit other parts of the world.  While constant fighting within Europe had many negative consequences, it had potential benefits for its expansion -- improved military technology, more efficient taxation and most importantly, no monarch was ever in a position to prohibit all European exploration.

Ferguson argues that scientific superiority was a key reason why Islamic civilisation was able to establish and maintain a caliphate covering such a large area.  The caliphate produced the world's first proper hospitals and universities and made numerous important discoveries.

As late as 1683, the Ottoman army came very close to capturing Vienna.  The fact that it did not was symptomatic of the changing fortunes of the West and the Islamic world.  Just as the Scientific Revolution was gathering pace in Europe, influential Muslim clerics were asserting more and more that the study of science and philosophy were incompatible with the Koran.  They even ruled that printing was incompatible with religion, thus further restricting the opportunity for the dissemination of new ideas.  Ferguson personalises the decline of the Ottomans and the rise of the West, writing ''sultan Osman III presided over a decadent Ottoman Empire, while Frederick the Great enacted reforms that made ... Prussia a byword for military efficiency and administrative rationality''.  Plus, Frederick encouraged science, enacted freedom of religion and decreed that there would be openness to immigrants.

The third chapter, ''property'', looks at why different parts of the New World became more dominant parts of the West than others, largely by contrasting the experience of North and South America.  Ferguson argues that the difference was not democracy per se, but ''in reality, democracy was the capstone of an edifice that had as its foundation the rule of law -- to be precise the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government''.  The key was that in North America, a system evolved based on the Lockean principle that an individual should be able to claim and then continue to own property without being subject to arbitrary intervention by government.  This decision on how to allocate land ''would ultimately determine the future leadership of western civilization''.  Even when Latin American countries achieved independence early in the 19th century, the rule of a strong leader took precedence over the rule of law, as Simon Bolivar's Organic Decree of Dictatorship ''made clear there would be no property-owning democracy in a Bolivarian South America, and no rule of law''.  In contrast, not just in the United States, but in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and British Africa, property ownership was widely dispersed, and democracy grew from it.

One must recognise that while the West may have exported many useful things to the Rest they also delivered many diseases with fatal consequences for millions.  This was something of returning a compliment, as eastern-originated disease had been a major killer in Europe in the 14th century.  Ferguson is keen to point out that Europe produced cures as well as sickness.  Work on tropical diseases from the 1880s to 1920s found cures for a number of them, and while a strong motivation was protecting colonists, it also had the potential to help natives.

The chapter on medicine is something of a paean to the medical pioneers who went into the tropics in the late 19th century seeking cures for diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, as he comments ''the bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier explorer''.  Ferguson argues that the potential medical benefits to native populations ''were often overlooked by those, like Gandhi, who maintained that the European empires had no redeeming features''.  He makes the further point that the reason life expectancy remains low in much of Africa is that many African communities still prefer to rely on traditional rather than Western medicine.  In the early 20th century, the French were particularly authoritarian in trying to stamp out traditional healing methods and replace them with modern ones and while ''it is easy today to dismiss such aspirations as insufferable Gallic arrogance'', they did extend thousands of lives.

Of course, not all science was benign.  The second half of the 19th century saw the development of the science of eugenics.  Ferguson makes the point that at that time ''racism was not so much a backward-looking reactionary ideology;  the scientifically uneducated embraced it as people today accept the theory of man-made global warming''.  The consequences of the theory arc described in all their gory detail, such as the Germans' belief that, in some cases, complete eradication of tribes was required, which led to events such as the massacre of the Herero people at Hamakari by German General von Trotha in 1904.  The fact that in the first half of the 20th century the racial ideas first applied in the colonies were then applied in Europe was a sign that Western Civilization had the potential to be its own greatest enemy.  Ferguson draws a direct link writing that ''if Auschwitz marked the culmination of state violence against racially defined alien populations, the war against the Herero and Nama was surely the first step in that direction''.

The chapter on consumption notes early on that ''consumer society is so all-pervasive today that it is easy to assume it has always existed ... yet in reality it is one of the more recent innovations that propelled the West ahead of the Rest''.  The first modern economy evolved in Britain, and Ferguson identifies two reasons, dearer labour and abundant coal, as to why the Industrial Revolution happened there first, rather than in other places in north-western Europe.

This is perhaps the most thought-provoking part of the book, with Ferguson getting onto his home turf of economic history.  He also deals with the growth of nationalism and notes the odd paradox that growth of nationalism coincided with a growing conformity of dress in emerging consumer economies.  Clothing plays a big part in this chapter for, as Ferguson argues, ''what people wear matters'' and ''the West's two great economic leaps forward -- the industrial revolution and the consumer society -- were to a huge extent about clothes:  first making them more efficiently and second wearing them more revealingly''.  Hence, he writes at some length about Isaac Singer's new sewing machine, a passage which captures Ferguson's strength as both an historian and a writer.  He recognises the importance of innovation and mechanical progress, but also makes the passage more lively by mentioning that Singer sired ''a total of twenty-four children by five different women'' and pointing out that Gandhi regarded the sewing machine as ''one of the few useful things ever invented''.

This chapter also introduces the first part of the Rest to copy the West -- Japan.  The Japanese were unable to be certain what lay behind Western success and so copied everything from the German army, British navy and American schools, to eating beef, which hitherto had been taboo.  Most importantly, in Ferguson's eyes, Japan adopted Western dress, ''realising what a potent agent of development Western clothes were'', thus unleashing that key driver of early industrialisation, the textile industry.  It was ''a pivotal breakthrough in world history''.

By way of contrast, Ferguson points out that consumerism and the 20th century's two most prominent forms of totalitarianism -- fascism and communism -- seem to have been incompatible.  Hitler was focused on destruction rather than consumption, with consumption of everything from textiles to coffee declining, and comparatively low rates of ownership of private cars.  Then there were the Communists.  Ferguson poses the question as to why the Eastern Bloc did not just allow its citizens as much rock n' roll and jeans as they wanted to overcome the chief grumbles of their young people, but he explains that ''the answer is that the consumer society posed a lethal threat to the Soviet system itself''.  Ferguson devotes a lengthy section to jeans, highlighting the irony of how sixties radicals all wore them, which more than anything else symbolised international consumer homogeneity.

In the final app chapter, Ferguson considers perhaps the most famous theory about why the West prospered -- the Protestant work ethic.  He concludes that Max Weber was right, but for the wrong reason.  The real contributor to economic development was the Protestant encouragement of literacy and printing so individuals could read the Bible.  In particular, Ferguson claims that ''recent surveys of attitudes show that Protestants have unusually high levels of mutual trust, an important pre-condition of efficient credit networks''.  He also explores why religion has continued to flourish in the United States while it declines across Western Europe.  The latter is something of a problem if, like some of the Chinese academics Ferguson quotes, you believe Christianity was one of the West's greatest strengths.

Always problematic for historians is when they try to become prophets as well as interpreters of the past.  The fact that, what Ferguson in his tech talk dubs Western Civilisation 1.0, the earlier version which climaxed in the Roman Empire, declined so quickly, gives him pause to consider whether version 2.0 might be about to head the same way quickly.  There are a number of issues which concern him.  Given his relationship with prominent Islam-critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it is no surprise that one of his worries is the rise of militant Islam within the West.  Yet, while he has a point, one must not forget that while large scale immigration to the West of people from former colonies has clearly changed those Western countries, the change there has been small compared to the change wrought on the colonies by the West, and that trend should continue for a while to come.  Perhaps of more pressing concern to the countries of the West is his recognition that where once the citizens of Western countries expected to live within their means, they now expect to get everything on credit.

Whether or not one agrees with all Ferguson's conclusions, one needs to recognise his ability as a writer to make his point in a clever way.  When discussing how the West was more receptive to importing new ideas, he writes:

The English were luckier in their drugs, too;  long habituated to alcohol, they were roused from inebriation in the seventeenth century by American tobacco, Arabic coffee and Chinese tea.  They got the stimulation of the coffee house, part cafe, part stock exchange, part chat-room;  the Chinese ended up with the lethargy of the opium den.

Then when assessing 1970s predictions about the future of the Soviet Union, he notes that the least accurate came from ''clueless academic Sovietologists''.

And one could say the same about the clueless academic historians who seem determined to wilfully misrepresent what Ferguson is saying.  He is not forgetting Islamic mathematics, or Chinese printing, but he is trying to establish why the West, which was clearly behind those civilisations on many criteria in the 15th century, got to be the imperialist, exporting its world view by the 20th century.

The fact that the West had been behind for many centuries clearly rules out any theory that the people of the West were intrinsically better, but some things they did must have made a difference.  Ferguson has made a valiant attempt to identify them.  He may not have provided a definitive answer, but it is a thought-provoking and challenging analysis.  Certainly, reading Civilization will enlighten young (and old) minds far more than trying to overanalyse a couple of obscure historical documents.