A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (23 page)

THE RISE OF THE WEST

Little by little all the non-western peoples of the earth found it necessary to do something drastic about the intrusive Europeans with their restless, disturbing ways. The rise of the West to this position of dominance all round the globe is, indeed, the main theme of modern world history.

—W
ILLIAM
M
C
N
EILL
¹

Past, present and future, the story of military dynamism in the world is ultimately an investigation into the prowess of Western arms.

—V
ICTOR
D
AVIS
H
ANSON
²

Yet any history of the world’s civilizations that underplays the degree of their gradual subordination to the West after 1500 is missing the essential point—the thing most in need of explanation. The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is the story at the very heart of modern history. It is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve.

—N
IALL
F
ERGUSON
³

I
n 1608 Hans Lippershey, a spectacle maker in the Dutch town of Middelburg, invented the telescope. Within a few decades, telescopes had been introduced from Europe to China, to the Mughal empire in India and to the Ottoman empire. All four civilizations
were thus on an equal footing in terms of possessing this powerful new instrument with its latent power for observing the universe and deducing the laws of planetary motion.

There are few controlled experiments in history, but the historian of science Toby Huff has discovered one in the way that the telescope was received and used in the 17th century. The reactions of the four civilizations to this powerful new instrument bear on the very different kinds of society that each had developed.

In Europe the telescope was turned at once toward the heavens. Galileo, hearing a description of Lippershey’s device, immediately set to building telescopes of his own. He was first to observe the moons of Jupiter, and he used the fact of Jupiter’s satellites as empirical evidence in favor of Copernicus’s then disputed notion that the planets, including the Earth, were satellites of the sun. Galileo’s argument that the Earth revolved around the sun brought him into conflict with the church’s belief that the Earth cannot move. In 1633 he was forced to recant by the Inquisition and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

But Europe was not monolithic, and the Inquisition was powerless to suppress the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo in Protestant countries. What Galileo had started was carried forward by Kepler and Newton. The momentum of the Scientific Revolution scarcely faltered.

In the Muslim world, the telescope quickly reached the Mughal empire in India. One was presented in 1616 by the British ambassador to the court of the emperor Jahangir, and many more arrived a year later. The Mughals knew a lot about astronomy, but their interest in it was confined to matters of the calendar. A revised calendar was presented to the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1628, but the scholar who prepared it based it on the Ptolemaic system (which assumes that the sun revolves around an immobile Earth).

Given this extensive familiarity with astronomy, Mughal scholars might have been expected to use the telescope to explore the heavens. But the designers of astronomical instruments in the Mughal empire did not make telescopes, and the scholars created no demand for them. “In the end, no Mughal scholars undertook to use the telescope for astronomical purposes in the seventeenth century,” Huff reports.
⁴

The telescope fared no better in the other Islamic empire of the time. Telescopes had reached Istanbul by at least 1626 and were quickly incorporated into the Ottoman navy. But despite Muslim eminence in optics in the 14th century, scholars in the Ottoman empire showed no particular interest in the telescope. They were content with the Ptolemaic view of the universe and made no effort to translate the works of Galileo, Copernicus or Kepler. “No new observatories were built, no improved telescopes were manufactured and no cosmological debates about what the telescope revealed in the heavens have been reported,” Huff concludes.
⁵

Outside of Europe, the most promising new users of the telescope were in China, whose government had a keen interest in astronomy. Moreover, there was an unusual but vigorous mechanism for pumping the new European astronomical discoveries into China in the form of the Jesuit mission there. The Jesuits figured they had a better chance of converting the Chinese to Christianity if they could show that European astronomy provided more accurate calculations of the celestial events in which the Chinese were interested. Through the Jesuits’ efforts, the Chinese certainly knew of the telescope by 1626, and the emperor probably received a telescope from Cardinal Borromeo of Milan as early as 1618.

The Jesuits invested significant talent in their mission, which was founded by Matteo Ricci, a trained mathematician who also spoke Chinese. Ricci, who died in 1610, and his successors imported the
latest European books on math and astronomy and diligently trained Chinese astronomers, who set about reforming the calendar. One of the Jesuits, Adam Schall von Bell, even became head of the Chinese Bureau of Mathematics and Astronomy.

The Jesuits and their Chinese followers several times arranged prediction challenges between themselves and Chinese astronomers following traditional methods, which the Jesuits always won. The Chinese knew, for instance, that there would be a solar eclipse on June 21, 1629, and the emperor asked both sides to submit the day before their predictions of its exact time and duration. The traditional astronomers predicted the eclipse would start at 10:30
AM
and last for two hours. Instead it began at 11:30
AM
and lasted two minutes, exactly as the Jesuits had calculated.

But these computational victories did not solve the Jesuits’ problem. The Chinese had little curiosity about astronomy itself. Rather, they were interested in divination, in forecasting propitious days for certain events, and astronomy was merely a means to this end. Thus the astronomical bureau was a small unit within the Ministry of Rites. The Jesuits doubted how far they should get into the business of astrological prediction, but their program of converting the Chinese through astronomical excellence compelled them to take the plunge anyway. This led them into confrontation with Chinese officials and to being denounced as foreigners who were interfering in Chinese affairs. In 1661, Schall and the other Jesuits were bound with thick iron chains and thrown into jail. Schall was sentenced to be executed by dismemberment, and only an earthquake that occurred the next day prompted his release.

The puzzle is that throughout this period the Chinese made no improvements on the telescope. Nor did they show any sustained interest in the ferment of European ideas about the theoretical structure of the universe, despite being plied by the Jesuits with the latest
European research. Chinese astronomers had behind them a centuries-old tradition of astronomical observation. But it was embedded in a Chinese cosmological system that they were reluctant to abandon. Their latent xenophobia also supported resistance to new ideas. “It is better to have no good astronomy than to have Westerners in China,” wrote the anti-Christian scholar Yang Guangxian.
⁶

Both China and the Muslim world suffered from a “deficit of curiosity” about the natural world, Huff says, which he attributes to their educational systems. But the differences between European societies and the others went considerably beyond education and scientific curiosity. The reception of the telescope shows that by the early 17th century, fundamental differences had already emerged in the social behavior of the four civilizations and in the institutions that embodied it. European societies were innovative, outward looking, keen to develop and apply new knowledge, and sufficiently open and pluralistic to prevent the old order from suppressing the new. Those of China and the Islamic world were still entrammeled in traditional religious structures and too subservient to hierarchy to support freethinking and innovation.

The trends in the 17th century illumined by Huff’s telescope experiment have continued to the present day with surprisingly little change. Four hundred years later, European societies are still more open and innovative than others. Islamic societies are still inward looking, traditional and hostile to pluralism. An authoritarian regime still rules China, suppresses all organized opposition and inhibits the free flow of ideas and information. The steadiness of these salient trends is a
strong indication, though indeed not proof, that evolutionary forces have shaped the basic nature of these societies and their institutions.

Because its societies are open and innovative, the West has come to achieve a surprising degree of dominance in many spheres, despite the fact that its methods and knowledge have long been an open book from which all others may copy. Most of the world is now integrated into the Western economic system. But Japan and China, two of its chief economic rivals, show few signs of becoming better innovators. Most of the world’s most successful corporations are still found in the West. Americans and Europeans still dominate most fields of scientific research and collect most Nobel Prizes.

The West continues to lead in military power. Its preeminence has not been uniform. Japan defeated the Russian fleet at the battle of Tsushima in 1905 and seized the East Asian holdings of European colonial powers in the Second World War. China battled the United States to a draw in the Korean War, and the United States did not prevail in Vietnam. European powers have withdrawn from many colonized countries after the cost of holding them became prohibitive. But Western force has remained essentially unchallenged since it withstood the threat of Ottoman invasion in the 17th century. For centuries, the most serious adversaries of Western powers have been other Western nations.

Western science, a driver of technology, still holds a commanding lead over that of other countries. Despite the expectation that Japanese science would become formidable in the wake of its modernization, this flowering has failed to take place. And despite its heavy investment in scientific research, there is no guarantee that by mere force of numbers China can become a major scientific power. Science is essentially subversive in that it requires, at least in its great advances, the toppling of accepted theories and their replacement with better ones. East Asian societies tend to place high value on conformity and respect for superiors, which is not fertile ground for science to flourish.

Throughout the world, Western medicine has proven more effective than the traditional kind. Western music, art and film are generally more creative than the tradition-bound artistic cultures of the East, and the openness of Western societies is regarded by many as more appealing. It would be invalid to ascribe any particular virtue to Europeans as individuals—they are little different from anyone else. But European social organization and especially its institutions have by several significant yardsticks proved more productive and innovative than those of other races. What then explains the rise and continued success of the West?

One explanation for the rise of the West is geographical. The geographer Jared Diamond is the most recent exponent of the idea. In his well-known book
Guns, Germs, and Steel,
he argues that the West is more powerful than others simply because it got a head start by enjoying more favorable conditions for agriculture. The nature of the people themselves, or their societies, have nothing to do with it, in his view. Everything in human history was determined by geographical features, such as the plant and animal species available for domestication or the plagues endemic in one population but not another.

Despite the popularity of Diamond’s book, there are several serious gaps in its argument. One is its anti-evolutionary assumption that only geography matters, not genes. His book, Diamond writes, can be summarized in a single sentence: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”
⁷
Geographic determinism, however, is as absurd a
position as genetic determinism, given that evolution is about the interaction between the two.

Diamond’s book is constructed as an answer to the question he was asked by a New Guinea tribesman as to why Western civilization produced so many more material goods than New Guinean society. Diamond gives no weight to such developments as the rise of modern science, the Industrial Revolution and the economic institutions through which Europeans at last escaped the Malthusian trap. Indeed, when Europeans brought their economic methods to Australia, for instance, they were quickly able to create and operate a European economy. Aborigines, the native Australian population, were still in the Paleolithic Age when Europeans arrived and showed no signs of developing any more advanced material culture.

If in the same environment, that of Australia, one population can operate a highly productive economy and another cannot, surely it cannot be the environment that is decisive, as Diamond asserts, but rather some critical difference in the nature of the two people and their societies.

Diamond himself raises this counterargument, but only to dismiss it as “loathsome” and “racist,” a stratagem that spares him the trouble of having to address its merits. While demonizing the opponents of one’s views is often effective in the academic sandbox, it is not automatically racist to consider racial categories as a possible explanatory factor. Diamond himself does so when it suits his purpose. He states that “natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies. . . . In mental ability, New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners.”
⁸
There is no evidence that this unlikely conjecture is true.
⁹

Equally strange is his assertion that intelligence is more likely to be favored in Stone Age societies than in modern ones. Intelligence can be more highly rewarded in modern societies because it is in far
greater demand, and the East Asians and Europeans who have built such societies do in fact have higher IQ scores, which may mean higher intelligence, than people who live in tribal or hunter-gatherer societies.

Guns, Germs, and Steel
has been widely popular, but the many readers who presumably skip over the oddity of its counterfactual statements are missing an important clue to the nature of Diamond’s book. It is driven by ideology, not science. The pretty arguments about the availability of domesticable species or the spread of disease are not dispassionate assessments of fact but are harnessed to Diamond’s galloping horse of geographic determinism, itself designed to drag the reader away from the idea that genes and evolution might have played any part in recent human history.

Geography and climate have undoubtedly been important, but not to the overwhelming degree that Diamond suggests. The effects of geography are easiest to see in a negative sense, especially their role in holding back population-driven urbanization in regions of low population density, such as Africa and Polynesia. Much harder to understand is how Europe and East Asia, lying on much the same lines of latitude, were driven in the different directions that led to the West’s dominance.

If geography provides only a first cut at the answer, can economics provide a more detailed explanation for the rise of the West? As recounted in chapter 7, economic historians have generally looked to factors such as institutions and resources to explain the genesis of the Industrial Revolution. But many of the apparent conditions for success were present in China as well as England, giving little evident reason for the West’s preeminence. “Almost every element usually regarded by historians as a major contributory cause to the industrial revolution in north-western Europe was also present in China,” concluded the historian Mark Elvin.
¹⁰

Those who favor institutions as the key to the Industrial
Revolution have emphasized England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, which placed the sovereign firmly under the control of Parliament and rationalized economic incentives. But both the Glorious Revolution and the Industrial Revolution that followed it were late developments in the rise of the West, the foundations of which historians believe were laid much earlier.

In a recent essay seeking to explain the rise of the West, the historian Niall Ferguson cited six institutions, the first of which he calls competition. By competition he means “a decentralization of political life, which created the launch-pad for both nation-states and capitalism.”
¹¹
This is another way of saying that the West, broadly speaking, enjoyed open societies with competing institutions, as opposed to the unrelieved despotism of the East.

The open society made possible the other institutions Ferguson deems critical to the rise of the West, such as the rule of law, including private property rights and the representation of property owners in a legislature; advances in science and medicine; and a growing economy fueled by technology and consumer demand.

“In the course of roughly 500 years,” Ferguson writes, “Western civilization rose to a position of extraordinary dominance in the world. . . . Western science shifted the paradigms; others either followed or were left behind. Western systems of law and the political models derived from them, including democracy, displaced or defeated the non-Western alternatives. . . . Above all, the Western model of industrial production and mass consumption left all alternative models of economic organization floundering in its wake.”
¹²

A society with several different power centers is less likely than an autocracy to suppress new ideas or to thwart innovation and entrepreneurship. Europe thus provided a more favorable environment than China for the emergence of science and medicine, and for the rise of capitalism. But Ferguson’s analysis boils down to the assertion that
the West succeeded because it was an open society. This is true so far as it goes, but why did the West alone develop a society of this nature? “This openness of society, together with its inventiveness, becomes what is to be explained,” writes the economic historian Eric Jones.
¹³