Why the West Rules - For Now
The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
By: Ian Morris
Published: October 12, 2010
Format: Hardcover, 768 pages
ISBN 10: 0-7710-6455-1
ISBN 13: 978-0-7710-6455-5
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
"Geography determined where in the world social development would rise fastest, but rising social development changed what geography meant", writes Willard Professor of Classics, Professor of History, and Director of the Archaeology Center at Stanford University, Ian Morris, in his panoramic and epic historical and archeological study Why the West Rules - For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. The author challenges both the long term lock in theory, and the short term accident theory, as being insufficient to explain the current dominance of the West.
Ian Morris presents a sweeping historical panorama that extends across tens of thousands of years of human existence. The author describes the rise of human civilization in both the West and the East, and how their initial parallel social development led eventually to a millennia long lead for the West. For the author, human civilization advances through the desire by people to do things easier, to reduce their levels of fear, and to increase their personal wealth. While many studies end with these social and psychological factors, Ian Morris adds more elements to his analysis. He considers the impact of geography on social development, and conversely the effects of that development on the importance of geography. The author also points to how what he calls the core of the civilization becomes rigid and decays, while the peripheries discover fresh advantages in what was considered previously as backwardness. The new peripheral innovations extend the core and often replace the previous core as the driving ideas of the society.
Ian Morris (photo left) demonstrates that previous theories of great individuals, race, and culture do not explain the rise and dominance of the West. Those concepts are replaced by the efforts of large groups of people, and by the subtle but critical effects of geography. Geography affected the social development of both East and West through relative location, the availability of the critical resource of the era, population movement, and disease. At the same time, the activities and ideas of the masses of people interacted with the geography, magnifying the importance of both factors. Even popular thought and philosophy are considered as being time relevant. For Ian Morris, each era got the thought it needed at the time, as an adjunct to the larger relationships of human activity, geography, and the interplay between the cultural core and periphery. The author describes technology as both a driver of culture, and it's result. Technology, for the author, only appears and becomes useful if a culture is prepared to receive it and its applications. The different appearance of technology, at various times in West and East, resulted from the social developmental conditions that required it.
For me, the power of the book is how Ian Morris takes a multi-disciplinary approach to his sweeping narrative to deepen the understanding of how and why the West and East developed as they did over the millenia. Through the combination of the latest research into every field from history and archeology to neuroscience and psychology, Ian Morris extends the scope of his study beyond the usual limits to create a more holistic result. Along with the wide overview of history, the author also provides a bold attempt at quantification of the various aspects of a culture's social development. His numerical scale offers a base standard for comparison of the relative levels of development in different cultures across very different times. The social development scale, even with the limitations acknowledged by the author, provides a useful baseline that adds perspective to different cultures and eras.
Ian Morris also takes a tentative exploration of the future social development of West and East, and which society will lead in the future. The author overcomes the short term accident and long term lock in theories of history by describing how the East actually took over the lead at the end of the Roman Empire period, but relinquished it again during the Industrial Revolution. Failing to recognize this transfer of leadership back and forth removes both of the competing dominance schools from consideration, as both fail to account for the transitions. By taking an overview of history over ten thousand years, Ian Morris is able to overcome this theoretical shortcoming. By enhancing his study with the numerical social development scale, Ian Morris adds a richer dimension to the discussion of why the West holds the lead at the moment.
I highly recommend the original and landmark book Why the West Rules - For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris, to anyone seeking a deeper and more comprehensive historical analysis of the current global dominance by the West. The author offers a lively discussion of history that reads more kike a novel than a historical study, widening the appeal of the book to include a larger audience. The author's writing and accessibility makes this book a tremendous popular history.
Read the enjoyable and thought provoking book Why the West Rules - For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris, and discover the many reasons why the West is the current globally dominant culture, and how all of that could change within the twenty-first century, but not for the usual reasons offered by most pundits. This book will open your eyes to the past and how it affects the present and the future.
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