Why the West Rules--For Now (99 page)

Looked at in a really long perspective, the threats that so scare us today seem to have a lot in common with the kinds of forces that have repeatedly pushed evolution into high gear in the past. Time after time, relatively sudden changes in the environment have created conditions in which mutations flourish, transforming the gene pool. About 1.8 million years ago the drying-out of East Africa’s forests apparently allowed freaks with big brains to fare better than
Homo habilis
. A brutal phase in the Ice Age about a hundred thousand years ago may have given
Homo sapiens
an equivalent opportunity to shine. And now, in the twenty-first century, something similar is perhaps happening again.

Mass extinctions are already under way, with one species of plant or land animal disappearing every twenty minutes or so. A 2004 study estimated that the cheeriest possible outcome is that 9 percent of the world’s 10 million species of plants and land animals will face extinction by 2050, and plenty of biologists expect biodiversity to shrink by as much as one-third or one-half. Some even speak of a sixth mass extinction,
*
with two-thirds of Earth’s species dying out by 2100.
Humans may be among them; but rather than simply wiping
Homo
off the planet, the harsh conditions of the twenty-first century might act like those 1.8 million or a hundred thousand years ago, creating an opportunity for organisms with new kinds of brains—in this case, brains that merge man and machine—to replace older beings. Far from trampling us, the hoofbeats of the horsemen of the apocalypse might serve to turn our baby steps toward a Singularity into a new great leap.

The Singularity, however, might be every bit as scary as Nightfall. In Kurzweil’s vision, the Singularity culminates with the merging of human and machine intelligence in the 2040s, and those of us who live long enough for this might in effect live forever; but some of the humans who have the most experience with this—technologists in the United States Army—doubt that things will stop at that point. The former colonel Thomas Adams, for instance, suspects that war is already moving beyond “
human space
” as weapons become “too fast, too small, too numerous, and … create an environment too complex for humans to direct.” Technology, he suggests, is “rapidly taking us to a place where we may not want to go, but probably are unable to avoid.” The merging of humans and computers may be just a brief phase before what we condescendingly call “artificial” intelligence replaces
Homo sapiens
as thoroughly as
Homo sapiens
replaced all earlier ape-men.

If this is where a Singularity takes us in the later twenty-first century, it will mean the end of biology as we have known it, and with it the end of sloth, fear, and greed as the motors of history. In that case my Morris Theorem—that change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people (who rarely know what they’re doing) looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things—will finally reach its limits.

Sociology as we know it will go the same way, though what kinds of rules will govern a robotic society is anyone’s guess; and the Singularity will surely obliterate the old geography. The ancient distinctions between East and West will be irrelevant to robots.

When historians (if such things still exist) look back from 2103 on the shift from carbon-to silicon-based intelligence, it may strike them as inevitable—as inevitable, in fact, as I have claimed that the earlier shifts from foraging to farming, villages to cities, and agriculture to industry were. It may seem just as obvious that the regional traditions
that had grown from the original agricultural cores since the end of the Ice Age were bound to merge into a single posthuman world civilization. The early twenty-first century’s anxiety over why the West ruled and whether it would keep on doing so might look a little ridiculous.

THE TWAIN MEET

There is a certain irony in all this. I began this book with a what-if story about the Chinese Empire taking Prince Albert to Beijing as a hostage in 1848, and then spent eleven chapters explaining why that didn’t happen. The answer to the book’s main question, I concluded, is geography; maps, not chaps, sent the little dog Looty to Balmoral rather than Albert to Beijing.

In this chapter I took the argument further, suggesting that explaining why the West rules also largely answers the question of what will happen next. As surely as geography dictated that the West would rule, it also dictates that the East will catch up, exploiting the advantages of its backwardness until its social development overtakes the West’s. But here we encounter another irony. Rising social development has always changed the meaning of geography, and in the twenty-first century, development will rise so high that geography will cease to mean anything at all. The only thing that will count is the race between a Singularity and Nightfall. To keep Nightfall at bay we will have to globalize more and more of our concerns, and arguments about which part of the world has the highest social development will matter less and less.

Hence the deepest irony: answering the book’s first question (why the West rules) to a great extent also answers the second (what will happen next), but answering the second robs the first of much of its significance. Seeing what is coming next reveals what should, perhaps, have been obvious all along—that the history that really matters is not about the East, the West, or any other subsection of humanity. The important history is global and evolutionary, telling the story of how we got from single-celled organisms to the Singularity.

I have argued throughout the book that neither long-term lock-in nor short-term accident theories explain history very well, but now,
once again, I want to go further. In the
really
long run, on the time scale of evolutionary history, neither long-term lock-in nor short-term accident theories actually matter very much. Fifteen thousand years ago, before the Ice Age ended, East and West meant little. A century from now they will once again mean little. Their importance in the intervening era was just a side effect of geography between the age when the first farmers pushed social development past about six points and that when the first machine-enhanced, postbiological creatures push social development past five thousand points. By the time that happens—somewhere, I suspect, between 2045 and 2103—geography will no longer mean very much at all. East and West will be revealed as merely a phase we went through.

Even if everything in this phase had gone as differently as could be imagined—if, say, Zheng He had really gone to Tenochtitlán, if there had been a new kind of Pacific rather than a new kind of Atlantic economy, if there had been a Chinese rather than a British industrial revolution, and if Albert had gone to Beijing rather than Looty to Balmoral—the deep forces of biology, sociology, and geography would still have pushed history in much the same direction. America (or Zhengland, as we might now call it) would have become part of the Eastern rather than the Western core and the West would now be catching up with the East rather than the other way around, but the world would still have shrunk from size large to size small and would still now be shrinking to size tiny. The early twenty-first century would still have been dominated by Chimerica, and whether it fell or not, the race between Nightfall and the Singularity would still be going on. And East and West would still be losing their significance.

This should not be a shocking conclusion. As long ago as 1889, while the world was still shrinking from size large to size medium, a young poet named Rudyard Kipling could already see part of the same truth. Freshly back in London from the far-flung battle line, Kipling got his big break with a ripping yarn of imperial derring-do called “The Ballad of East and West.”
*
It tells the story of Kamal, a border raider who steals an English colonel’s mare. The colonel’s son leaps
onto his own horse and pursues Kamal through the desert in a chase of epic proportions (“
They have ridden
the low moon out of the sky, their hoofs drum up the dawn, / The dun he went like a wounded bull, but the mare like a new-roused fawn”). Finally, though, the Englishman is thrown. Kamal charges back at him, rifle raised. But all ends well: the two men “looked each other between the eyes, and there they found no fault, / They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on leavened bread and salt.”

Stirring stuff, but it is the poem’s opening line—“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”—that gets all the attention, mostly from people quoting it as an example of the nineteenth-century West’s insufferable self-satisfaction. Yet that was surely not the effect Kipling was hoping for. What he actually wrote was:

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

As Kipling saw it, people (real men, anyway) are all much the same; it is just geography that obscures the truth, requiring us to take a trip to the ends of the earth to figure things out. But in the twenty-first century, soaring social development and a shrinking world are making such trips unnecessary. There will be neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birth when we transcend biology. The twain shall finally meet if we can just put off Nightfall long enough.

Can we do that? I think the answer is yes. The great difference between the challenges we face today and those that defeated Song China when it pressed against the hard ceiling a thousand years ago and the Roman Empire another thousand before that is that we now know so much more about the issues involved. Unlike the Romans and the Song, our age may yet get the thought it needs.

On the last page of his book
Collapse
, the biologist and geographer Jared Diamond suggested that there are two forces that might save the world from disaster:
archaeologists (who uncover the details of earlier societies’ mistakes)
and television (which broadcasts their findings). As an archaeologist who watches a lot of television, I certainly agree, but I also want to add a third savior, history. Only historians can draw together the grand narrative of social development; only historians can explain the differences that divide humanity and how we can prevent them from destroying us.

This book, I hope, might help a little in the process.

Appendix: On Social Development

The index of social development is the backbone of this book, holding together the body of facts that archaeologists and historians have accumulated. The index does not itself explain why the West rules, but it does show us the shape of the history that has to be explained. I provide a full account of the index, for those interested in the methods and detailed evidence behind the calculations, at the website
www.ianmorris.org
; this appendix is intended only as a quick summary of the main technical challenges and the basic results.

FOUR OBJECTIONS

I see four obvious objections to the social development index:

1. Quantifying and comparing social development in different times and places dehumanizes people and we should therefore not do it.

2. Quantifying and comparing societies is a reasonable procedure, but social development in the sense I defined it (as societies’ abilities to get things done) is the wrong thing to measure.

3. Social development in the sense I defined it is a useful way to compare East and West, but the four traits I used to measure it (energy capture, organization/urbanization, war-making, and information technology) are not the best ones.

4. These four traits are a good way to measure social development but I have made factual errors and got the measurements wrong.

I addressed objection 1 in
Chapter 3
. There are plenty of historical and anthropological questions for which quantifying and comparing social development is no help at all, but asking why the West rules is by its nature a comparative and quantitative question. If we want to answer it, we must quantify and compare.

I also said a few words in
Chapter 3
about objection 2. Perhaps there are other things we could measure and compare that would work better than social development, but I do not know what they are. I leave it to other historians and anthropologists to identify other objects to measure and to show that they yield better results.

Objection 3 can take three forms—that we should add more traits to my four; that we should use different traits; or that we should look at fewer traits. As I wrote this book I did explore several other traits (for example, area of largest political unit, standards of living [measured through adult stature], transportation speeds, or size of largest monuments), but all had severe evidence problems or failed the test of mutual independence. Most traits in any case show high levels of redundancy through most of history, and any plausible combination of traits will tend to produce much the same final result.

There are plenty of small and two large exceptions to the redundancy rule. The first large exception is what we might call the “nomad anomaly”—the fact that steppe societies normally score low on energy capture, organization, and information technology, but high on war-making. This anomaly helps explain why true nomad societies have been so good at defeating empires but so bad at running them,
*
and it deserves extensive study, but it does not directly affect the comparisons between the settled, agrarian Eastern and Western cores in this book.