by Ian Morris
February 6th, 2021
Most scholars are specialists: they zero in on one tiny area that nobody else has worked on and quickly become “The World’s Leading Authority on the World’s Least Important Subject”. This is a safe way to build a successful academic career. A few rare individuals buck the trend and tackle the big issues. They don’t just eschew the trees for the forest — they look at the whole damn planet.
Ian Morris has done this. His book looks at human history from the highest possible altitude, attempting to see the biggest of pictures by integrating everything we know about, well, just about everything. Sadly, he fails to include several crucial areas (mathematics, science, and technology), and this omission ruins his effort. More on this later.
The core of Morris’ idea is a single variable he calls social development. This is sum of four key components. First is energy capture, as measured by human caloric intake, use of domesticated animals such as horses and oxen, harvesting of energy sources such as as wind, moving water, wood, and coal.
The second is social organization, as measured by the population of the largest city in a civilization. Obviously, crowding a lot of people together in a city, feeding them, organizing their labors, and keeping order requires a lot of social organization.
The third is war-making capacity. This is a bit tricky, as it includes both the size of armies and the sophistication of their armaments.
The fourth is information technology, which includes literacy, record-keeping, and storage of information.
Morris assesses available information and produces empirical values for all these variables, then converts them into point scores for the two primary civilizations of history: East and West. Of course, these values are in many cases just guesses, but they are educated guesses. Adding them together produces his social development score.
It’s easy to dismiss such an effort as overly simplistic. Suppose, for example, that we attempted to measure an individual’s net contribution to society as a score based on that person’s IQ, academic GPA, and net worth at death. Yes, this would be an interesting exercise, and would likely yield some useful insights. But at the same time, it fails to take into account all manner of important factors. Teachers would suffer from lowered scores because of their low income. Many creative people would also be underestimated by such a system. And of course, it doesn’t take into account the negative contributions of people like Donald Trump, whose high net worth would push him up the scale.
Nevertheless, the basic concept that Mr. Morris pursues can prove worthwhile, so I do not condemn it for simplicity. Instead, Mr. Morris’ failure comes from “squeezing the data too hard”. When your data is weak, you must needs be conservative in drawing conclusions. Mr. Morris’ grand conclusions are not justified by his data set.
Mr. Morris’ final results are presented in a graph of social development of both East and West over the course of history. That graph boils down to this summary: western civilization got started two thousand years before eastern civilization, and hence enjoyed a big lead in social development for most of history. However, the West suffered a collapse when the Roman Empire fell, and Eastern civilization passed it. The East retained its lead until about 1750, when the West industrialized and shot past the East, humbling it for two hundred years. But now the East is rising again, and will soon surpass the West.
My copy of the book is adorned with several score colored flags marking statements that I deem to be wrong. Some of these are errors of fact (No, Pliny the Elder didn’t die because he was too fascinated with the eruption of Vesuvius to run away from the lava. There was no lava. He was killed by the combination of heat, ash, and poisonous gases from the pyroclastic flow. Nor was soap invented by the Chinese around 1000 CE; the Babylonians invented it about 5,000 years ago. Nor did the tail of a comet cause global cooling around 530 CE.)
Others are errors of judgement: Mr. Morris is just plain wrong in claiming that the Greeks were no more rational than the Chinese. But the most serious errors are his blind spots with respect to the history of rationalism, mathematics, science, and technology.
Perhaps his dismissal of the Greek achievement is an overreaction to the pedestal that historians have placed it on for so many years. Yes, most histories laud classical Greek society as the greatest golden age in history. While a certain amount of contrarianism is often useful, in this case, the idolization of classical Greek civilization is entirely deserved.
Classical Greek civilization arose because of a unique confluence of special conditions. It truly was unique in human history, and that uniqueness arose from a unique set of circumstances attending its birth. I describe that process here. If you doubt my claims about classical Greek civilization, I urge you to read that material before proceeding further.
In any case, it doesn’t take much reading to realize that the Greeks were way ahead of the Chinese. Yes, Confucius compares well with Socrates, but there’s nothing in Chinese literature matching the logical precision of Aristotle’s work on logic. And the mathematics in Ptolemy’s Almagest goes way, way beyond anything that the Chinese ever figured out.
As I mentioned earlier, Mr. Morris’ poor grasp of the history of math, science, and technology undermines his entire effort. He appears to consider science to be nothing more than the accumulation of facts about the physical world. In truth, the accumulation of facts is only the first step in science; the crucial step is the discovery of general laws that explain those facts. This was part of the Greek achievement, and it simply didn’t happen in China.
The value of rationalism, mathematics, and science was not at all apparent during Greek times; it certainly didn’t help Greece conquer the world. Nevertheless, these ideas slowly simmered in Western civilization for two thousand years, seeping into the Western worldview through the works of Thomas Aquinas, the Oxford Calculators, and Copernicus, before finally blossoming into genuine science with Galileo. The advance of Western science led to the great technological leaps that triggered the Industrial Revolution and enabled Western conquest of the rest of the world.
At this point, Mr. Morris will rightly point out that Chinese technology was well ahead of Western technology for most of history. The Chinese invented gunpowder, the compass, and a host of other impressive technologies. I explain the difference between Chinese technological development and Western technological development after 1750 on this page.
Mr. Morris states that the Chinese might well have produced their own Industrial Revolution. After all, he points out, they knew about coal and had plentiful supplies of it. Therefore, in his view, it was only a matter of time before they would have had their own Industrial Revolution, but they were cut short by the West (specifically, by Britain).
Bullshit. The Industrial Revolution was not the inevitable result of steadily advancing social development. China would NEVER have experienced its own Industrial Revolution, because it never developed the rationalism and science that underlaid the Industrial Revolution.
There’s an irony in all this: the technological progress that the West has unleashed has far outstripped our political progress. We are still too immature politically to cope with the problems our technology has created. Worse, our technological progress is accelerating, while our political maturity creeps along. It is inevitable that the growing chasm between our technological capabilities and our ability to respond to those technologies effectively will lead to the destruction of our civilization. Perhaps, had we followed the slower path that China was on, we might not face this problem. Perhaps today we’d still be living in conditions rather like those of the East and West before the Industrial Revolution: wretchedly but safely.
I must add the Mr. Morris is a delightful writer; his prose is clear, erudite, and witty. I highly recommend his book because it’s so illuminating. A shame, then, that it’s so wrong.
Finally, I wish he’d told us who Looty was.