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A review by lpm100
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Book Review
Civilization: The West and The Rest
4/5 stars
"An answer to neurotic Western oikophobia by a respectable historian"
******
Over some amount of time, so many events happen that historians have to abstract certain characters and happenings for focus and exclude others.
And so of course the same book is never written twice, but even when different books are written-- the books don't necessarily add that much value because not every single event in history is necessary to explain present times.
This author's conceptual framework is to reduce the success of Western countries to 6 "killer apps": competition, science, property, medicine, consumption, work. And no small purpose is to rebut Western academic oikophobia. ("Eurocentrism" is a rhetorical epithet to dismiss out of hand any serious analysis.)
The six killer apps each have a chapter, but not all chapters are about what they say they are about - - sometimes there are very lengthy detours. (For instance, his chapter on work is actually a history about the role of Christianity in Western affluence.)
Historical Recapitulations:
1. China squandered a very large lead because of hubris. (Any other book on Chinese history for the past 500 years will tell us this.)
2. Europe had geographic advantages in that it had navigable waterways and harbors that created kingdoms that were not so large as to be monolithic and uncompetitive (à la China), but not so fragmented has to be unable to take advantage of scale effects to support large projects-- à la Africa. (Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Thomas Sowell's "Cultures" trilogy)
3. Resource Curse: the English settlers in North America set up to build institutions for purposes of land distribution. The Spanish crown was interested to get the most gold and silver for its Treasury, and not to build institutions. (Francis Fukyuama, "The Origins of Political Order.")
4. Speculation on the possible Christianization of China. (Other people have noticed this. Including at least one author that is quoted in the book. David Aikman.)
5. The consumer Society was created in some part by the techniques of mass production learned during the world wars.
Characters/events brought into focus:
1. Frederick the Great, the architect of the clean Prussian bureaucracy.
2. Kemal Ataturk, the modernizer of Turkey.
3. Debate between John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.
4. French Revolution vis-a-vis the American
Factoids:
1. The main Chinese collapse saw the Chinese population reduced by 40% over a period of 70 years.
2. Brazilian slaves were much larger in number than North American ones, and they had the power of manumission. (Most Brazilian slaves didn't live longer than a year, though.)
3. French and Napoleonic wars between 1792 and 1815, 3.5 million dead. 20 times more dead than Americans that died in the US revolution. (4435 people, and 2,260 for the War of 1812.)
5. Germans perfected their concentration camps actually much before WWII - - in what is now Namibia. Between September 1906 and March 1907, a total of 1,032 /1,795 prisoners on Shark Island died. Before the uprising, the Herrero had numbered 80,000; afterward only 15,000 remained. There had been 20,000 Nama; fewer than 10,000 were left when a census was conducted in 1911. Only 1 in 10 Nama prisoners survived the camps.
6. China has been cheap labor for a long time. For a period of about 3 centuries, their wages raised from 3 g of silver per day to 5~6g. That's a doubling time of over 200 years (p.211).
7. The Jewish inventor of the sewing machine, Isaac Singer, had a total of 24 children by 5 different women and had to flee the United States because of bigamy.
8. If we believe the author's quoting David Aikman, Jiang Zemin said that he would like to issue "a decree to make Christianity the official religion of China" (p.287).
9. Trade brings people together and consumerism is a slow but powerful tool in creating and homogenizing people because of their consumption patterns.
Second order thoughts:
1. This book was published long enough ago that some of the author's assertions can be tested.
a. Ferguson was expecting that China was going to become the biggest economy in the world in the next decade, and then the current financial crisis happened. It's essentially a real estate crisis, and those take quite some time to sort out.
b. Also, the current Chinese emperor (Xi Jinping) is trying to destroy indigenous Christianity and is taking China back in the direction of totalitarianism.
c. No (p.312) US governments budget deficits did not get smaller, but have exploded.
d. Chinese Trade balance is the same as a percentage of GDP from 2011 and almost twice as big in dollar terms; "consume more/import more/invest abroad more/innovate more" DID NOT happen.
e. Belt and road initiative has been shown to be a money loser and is falling apart even as we speak.
f. No, mathematics scores don't have a consistent relationship to economic growth. Japan has had great ones for decades and they have been stagnant just as long.
2. "If you build it, they will come." But that which is built will not last. Western Civilization will have its moment, and through some series of missteps, it will be no more. And that has happened many other times. Maybe it will be slow. Maybe it will be fast. And the details will be different, but everyone gets their turn in this farce. Even very long lived civilizations go through repetitive collapse.
3. There are many different theories about the degeneration of some given civilization. That could have been a book in its own right, although Ferguson did give us a taste in the conclusion.
4. It seems like when Western people get things right, they don't even believe in what they have built. (Total fertility rate is below replacement all over the West.) Meanwhile, Africans can't manage a state (or anything else, really) for any reason, and I think they have a total fertility rate of about 7.0. (The author is very aware of Jewish intellect. And Jews in America live in security, and it seems like they have lost interest in having babies: same population numbers for the past 50 years and 1.86 children per women.)
5. Maybe prosperity/Western Civilization contains the seeds of its own destruction. Enough prosperity creates a class of academics that can sit around and generate problems and turn people against each other. ("Hey ho hey ho, Western civ has got to go.")
6. It has been known for a long time that democracies destroy themselves. Maybe with increased democracy in what is the "West," the same thing is happening again? It is also been asserted before - - about 40 years ago - - by Joseph Tainter that: civilizations reach complexity levels until there is no further benefit from the complexity and then they collapse again.
Verdict: it does not hurt to read this book, and I believe that it might be a keeper--at least until another of these panoramic history books comes along to update it.
Vocabulary:
Eight legged essay
Four Books and Five Classics of Confucianism
pathic
catamite
fee simple
fee tail
freehold
copyhold
palatine
cazique
headright
leet-men
coruscating
subaltern
punkah wallah
equipoise
Quotes:
"A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace."
"Christianity was stuffed with miracles kind of contradictions and absurdities, was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the orientals and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it ans some imbeciles actually believed it." (p.76, Frederick The Great).
"No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible." (p.101)
".... First demonstration in the Modern Age of the grim truth that revolutions devour their own children." (p.153)
"Western civilization was about to encounter its most dangerous foe: itself" (p.181).
"Each European power had its own distinctive way of scrambling for Africa. The French... favored railways and health centers. The British.... built mission schools. The Belgians turned the Congo into a vast slave state. The Portuguese did as little as possible. The Germans..... for them, colonizing Africa was a giant experiment to test, among other things, a racial theory." (p.176).
"The slaughterhouse of the Western front was like a vast and terrifying laboratory for medical science, producing significant advances in surgery, not to mention psychiatry. The skin graft and antiseptic irrigation of wounds..... The earliest blood transfusions. For the first time, all British soldiers were vaccinated against typhoid, and wounded soldiers were routinely given anti-tetanus shots.
"If we want everything to stay as it is, everything will have to change." (p.215- Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa)
"There is more power in rock music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than in the entire Red Army." (p.244)
Civilization: The West and The Rest
4/5 stars
"An answer to neurotic Western oikophobia by a respectable historian"
******
Over some amount of time, so many events happen that historians have to abstract certain characters and happenings for focus and exclude others.
And so of course the same book is never written twice, but even when different books are written-- the books don't necessarily add that much value because not every single event in history is necessary to explain present times.
This author's conceptual framework is to reduce the success of Western countries to 6 "killer apps": competition, science, property, medicine, consumption, work. And no small purpose is to rebut Western academic oikophobia. ("Eurocentrism" is a rhetorical epithet to dismiss out of hand any serious analysis.)
The six killer apps each have a chapter, but not all chapters are about what they say they are about - - sometimes there are very lengthy detours. (For instance, his chapter on work is actually a history about the role of Christianity in Western affluence.)
Historical Recapitulations:
1. China squandered a very large lead because of hubris. (Any other book on Chinese history for the past 500 years will tell us this.)
2. Europe had geographic advantages in that it had navigable waterways and harbors that created kingdoms that were not so large as to be monolithic and uncompetitive (à la China), but not so fragmented has to be unable to take advantage of scale effects to support large projects-- à la Africa. (Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Thomas Sowell's "Cultures" trilogy)
3. Resource Curse: the English settlers in North America set up to build institutions for purposes of land distribution. The Spanish crown was interested to get the most gold and silver for its Treasury, and not to build institutions. (Francis Fukyuama, "The Origins of Political Order.")
4. Speculation on the possible Christianization of China. (Other people have noticed this. Including at least one author that is quoted in the book. David Aikman.)
5. The consumer Society was created in some part by the techniques of mass production learned during the world wars.
Characters/events brought into focus:
1. Frederick the Great, the architect of the clean Prussian bureaucracy.
2. Kemal Ataturk, the modernizer of Turkey.
3. Debate between John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.
4. French Revolution vis-a-vis the American
Factoids:
1. The main Chinese collapse saw the Chinese population reduced by 40% over a period of 70 years.
2. Brazilian slaves were much larger in number than North American ones, and they had the power of manumission. (Most Brazilian slaves didn't live longer than a year, though.)
3. French and Napoleonic wars between 1792 and 1815, 3.5 million dead. 20 times more dead than Americans that died in the US revolution. (4435 people, and 2,260 for the War of 1812.)
5. Germans perfected their concentration camps actually much before WWII - - in what is now Namibia. Between September 1906 and March 1907, a total of 1,032 /1,795 prisoners on Shark Island died. Before the uprising, the Herrero had numbered 80,000; afterward only 15,000 remained. There had been 20,000 Nama; fewer than 10,000 were left when a census was conducted in 1911. Only 1 in 10 Nama prisoners survived the camps.
6. China has been cheap labor for a long time. For a period of about 3 centuries, their wages raised from 3 g of silver per day to 5~6g. That's a doubling time of over 200 years (p.211).
7. The Jewish inventor of the sewing machine, Isaac Singer, had a total of 24 children by 5 different women and had to flee the United States because of bigamy.
8. If we believe the author's quoting David Aikman, Jiang Zemin said that he would like to issue "a decree to make Christianity the official religion of China" (p.287).
9. Trade brings people together and consumerism is a slow but powerful tool in creating and homogenizing people because of their consumption patterns.
Second order thoughts:
1. This book was published long enough ago that some of the author's assertions can be tested.
a. Ferguson was expecting that China was going to become the biggest economy in the world in the next decade, and then the current financial crisis happened. It's essentially a real estate crisis, and those take quite some time to sort out.
b. Also, the current Chinese emperor (Xi Jinping) is trying to destroy indigenous Christianity and is taking China back in the direction of totalitarianism.
c. No (p.312) US governments budget deficits did not get smaller, but have exploded.
d. Chinese Trade balance is the same as a percentage of GDP from 2011 and almost twice as big in dollar terms; "consume more/import more/invest abroad more/innovate more" DID NOT happen.
e. Belt and road initiative has been shown to be a money loser and is falling apart even as we speak.
f. No, mathematics scores don't have a consistent relationship to economic growth. Japan has had great ones for decades and they have been stagnant just as long.
2. "If you build it, they will come." But that which is built will not last. Western Civilization will have its moment, and through some series of missteps, it will be no more. And that has happened many other times. Maybe it will be slow. Maybe it will be fast. And the details will be different, but everyone gets their turn in this farce. Even very long lived civilizations go through repetitive collapse.
3. There are many different theories about the degeneration of some given civilization. That could have been a book in its own right, although Ferguson did give us a taste in the conclusion.
4. It seems like when Western people get things right, they don't even believe in what they have built. (Total fertility rate is below replacement all over the West.) Meanwhile, Africans can't manage a state (or anything else, really) for any reason, and I think they have a total fertility rate of about 7.0. (The author is very aware of Jewish intellect. And Jews in America live in security, and it seems like they have lost interest in having babies: same population numbers for the past 50 years and 1.86 children per women.)
5. Maybe prosperity/Western Civilization contains the seeds of its own destruction. Enough prosperity creates a class of academics that can sit around and generate problems and turn people against each other. ("Hey ho hey ho, Western civ has got to go.")
6. It has been known for a long time that democracies destroy themselves. Maybe with increased democracy in what is the "West," the same thing is happening again? It is also been asserted before - - about 40 years ago - - by Joseph Tainter that: civilizations reach complexity levels until there is no further benefit from the complexity and then they collapse again.
Verdict: it does not hurt to read this book, and I believe that it might be a keeper--at least until another of these panoramic history books comes along to update it.
Vocabulary:
Eight legged essay
Four Books and Five Classics of Confucianism
pathic
catamite
fee simple
fee tail
freehold
copyhold
palatine
cazique
headright
leet-men
coruscating
subaltern
punkah wallah
equipoise
Quotes:
"A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace."
"Christianity was stuffed with miracles kind of contradictions and absurdities, was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the orientals and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it ans some imbeciles actually believed it." (p.76, Frederick The Great).
"No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible." (p.101)
".... First demonstration in the Modern Age of the grim truth that revolutions devour their own children." (p.153)
"Western civilization was about to encounter its most dangerous foe: itself" (p.181).
"Each European power had its own distinctive way of scrambling for Africa. The French... favored railways and health centers. The British.... built mission schools. The Belgians turned the Congo into a vast slave state. The Portuguese did as little as possible. The Germans..... for them, colonizing Africa was a giant experiment to test, among other things, a racial theory." (p.176).
"The slaughterhouse of the Western front was like a vast and terrifying laboratory for medical science, producing significant advances in surgery, not to mention psychiatry. The skin graft and antiseptic irrigation of wounds..... The earliest blood transfusions. For the first time, all British soldiers were vaccinated against typhoid, and wounded soldiers were routinely given anti-tetanus shots.
"If we want everything to stay as it is, everything will have to change." (p.215- Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa)
"There is more power in rock music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than in the entire Red Army." (p.244)