How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity Read online

  HOW THE WEST

  WON

  The Neglected Story of

  the Triumph of Modernity

  Rodney Stark

  Wilmington, Delaware

  Contents

  Introduction

  What You Don’t Know about the Rise of the West

  Part I Classical Beginnings (500 BC–AD 500)

  1 Stagnant Empires and the Greek “Miracle”

  2 Jerusalem’s Rational God

  3 The Roman Interlude

  Part II The Not-So-Dark Ages (500–1200)

  4 The Blessings of Disunity

  5 Northern Lights over Christendom

  6 Freedom and Capitalism

  Part III Medieval Transformations (1200–1500)

  7 Climate, Plague, and Social Change

  8 The Pursuit of Knowledge

  9 Industry, Trade, and Technology

  10 Discovering the World

  Part IV The Dawn of Modernity (1500–1750)

  11 New World Conquests and Colonies

  12 The Golden Empire

  13 The Lutheran Reformation: Myths and Realities

  14 Exposing Muslim Illusions

  15 Science Comes of Age

  Part V Modernity (1750– )

  16 The Industrial Revolution

  17 Liberty and Prosperity

  18 Globalization and Colonialism

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction

  What You Don’t Know about the Rise of the West

  This is a remarkably unfashionable book.

  Forty years ago the most important and popular freshman course at the best American colleges and universities was “Western Civilization.” It not only covered the general history of the West but also included historical surveys of art, music, literature, philosophy, and science. But this course has long since disappeared from most college catalogues on grounds that Western civilization is but one of many civilizations and it is ethnocentric and arrogant for us to study ours.1

  It is widely claimed that to offer a course in “Western Civilization” is to become an apologist “for Western hegemony and oppression” (as the classicist Bruce Thornton aptly put it).2 Thus, Stanford dropped its widely admired “Western Civilization” course just months after the Reverend Jesse Jackson came on campus and led members of the Black Student Union in chants of “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ has got to go.”3 More recently, faculty at the University of Texas condemned “Western Civilization” courses as inherently right wing, and Yale even returned a $20 million contribution rather than reinstate the course.

  To the extent that this policy prevails, Americans will become increasingly ignorant of how the modern world came to be. Worse yet, they are in danger of being badly misled by a flood of absurd, politically correct fabrications, all of them popular on college campuses: That the Greeks copied their whole culture from black Egyptians.4 That European science originated in Islam.5 That Western affluence was stolen from non-Western societies.6 That Western modernity was really produced in China, and not so very long ago.7 The truth is that, although the West wisely adopted bits and pieces of technology from Asia, modernity is entirely the product of Western civilization.

  I use the term modernity to identify that fundamental store of scientific knowledge and procedures, powerful technologies, artistic achievements, political freedoms, economic arrangements, moral sensibilities, and improved standards of living that characterize Western nations and are now revolutionizing life in the rest of the world. For there is another truth: to the extent that other cultures have failed to adopt at least major aspects of Western ways, they remain backward and impoverished.

  Ideas Matter

  This book is not, however, simply a summary of the standard lessons of the old “Western Civilization” classes. Despite their value, these courses usually were far too enamored of philosophy and art, far too reluctant to acknowledge the positive effects of Christianity, and amazingly oblivious to advances in technology, especially those transforming mundane activities such as farming and banking.

  In addition, while writing this volume I frequently found it necessary to challenge the received wisdom about Western history. To mention only a few examples:

  •

  Rather than a great tragedy, the fall of Rome was the single most beneficial event in the rise of Western civilization. The many stultifying centuries of Roman rule saw only two significant instances of progress: the invention of concrete and the rise of Christianity, the latter taking place despite Roman attempts to prevent it.

  •

  The “Dark Ages” never happened—that was an era of remarkable progress and innovation that included the invention of capitalism.

  •

  The crusaders did not march east in pursuit of land and loot. They went deeply into debt to finance their participation in what they regarded as a religious mission. Most thought it unlikely that they would live to return (and most didn’t).

  •

  Although still ignored by most historians, dramatic changes in climate played a major role in the rise of the West—a period of unusually warm weather (from about 800 to about 1250) was followed by centuries of extreme cold, now known as the Little Ice Age (from about 1300 to about 1850).

  •

  There was no “Scientific Revolution” during the seventeenth century—these brilliant achievements were the culmination of normal scientific progress stretching back to the founding of universities in the twelfth century by Scholastic natural philosophers.

  •

  The Reformations did not result in religious freedom but merely replaced repressive Catholic monopoly churches with equally repressive Protestant monopoly churches (it became a serious criminal offense to celebrate the Mass in most of Protestant Europe).

  •

  Europe did not grow rich by draining wealth from its worldwide colonies; in fact, the colonies drained wealth from Europe—and meanwhile gained the benefits of modernity.

  Also, both the textbooks and the instructors involved in the old “Western Civ” courses were content merely to describe the rise of Western civilization. They usually avoided any comparisons with Islam or Asia and ignored the issue of why modernity happened only in the West. That is the neglected story I aim to tell.

  To explore that question is not ethnocentric; it is the only way to develop an informed understanding of how and why the modern world emerged as it did.

  In early times China was far ahead of Europe in terms of many vital technologies. But when Portuguese voyagers reached China in 1517, they found a backward society in which the privileged classes were far more concerned with crippling young girls by binding their feet than with developing more productive agriculture—despite frequent famines. Why?

  Or why did the powerful Ottoman Empire depend on Western foreigners to provide it with fleets and arms?8

  Or how was it possible for a relative handful of British officials, aided by a few regular army officers and noncommissioned officers, to rule the enormous Indian subcontinent?

  Or, to change the focus, why did science and democracy originate in the West, along with representational art, chimneys, soap, pipe organs, and a system of musical notation? Why was it that for several hundred years beginning in the thirteenth century only Europeans had eyeglasses and mechanical clocks? And what about telescopes, microscopes, and periscopes?

  There have been many attempts to answer these questions. Several recent authors attribute it all to favorable geography—that Europe benefited from a benign climate, m
ore fertile fields, and abundant natural resources, especially iron and coal.9 But, as Victor Davis Hanson pointed out in his book Carnage and Culture, “China, India, and Africa are especially blessed in natural ores, and enjoy growing seasons superior to those of northern Europe.”10 Moreover, much of Europe was covered with dense hardwood forests that could not readily be cleared to permit farming or grazing until iron tools became available. Little wonder that Europe was long occupied by cultures far behind those of the Middle East and Asia.

  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”

  One 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 g
rasping 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.