NorthOfNorth wrote on Feb 23
rd, 2011 at 7:20pm:
Soren wrote on Feb 23
rd, 2011 at 11:32am:
One of the most fascinating aspects of the rise of China is whether it can succeed without adopting the whole-package or whether a failure to do so will make the whole enterprise inherently unstable.
Ironic for anyone to imagine that for China to merely return to its 4000 year old social, cultural and scientific world dominance (as opposed to aspiring to its novelty), it must adopt attitudes that are not Chinese.
It is not at all ironic, if only because China never dominated the world. Not even Asia and throughout its history it had serious difficulties even with dominating China itself.
Killer 'apps': the ideas that propelled the west to world domination
1.Competition: In the 15th century, China was the most advanced civilisation in the world, while Europe was a backwater. But then things changed and by the late 18th century Adam Smith could observe that China had been "long stationary". What happened? Ferguson argues that Europe's fragmented political structure led to competition and encouraged Europeans to seek opportunities in distant lands. The increasingly insular China, by contrast, stagnated.
2. Science: The 16th and 17th centuries were the age of science, with an extraordinary number of breakthroughs occurring. This revolution was, Ferguson writes, "by any scientific measure, wholly European". In the Muslim world, clericism curtailed the spread of knowledge, while in Europe, aided by the printing press, the scope of scholarship dramatically widened. Ultimately, breakthroughs in science led to improvements in weaponry, further cementing the west's advantage.
3. Property: Why did the empire established by the English in north America in the 17th century ultimately prove so much more successful than that established by the Spanish in south America a century earlier? It was, Ferguson contends, because the English settlers brought with them a particular conception of widely distributed property rights and democracy, inherited from John Locke. This proved a far better recipe for success than the Spanish model of concentrated wealth and authoritarianism.
4. Modern science: According to Ferguson, modern medicine was the west's "most remarkable killer application". Western medical advances in the 19th and 20th centuries increased life expectancies across the world, including in the colonies. The French in particular, largely thanks to a lofty conception of their imperial mission, brought significant improvements to public health in western Africa, developing effective vaccinations for diseases such as smallpox and yellow fever.
5. Consumption: The west's dominance of the rest of the world was not only achieved by force; it was also, as Ferguson shows, achieved through the market. The industrial revolution in 18th and 19th century Britain created a model of consumerist society that has proved irresistible, as shown, for example, by the way that the western style of dressing has swept the globe. Yet there's a paradox: how was it that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice has ended up homogenising humanity?
6. Work ethic: As Max Weber noted a century ago, Protestantism was a form of Christianity that encouraged hard work (and just as importantly, Ferguson adds, reading and saving). It isn't a coincidence, he says, that the decline of religion in Europe has led to Europeans becoming the "idlers of the world" (while the more religious US has remained hard-working). Interestingly, Ferguson also argues that China's embrace of hard work is partly because of the spread there of Protestantism.
Niall Ferguson's Civilization begins on 6 March on Channel 4
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/20/niall-ferguson-interview-civilizatio...
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