How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (2 page)

Other scholars have attributed the success of the West to guns and steel, to sailing ships, or to superior agriculture.
¹¹
The problem here is that these “causes” are part of what needs to be explained: why did Europeans excel at metallurgy, shipbuilding, and farming? The same objection arises to the claim that science holds the secret to “Western domination,”
¹²
as well as to the Marxist thesis that it was all due to capitalism.
¹³
Why did science and capitalism develop only in Europe?

In attempting to explain this remarkable cultural singularity, I will, of course, pay attention to material factors—obviously history would have been quite different had Europe lacked iron and coal or been landlocked. Even so, my explanations will not rest primarily on material conditions and forces. Instead I give primacy to
ideas
, even though this is quite unfashionable in contemporary scholarly circles. I do so because I fully agree with the distinguished economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey that “material, economic forces … were not the original and sustaining causes of the modern rise.” Or, as she put it in the subtitle of her fine book: “Why economics can’t explain the modern world.” Quietly mocking Karl Marx, McCloskey asserted that Europe achieved modernity because of “ideology.”
¹⁴

If Marx was sincere when he dismissed the possibility of ideas being causative agents as “ideological humbug,”
¹⁵
one must wonder why he labored so long to communicate his socialist ideas rather than just
relaxing and letting “economic determinism” run its “inevitable” course. In fact, Marx’s beloved material causes exist mainly as humans
perceive
them—as people pursue goals guided by their ideas about what is desirable and possible. Indeed, to explain why working-class people so often did not embrace the socialist revolution, Marx and Friedrich Engels had to invent the concept of “false consciousness”—an entirely
ideological
cause.

Similarly, it is ideas that explain why science arose only in the West. Only Westerners thought that science was possible, that the universe functioned according to rational rules that could be discovered. We owe this belief partly to the ancient Greeks and partly to the unique Judeo-Christian conception of God as a rational creator. Clearly, then, the French historian Daniel Mornet had it right when he said that the French Revolution would not have occurred had there not been widespread poverty, but neither would it have occurred without revolutionary philosophies, for it was “ideas that set men in motion.”
¹⁶

Once we recognize the primacy of ideas, we realize the irrelevance of long-running scholarly debates about whether certain inventions were developed independently in Europe or imported from the East. The act of invention is obviously crucial, but just as important, societies must value innovations enough to
use
them. The Chinese, for example, developed gunpowder very early on—but centuries later they still lacked artillery and firearms. An iron industry flourished in northern China in the eleventh century—but then Mandarins at the imperial court declared a state monopoly on iron and seized everything, destroying China’s iron production.

This book explains why such setbacks occurred—and why they did
not
occur in the West.

Turning Points

Finally, I will be equally out of fashion by giving weight to specific events. It has become the received wisdom that events such as battles are mere decorations on the great flow of history, that the triumph of the Greeks over the immense Persian host at Marathon (490 BC) or their sinking of the Persian fleet at Salamis (480 BC) merely reflected (as one popular historian put it) “something deeper … a shift in economic power from the
Fertile Crescent to the Mediterranean.”
¹⁷
Rot! Had the very badly outnumbered Greeks lost either battle, that “shift” would not have occurred and we probably never would have heard of Plato or Aristotle.

Of course, the Greeks won, Plato and Aristotle lived, and Western civilization flourished. That is the story I shall tell.

Part I

Classical Beginnings (500 BC–AD 500)

1

Stagnant Empires and the Greek “Miracle”

O
ne easily supposes that large societies are a modern phenomenon. Not so. At the dawn of history most people lived lives of misery and exploitation in tyrannical empires that covered huge areas.
¹

The first empire arose in Mesopotamia more than six thousand years ago.
²
Then came the Egyptian, Chinese, Persian, and Indian empires. All these empires suffered from chronic power struggles among the ruling elites, but aside from those, some border wars, and immense public-works projects, very little happened. Change, whether technological or cultural, was so slow as to go nearly unnoticed. As the centuries passed most people lived as they always had, “just a notch above barest subsistence … little better off than their oxen,” in the words of the anthropologist Marvin Harris.
³
This was not because they lacked the potential to achieve a much higher standard of living but because a predatory ruling elite extracted every ounce of “surplus” production. All signs of resistance were brutally crushed.

In the midst of all this misery and repression, a “miracle” of progress and freedom took place in Greece among people who lived not in an empire but in hundreds of small, independent city-states. It was here that the formation of Western civilization began. Sad to say, this beacon of human potential eventually was extinguished by the rise of new empires. But its legacies survived.

The Poverty of Ancient Empires

We remain fascinated by accounts of the opulent splendor of ancient imperial courts, of gigantic palaces with golden fixtures and silk-lined walls, of bejeweled wives and concubines served by countless slaves and servants. Imagine the wealth of the great Egyptian pharaohs in light of the staggering treasures buried with King Tutankhamun (1341–1323 BC), a minor and short-lived pharaoh. Even though Tut’s coffin was made of solid gold, his treasures are mere trinkets compared with what must have been buried with Ramesses II (ca. 1303–1213 BC), who probably was the wealthiest and most powerful of all the pharaohs. But it wasn’t only treasure that was buried with the early pharaohs; many of their retainers, wives, concubines, and even pet dogs were slaughtered and placed in their tombs. One First Dynasty royal Egyptian tomb included 318 sacrificed humans; their average age was estimated to have been twenty-five.
⁴
In Mesopotamia an emperor’s entire court, including not only wives and servants but also senior officials and confidants, was buried with the sovereign. And late in the second millennium BC, each Chinese royal funeral saw
thousands
put to death.
⁵

In all the ancient empires, monumentalism was rife. Pharaohs built pyramids, huge statues such as the Sphinx, immense shrines, and even whole personal cities. The rulers of Mesopotamia built enormous ziggurats, shrines consisting of a set of huge square blocks (or floors) of decreasing size set atop one another, often having five levels or more. The setbacks surrounding each block were often landscaped with trees and shrubs (hence the “Hanging Gardens” of Babylon). The largest surviving ziggurat, near Susa in southern Iran, is 336 feet per side at the base and is estimated to have been about seventeen stories high.
⁶

But despite such monuments and fabulous royal wealth, the great empires were very poor. As the historian E. L. Jones noted, “Emperors amassed vast wealth but received incomes that were nevertheless small relative to the immensity of the territories and populations governed.”
⁷
Indeed, because of imperial opulence, “century after century the standard of living in China, northern India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt hovered slightly above or below what might be called the threshold of pauperization,” as Marvin Harris put it.
⁸
Too often historians have noted the immense wealth of rulers without grasping the sacrifices this imposed on the populace. The Wikipedia article on the Maurya Empire, which
ruled most of India from 321 to 185 BC, praises it for generating prosperity, while innocently noting a report from the time that the Indians “all live frugally … and their food is principally a rice-pottage,” as though this were merely a matter of preference. To quote Jones once again, “The splendours of Asian courts … merely testify that political organization could squeeze blood out of stones if the stones were numerous enough.”
⁹

A review of tax rates imposed by the ancient empires reveals just how hard the nobility squeezed. In Mesopotamia the official tax rate was 10 percent of all crops, but in fact the collectors often demanded as much as half. In Egypt the pharaoh took at least a fifth of all harvests and required peasants to work on “public” projects in the off-season. In India the ruler was entitled to one-fourth of the crop and could take a third in “emergencies.”
¹⁰
Local elites and landlords usually took even more. With taxes claiming half or more of a harvest, and about a third of a grain crop kept to provide seeds for the next planting, the peasants had very little left for their own subsistence. In addition to taxes were outright confiscations of individuals’ entire wealth, which often required no justification. Hence, as Ricardo Caminos put it about the ancient Egyptians, “peasant families always wavered between abject poverty and utter destitution.”
¹¹

If the elite seizes all production above the minimum needed for survival, people have no motivation to produce more. In despotic states where rulers concentrate on exacting the maximum amount from those they control, subjects become notably avaricious too. They consume, hoard, and hide the fruits of their labor, and they fail to produce nearly as much as they might. Even when some people do manage to be productive, chances are that their efforts will merely enrich their rulers. The result is a standard of living far below the society’s potential productive capacities. The average free citizen did not live much better than did the huge numbers held in slavery by the ancient empires.

The economic system of ancient empires and of all despotic states has come to be known as the
command economy
,
¹²
since the state commands and coerces markets and labor—to exact wealth for itself—rather than allowing them to function freely. The people are usually subject not only to confiscatory taxation but also to forced labor, which accounts for the monumentalism of empires. Pharaohs did not hire tens of thousands of peasants to build pyramids; they forced them to do so—and fed them so poorly and exposed them to such dangerous working conditions that many did not survive.
¹³
It is estimated that nearly six million Chinese
peasants were forced to build the Grand Canal in China, and perhaps as many as two million of them died.
¹⁴
Another million probably died to build the Great Wall of China.
¹⁵

Command economies began with the earliest empires and have lasted in many parts of the modern world—they still attract ardent advocates. But command economies neglect the most basic economic fact of life:
All wealth derives from production
. It must be grown, dug up, cut down, hunted, herded, fabricated, or otherwise created. The amount of wealth produced within any society depends not only on the number involved in production but also on their motivation and the effectiveness of their productive technology. When wealth is subject to devastating taxes and the constant threat of usurpation, the challenge is to
keep
one’s wealth, not to make it productive. This principle applies not merely to the wealthy but with even greater force to those with very little—which accounts for the substantial underproduction of command economies.