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The Dark Future of the West

Will the East dominate the West by the end of this century? Absolutely, says Stanford professor of classics and history Ian Morris; and there is little the West can hope to do about it. In a talk hosted by the New America Foundation and the Atlantic Council in Washington – “Will the East dominate the […]

Will the East dominate the West by the end of this century? Absolutely, says Stanford professor of classics and history Ian Morris; and there is little the West can hope to do about it.

In a talk hosted by the New America Foundation and the Atlantic Council in Washington – “Will the East dominate the West in the 21st Century?” – Professor Morris elaborated on his recent book, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future. With his background in the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, Morris introduces a long view to the currently fashionable topic of the fate of civilizations, also tackled by Niall Ferguson in latest bestseller Civilization: the West and the Rest. As the subtitle of Morris’ book belies, these works of history find their niche through addressing popular concerns about the future. Ferguson confirmed this appeal in a congratulatory review of Why the Rest Rules: “one really scholarly book about the past is worth a hundred fanciful works of futurology.”

While Ferguson identifies a series of transferable “killer applications” for civilizational ascendancy, such as science, democracy and medicine, capable of being “downloaded” by any aspiring power, Morris puts forward the accidents of geography – and the adaptive responses it demands from “lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable ways of doing things” – rather than civilizational genius as the primary motor of historical change. This sets the deterministic tone of the grand predictions that follow.

Using an index of social development of his own invention to measure East-West competition stretching back to the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago, carefully constructed graphs show East and West more or less keeping pace with each other up until the relative end of the timescale, revealing little more than the blind drift of history. The Roman Empire marked an unprecedented peak of development, during which the West rose significantly above the East, only to have the roles reversed as the Empire disintegrated and Europe entered its Dark Age. The East kept up its lead until Europe entered the early modern period in the 17th century – an era of Western dominance (just about) still ongoing.

According to the inputs of Morris’ index, the East will overtake the West in “social development” at 2103 – the remarkably exact end-date he assigns to Western supremacy. As this deterministic forecast has it, there is little the West can do now to reverse this trend. The seeds for Western decline and Eastern ascendance were planted in the choices made one hundred years ago or more. Decisions over debt ceilings and military interventions in non-Western lands will have little effect on the broader tipping of the see-saw. The best the West can do is to manage prudently and make provisions for its downward trajectory, which China failed to do when it rejected Britain’s free trade embassy in 1783, and neglected to properly fortify the Pearl and Yangtze deltas against British naval power in 1840.

However, with the exponential advance in computer technology and bioscience, and the inevitable transformation it will impose on the human experience, old geographical markers may cease to matter – “social development determines what geography means,” Morris said. With this, the East-West distinction will melt away, rendering the predicted victory of the East meaningless. But it is not altogether clear how apt the distinction was in the first place. Quite what the East and West both meant 12,000 years ago at the beginning of Morris’ timescale, considering the great migrations and cultural cross-fertilizations that would follow, is difficult to fathom. Indeed, what is most striking in all this modish talk of civilizational rise and fall is the broad extent to which the East-West paradigm is accepted.

The West – namely, Europe, America and Australasia – can claim some integrity through a historically shared religion, a consensus on political and economic organization, and a common philosophical framework derived from ancient Athens. The same cannot be said of the East. Take a short glance at China and India, the two principal emergent powers of the East. Buddhism may have reached China from India through the Himalayan corridors, but the affinity largely ends there; in ethnicity, language, religion, and politics, they are continents apart – not to mention that their strategic interests are fundamentally at odds and mutual suspicion reigns.

Furthermore, the East-West paradigm leaves vast question marks hovering over regions such as Africa – is its future development and capacity for global competitiveness to be written off entirely? – and Latin America, where countries such as Brazil are becoming world economic players, and whose membership in the West is very much open to question. The world we live in is far from bipolar, as it may have been during the Cold War. It may be, in fact, a world nobody truly rules.

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