British historian Niall Ferguson, in a forthcoming book, thinks he has cracked one of the most intriguing of cultural conundrums – how it was that the West became the springboard for the explosion of knowledge, ideas and sheer energy that defines the modern world.
It is a conundrum because up to about 1400 the axis of civilisation was to be found towards the East where the Arabs and Chinese were well ahead of Europeans in the fields of mathematics, science, engineering and philosophy.
Ferguson identifies six key factors which unleashed the western dynamic.
“1. Competition: a decentralisation of political and economic life, which created the launch pad for both nation states and capitalism.
2. Science: a way of understanding and ultimately changing the natural world, which gave the West (among other things) a major military advantage over the Rest.
3. Property rights: the rule of law as a means of protecting private owners and peacefully resolving disputes between them, which formed the basis for the most stable form of representative government.
4. Medicine: a branch of science that allowed a major improvement in health and life expectancy, beginning in Western societies, but also in their colonies.
5. The consumer society: a mode of material living in which the production and purchase of clothing and other consumer goods play a central economic role, and without which the Industrial Revolution would have been unsustainable.
6. The work ethic: a moral framework and mode of activity derivable from (among other sources) Protestant Christianity, which provides the glue for the dynamic and potentially unstable society created by apps 1 to 5”
Looking to the future he identifies these factors as absolutely essential if any other society is to catch up or overtake the West. It would be interesting to see how many boxes could be ticked for modern China and India.
Exit question: How many of the above factors have the forces of the Western Left sought to undermine over the last fifty years?
h/t Coffee House
