Why the West?

Lingua Franca, November, 2001

Why the West?
The Unsettled Question of Europe's Ascendancy
by Gale Stokes


NOT MANY HISTORIANS WOULD SUBTITLE A BOOK "THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES."
AND INDEED, Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, the
ambitious book with that subtitle, is not a historian but an evolutionary
biologist. Nonetheless, in the past few years, numerous historians have
joined Diamond in publishing studies with ambitions on a macrohistorical
scale. Many of these works focus on variants of the question that first
inspired Diamond to write his extremely popular book. While Diamond was
doing fieldwork in New Guinea, a native informant asked him, "Why is it
that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea,
but we black people had little cargo of our own?" Diamond knows that from a
genetic point of view humans have been essentially equivalent for tens of
thousands of years, and his fieldwork in New Guinea convinced him that the
peoples there were on average more intelligent than Westerners. Thus the
question seemed to him both puzzling and worth pursuing. And so it has
seemed to many others. 

The issue that has occupied macrohistorians over the past generation can be
stated quite succinctly: Why Europe? Why did a relatively small and
backward periphery on the western fringes of the Eurasian continent burst
onto the world scene in the sixteenth century and by the nineteenth century
become a dominant force in almost all corners of the earth? Until recently,
two responses have dominated. The first is that something unique in the
European past lay behind its eventual economic development and power. This
something unique is often seen as a universal good—such as reason, freedom,
or individualism—that first developed in Europe but ultimately relates, or
should relate, to all human beings. The best-known recent study in this
school is The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some
So Poor (Norton) by the now emeritus Harvard historian David S. Landes. 

The second response is that there was nothing particularly special about
Europe until at least 1500, and probably not until 1800. In this view,
Europe's rise to dominance was due not to any exceptional qualities but to
its ability to seize vast amounts of gold and silver in the New World and
create other forms of wealth through colonial trade. Proponents of this
idea tend to see the last thousand years as dominated primarily by the
cultures and economies of Asia, especially China, with a relatively brief
and probably transient burst of European power in the last quarter of the
millennium. The most successful synthetic study in this vein is ReOrient:
Global Economy in the Asian Age (California) by the world-system theorist
Andre Gunder Frank. 

Both of these approaches tend to be polemical. For example, Landes calls
criticism of scholarship that emphasizes European uniqueness "simply
anti-intellectual; also contrary to fact." Frank believes his analysis
"pulls the historical rug out from under the
anti-historical/scientific—really ideological—Euro-centrism of Marx, Weber,
Toynbee, Polanyi, Braudel, Wallerstein, and most other contemporary social
theorists." Recently, however, a less polarized way of tackling
macrohistorical issues has begun to emerge: the world-historical approach.
World historians tend to see the past thousand years, and maybe even a
longer period, as a series of interactions and encounters in which humanity
as a whole participated in a vast adventure of development, the sources of
which were varied and the impact of which was worldwide. These historians
tend to focus on encounters and comparisons rather than on hegemony and
dominance. 

One touches on these issues with considerable trepidation. The low esteem
in which professional historians have held such figures as Oswald Spengler
and Arnold Toynbee grows in part out of the conviction that their work was
not properly grounded in detailed archival research. But macrohistory does
not have to sacrifice rigor. William H. McNeill, one of the two universally
admired macrohistorians—the other being Fernand Braudel—points out that the
fundamental issue is not the scope of an inquiry but the skill with which a
historian chooses questions and the integrity he or she brings to the task. 

DAVID S. LANDES'S rich study unapologetically credits the world's economic
and social progress over the last thousand years to "Western civilization
and its dissemination." The reason, he believes, is that Europeans invented
systematic economic development. Landes adds that three unique aspects of
European culture were crucial ingredients in Europe's economic growth.
First, science developed as an autonomous method of intellectual inquiry
that successfully disengaged itself from the social constraints of
organized religion and from the political constraints of centralized
authority. Though Europe lacked a political center, its scholars benefited
from the use of a single vehicle of communication: Latin. This common
tongue facilitated an adversarial discourse in which new ideas about the
physical world could be tested, demonstrated, and then accepted across the
continent and eventually across the world. 

Second, Landes espouses a generalized form of Max Weber's thesis that the
values of work, initiative, and investment made the difference for Europe.
Despite his emphasis on science, Landes does not stress the notion of
rationality as such. In his view, "what counts is work, thrift, honesty,
patience, [and] tenacity." The only route to economic success for
individuals or states is working hard, spending less than you earn, and
investing the rest in productive capacity. This is his fundamental
explanation of the problem posed by his book's subtitle: "Why Some Are So
Rich and Some So Poor." For historical reasons—an emphasis on private
property, an experience of political pluralism, a temperate climate, an
urban style—Europeans have, on balance, followed those practices and
therefore have prospered. 

Third, and perhaps most important, Europeans were learners. They "learned
rather greedily," as Joel Mokyr put it in a review of Landes's book. Even
if Europeans possessed indigenous technologies that gave them an advantage
(spectacles, for example), as Landes believes they did, their most vital
asset was the ability to assimilate knowledge from around the world and put
it to use—as in borrowing the concept of zero and rediscovering Aristotle's
Logic from the Arabs and taking paper and gunpowder from the Chinese via
the Muslim world. Landes argues that a systematic resistance to learning
from other cultures had become the greatest handicap of the Chinese by the
eighteenth century and remains the greatest handicap of Arab countries today. 

Although his analysis of European expansion is almost nonexistent, Landes
does not argue that Europeans were beneficent bearers of civilization to a
benighted world. Rather, he relies on his own commonsense law: "When one
group is strong enough to push another around and stands to gain by it, it
will do so." In contrast to the new school of world historians, Landes
believes that specific cultural values enabled technological advances that
in turn made some Europeans strong enough to dominate people in other parts
of the world. Europeans therefore proceeded to do so with great viciousness
and cruelty. By focusing on their victimization in this process, Landes
holds, some postcolonial states have wasted energy that could have been put
into productive work and investment. If one could sum up Landes's advice to
these states in one sentence, it might be "Stop whining and get to work."
This is particularly important, indeed hopeful, advice, he would argue,
because success is not permanent. Advantages are not fixed, gains from
trade are unequal, and different societies react differently to market
signals. Therefore, not only is there hope for undeveloped countries, but
developed countries have little cause to be complacent, because the current
situation "will press hard" on them. 

Despite this hint of possible European decline, the thrust of studies like
Landes's is to identify those distinctive features of European civilization
that lie behind Europe's rise to power and the creation of modernity more
generally. Other historians have placed a greater emphasis on such features
as liberty, individualism, and Christianity. In a review essay, the art
historian Craig Clunas listed some of the less well known linkages that
have been proposed between Western culture and modernity, including the
propensities to think quantitatively, enjoy pornography, and consume sugar.
All such proposals assume the fundamental aptness of the question: What
elements of European civilization led to European success? It is a short
leap from this assumption to outright triumphalism. The paradigmatic book
of this school is, of course, The End of History and the Last Man, in which
Francis Fukuyama argues that after the collapse of Nazism and communism in
the twentieth century, the only remaining model for human organization in
the industrial and communications ages is a combination of market economics
and limited, pluralist, democratic government. 

THIS KIND of confidence provokes heavy fire, as well as resentment and
anger. Critics argue that the undoubted ascendancy of Europe in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries was substantially less inevitable than
most have assumed and was certainly not due to any inherent European
superiorities. Instead of growing out of unique European experiences,
Western domination was almost accidental; it has been brief, and it will be
short-lived. In The Colonizer's Model of the World, the late James M. Blaut
wrote that "the myth of the European miracle is the doctrine that the rise
of Europe resulted, essentially, from historical forces generated within
Europe itself." Blaut assembles a multitude of data undermining the
demographic, climatic, and geographic arguments for European uniqueness. He
makes a strong case that European success was due primarily to Europe's
good fortune in being well placed geographically to exploit the gold and
silver of the Americas and the colonial trade that these resources made
possible. 

While Blaut presents the most systematic critique of Eurocentrism, Andre
Gunder Frank offers the most thorough alternative explanation of the course
of modern history. Frank does not give an inch to Europe, which in his view
made little or no contribution to its nineteenth-century hegemony.
Early-modern Europe was not more advanced "in any way than other regions of
the world." "Europeans did not do anything—let alone modernize—by
themselves." "The Europeans did not in any sense 'create' the world
economic system itself nor develop world 'capitalism.'" "The Europeans had
no exceptional, let alone superior, ethnic, rational, organizational, or
spirit-of-capitalist advantages to offer, diffuse, or do anything else in
Asia." 

Full article: http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0111/cover.html

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org