Civilization: The West and the Rest Paperback – Illustrated, October 30, 2012

Civilization by Niall Ferguson addresses the most important topic of our time. Empires rise and fall. The American empire took over from the British between the two wars. It did so on the basis of economic along with military might which underpin all empires. It is tautological that all empires before America's have declined into senescence. Is this now happening to America? Is western civilization in its final stages? Civilization gives much insight on this topic. The up-and-coming empire that may or may not supplant western civilization is that of China. China - the Middle Kingdom - was the reigning empire before the year 1500. To fathom the future of something as complex as that of empire it is vital to look back and understand why empires in the past have risen and fallen. Ferguson does journeyman's work on this.The preface is worth the price of admission. It is notable that the top business economist of the second half of the 20th century, Henry Kaufman of Solomon Brothers fame, induced Ferguson to move from London to the center of money and power, Manhattan. If America is going down, its decline will be dated from the epicentral destruction of Manhattan's twin towers. The value of the US dollar - also highly symbolic - peaked a few short months later, that is, historically coincident with. The closely following collapse of US financial markets in 2008 and the torpid recovery since, including the imploding financial system of Europe, puts the rise of China and relative fall of western civilization in high relief. In his preface, Ferguson gives a wonderful explication of how history - a living past - can help us discern possible futures so as to make better decisions today. He quotes in detail the thought process of R.G. Collingwood. History offers something different from scientific rules, namely insight. "The key point of the book is to understand what made ... [western] civilization expand so spectacularly in its wealth, influence, and power." This, as Ferguson emphasizes, requires telling the story with analytics, evidence, and testable counterfactual questions. By such methodology Ferguson arrives at six crucial innovations by which in his view western civilization climbed to the top, and which are the heart of the book.In his introductory chapter, Ferguson quashes the modernist absurdity of relativism - that all civilizations are in some sense equal. He does so by introducing a number of nonpareil concepts like life expectancy across time and place, the economic system, and non-economic institutions, all of which dynamically over time differentiated western civilization from the rest of the world during the relevant timespan. He then lays out what he believes are the mainsprings of the West's rise - six "novel complexes of institutions and associated ideas and behaviors": Competition, Science, Property Rights, Medicine, The Consumer Society, and The Work Ethic. These are the subjects of chapters 1-6.The difficulty of conceptualizing a work like this lies in finding an Archimedean-like place far enough removed to get leverage on the trees so as to reveal the breadth and nature of the forest as well as the species of trees that make it up. This ability, though it is not normally put this way, is why we revere Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Gibbon, Adam Smith and statesmen like Gandhi and Churchill and Deng Xiaoping. They got their arms around big things and moved the world of ideas. Not every thought has to be original, and not every tree has to be (or indeed can be) put under the lens. What matters is that the kaleidoscope of world view gets shifted to make more sense out of what is otherwise chaos. Civilization has changed my view of the world by giving me a concrete set of pegs on which to hang the various aspects of causality in my quest to understand empire. Competition is the sine qua non of free market economics. How can it not be that the dynamic effect of competition amongst the splintered states of Europe from 1500 on was a powerful force moving western civilization forward? Of course competition was not a sufficient force, it took more. Gutenberg's printing press set off the intellectual revolution (innovation) that led to the scientific method (Chapter 2). Of course sanctity of the individual's right to own Property (Chapter 3) is at the motivational heart of saving that permits accumulation of capital, which in turn is a necessary means of production to grow an economy. The East has adopted capitalism now, no matter that it be called something else, and is surging economically since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spread of globalism. Western medicine (Chapter 4) has made all the difference to life span. It's hardly a stretch to think it was a game changer for the West. And, there is more (of a secondary nature) in this chapter on how colonization by Europe, which had its down side, also had a powerful upside on many peoples outside the West via the travels of medicine. Consumption (Chapter 5) is an odd one, and it is thought provoking to view this largest component of GDP from Ferguson's perspective. I did not realize that textiles were the main industrial product at first in England and then synchronously at the take-off stage of every country which has gotten on the up escalator thereafter. China as well. You can almost predict textile production will at some point come to the Congo. And you will never look at a pair of jeans the same way again after reading Civilization. Work (Chapter 6) goes without saying. Ferguson gets you thinking about how the work ethic in America is slipping, even more so in Europe, and how statistically work effort is almost in a different ballpark in the East (they work more hours). This has implications for the future of empire, and from the broadest of contexts points to policy implications about work incentives here in America. This frame should be a starting point for thinking about the welfare state and optimal taxation of work effort. Ferguson puts his sixth finger squarely on it. I leave his conclusion for to the reader to discover. Highly recommended with 5 stars.

The elevator pitch for Niall Ferguson's "Civilization: The West and the Rest" is simple: Western civilization has risen to dominate world affairs over the last five hundred years, a record unmatched in world history and at odds with its population and geography relative to other countries and civilizations, due to six "killer apps" that have provided an advantage on the international stage. Further, it may be the West's loss of those same "apps" that is leading to decline now.Ferguson pegs the rise of the West to dominance at about the same time as the discovery of the Americas, and so, having just finished a look at that chapter of history in "1491" and "1493", I decided to take a closer look at Ferguson's argument. What was the secret of the West? And could we really be headed towards decline or collapse?Where many histories today focus on the specific "modules" of history, drilling down to look closely at specific persons or events (think Goodwin's "Team of Rivals" on Abraham Lincoln's political management or Horowitz's "Midnight Rising" on the John Brown raid at Harper's Ferry), Ferguson takes another tact by looking at the broad strokes of history to find themes, the grand "narratives" of history, as he calls them. Where other historians dig into the details, Ferguson wants to look at the big picture. As he explains in the preface:"Watching my three children grow up, I had the uneasy feeling that they were learning less history than I had learned at their age, not because they had bad teachers but because they had bad history books and even worse examinations. Watching the financial crisis [of the late 2000s] unfold, I realized that they were far from alone, for it seemed as if only a handful of people in the banks and treasuries of the Western world had more than the sketchiest information about the last Depression. For roughly thirty years, young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated `modules', not narratives, much less chronologies. They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast. They have been encouraged to feel empathy with imagined Roman centurions or Holocaust victims, not to write essays about why and how their predicaments arose."With that flippant, matter of fact, almost "devil-may-care" attitude then, Ferguson determines to take the reader through a grand narrative of the last five hundred years, identifying six "killer apps" that Western civilization adopted to rise to a dominance unmatched in breadth and duration in human history. It is this broad overview, as told in Ferguson's urgent and quick-witted voice, that makes the extended argument so interesting and in an age of multicultural relativism, refreshing. Welding his argument--not just about the cause of Western civilization's success, but also that "the historian can commune with the dead by imaginatively reconstructing their experiences" to inform and predict the future--Ferguson spins together the documents, events, and personalities to form a narrative, a story, about why the West succeeded in the face of larger, richer, and, at the onset, more wealthy civilizations.The "tools" to which he attributes the rise of the West are likened to "apps," downloadable software that augment computers and mobile devices. By looking at the narrative, Ferguson finds the roots of the West's success, as well as why, perhaps, the West as begun to decline while other civilizations advance. Not specific to the West, but, like the real world apps in the metaphor, the values can be "downloaded" by any culture for similar results, and in the closing Ferguson addresses the adaptation by non-Western cultures that have done, and are doing, just that with success.The "apps" Ferguson finds, while not necessarily surprising, are informative: competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumption and the birth of the "consumer society" ("without which the Industrial Revolution would have been unsustainable") and Max Weber's Protestant "work ethic". While the narrative is anything but chronological, Ferguson's grasp of history and the sweeping strokes with which he paints the narrative provide fascinating reading. One cannot sense, however, that Ferguson, almost anything but apologetic, is on the verge of glorying in the success of the British Empire during its hey-day as a colonial power, noting with statistical explanation the improvements brought to the world through Western influence, whether it be in medicine, literacy, and education. Or blue jeans, for in the end, one side effect of rise of the West is not diversity, but conformity as cultures imitate and emulate Western styles, habits, and philosophy.Ironically to this writer, who sees such deep and lasting value in the political institutions of the West, Ferguson notes that one area where the West has not been uniformly imitated is the political."Only in the realm of political institutions does there remain significant global diversity, with a wide range of governments around the world resisting the idea of the rule of law, with its protection of individual rights, as the foundation for meaningful representative government."In other words, we'll take your blue jeans, your medicine, even your work ethic, but you can keep the Bill of Rights and representative government, they say. Indeed, it is that imitation of the West that has brought China from the depths of the Cultural Revolution to heights today when its economy can weather the financial crisis without more than a hiccup.After Ferguson's narrative through the six "apps", then, we reach the essential question suggested by any study of the West's rise: is the West now in decline? And if so, is it too late to reverse?Perhaps not. Although China's rise seems ominous, and indeed, Ferguson cites China's relative nonchalance towards doing business with the dictators and warlords of the world business "it's just business" as evidence that China is more concerned about rising than its popularity, China still faces problems that could arrest its progress, especially from social unrest, political pressure from its growing and unrepresented middle-class, or friction with its neighbors in Asia.Noting that a "retreat from the mountains of the Hindu Kush" (Afghanistan) seems to proceed the fall of any empire--be it Alexander's, British, Russian, or most recently American--Ferguson is unwilling to give up on the West, yet. No, the things that set the West apart are no longer distinct, but nor has the entire package of "apps" been embraced."The Chinese have got capitalism. The Iranians have got science. The Russians have got democracy. The Africans are (slowly) getting modern medicine. And the Turks have got the consumer society. But what this means is that Western modes of operation are not in decline but are flourishing nearly everywhere, with only a few remaining pockets of resistance. A growing number of Resterners [Ferguson's name for non-Westerners] are sleeping, showering, dressing, working, playing, eating, drinking and travelling like Westerners. Moreover, as we have seen, Western civilization is more than just one thing; it is a package. It is about political pluralism (multiple states and multiple authorities) as well as capitalism; it is about the freedom of thought as well as the scientific method; it is about the rule of law and property rights as well as democracy. Even today, the West still has more of these institutional advantages than the Rest. The Chinese do not have political competition. The Iranians do not have freedom of conscience. They get to vote in Russia, but the rule of law there is a sham. In none of these countries is there a free press. These differences may explain why, for example, all three countries lag behind Western countries in qualitative indices that measure`national innovative development' and `national innovation capacity'."True, the West is not without its faults, he says, but our downfall will come from within, not from external pressure. It's the loss of the "killer apps" by our culture that will, in the long and short run, lead to our continued decline. Don't mistake the adoption, however, by others as the reason for the decline of the West. Rather, it is the West's abandonment of the values that brought them prominence that is leading to the decline. Here, again, Ferguson picks up the theme in his preface--we must learn from history. If we are to maintain the great values that gave the West its rise, we must study and learn the great works--the documents--that teach those values.* Add up all the values, and, like any follower of Churchill, it adds up to courage and action."Today, as then [1938 and the German Nazi threat to Western civilization], the biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity - and by the historical ignorance that feeds it."__________________________* Ferguson's recommended "standard works" for Western civilization are:The King James BibleIsaac Newton's PrincipaJohn Locke's Two Treatises of GovernmentAdam Smith's Moral Sentiments and Wealth of NationsEdmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in FranceCharles Darwin's Origin of the SpeciesWilliam Shakespeare's playsSelected speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Winston ChurchillAlso, if he could select only one of the above, it would be Shakespeare's collected works.