Europeans dominated

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

As an aside to this question of why the Europeans dominated the rest of the world and not vice versa - I’d forward the notion that there have essentially been only two REALLY significant developments in human history so far.
First: the introduction of agriculture, and second; the industrial revolution. (The modern world is evidence that the Europeans got to the second point first.) Once either of these came about, all bets were off as to where they’d lead us.

Clearly, human history can be broken down into more granular parts; the plough, mathematics, Christianity, the printing press, democracy, electricity, etc. But I’d venture that our existence boils down to the two questions of a) do you have enough to eat to survive?; and b) if you do have enough to eat to survive, then how’s your quality of life?

Then there’s the question of what’s the next great development, and I’d venture that it’s not the computer or the internet, but artificial intelligence, which should be along sometime in the 21st century. And, like the other two developments, I’d suggest that once it comes about, all bets are off as to where it will take us.

Martin Archer,
9.40 AM
Monday, November 27, 2000
mart@dazeofourlives.com
http://www.dazeofourlives.com

2

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How come Europeans dominated the rest of the world and not vice versa? (20-Jun-1997)

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3

I think I would turn these questions around. Certainly if the typical person doesn’t have enough to eat to survive, something’s going to change. It seems to me that the real question is “If you do have more than enough to eat to survive, what do you do with the surplus?”

If you look at China as an example, they have had an investible surplus for many centuries - since the invention of wet rice cultivation - yet they remain poor. (And yes, I regard their current government as very similar to their traditional structures). The two possible (related) reasons for this are culture and institutions. If when there is enough to eat you cannot or do not feel motivated to invest, your economy will not grow.

Whether or not it was confidence in institutions developed following the Scottish Enlightenment or ongoing competition between institutional alternatives, Europeans wanted to and were able to use the surplus above subsistence to grow.

In addition to the books cited by Cecil, try Landes The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. It is a good and non-technical read.

4

I think the OP captured this aspect with the quality of life part B, although to respond to the first part, the something which might change is you die (among other possible outcomes.)

China is relatively poor now. Does that mean they were relatively poor in the past? It doesn’t strike me as useful to make this sort of comparision.

Quite true.

I was singularly unimpressed by Landes, whose ideological axe grinding is terribly tedious --he appears to have major and unresolved issues with historical revisions in the past 40 years.

He does make interesting points but he also commits the
very sins which he so readily castigates his perceived ideological enemies (which appear to be any kind of revisionist historical criticism of European place in history or in some respects non-Western histories.)

Some trivial errors disappoint. Much more disappointing is his use of straw men in an ideological dismissal of
points of view he does not like rather than addressing the substance of the argument. Oddly enough, he does this at the same time as he claims others do it, notably the anti-Orientalist school of Ed Said. See pg 411. Not that I have the least sympathy for the Ed Said cult – but
there are critiques of “oreintalism” (i.e. certain kinds of dismissive and not well rooted writing , which are much more substantive. ) However our friend gives not the slightest hint of this, prefering to attack Ed Said --a good target one must admit-- without acknowleding much better works. I find the book to be undermined by its its breezy dissmissals of contrary points without any real critique. It very much detracts from his analysis and gives the whole book a polemical feel.

5

Some random thoughts on item 3 in Paul Kennedy’s thesis as Cecil describes it (bear in mind I’m saying this without having read Kennedy’s book).

Any advantage Europeans had in intellectual liberty is fairly recent - but that makes sense, because European world domination is recent too. In the Middle Ages, you were a lot better off being Jewish in Muslim Egypt than you were being Jewish anywhere in Christian Europe. But now a Muslim can fearlessly stand on a street corner in London and hand out anti-Christian pamphlets, while Iran slaps Salman Rushdie with a fatwa ordering his murder when he publishes a little blasphemy against Islam.

So how did the West get ahead in the intellectual liberty category? I think the first step was when the church began successfully competing for power with the state in early medieval Europe. The church became a major financial power, it could and did finance campaigns by one king against another. It also could spark revolts against kings by excommunicating them, and churchmen became major feudal landholders. I’m not that familiar with Asian history, but I don’t know of any case where Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim clergymen held that kind of king-rivaling power. And in Islam, there was no competition between church and state, because they were the same: the caliph was the supreme religious leader and the supreme secular leader rolled into one.

Obviously, this first step alone wasn’t enough to give the West an edge in intellectual liberty (see above about tolerating Judaism in Egypt vs. Europe). But it did lay the groundwork by establishing a rival to the king’s (the state’s) authority.

The second step was the Protestant Reformation. This established a majority and a minority religious sect in just about every kingdom in Europe. When there was only one church in each kingdom, that church was just as enthusiastic about repressing free thought as the king was. But after the Reformation, whichever faction was in the minority (usually the Protestants) knew it couldn’t enforce religious/intellectual uniformity on the majority, however much they would have liked to. The Calvinists and Lutherans didn’t WANT to tolerate other religious opinions; they HAD to, in kingdoms where they were in the minority, and so their followers pleaded for intellectual liberty as a survival tactic. The Catholics were eventually forced to do the same thing in majority-Protestant countries like England, Scotland, and the Netherlands. The Christian church had already been established as a rival to the state; now for the first time it became in part (never in full) a reluctant force for intellectual liberty.

After getting its jump-start from the Reformation, intellectual liberty became self-promoting, like a positive genetic adaptation in evolution. If you had it, you prospered and multiplied; if you didn’t, you suffered and dwindled. Kings who tried to suppress minority religious factions lost important sources of skill and revenue. E.g., in Spain Isabella and Ferdinand kicked out the Jews and Muslims, depriving themselves of their kingdoms’ juiciest fonts of tax money; the Dutch and Algerians absorbed these people and benefited. For the same reason, the persecution of the Huguenots worked directly to the benefit of England and Swtizerland. Suppression of intellectual/religious liberty also had a nasty tendency of provoking devastating civil wars, as France and the Empire both found out.

Recognizing that the above is a simplification of an irreducibly complex story, my recipe for intellectual liberty is: take about thirty weak States. Throw in pan with one strong Church. Boil for 1,000 years. Break Church into small pieces. Stir well.

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I agree with the sentiment expressed in the previous post (Why intellectual liberty in the West?) - if I’m reading it correctly. I think you’re essentially saying that the less the church and religious doctrine are able to meddle with a society, the more progress the people can make - given the geographical advantages Europe had, as professed in the original Straight Dope column.

I see this though, as further evidence that human history is the history of technology - a la James Burke’s “Connections”. This includes the technology of ideas, like Rationalism, Democracy, and Capitalism, to name three big ones.

But like the granularity of conventional history, where you might posit instances like Protestant Reformation, or Newton’s Gravity, or Darwin’s Evolution as being turning points, I’d still maintain you’re missing the point. I really think that human nature has hardly changed at all since our pre-historical existence. A lunatic with a Kalishnikov is no different than a marauding Neolith, save for lethal potency. I’d suggest that likewise, a “normal” person vegetating in front of the tv is experiencing similar emotions to a “cave-man” curling up in front of his fire. (Most likely, ill-advised vague and vacant feelings of comfort and safety.)

In spite of the West’s “triumph”, I’d venture that it’s only our technology that separates us from the vanquished rest of the world. And to reiterate, I’d include the technology of ideas in that definition. One need only walk the streets here in Los Angeles to see how different and yet how similar we must be to early homo sapiens.

And no - I don’t think the answer is more Church, or more religious doctrine.

7

Perhaps I expressed myself poorly, although there is a point hiding between the cracks.

The point I was trying to get at is that China (let’s leave aside post-1949 for neatness’ sake) has done very poorly in a absolute not relative sense. I can’t say offhand how long the “Han people united” thing has been going (a thousand years?) but the returns are unimpressive unless one is a mandarin who values the treasures of state or political stability per se as measures of the performance of political systems. If China had done absolutely well - or even okay - then given its head start Europe could not have dominated. Perhaps I would have been better to use the even less happy case of India.

Now of course the relative performance of China is important in the question of European dominance. If China had had a system that was stable, non-navel gazing and capable of productively transforming surpluses into investments then Europe would not have stood a chance. How much of China’s isolationism was symptomatic of its Confucionist institutional setup and how much was contingent on the vagaries of palace politics is obviously hard to say - although I lean strongly towards the former.

On the matter of Landes: For the specifics, I’ll have to look 'em up - where I am the book ain’t. But more generally, he suffers what all “popular” writers do - he grid-reads and simplifies the story. Whilst it is a good read it is by no means an agnostic tour of the literature (to the small degree that I know it), but no single author is likely to be enough for a live topic. My own thoughts on these issues (shorn of inconvenient realism) come from Douglass North.

On a side note Collounsbury I very much enjoy reading your posts.

8

Well, no, I’m trying to say a little more than that. Lack of intellectual liberty in India and China can’t be explained by greater religious intervention and meddling; both had less powerful churches than the West, but the state was able to suppress free speech and thought.

A strong church was required first to keep the state from having the same monopoly power to suppress dissenting thought that it did in the East. Then that church had to fragment so it couldn’t enforce its own orthodoxy any more.

This sounds reasonable to me. I am simply promoting the early rise of a Church competitive to the state, and the reformation, as an explanation of how the “technology” called intelelctual freedom was created.

But I’m not comfortable calling intellectual liberty a “technology,” because I think of technology as something deliberately created for a specific purpose, like a lathe or a hammer. I view intellectual liberty in the West as being something of an accident, not intended by people who were indispensably necessary to bring it about. John Calvin or Martin Luther would have been aghast had they realized that their actions had opened the way for a society where you and I can have this conversation without being arrested.

Not more Church, and not more religious doctrine, but more churches and varied, mutually contradictory religious doctrines, brought about intellectual liberty in the West. This is not because any one church or doctrine likes intellectual liberty (as a rule each of them would suppress that liberty if they could only become dominant and exclude their competitors). Rather, it’s because churches have limited the power of the state, and it was the state rather than the church that stunted intellectual liberty outside of the West.

9

Picmr and Collounsbury:

It appears you both consider the Chinese’ “current government as very similar to their traditional structures.”

I admit I don’t know a lot about China’s current or traditional government. But one thing I thought I knew was that China traditionally had a bureaucracy selected by merit as reflected by standardized tests, for well over a thousand years. My impression was that today, the Chinese bureaucracy is a party patronage system that would be more recognizable to the Jacksonian Democrats than the 19th-century mandarins.

Please correct me.

10

Danimal writes:
But I’m not comfortable calling intellectual liberty a “technology,” because I think of technology as something deliberately created for a specific purpose, like a lathe or a hammer.

I’d point out that technology can be defined as not only the “end product”, but also the method by which we get there. So this includes ideas and thought methodology alongside tangible artifacts like hammers.

I posted my original thoughts as an aside, so I’m aware that I’m not specifically addressing the question of the “Triumph of the West”, but I still maintain that the history of humans is not the history of Kings and Queens, of dynasties, deities, and religious denominations, but the history of technology. If we’re agreed on that - and I’m not certain we are - I’d rather hear people’s opinions on their own view of what constitutes the larger scales of the granularity of history, competing with, or complimentary to my “technological history theory”.

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I will agree with you at least this far: the history of human progress is the history of technology. Insofar as humans are better off today than the ancient Egyptians, it’s a lot more because our technology is superior than because our government and social institutions are superior.

Dynasty and religion are very important components of our species’ story, if for no other reason than the sheer amount of death and destruction they have caused. Even aside from that they are historical atmosphere; they dominated the consciousness of people throughout history probably even more than technology did. Writing was the single most important technological innovation of the Mesopotamians, far more important to future progress than any of its kings or priests, but Joe Mesopotamian knew the name of his king, knew the name of his god, and didn’t know how to read.

12

Don’t think I’m not fascinated by more than just technological history. To oversimplify my view on the study of human history: “It’s all good!”
My view is that we stand on the shoulders of giants. It boggles my mind to imagine the hardships endured by my ancestors from as recently as the 19th century, let alone any earlier than that. But they endured and gave me the life I have.
I’m lucky. I’m a white, Anglo, English-speaking male resident of the USA. Guys like me wrote the history books. We won. It’s easy for me to purport the subjective history of the human race as is common knowledge. This is almost anthropomorphic in it’s circularity.
I guess I’m trying to say that my original aside was an attempt, from this perpective, not to navel-gaze. To come at the question as if from an extraterrestrial viewpoint.
The original Straight Dope question should perhaps be put to people who don’t enjoy my/our privileges.

P.S. I’m not quite so serious about history at my website:
Daze of Our Lives.
State of the Art 19th Century humor.
Updated Monday to Friday.
http://www.dazeofourlives.com

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I left that alone because I don’t know enough about the subject to comment. I think picmr is not quite on the right track with that…

and thanks picmr…

14

I don’t have my Islamic history book in front of me (*A Short History of Islam * by Karen Armstrong – highly recommended), so I’m going from memory. The caliphate was the supreme political ruler only up through the 900s or so. They then became figureheads, with no political, and steadily decreasing religious, power. During the period of the caliphate, non-Arabs were discouraged, even prohibited, from becoming Muslims. The Muslims themselves seemed to have very little interest in the states they conquered, other than for amassing wealth. Their tolerance of Jews, Christians, and others undoubtedly benefitted their intellectual and technological advancement.

Islam had it’s own “reformation” in the Shiite / Sunni split. This, too, inspired a number of new religious forms to flourish – though it also led to a certain amount of repressions.

As the Islamic empire(s) declined, fundamentalism began to rise. This is not uncommon – when a people feel disenfranchised, they often turn to a higher power for strength and meaning. (Fundamentalist Christians, Orthodox Jews, and even the role of religion in African-American society can all be seen in this light.) Thus, intellectual liberty does not appear to be self-perpetuating. When a society loses political, military, and/or economic power, it often closes ranks and divides itself along religious lines. (The Sunni and Shiite pretty much hate each other now.)

15

I wouldn’t want to make too much of this, but I guess it depends on what is meant by a system of merit and a system of patronage. IIRC there was great emphasis on literature and the traditional musings of place courtiers as opposed to say managerial or scientific expertise. Certainly the system recruited the brightest almost regardless of parentage, but the merit basis seems to me have been assessed as an ability to fit in. A self-perpetuating elite co-opts potential opponents and confines discussion to its own ranks. It seems to me that the current government operates in much the same way, cherry-picking the brightest, deciding policy internally by mysterious means and keeping power centralised whilst reaching out into the provinces with a system of patronage.

16

Even in a meritocracy, someone sets the standards, compiles the tests to be passed.
With, for want of better words, “human nature”, this is bound to become some sort of self-perpetuating system for some favored sub-section of the society, over time.

17

That in a nutshell dazeofourlives is the puzzle. Given that human nature is the same everywhere and that all institutional arrangements are subject to opportunistic white-anting (in economists’ jargon “the iron law of rent-seeking”), how is that some structures work better than others?

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I’m not trying to idealize the pre-Communist Chinese system here, just trying to determine how different it was from today’s. Dayz mentioned that any merit system ends up favoring some sub-section of society, and that’s certainly true (obviously, it at least favored the literate minority!). And what Picmr said about the tests favoring a knowledge of the classics matches with what I’ve heard.*

Still, whatever privileges and advantages Jiang Would-Be-Bureaucrat might have had, he ultimately had to face the (biased) test, and his performance dictated whether and where he would enter the bureaucracy. I thought that wasn’t how it worked any more; that you were recruited from the Party, effectively based on how well you’d shined your superiors’ boots, and never had to face a formal test. This is how it works in most one-party states.

  • One thing I noticed when I read * The Private Life of Chairman Mao * is how much the Chinese Communist edicts and doctrines were modeled to sound like pronouncements from Confucius, Mencius, or Lao Tzu.
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I wouldn’t profess to know the definitive answer to that one. Different structures work better wherever you care to focus.
I know, from having been a manager at a busy restaurant, that you could never have run the place as a democracy - or even as some sort of meritocracy. Point in case was that some of the worst waiters also happened to have winning personalities, and were part of the appeal of the place that kept customers coming back for more. Figure that one out.
I’d recommend any would be philosopher work in the restaurant industry for at least a year, to have the principles worn out of them!

20

Serves me right for glossing over details. I had thought the caliphs held onto power a little longer than that; wasn’t the Almohad al-Mansur a strong and independent caliph as late as 1195? But yes, eventually the caliphs did become figureheads.

I believe my basic point is still valid, though, because I think the Seljuk and Ottoman sultans became supreme religious as well as political leaders, much as the caliphs had been. No basis or precedent to declare certain “spiritual” and “intellectual” matters as a province of the church separate from the state.

Now this is very much the opposite of what I have read. I thought the Persians converted to Islam en masse when the Arabs took them over, and indeed that a great deal of “Arab” medieval philosophy and culture was either Persian or transmitted from Persians.

I too am going from memory here, from the Durants’ * The Age of Faith. *

Agreed.

Yes, but I’m not sure it fragmented individual Muslim states the way the Reformation fragmented individual Christian ones. Looking at the modern Muslim states, they tend to be practically all Shi’ite (Iran), or practically all Sunni (almost everybody else). Iraq is the only modern Muslim state that I know is deeply split on sectarian lines. For that reason I always interpreted Islam’s schism as being more like the Roman Catholic / Eastern Orthodox split than the Reformation, splitting one region from another but not splitting kingdoms internally.

That is a penetrating insight. Discouraging, too.